Preface

This feature is a companion to Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent, a conference that took place at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on April 13–14, 2012. The feature includes versions of papers that were given as part of the conference, reviews and commentaries related to the conference, as well as articles, reviews, and interviews that relate to poetry and community more broadly.

In designing this conference, we wanted to bring together advanced graduate students with early, mid-career, and established scholars to discuss what we see as a discrepancy between how poetry gets taught to undergraduates and how we talk about poetry communities in our criticism. Our CFP read: “Twentieth-century poetry is often taught through the lens of poetry communities: Imagists, Black Mountain, Language Poetry, etc. These poetry communities, for better or worse, also shape how scholars think about and write about poets and poetry in their research. Some poets are studied mainly to demonstrate their membership in a school or movement; others are treated in isolation to exaggerate their influence. Recent attempts to bridge these divergent approaches include focuses on friendships, collaborations, careers, and reception. This conference seeks papers that respond to questions such as: How are schools and movements identified? What role do friendships and collaborations play? How do publishers, editors, scholars, and publics create poetry communities? How do editing, production and marketing affect individual careers? What is the role of reception in entrenching or altering reputations? How do identity politics affect claims to representation? What are the similarities and differences between local, national, and transnational communities? How should scholars understand eccentrics, loners, or individualists? How do manifestos form group identity? What are specific communities of reception? How do major and minor communities work? What is the validity (or not) of common community designations or labels?” Many of these questions were addressed in some form or another in the papers delivered at the conference, which can be viewed at PennSound. Now that the conference is over, we are in a position to discuss the primary themes that were addressed during the conference more fully. 

1) We were happy that several people mentioned two obvious touchstones for our conference title, Marjorie Perloff’s “Avant-Garde Community and the Individual Talent” and Charles Bernstein’s “Community and the Individual Talent.” Of course T. S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was a point of reference, but the title plays off of these more recent works as well. Understandably, several speakers expressed anxiety over a conference seemingly framed by Eliot. Aren’t we past having to root our practice, and lend justification to our scholarship, by referencing the Men of 1914? In a way, yes. In another way, no. Although Eliot’s reasons for defending literary value have fallen out of favor, the question of literary value, and of why we read and teach what we do, persists.

2) A general hesitance of using the term “community” without significant qualification permeated the conference. “Noetry Opportunities and the Unlocatable Anti-Genius” or “Poets and the Baggage of Communal Belonging” might have been more apt titles for our conference. Conference participants debated whether recent generations of avant-garde poets have been able to theorize poetic community in such a way as to redress its historical simplifications and blind spots, or whether all ideologies of poetic community are ultimately subject to the same problems.

3) A third overarching theme was the place of English in our understandings of poetry and communities. How we characterize poetry communities in an Anglophone or North American context is often quite dissociated from how we might characterize them in a broader context. The conference’s focus on American poetry, albeit with significant exceptions, compelled us to ask about the limits of studying poets and poetry communities without recourse to a comparative or transnational framework.

4) Lastly, we discussed the problematics of applying the concept of poetry communities exclusively to poets, publishers, and critics as compared to applying it to larger collectivities (societies, nations, etc.). While some argued that poetry necessarily reflects a community larger than that of the people who produce, circulate, and consume it, others depicted particular poetry communities as predominantly concerned with the exemplary or competitive nature of their own identity.

Although the conference explored numerous other topics that we cannot detail here, we believe the four topics mentioned above were especially important to conference participants and warrant further discussion. We hope this feature furthers discussion and debate about these important topics.