A Fresh Look at André Spears’ “From the Lost Land I-XII”

“And it is all held together in an irrepressible delight in language and what happens when language and imagination are unleashed and told to have a good time.”

Previous to the 20th century, poetry thrived with genres. Epics, mock epics, dramatic poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, ballads, odes, and eclogues—to name only a few—occupied the poetry landscape. By the middle of the 20th century, the official list had dwindled down to mostly one—well, maybe two: the lyric poem and then the post-1970 non-signifying anti-lyric poem, an invention of the pseudo-avant-garde in reaction to the lyric. A number of factors played into the process that led to that contraction of poetry’s eco-niche. Chief among them was the transformation Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot brought to poetry, writing epics that introduced disorienting techniques such as parataxis and collage which radically narrowed poetry’s readership. Paradoxically, that resulted in the growth of the creative writing industry and the institutionalization of poetry in the university as poets flocked to the lyric in reaction to the difficulty of Pound and Eliot.

At the same time, outliers continued to keep alive other formal possibilities. Charles Olson and Edward Dorn worked with the epic and the mock epic. Some younger poets like Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette) and Anne Waldman (The Jovis Trilogy) continued to develop those possibilities. Robert Duncan wrote philo-theo-sophical meditations. Jack Spicer wrote books. By and large, however, and certainly after the 1980s, the imagination of poetry shrank until what was left was the lyric, the anti-lyric, and something called “the long poem,” though what that was supposed to be was never very clear. The lyric has many manifestations, ranging from creative writing’s “self-expression” to complex arrangements of language that open thinking into the self’s relation to the visible and the invisible worlds. Creative writing tends toward the “self-expression” end of the spectrum. The non-signifying anti-lyric was the result of the rise of sociology and a (post) Marxist commitment to materialism. It ended up feeding into a binary opposition between “poetry based on the virtue of intellect” and “the poetry of virtuous sentiment.” As a spokesman for the non-signifying camp put it, the old saws (i.e., Head and Heart) stand in for an engineered division between intellect and emotion. It is very avant-garde, in a retro kind of way.

Among the current outliers, André Spears’ work stands out as particularly radical in its thinking of what poetry can do when the imagination—rather than ideology or self-obsession—fuels poiesis.