We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry 9781783098866

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We Need to Talk

NEW WRITING VIEWPOINTS Series Editor: Graeme Harper, Oakland University, Rochester, USA Associate Editor: Dianne Donnelly, University of South Florida, USA The overall aim of this series is to publish books which will ultimately inform teaching and research, but whose primary focus is on the analysis of creative writing practice and theory. There will also be books which deal directly with aspects of creative writing knowledge, with issues of genre, form and style, with the nature and experience of creativity, and with the learning of creative writing. They will all have in common a concern with excellence in application and in understanding, with creative writing practitioners and their work, and with informed analysis of creative writing as process as well as completed artefact. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW WRITING VIEWPOINTS: 16

We Need to Talk A New Method for Evaluating Poetry

Michael Theune and Bob Broad

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI 10.21832/THEUNE8859 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Theune, Michael, 1970- author. | Broad, Bob, 1960- author. Title: We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry/Michael Theune and Bob Broad. Description: Bristol; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2017. | Series: New Writing Viewpoints: 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017036735| ISBN 9781783098859 (hbk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783098873 (epub) | ISBN 9781783098880 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Poetry–Explication. | Poetry–Study and teaching. | Poetry–Authorship. | Poetics. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) Classification: LCC PN1101 .T47 2017 | DDC 808.1/07–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036735 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-885-9 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2018 Michael Theune and Bob Broad. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Edwards Brothers Malloy, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgements

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Foreword Patrick Bizzaro

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Introduction: Show Your Work!

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Opening the Doors to Inquiry

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The Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) Investigation: A PDCM Case Study

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A Chorus of Voices Reflecting on the CAPER Project

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Promising Applications of and Futures for Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping

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Do It Yourself

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Appendices

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Appendix A: How to Do Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping

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Appendix B: Brief Descriptions of the Twelve CAPER ‘Finalist’ Poems

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Appendix C: List of ‘Nodes’ from Our Data Analysis

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Appendix D: CAPER Follow-Up Invitation Letter

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Appendix E:

Nominated Poets’ Follow-Up Letter

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Appendix F:

Illinois Wesleyan University Department of English Creative Writing Rubric

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References

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About the Authors

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Index

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Acknowledgements Both authors feel indebted to many people whose work made this book possible. We thank our friends, family, and colleagues for their patient and sincere interest in this long-term project. Their curiosity and enthusiasm fortified us for the journey. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value is a long-time and profound influence on both authors. Along with Alberta Turner and H.L. Hix, Patrick Bizzaro blazed new paths in poetic axiology, without which we expect we would not have found our way. Bizzaro’s Foreword provides the ideal scene-setting for the drama we present here. Numerous other evaluative pioneers are named in the pages of this book, and We Need to Talk is indebted to them all. Perhaps most of all, we thank the seven poet-critic-teachers who participated in the CAPER discussion in spring 2007. They devoted their time, knowledge, talent, and spirit to exploring how they evaluated the 12 ‘finalist’ poems. Thanks, too, to the 12 poets whose work was discussed by the CAPER editorial board; we hope they are gratified that CAPER participants selected their poems as among the best contemporary US verse. Special appreciation goes to Austin Smith, Kent Johnson, and David Berman, poets who also contributed their post-CAPER reflective statements. We thank Illinois Wesleyan University and Illinois State University for their ongoing support for our teaching and research programs. IWU provided grant support for portions of this work. Former English Department Office Coordinator Julie Lappin did the bulk of the transcription from audio recordings to text, a highly demanding task. Several individuals and groups granted us permission to quote from their own poetic-evaluative endeavors: The Department of English at IWU, Emily Susina (Mike Theune’s student), and the students of English 370, “Issues in Contemporary American Poetry,” in fall 2012. We are grateful for their cooperation. Sections of this book were previously published in different form in the following venues: An earlier version of Chapter 1, “Opening the Doors to Inquiry,” appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review 44 (2017) as “Value Hunger: Feeding the Need vii

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for Assessment in Poetry.” Chapter 2, “The Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) Investigation: A PDCM Case Study,” originally appeared as “How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry,” in College English 73.2 (2010). The discussion of PDCM in the classroom contained in Chapter 4 (“Promising Applications of and Futures for Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping”) appeared in Graeme Harper’s edited collection Creative Writing and Education (Multilingual Matters, 2015) as part of “The Poetry of Evaluation: Helping Students Explore How They Value Verse.” We thank the editors and publishers of these previous works for their guidance and support in bringing our earlier scholarship to print and for permission to re-work these documents for use in the current book. Much appreciation goes to Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper, who carefully read and suggested revisions on an earlier draft of the book manuscript. Many good people at Multilingual Matters helped shepherd this book through its final stages of publication. We earnestly dedicate this book to all those readers who will put our ideas and methods to use in their diverse local poetic contexts around the globe. We request that you keep us informed about your PDCM efforts and discoveries. The world wants to know why you tried PDCM, what results you achieved, and what you learned.

Foreword Instead of a helpful critique of a rejected manuscript, a poet is more apt to get something like this for the trouble of having submitted to a contest: Thank you so much for submitting your manuscript to the Press. We wholly enjoyed reading your work, but we could only take three titles from nearly 300 terrific submissions, making it necessary for us to return many entirely deserving manuscripts. The deadline for our next open competition is March 15. We hope you will submit a revision of this manuscript or a new manuscript altogether to us for our consideration. Okay. But is this an invitation, maybe one of hundreds, to submit to a new contest? Will this new contest cost the poet another 30 bucks? If that poet’s work was ‘terrific’, why wasn’t it published? What were the editors really looking for? My own first book-length publication of poetry, Ohio Seduction (Bizzaro, 1975), was solicited by an editor after he heard me read from a draft of it. I love that book, in part because it was so easy to publish. I was fortunate: the editor had some sort of reaction to the poems he heard and decided that manuscript met his unstated criteria. That experience might have ended very differently if I had submitted it blindly to a contest. I doubt I could get that manuscript published in 2017. (Saying so makes me feel even more aware of the instability of and the significant role of context in evaluation – so I’m even more hopeful about the influence of the work found in these pages by Theune and Broad.) While offering so much, the contemporary American poetry scene, a scene that is very difficult to comprehend and getting more difficult to understand as the years roll by, is replete with dissatisfactions. Throughout my career, I have felt such dissatisfactions – especially those involving the assessment of poems – and in my scholarly work I have attempted to address many of them. Here, I’d like to share some of them – some I’ve responded to, but also some I’ve not – through anecdotes from my life as a poet, editor, anthologist and teacher of poetry writing, to help show some

