Review: Poetry’s Fork, My Account of Some Experiments in Poetry Today by Edgar Garcia

There are said to be certain Mexican shamans whose magic is based on a performance of the crossroads, wherein the act of situating themselves in a crisis of choice between multiple, indeterminate directional possibilities summons an intense cosmic energy with which they can change their identity at will. Personal transformation is brought on through agonistic self-splitting and animistic metamorphosis. Ohmaxac. Yoruba cosmology recognizes a similar energy in the god Eshu. Likewise, the blues musician Robert Johnson fell to his knees at a crossroad, supplicating to his lord after a Faustian pact with the devil. This is precisely analogous to the state in which American poetry finds itself today: squinting to see conclusively in every murky direction. We shall, some think, decide on a way forward for the lyric by chasing an old polemic, then out of this polemic we shall make bait for an old bogey because that, if nothing else, will keep the ink running. But the bogey with two backs is quite tired; its antinomic categories of conceptual and expressivist poetics alike reduce the field of poetry to an inert binary. And when a hybrid of the two was attempted in American Hybrid, David St. John and Cole Swensen’s 2009 anthology of “new poetry,” the gesture was already so institutionalized that its birth seemed attended with death knells (heard in the flurry of critical attacks that accompanied its publication). If Donald Allen’s epochal 1960 New American Poetry was meant to promote new ways of writing by writers who hadn’t yet entered into the mainstream with formal publications, St. John and Swensen’s anthology seems instead to have enshrined a contemporary establishment, emanating a rather tenured sense of the new. Fresh blood and cosmic energy this was not. READ MORE