Opening the Doors to Inquiry

... even today, when value judgments are often considered out of order ...

Marjorie Perloff, 2015

Evaluation occurs all the time in poetry. Textbook authors and anthologists – including editors of a serial publication that claims to contain 'The Best American Poetry' – select some poems for reprinting, and not others. Contest judges award prizes to some poets, and not to others. Readers for poetry contests select a handful of works from the slush pile for a judge's final selection, turning down many, many more. Critics evaluate published books of poems, giving rave reviews to some, middling or negative reviews to others. Publishers select some manuscripts for publication, but not others. Editors determine which submissions to include in their journals and which to exclude. The faculty of poetry graduate programs evaluate applicants' writing samples, and some applicants are accepted – some with full funding, some with no funding at all – while many are rejected. Teachers assign top grades to some poetry students, and lower grades to others. Workshop participants offer each other feedback, hoping to help make a rough draft an accomplished poem. Readers determine over and over again what books and poems to pick up or put down, and when.

But let's be clear, evaluation is not the activity solely of those thinking about or reacting to already-made poetry, it is also central to the activity of poem making. Indeed, the working poet is one of the most active critics, constantly making evaluative assessments regarding a poem in process, asking and answering implicitly or explicitly again and again evaluative questions such as: is this the right word, or is there a better one? Is this the right line break, or is there a better one? Is this the most powerful turn this poem can take, or is there a better one? Is this the right ending, or is there a better one? Is this draft of this poem beautiful? Is this draft of this poem true? Should a poem be beautiful? Should it be true? Have I loaded all my rift with ore? Has all my stitching and unstitching been for something more than naught? Go to archives, examine poets' manuscripts and see in the crossings out, the corrections and the multiple drafts, the physical signs of evaluation in the poem-making process.

In fact, evaluation is such an integral part of poem making, it is no stretch to say that virtually every great poet has possessed axiological self-awareness. In other words, they are keenly aware of how poetic value is constructed. Of the vast number of subjects that poets have thought about, meditated on and agonized over – love, nature, sex, death – one of the major subjects is poetry itself and how it should be valued. The history of poetry includes vital, energetic, charged statements about the art of poetry. In defenses, manifestos, essays, prefaces, letters, lectures and ars poeticas, great poets have strived to articulate what they value in and about poems. To cite just a few examples by (fairly) recent American poets:

• 'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry' (Dickinson, 1958).

• 'The poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge' (Olson, 1966: 16).

• 'A poem should not mean / But be' (Macleish, 1952: 19).

• 'Ideally a poem will be both mysterious (incunabula, driftwood of the unconscious) and organic (secular) at the same time' (Guest, 2003: 20).

• 'A sense of cultural responsibility prompts [Black poets] to affirm the place of poetry in the struggle against social injustice' (Dove & Nelson, 1991: 220).

Such aesthetic statements, and the axiological insights at their core, are not peripheral to poetry, but, very often, comprise a vital part of the action of poem making. By formulating such statements, poets reveal to themselves and others what characteristics they do and do not appreciate in poetry – often such statements reject earlier or commonly accepted values to then formulate, embrace and/or endorse something new and then the statements can lead poets to new creative territory by encouraging them to endeavor to embody their axiological self-awareness in their creative work.

Though evaluation is ubiquitous, reflection on it, and on the values fundamental to it, is surprisingly rare. In this chapter, we examine the recent history and current state of axiological thinking in contemporary American poetry and poetics, which recognize the need for evaluation but remain confounded by problematic theories and methods. Then we turn to consider three key efforts to engage poetic axiology more fully: Alberta Turner's (1980) Poets Teaching: The Creative Process, Patrick Bizzaro's (1993) Responding to Student Poems and H.L. Hix's (2004) Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation. While recognizing the invaluable contributions of these earlier studies, we will also show their limitations, and demonstrate how a further step is still required.

Too Many Values, Too Few Approaches: The Current State of Poetic Axiology and a Recommendation

There is great confusion and skepticism today about the basis, the ground, for judgments about poetry: why was this particular poem or aspect of a poem valued above others? While there are numerous reasons for this confusion and skepticism, two are key. The first problem is that there are now multiple (and often mutually incompatible) grounds for valuing poetry, each with its own criteria for what is 'best'. The second problem grows from the first: that judgment in the context of these multiple poetic values has been framed as either objective or subjective, two conceptions which both turn out to be evaluative dead ends.

For some time, American poetry has been thought of as a bifurcated field; as Eliot Weinberger (1993: xi) states in his introduction to his anthology American Poetry Since 1950: 'For decades, American poetry has been divided into two camps'. This divide has manifested itself in multiple oppositions, including Language poets vs. New Formalists, Post-Avant vs. School of Quietude, and elliptical poetry vs. the poetry of argument and wit. Contemporary American poetry, in fact, has been for some time a collection of poetries. According to some...