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of the ways that Theune and Broad’s work has a handle on the uncertainty we feel in confronting the demands that assessments of poetry make upon us individually, not to mention communally. My book Responding to Student Poems (Bizzaro, 1993), which Theune and Broad see as a predecessor to theirs, begins with these two sentences: Perhaps no course in writing is more difficult to teach than poetry writing, and no task in that course more challenging than reading and evaluating poems written by students. In spite of this fact, little scholarship has been published in recent years concerning how to teach students to write poems. (Bizzaro, 1993: xi) My emphasis in that book was on the under-theorized and rarely investigated practice of teaching poetry writing. Theune and Broad pick up and extend this work in significant ways. However, Responding to Student Poems also examines some of the evaluative practices of poetry editors. I started safely with the premise ‘that editors, like myself, hardly ever attempt to sabotage their journals by publishing poems they do not like or, in any event, poems they deem unworthy of being made public’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 34). Then I posited several theories based on my experiences as a poetry editor of at least four journals prior to writing that book. New to the profession and untenured, I sought safe ground: ‘I believe that poetry is not one thing, but many, and that editors, like myself, have personal, though discernible, biases about what poetry is’. I noted that editors seldom debate this point, though they make efforts with varying degrees of seriousness to clarify their ‘values and emphases’ in places such as Poet’s Market. The remarks of editors, I discovered, are offered in the most general terms, ranging from the plea of one editor for ‘poems of high quality’ to a more detailed but equally vague request from another for ‘interesting and compelling poetry that operates above and beyond the ho-hum, so-what level, in any form or style about anything; poetry that is fresh, energetic, committed, filled with some strong voice of authority that grabs the reader in the first line and never lets go’ (quoted in Bizzaro, 1993: 35). About such claims, I found it was still too easy to ask: ‘What are the editorial biases? Or, what do the editors envision as poems worthy of publication? Or, more succinctly, what kinds of texts will be acceptable as poems in these contemporary literary magazines’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 35)? My skepticism had a history. I encountered my own difficulties in deciding upon what to publish early in my career, as associate and poetry editor of what is now a well-known National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) journal. The editor-in-chief was a bright and vivacious technical

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writer with, among other endearing qualities, a bawdy sense of humor, a penchant for dirty jokes and a laugh that would resonate throughout our office building. She also ruled the editorial process for the magazine and often made decisions apart from the rest of us. It was definitely her journal. But, generally, she left decisions about which poems to publish up to me. To her thinking, making those kinds of decisions was boring work best left to the nerds. And it wasn’t much work for me in exchange for an impressive-sounding credential that I could display each year in my annual report: associate and poetry editor of a very visible journal. And this service was highly rewarded for my effort at reading, maybe, a dozen poems if I had a busy year. Still, young and untenured, I wanted to be careful and tried to choose what I considered the best two or three poems for each issue, poems appropriate to the goals of the journal. The tenure committee, I felt certain, would be watching! One year, though, at an annual meeting of teachers which she attended, the editor-in-chief went to a ‘poetry roundup’ and heard a nasty poem about a man who caught his member in his zipper. This poem must have appealed to the editor on many levels because when she returned to campus she told me she had been doing my job for me and, sure enough, that poem appeared in the next issue of the magazine, alongside the three poems I accepted for what they had to say about teaching composition. As this could bring some unnecessary attention to the then ready-todepart poetry editor, I went to the editor’s office to tell her, as I recall, ‘That isn’t a poem I would have accepted for publication, and I think it reflects on me as Poetry Editor’. ‘Well, then’, she said, ‘you can have all the credit’. I learned firsthand that decisions regarding what gets published are often determined not by the expert in reading poems, the so-called ‘poetry editor’, but by someone else higher in the editorial hierarchy. And any evaluative decision might not please everyone on the editorial board. Still, some conversation about and public articulation of what we value in a poem might have prevented this embarrassment. Let me offer another personal experience with poetic axiology as an example of the kind of mistake I have made, and one of the sort that could be alleviated by attention to We Need to Talk. Years ago, I submitted a poem for a contest. The winning poem would be published on a broadside. I like poems on broadsides. I own signed and framed broadsides by poets of the caliber of Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, James Wright, Anne Sexton and John Berryman, so it seemed to me that publishing poems on broadsides had a distinguished place in the poetry scene. I looked at each of those broadsides critically alongside my own poems: each of the famous poems published on those broadsides is fewer than

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14 lines. I figured there must be a reason for this. Maybe shorter poems could be presented on the broadside in such a way that they might be read from across the room, and I suspected that would be a good thing. One might assume, then, as I did, that the poems best suited to broadsides are fewer than 14 lines long and that submitting a poem of 13 lines or fewer would give a poet an advantage in this contest. So, with this valuable insight, I submitted a poem for the broadside competition that was exactly 13 lines. Ends up, the poem that won that broadside competition was nearly 40 lines long, necessitating two very thin columns on the poster. I guess that the poet-me didn’t get one message or another about that genre called ‘the poetry broadside’ or about the contest’s judges and, therefore, submitted a poem that – among other things, no doubt – did not meet the unstated length requirement. (Note: I have had about half a dozen poems selected for publication on broadsides in my long career as a poet, and each of them has been 14 lines or fewer.) My own work, as well, has been the subject of some of my own scrutiny. One of my first efforts to advance on the work I did in Responding was to study and theorize how values are developed in reading poetry. Specifically, I wanted to study my creative writing students’ decisions to submit their work to one magazine or another, a requirement in a course I teach to creative writing majors and graduate students. How do students make the decision to submit their poems to a specific magazine? What is the connection between their writing and the writing they read in magazines they would like to see their work in? Guided by C.S. Pierce’s notion of the interpretant, which exists in ‘the gap which opens up between those two terms—the signifier and the signified’ (Berthoff, 1996: 9), my ‘Reading as a Writer, or What Happens When the Lights Go On’ (Bizzaro, 1999) attempts to better understand choices my students made regarding their efforts to match their work to magazines. By requiring my students to explain their choices, I had them reflect upon their judgments in a manner not too different from that reported in We Need to Talk, though my goals were different. My study began as an exercise in understanding theories that shed light upon the ways literary values are developed rather than empirical research resulting in a method for doing so when the occasion calls for it. My efforts fall more comfortably into the classification Janice M. Lauer and J. William Asher (1998: 4) label ‘rhetorical research’ ‘that proceeds largely by deduction and analogy, that starts with probable theoretical premises, examines these premises, posits new theory derived from the premises, and argues for its viability’. In doing my research into theories that explain how ‘the lights went on’ for my students in clarifying what they value in poetry, I cited the reflections my

