when poets attack

What can a university English Department offer if it must reject not merely the entire canon of the greatest works in the English language, but any notion of excellence or traditional understanding of art? If everything must be part and parcel of neo-Marxist drivel and anti-Western cant, how does an English Department distinguish itself from Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy or any other academics struggling to parrot the same sterile ideas in new, publishable forms?

The key appears to be an intentional obscurity, new wordings and an almost militant stylistic that dares the reader to comment on the emperor’s new ensemble under penalty of being called ignorant and bigoted.

José Felipe Alvergue, the chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, made news recently by overturning a table used by Republican students to advocate for their candidate in the state court election. He was suspended.

In an earlier, happier time, a professor would presumably have better things to do than stop and commit assault. If a professor were to stop by, perhaps it would be to initiate a Socratic exchange on the questions at issue in the election, or offer some interesting historical or literary gem of possible interest to politically active students, or otherwise exude erudition and a love of teaching.

Why would conservatism and any semblance of a return to valuing the core treasures of Western Civilization be not just an alternative view, but a mortal threat to this fellow?

Alvergue is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017). His book scenery (2020) won Fordham University Press's Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. (I had thought E.E. Cummings had kind of exhausted the lowercase shtick.) Here is a writing sample:

The contemporary is always looking upon casta as a way of mitigating the exceptionalist responsibility of naming while keeping the named working and the work self incriminatingly a response to crisis. A need for work. A growth for finance. A stable platform, an insurance against risk and ground for home. This is a continuum, the production of knowledge from place––the exploitation of place, the making coeval of place and body, labor and precarity.

The crisis of change and human impact exposes actuarial typification. A problem. A tide. A storm. An invasive species of thought, description, and body. Is the democratic paradox itself––to care from a universal necessity. To police in the attempt to preserve positions. A new language irrupts from new acts of defense.

In the movies, the self-conscious pseudo meanings delivered by a mock-beat poet is a comic interlude, not grounds for tenure.

Imagine being a student and trying to figure out what will be expected on the final exam if the professor offers this as literary criticism (do they still do exams or was that eliminated as a colonialist holdover?):

I really like this way of talking about books that are conscious of genre only if for the intent of unsettling genre as boundary––or I guess treating genre exactly as that, boundaries that can be approached without destroying what makes them such––a boundary. Like walking along that dynamic terrain where a body of water territorializes and recedes from a terrain. It gets cloudy and one leaves an imprint, but the wash always resets the boundary. That’s the beauty of genre. You can’t break them. I would hope that potential readers understand that. Experimental or conceptual work won’t undo identity, particularly a reader’s identity; they seek to expand the topology or landscape we envision ourselves to inhabit. Poetry is about nuance, not reduction. I think these existential questions related to Literature must also account for area literature, like US Ethnic literature; it’s not just for the big white authors of ‘Western Civilization’. I would hope that they understand the politics of this intervention as well.

I think it’s mostly a (generational) creation, this worldview of a long unfolding optimism. What I mean is that I imagine it’s a worldview that has been taught and believed in as a way of negotiating past and present. Maybe it feels uniquely disjunctive when one age-community, or mnemonic-community, is making sense of “their” view of the present given their unique lifespan. And it’s why I turn to poetics, which is like a fungal archive of memory and saying. And for its ability to interrogate temporal reductivism. I say this knowing that someone might also argue my use of images from distinct historical moments within the same poetic utterance can be “heard” or “seen” as reductivist to an imposed emotional register. But that’s also something I wanted to work through, and there are maybe only a few ways of accomplishing that thinking within the technology of a book.

I guess if a student seeks an escape from clarity and wants no part of useful or appealing prose styles, being an English major at UW-Eau Claire would be just the ticket.

You would think the emperor would be feeling a chill by now.