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students made when writing their assignment in order to think more deeply about those theories. Still, Theune and Broad’s work provides me with some insight into how, essentially, the assignment at the heart of ‘Reading as a Writer’ could be modified slightly, but significantly. Rather than having each student reflect individually on what they think they value, students could gather and share selections from their favorite literary journals and discuss communally what they admire in the journals they selected. Fellow students could ask questions and push each other’s thinking further. It might also be interesting to enliven these conversations by adding an element of axiological competition to them: perhaps have the students pick a certain number of pieces for our own ‘Best Creative Writing Pieces’ anthology. Having students wrestle with and inquire more fully could offer a host of new evaluative information and insights. I’m struck by another example of when the method of creative writing ‘dynamic criteria mapping’ could have aided my work. I was asked to consult at a university in the southeastern United States to help a faculty adviser oversee the editing of a student literary anthology. As I considered this task – and I needed to think a lot about it because, until Theune and Broad provided it, we had no empirically tested method for helping students assess literary works such as those this editorial board would receive – I realized that, for me, the goal was to find some sort of consistency in the assessment of what was submitted by students and then to guide the student editorial board in their process of selecting the ‘best’ work for publication. The problem with that task, as I understood it even as I planned a strategy for use with those student/editors, is how to engage in a process that will produce criteria for making such aesthetic judgments and to understand the values upon which those assessments are based. It is not that I avoided the issues of poetic axiology, but I see how this task might have been done more effectively if I had sent a batch of poems from various journals to the editorial board as a basis for conversation and then worked with the whole editorial staff in selecting poems from that batch that might be used in an imaginary journal. Then, by discussing the choices and why they were made, I believe we could have been better positioned to select works for the university’s literary magazine. The findings that led me to write Responding to Student Poems were serendipitous but have opened a topic worthy of conversation over 20 years later. I am grateful for that. I believe the effort in We Need to Talk to address poetry as a discipline makes inevitable some practical applications – in the classroom, in the editorial boardroom, around the judges’ table – of the method advocated in this book by Theune and Broad, poetry dynamic

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criteria mapping, to the purposes of confronting the multiplicity of poetic values which makes it so difficult to respond to poetry and talk about it sensibly. What has been missing is a reliable treatment of poetic axiology. You will find such a treatment in the pages of this book. Patrick Bizzaro Indiana, PA December 2016

Introduction: Show Your Work! Decades ago, T.S. Eliot (1961: 6) announced: ‘… there are these two theoretical limits of criticism: at one of which we attempt to answer the question “what is poetry?” and at the other “is this a good poem?”’ Far from having been finally asked and answered, these questions remain vital for poetry today. In fact, there is strong consensus among contemporary poets and critics that we need to investigate more closely the different ways we value poetry – not only which particular poems or aspects of poems are valued but also how and why. In ‘Show Your Work!’, Matthew Zapruder (2009) calls for critics to explicitly lay out the reasoning behind their evaluative claims. Noting that critics ‘can do one of at least two things’, either ‘insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people’ or else ‘write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that may affect a reader’, Zapruder ultimately wants to see in those more substantial and accurate reviews how critics move from perceptions to assessments. In the final paragraph of his essay, Zapruder states: I remember that my geometry teacher used to write at the top of my tests, in giant capital letters, SHOW YOUR WORK! This is what I often find myself silently screaming at the pages of yet another diffuse review. I believe that as a reader I am, like almost anyone except the reviewer and perhaps his or her unfortunate subject, much more interested in the kind of thinking that led to the judgments of quality than the judgments themselves. (Zapruder, 2009) Zapruder’s is not the only voice calling for a more accurate and open accounting of the processes leading to aesthetic judgments. Many other poets and critics have made the same demand. Take, for example, a number of the responses included in ‘Some Darker Bouquets: A Roundtable’, a recent conversation initiated and hosted by Kent Johnson (2009). Inspired by Jason Guriel’s call for more ‘necessarily skeptical’ reviews, Johnson contends that one of the main reasons a vast majority of poetry reviews

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are less critical than they might or should be is the insularity of the poetry community – those engaged in publishing don’t want to offend anyone who might have some sway over her/his own future publication. Therefore, Johnson recommends that critics work to start a ‘“satellite economy” of apocryphal reviewing’, allowing and encouraging anonymous and pseudonymous reviews. Among the 32 contributors to this roundtable, those who agree with Johnson’s call for a critical black market also call for a simultaneous increase in poetry reviewing’s central economy of more substantial and judicious reviews. Many of these pleas specifically call for further investigation into how poems are valued. For example, John Latta (2009) laments critics’ ‘inability to do any hard justificatory work’. Robert Baird (2009) calls for ‘intelligent, instructive arguments’ both ‘about how poems work and why they are (or are not) important’ and ‘about goodness’. Tom Orange (2009) challenges the label ‘negative’ for reviews that ‘point out where a poet’s technique or aesthetics do not succeed in my estimation and explain why according to my personal criteria and values’. Orange believes that ‘we lack a properly rich and nuanced critical vocabulary adequate to the varieties of our poetry today’. Mark Wallace (2009) defines the ‘best reviews’ as those that are ‘informed, descriptive, substantive, insightful, and make plain the values of the reviewed text and the values of the reviewer’, and he emphasizes the need for reviewers to ‘reveal their values and offer some evidence for their positions’. Calling for more ‘judicious’ reviews, Barry Schwabsky (2009) asks, ‘Where is the critic who understands the value of the work of, say, Clark Coolidge, but can explain the difference between a great work by Coolidge and just an average one?’ These numerous participants in Johnson’s colloquy yearn and cry out for a clearer, more frank, more robust, more informative approach to the evaluation of poetry. As does Marjorie Perloff (2015), who begins her essay ‘Poetry Criticism Today’ with the same passage from Eliot that we used to open this introduction. Calling its insights ‘incontrovertible’, Perloff continues: The word criticism (from the Greek verb krinein, to judge) refers, first and foremost, to the making of judgments, and critics even today, when value judgments are often considered out of order, inevitably make judgments based on particular assumptions of what is good or bad, right or wrong in the work to be judged. The difficulty is that, with few exceptions, the practical critic’s theoretical assumptions are taken for granted rather than clearly articulated. (Perloff, 2015)

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Perloff clarifies, ‘Helen Vendler, for example, does not come out and say, “I am not especially interested in satire, comic poetry, or Dada collage; my own predilection is for a lyric poetry of high seriousness, a poetry whose language comes to terms with human suffering.” We can only deduce this view from her actual discussions of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Jorie Graham’. Perloff agrees with Zapruder and many of the participants in Johnson’s roundtable that the state of criticism would be improved if critics showed more of their evaluative work. While there currently seem to be increasing calls for critics to share the grounds for their judgments, this desire for more straightforward discussion of the dynamics of literary evaluation has been around for some time. Famously, in 1937, René Wellek asked the same thing of F.R. Leavis in a public letter (Wellek & Leavis, 1948). Having considered Leavis’s book Revaluation (1936), which he initially praises, describing it as ‘the first consistent attempt to rewrite the history of English poetry from the twentieth-century point of view’, Wellek (Wellek & Leavis, 1948: 23) puts forward what he calls ‘some fundamental criticisms’, the first and foremost of which is that he (Wellek) ‘could wish that you [Leavis] had stated your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically’. Wellek continues: ‘I do not doubt the value of these assumptions and, as a matter of fact, I share them with you for the most part, but I would have misgivings in pronouncing them without elaborating a specific defence or a theory in their defence’. Wellek announces to Leavis that he is going to ‘sketch your [Leavis’s] ideal of poetry, your “norm” with which you measure every poet’. In other words, Wellek decides to show Leavis’s work. Here is Wellek’s sketch, which he composes using ‘tags from [Leavis’s] book chosen from all chapters’: … your poetry must be in serious relation to actuality, it must have a firm grasp of the actual, of the object, it must be in relation to life, it must not be cut off from direct vulgar living, it should not be personal in the sense of indulging in personal dreams and fantasies, there should be no emotion for its own sake in it, no afflatus, no mere generous emotionality, no luxury in pain or joy, but also no sensuous poverty, but a sharp, concrete realization, a sensuous particularity. The language of your poetry must not be cut off from speech, should not flatter the singing voice, should not be merely mellifluous, should not give, e.g., a mere general sense of motion, etc. (Wellek & Leavis, 1948) Having offered his inductively derived sketch of Leavis’s poetic-evaluative framework, Wellek then asks more of Leavis: ‘… the only question I would

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ask you is to defend this position more abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical, and, of course, ultimately, also aesthetic choices are involved’ (emphasis original). In the rest of his letter, Wellek makes clear what some of those choices were, focusing on the ways that Leavis’s ‘insistence on a firm grasp on the actual predisposes [Leavis] in the direction of a realist philosophy and makes [Leavis] unappreciative of a whole phase of human thought: idealism as it comes down from Plato’ (Wellek & Leavis, 1948: 24). Wellek then shows how Leavis’s underappreciation of idealism shapes some of his particular assessments. What is important to note here is that all these different poets and critics – Zapruder, many participants in Johnson’s roundtable, Perloff and Wellek – are making a similar, sophisticated, multilayered and crucial request: not only do they want clear, decisive value judgments, but they also want clear articulations of the thinking behind those assessments – they want inquiry into, transparency regarding and reflection on one’s evaluative criteria. But this complex request rests on a key assumption: that those who assess poetry in fact know what their values really are, and that they then could, if they so wished, accurately reveal them. They seem to believe that a critic’s values exist like a precious mineral that, sitting close to the surface, near revealing sunlight, could be easily mined and displayed. The only actions needed for such a search is a little digging and some sifting, work the critic could do alone, with texts and a little reflection. On this last point, we (Theune and Broad) believe something significantly different. While we agree it is generally beneficial for those who evaluate poetry to be aware of and share their criteria, we do not agree that literary values are so easily uncovered. We do not believe that values are a static, solid substance easily captured, simply grasped. Instead, we conceive of values as much more complex, roiling entities, some of which can be quirky to the point of being quark-like: sometimes particles, sometimes waves – existing at times only in relation to other entities and forces. Though dynamic and shifting, such entities are still available as objects of inquiry. Values, including how they interact, can be examined. But to do so, mere digging will not do. You need a new method: instead of grabbing a shovel, you need to build a particle collider. We believe that anyone making assessments of poetry that have consequence for others – poetry reviewers and critics, certainly, but also teachers, editors and anthologists – needs to undertake a specific kind of research process to be able to accurately identify their own evaluative criteria. We believe that becoming more aware of our values is a phenomenological problem that cannot be solved through mere reflection. The problem

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can only be solved by engaging in a collaborative, deliberative, rhetorical venture – a process that helps make us conscious of those values, and therefore able to accurately share them. We believe that significant effort must be put forth before those who assess poetry can accurately show their work, and it must be a particular kind of effort: setting up, recording and analyzing evaluative conversations. Our particle collider is called ‘poetry dynamic criteria mapping’ or PDCM. PDCM is a method for coming to understand the relations (mapping) among diverse, shifting (dynamic) standards (criteria) for the evaluation of poetry. Like a particle collider, which is at once cutting edge but also simple – it smashes things to learn about them – PDCM is both elemental and new. PDCM involves attending to the actual conversation of a group of poetry evaluators – say, an editorial board, the co-editors of an anthology or the faculty members tasked with selecting the incoming class for a poetry Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program – recording it, and then analyzing it to find out not how the decision makers think they made their assessments, but how they actually judged specific texts in conversation with each other. (We describe this method in greater detail in Chapter 2.) While some previous poetical-evaluative experiments (discussed in Chapter 1) lead up to it, PDCM is a technique of investigating values that stands ready and waiting to be implemented in the field of poetry. PDCM is an extension of ‘dynamic criteria mapping’ or DCM, an established method for colliding and discovering values in the field of composition. PDCM, thus, itself is formed out of a collision of interests and activities in two fields: poetry and composition. If this seems a natural connection – the writing of poetry (the process, if not the product) might be thought to have much in common with writing more generally – the connection certainly has not been made robustly in American higher education until relatively recently. (We more closely examine this co-disciplinary relationship in the conclusion of this book.) Institutionally and disciplinarily, there has been nothing natural about the connection between poetry and composition. Anxiety about crossing disciplinary boundaries has long played a role in drawing inquiry into poetical values to a premature close. F.R. Leavis’s multifaceted, complex and defensive response to Wellek centers on disciplinarity. According to Leavis (Wellek & Leavis, 1948: 30), Wellek’s desire to have all assumptions unpacked is the desire of a philosopher, while his own ‘pretensions’ are ‘to being a literary critic’. Though Leavis (Wellek & Leavis, 1948: 31) acknowledges ‘varying kinds of alliances between the literary critic and the philosopher’, he believes the two disciplines in fact are ‘quite distinct and different kinds of disciplines’.

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Additionally, even though Leavis (Wellek & Leavis, 1948: 32) acknowledges that ‘a philosophic training might possibly—ideally would—make a critic surer and more penetrating in the perception of significance and relation and in the judgment of value’, he still finds it ‘reasonable to fear—to fear blunting of edge, blurring of focus, and muddled misdirection of attention: consequences of queering one’s discipline with the habits of another’. We are much less anxious about – and frankly are more excited by – the ‘queering’ of disciplines such as philosophy and criticism, theory and pedagogy, composition and poetry. The queering of disciplines has been generally very productive in the decades since Wellek and Leavis’s exchange, sometimes even giving rise to new disciplines, including culture, gender and, yes, queer studies. Disciplinary ‘queering’ has also been productive in the study of value. The queering of economics and sociological approaches gave rise to the study of ‘revealed preferences’, a way to approach the question of what someone truly values not by asking that person what they think they value but by studying what choices, including purchases, they actually make. In How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, Michèle Lamont (2010: 3) ‘queers’ typical approaches to the study of academic peer review, opting not to seek information about outcomes – did a grant recipient go on to do great things? – but rather, as a sociologist, to listen in on granting committees as they did their work in order to determine ‘which standards define and constrain what we [professors] see as excellent’. PDCM is cognate with such seemingly queer, interdisciplinary approaches. In fact, we believe it jibes with what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988: 29) has called ‘an alternative project’. In response to what she refers to as ‘the exile of evaluation’ (Smith, 1988: 17) – that is, a situation in which ‘the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and explicitly exiled by the literary academy’ – Smith calls for inquiry that ‘would not seek to establish normative “criteria,” to devise presumptively objective evaluative procedures, or to discover grounds for the “justification” of critical judgments or practices’, but rather such research would clarify the nature of literary—and, more broadly, aesthetic—value in conjunction with a more general rethinking of the concept of ‘value’; it would explore the multiple forms and functions of literary evaluation, covert as well as overt, nonverbal as well as verbal, institutional as well as individual; it would account for the features of literary and aesthetic judgments in relation to the multiple social, political, circumstantial, and other constraints and conditions to which they are responsive… (Smith, 1988: 29)

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This alternative project would not be ‘a monolithic intellectual project’; rather, according to Smith: What is desirable … is an inquiry pursued with the recognition that, like any other intellectual enterprise, it would consist, at any given time, of a set of heterogeneous projects; that the conceptual structures and methodological practices adopted in those projects would themselves be historically and otherwise contingent, reflecting, among other things, prevailing or currently interesting conceptual structures and methods in related areas of inquiry; that whatever other value the descriptions and accounts produced by any of those projects might and undoubtedly would have (as, for example, indices of twentieth-century thought to future historians), their specific value as descriptions and accounts would be a function of how well they made intelligible the phenomena within their domain to whoever, at whatever time, and from whatever perspective, had an interest in them; and that its pursuit would be shaped by—that is, energized and transformed in response to—those various, historically emergent interests, and its descriptions and accounts variously interpreted and employed accordingly. (Smith, 1988: 29) Although there may not be an exile of evaluation within contemporary American poetry, most of the poets and critics we have cited clearly believe that evaluation has not been pursued as far or as explicitly as it could or should be. Poetry needs a new method, an alternative project corresponding extensively to Smith’s descriptions above (social, heterogeneous, contingent and descriptive), to enable evaluators to show their work more accurately. PDCM is that method. Here is the plan for the work ahead: •

Chapter 1: ‘Opening the Doors to Inquiry’ provides the scholarly context and background for PDCM. Here, we offer some key reasons why PDCM has not yet been taken up, including the seemingly unassessable multiplicity of values and a limiting subjective–objective binary as a means to approach value. It then examines some past efforts – Alberta Turner’s Poets Teaching: The Creative Process, Patrick Bizzaro’s Responding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory and H.L. Hix’s Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation – to develop new methods to investigate more deeply how we value contemporary poetry. This chapter understands these important works to be prototypes that, though having limitations, make real contributions, both leading toward and showing the need for PDCM.

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Chapter 2: ‘The Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) Investigation: A PDCM Case Study’ offers both the theory behind PDCM and a detailed illustration of the method. This chapter discusses why it is especially valuable to analyze live evaluative interactions, and it shows how to do so by examining and discussing one PDCM study undertaken by the authors several years ago. We invented a fictional new poetry journal (CAPER) and made our research participants editorial board members. Their task was to select the ‘most successful contemporary American poems’ for publication in the inaugural issue of the journal. Analyzing their debates regarding which poems were ‘most successful’ and why, we discovered complex and conflicting systems of values guiding this editorial board, including an array of often invisible ‘contextual’ values. Chapter 3: ‘A Chorus of Voices Reflecting on the CAPER Project’ gathers statements from a variety of participants and concerned others that we have collected during our research. We believe these multiple additional viewpoints enrich our understandings of PDCM and its potential. For example, CAPER participants shared reflections on their experiences negotiating their selections for the launch issue of the imaginary journal. Several poets whose work was nominated by members of the CAPER editorial board also offered their reactions to the deliberations. We bring all these voices into this discussion of PDCM in order to hear more from people in a good position to respond thoughtfully to the study and to point to the future of communal poetic evaluation. Chapter 4: ‘Promising Applications of and Futures for Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’ offers examples of how PDCM has been and can be put to use. It reports on the ways that PDCM has been used in the undergraduate classroom to help students understand the complex evaluative processes in which they regularly engage, and by faculty in an English department working to create a more accurate and useful rubric to assist the assessment of work by its creative writing students. Focusing on the phenomenon of contemporary American hybrid poetry, this chapter also examines particular sites of evaluation in recent American poetry where PDCM was not, but should have been, productively employed. Chapter 5: ‘Do It Yourself’ argues that now, with the field of creative writing studies established, is the time that PDCM will be taken up more widely. It also argues that there is an ethical obligation to undertake PDCM, urging all of those engaged in the assessment of poetry to acknowledge and act in accordance with the democratic ethos of PDCM.

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Before we proceed, we wish to briefly comment on the disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries of this project, specifically our focus on contemporary American poetry, Theune’s home discipline. We know that PDCM is a new and yet very relevant way to address some pressing issues in recent American poetry. It also may be applicable to axiological research in the poetry writing, teaching and criticism of other nationalities. If so, we hope it is adopted in those contexts. DCM, the core methodology of PDCM, also may be applicable to fields other than poetry, and in fact we think it is: in Chapter 4, we note how a group of English faculty members used DCM to create a rubric for creative writing more broadly, and not just poetry; in Chapter 5, we demonstrate how DCM would be a useful component of a fiction writing assignment. However, our work with PDCM clearly reveals the importance of context, and we acknowledge here, at the outset of our project, that American poetry is our predominant frame. Reflecting further on the two questions that set the theoretical limits of criticism – ‘What is poetry?’ and ‘Is this a good poem?’ – T.S. Eliot (1961: 6) notes that they ‘imply each other. The critic who remains worth reading has asked, if he [sic] has only imperfectly answered, both questions’. We, too, encourage asking such questions, and while it may be the case that all possible answers to these key questions will in some way be imperfect, we suggest that PDCM presents a much-improved method for discovering axiological truths. In ‘Criticizing Criticism: Matthew Zapruder suggests you SHOW YOUR WORK!’ at htmlgiant.com, Justin Taylor (n.d.) notes both that ‘we’re going to need to build our critical vocabularies back up, but in order to do that we’ll need to first build back up the vocabularies of the form itself’ and that to do so we will need to address the question ‘what do we talk about when we talk about poetry?’ It’s PDCM that offers a way, specifically through talk, for groups of people who value poetry to build up their critical vocabularies. As Taylor notes: ‘Until we can answer that question articulately and succinctly to ourselves, we don’t have much of a chance of explaining it to anybody else’.

1 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.

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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

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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 commentators, however, binaries do not adequately account for the proliferating multiplicity of kinds of poetry in America now. Mark Wallace (2001: 193) recognizes five ‘major networks of poetry production in the United States’, including: • • • • •

‘the proponents of ‘traditional’ formalism’; ‘the proponents of confessionalism’; ‘the proponents of identity-based poetries’; ‘the proponents of the New American poetry speech-based poetics, often associated with Beat generation, ethnopoetics, or New York school writing’; ‘the avant-garde … among whom the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E network has been a vital force’.

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In Apples and Orangutans: Competing Values in Contemporary Poetry, Charles Harper Webb (2004) lists over 60 of the ‘competing values that exist among poets and/or lovers of poetry in the United States today’. These values include: • • • • • • • •

‘Difficulty’, ‘Clarity’ and ‘Indeterminacy’. ‘Seriousness’ and ‘Wit and humor’. ‘Sincerity’ and ‘Irony’. ‘Moral, mental, spiritual, psychological uplift’ and ‘Art for art’s sake’. ‘Careful crafting’ and ‘Spontaneity’. ‘Closure’ and ‘Absence of closure’. ‘Disguised technique’ and ‘Laid-bare technique’. (As subsets of ‘A particular world view’) ‘Women’s/racial/ethnic issues’ and ‘White men’s issues’.

Noting that poets have long had their feuds, Webb (2004: 76) suggests that today’s poetic diversity may simply be greater than it has ever been: ‘Comparing poems might not always have been apples to apples, or even crabapples to pippins, but it was not apples to landfills, or dirtbikes, or orangutans, as it often is today’. The literary canon has indeed expanded in the past 50 years to include a vastly more diverse set of authors and schools, and therefore values. While many see this opening up of the canon – the proximate reason for such a seemingly unassessable multiplicity of poetry – as a good circumstance, the effect on assessment persists: there are no set standards, rendering poetry unassessable. As Webb notes, ‘As for critical assessment of poetry—how does one competently assess something when there is no agreement what that thing should be?’ This seemingly impossible situation for assessment is made all the more intractable by the fact that, for the most part, only two options for thinking about and dealing with these values tend to be considered: objectivist – that somewhere in these criteria are the universally correct standards, or subjectivist – that whatever criteria one chooses simply is a matter of taste and therefore immune to inquiry, discussion and negotiation. However, even though some may yearn for objective criteria (including some prominent voices in the field of creative writing studies, as we discuss in Chapter 5), they are untenable; as Webb states, ‘Unlike the 100-meter dash, where the fastest time wins, contemporary poetry can offer few, if any, objective criteria for winning’. But then, within this binary, the only remaining option for selecting among criteria is by subjective means. However, one problem with the subjective is that it is always merely subjective, offering no compelling, persuasive basis for

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an evaluation. One simply decides what is better or worse. De gustibus non disputandum est. Another problem with declaring poetic value subjective is that it does not jibe with the common experience (as will be shown in later sections of this chapter) that value can and should be deliberated, evaluations discussed and minds changed. After all, if value is merely subjective, why bother arguing about it? In ‘Criticism’s Crisis’, in part a meditation on Zapruder’s ‘Show Your Work!’ (mentioned in the introduction), Brian Henry (2010: 29) encapsulates and bemoans the situation created by a world of numerous, conflicting values without any pragmatic way to navigate, examine or otherwise engage them. Henry states: ‘Poetry criticism seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. It’s not just that critics cannot agree on which poets or kinds of poetry are the best, but that poetry critics often have no common approaches’. Henry (2010: 30) adds, ‘Poetry critics have been compared to doctors (albeit doctors who diagnose without fixing anything), but doctors at least agree on the basics. There’s no such foundation for the poetry critic to draw from. What one critic considers sophisticated, another considers retrograde; what one considers adventurous, another considers slapdash. This makes the poetry critic’s job that much more difficult and keeps the collective hand-wringing going’. Fortunately, it is not the case that we can engage today’s various poetic values only with either ultimately arbitrary objective ‘common approaches’ or else mere, isolated subjectivism. Nor is it the case that hand wringing is the only remaining course of action. In Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988) argues that value is more properly considered ‘radically contingent’, that is, ‘being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, nor an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables or, to put this another way, the product of the dynamics of a system …’. Smith (1988: 11) takes great pains to make clear that contingency offers a way to think about value other than through the lens of objectivity such that ‘contingent’ is not ‘subjective’ and so it does not ‘close the doors to inquiry’. Instead, according to Smith, it ‘opens them’. Evaluative contingency provides new avenues for axiological investigation: ‘If we recognize that literary value is “relative” in the sense of contingent (that is, a changing function of multiple variables) rather than subjective (that is, personally whimsical, locked into the consciousness of individual subjects and/or without interest or value for other people), then we may begin to investigate the dynamics of that relativity’ (emphasis added).

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We now review some previous ‘investigations into the dynamics’ of poetic judgment, recognizing how each moved the poetic evaluative inquiry forward and noting how each study ran up against different limitations.

Alberta Turner’s (1980) Proto-Empirical Project In the late 1970s and early 1980s, poet, editor and long-time director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Alberta Turner, published the results of multiple separate yet similar inquiries into poetry that reveal a great deal about poetic axiology: Fifty Contemporary Poets (Turner, 1977), Poets Teaching (Turner, 1980) and 45 Contemporary Poems (Turner, 1985). Though the shared subtitle of these books – The Creative Process – identifies most precisely the central object of study for each project, a close reading of all of these texts reveals that axiology is a crucial part of the poetic process. Here, however, we will focus only on Poets Teaching, the project in which axiology plays the most explicit role. We will make clear Turner’s axiological inquiries and findings, but we will also show that much more can and should be done to investigate poetic value. Poets Teaching is a book designed to reveal ‘what actually happens when the professional teaching poet sits down with the student poem. It allows the reader to look over the shoulder of thirty-two poets while they are teaching’ (Turner, 1980: xii). In it, Turner (1980: xii) collects commentary by 32 teaching poets – who are ‘established’ and whose ‘work and theory are near the center of contemporary poetics’ and yet who also ‘represent a range of age, sex, geographical location, kind of poetry written, and teaching temperament’ – on work by 30 student poets. The teaching poets – including Jon Anderson, Marvin Bell, Albert Goldbarth, Donald Justice, Larry Levis, Heather McHugh, Sandra McPherson, David St. John, William Stafford, Stanley Plumly and Jean Valentine – were organized into 11 groups of 2 to 5 poets, and each of these groups commented on 1 to 3 student poems. A brief orientation to the groups – which includes information on the teaching poets’ relationships with each other and often with the students whose work they will examine (often, the work under scrutiny is by a student of one or more of the teaching faculty) – introduces the student poems, which are then followed by the commentary of each of the participating teaching poets. Assessment is a central concern of Poets Teaching: ‘any reader interested in contemporary poetry will want to look in order to understand what criteria contemporary poets use to judge each other’ (Turner, 1980: xii). In her introduction, Turner (1980: 4) notes both that ‘[b]efore actually revising student poems, both students and poets need criteria of what a

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poem should be’ and that ‘[m]ost make no initial statement about criteria, but assume them’. This is not to say that there are no criteria but rather that they are implicit, and so need to be teased out: ‘[N]o student would be long in doubt about what [the criteria] were, for the comments on the poems tend to be more specific than general, and praise and blame are awarded for the ideas, words, and rhythms which fulfill or violate the poets’ criteria’. Turner (1980) then outlines the teachers’ shared criteria: Whether stated or implied, the criteria are fairly uniform. They consist of the critical theories of postmodernist poetry. Most often the poets seek for ingenuous or at least unpretentious sincerity rather than posture or preaching. Levis distrusts ‘a slick poem in a prevailing style’; [Philip] Booth, a poem that is ‘typically bad rather than individually bad’; Anderson, anything that doesn’t seem ‘earned.’ Several also mention significance. St. John would have the poem create for the reader a ‘familiar and intimate anxiety.’ [Mark] Halperin wants surprise, ‘the kind that hits you somewhere it hurts.’ [John] Haines insists that the poet ‘have something to say. (Turner, 1980: 4–5) Turner’s work in Poets Teaching is impressive and significant. It marks a shift in approach from speculative contemplation about value in (what was then) contemporary poetry to empirical inquiry. Indeed, Patrick Bizzaro (2004), whose work is the focus of our next section, states: ‘I don’t believe anyone has yet adequately expressed the gratitude we should feel toward Alberta Turner for her valuable work she did during her career. She was way ahead of most of us in her belief that creative writing was a field worthy of study’. Though Bizzaro is certainly correct, Turner’s work has some problematic tendencies. Most significantly, its analyses overreach in trying to offer universalized, unified truths. Poets Teaching also has a significant limitation: its method of having individual teaching poets respond in isolation cannot account for, as Turner thinks it does, ‘what actually happens when the professional teaching poet sits down with a student poem’. Chief among her work’s problems is Turner’s apparent desire for her findings to be universal, or at least generalizable or broadly applicable. Turner takes care to reveal that, in and among all the diversity and representativeness of her studies’ participants, a core, shared understanding in fact emerges. The opening sentence of Poets Teaching’s introduction states: ‘The assumption behind these essays, an assumption so basic that it is not even stated, seems to be that poems have an almost metaphysical existence inside students and that only if students listen very carefully and

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transcribe very skillfully can they tease them out of themselves without damaging them’ (Turner, 1980: 1). The drive to find unity in multiplicity is even more apparent when Turner, in her introduction, analyzes some of the different feedback that particular groups of teaching poets give to work by the same students. Turner undertakes two such closer looks, and the result of each is the discovery of unity in seeming multiplicity. The action of taking closer looks, in fact, is occasioned by what seems to be a felt need to wrestle with multiplicity. Turner (1980: 6) recognizes that ‘[t]he actual editing of the student poems in this collection might be expected to vary widely from poet to poet, student to student, poem to poem, and even from draft to draft of the same poem’, and that these differences likely are caused by differing ‘subjective criteria, vocabulary, ... methods of contact’ and ‘individual differences in perception and personality’. And so, because of this multiplicity, ‘To determine the kind or extent of help that the same poem is likely to get from different teachers, we need to look at what actually happened to several of the poems’. The result of each of these closer looks is greater unity. Examining the feedback given by those in her own group (David Young, Stuart Friebert and David St. John, along with Turner), Turner (1980: 10) notes that despite ‘significant differences’ all ‘have agreed on essentials: the poem is nearly finished; it has found its center and dominant tone—it is a poem’; ‘[a]ll ... are clearly operating out of the same poetic principles: that feeling is best revealed and created by “show not tell,” that emotion has a different rhythm from exposition, and that a poem should be as lean as possible’. The result is that, for Turner, ‘[O]n the whole one is left with the distinct impression that the differences among the four poets’ advice to this student are less significant than the similarities’. Turner (1980: 11) transitions from her first to her second closer look by noting that ‘[t]his kind of uniformity [i.e. the uniformity found in the previous close look] is more common than not in this collection, but there are cases in which discrepancies are both greater and more fundamental’. Though Turner acknowledges the work of this group – which, unlike all the others, tape recorded and transcribed an actual discussion of their deliberations (an important detail discussed further below) – ‘is at times confusing’ and in other ways seemingly problematic, the ultimate result again is unity: ‘But when one considers further, that which has actually happened is a demonstration of honesty, humility, good teamwork, and considerable restraint’, and Turner (1980: 14) then notes the various signs of this unity.

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Turner’s analyses are skillful, insightful and largely persuasive, but her drive to unity makes them seem more deductive than inductive, derived more from a yearning for unity than from the data. Also, Turner offers only partial analyses of the work of 2 of the 11 groups. A fully empirical, inductive study likely would have inspected and analyzed all the groups’ work to discover not only uniformity but also patterns of, as Turner calls them, ‘discrepancies’. Discrepancies, for Turner, typically are elements to be smoothed over. For example, when discussing the idiosyncrasies of her participants’ terminology, Turner (1980: 5) tends to normalize the discrepancies: ‘[T]hese poets seem almost deliberately to avoid using many of the standard critical terms. For theme they tend to say center or impulse. For persona or point of view or tone they tend to say voice … And they use abstractions which have been worn smooth in lay language to perform some very important value judgments—for example, interesting to mean significant or even profound; surprise to mean the effect produced by the most skillful fusion of theme, image, and rhythm, and diction’. The discrepancies, however – say, the difference between ‘center’ and ‘impulse’ – in an empirical, inductive analysis are there to be studied, and not studying them is a big part of what keeps Poets Teaching from being more fully analytical. Our final critique of Turner’s work is its hesitation regarding putting its participants in actual, live conversation with each other. Turner (1980: 16, 40, 53, 63, 83, 109, 120, 139, 169, 203) repeatedly emphasizes the fact that, though they may know each other and perhaps be colleagues, friends or even partners, the work that each participant did was her/his own: with only one exception (discussed below), the brief orientation preceding the work of each group mentions that each member of that group worked ‘independently’. While, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this methodology – Turner shows how revealing it can be – it has some clear limitations. Though Turner (1980: xii) says it does, this methodology does not reveal ‘what actually happens when the professional teaching poet sits down with the student poem’ nor does it permit ‘the reader to look over the shoulder of thirty-two poets while they are teaching’. Rather, Poets Teaching offers only an approximation of such teaching. A number of teaching poet participants note this in their commentaries. For example, Robert Wallace (1980: 94) remarks that in ‘an actual teaching situation’ his ‘response to a poem’ would ‘vary considerably with regard to the individual student as well as to a variety of other factors’, and he makes clear that his responses ‘only approximate the teaching experience’. Marvin Bell (1980: 112) implores: ‘Don’t anyone, please, take this essay to represent how I teach!’

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Turner’s simulation also may not be as revealing as it could be if the interactivity of real teaching were involved. In the fourth of four ‘disclaimers’ that Bell enumerates at the beginning of his commentary, he notes the importance of real discussion to his teaching: ‘Dialogue is required for getting straight the terms, and for finding out what the student did that was intentional and what was lucky, what was understood and what was merely accepted, what was programmed and what was intuitive’. Consider what kinds of discussions – clarifications, arguments, etc. – might have arisen over the idiosyncratic use of terms such as ‘center’ and ‘impulse’, and even ‘interesting’. The one group that worked collectively rather than ‘independently’ devised a way to capture dialogue and let readers, if not quite look over the shoulder of, then at least listen in on, poet-teachers and students talking. Jon Anderson, Mark Halperin and Steve Orlen tape recorded ‘informal discussions of poems by three of [their] former students’, Bruce Cohen, Michael Collier and Boyer Rickel. They (Anderson et al., 1980: 152) did this, they report, ‘[b]ecause so much of [their] teaching is done in workshops’ (152). This group chose to reproduce the particular workshop they did as much ‘for its digressions on matters of poetic process and strategy as for the typical workshop “doctoring” of a poem’. And, indeed, according to Turner (1980: 14), who in her introduction comments in detail on it, this conversation too, even though it diverges from her planned methodology and ‘[a]t first reading… seems confusing’, offers noteworthy insights. Turner’s work is commendable, offering ideas gathered by taking the approach to evaluating poetry a step closer to the empirical. However, it has its limitations, some of which Turner (1980:14) recognizes: she states that her study in Poets Teaching offers only a ‘partial view’, in this case, ‘of the teaching process’. It also has further possibilities; Turner (1980: xii) notes that the approach of Poets Teaching is also ‘sufficient for starting other investigations’, including at least one that is taken up (though without reference to Turner) by H.L. Hix (discussed later in this chapter) and pursued in our own study (in Chapter 2): ‘Do poets’ specific criticisms illustrate their stated poetic theories?’ Our reading of Poets Teaching and its limitations, as well as the possibilities it opens, suggests that more remains to be done to approach the empirical, to help ensure a more inductive analysis of the gathered material and even to gather different kinds of material by more closely approximating the ways that poetry is actually assessed, including investigating the social, a move that we think will be ‘interesting’ – both significant and profound. For now, though, we turn to the work of Patrick Bizzaro, who so admires Turner’s efforts, and whose own project is in close conversation with that of Turner.

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Bizzaro’s (1993) Solitary Self-Analysis In Responding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory, Patrick Bizzaro (1993: xi) notes: ‘Perhaps no course in writing is more difficult to teach than poetry writing, and no task in that course more challenging than reading and evaluating poems written by student-writers’. However, according to Bizzaro, this situation has failed to produce a great deal of scholarship, for two reasons: ‘our profession’s lack of curiosity concerning what happens when teachers read and evaluate student poetry’ and the ‘simple acceptance of traditional but untested methods of instruction’. In his groundbreaking, multifaceted book, Bizzaro corrects this situation by closely examining data that reveal his own habits and values, and by sharing with his readers the steps he took to make himself and his students more self-aware readers and evaluators of poetry. Propelled by a seemingly simple question – ‘Do teachers’ habits of reading, when employed in reading and evaluating drafts of their own writing, influence the way they read, evaluate, and eventually grade drafts of their student writing?’ (Bizzaro, 1993: xvii) – Bizzaro examines multiple drafts of one of his own poems, registering the ways he revises, trying to understand what aesthetic values and theoretical perspectives are implicit in the decisions he makes. Bizzaro encourages teachers of poetry writing to become curious about their methods of assessment and to investigate those methods through disciplined, empirical analysis of their own methods of revision. While Bizzaro (1993: 16) believes that reading ‘a collection of essays such as Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (1977) … serve[s] to some extent to demystify the making of poems’, he emphasizes that ‘the kind of examination they offer can do teachers of poetry writing more good if viewed as models for the self-examination teacher-writers should employ prior to teaching a course in poetry writing’. Specifically, Bizzaro (1993: 9) advises teachers of poetry writing to carefully analyze the changes made in drafts of their own work in an attempt to discover what literary values and judgments are embedded in these revisions. In subsequent chapters, Bizzaro examines how each of the theoretical perspectives he focuses on – New Critical, reader response, deconstructionist and feminist – might influence the acts of reading and evaluating poems. Additionally, he makes clear how he uses all of this as a pedagogical tool, sharing his studies and the theoretical perspectives with his students, encouraging them to consciously try out different perspectives for themselves to both broaden and focus their own critical capabilities. In extending and converting his axiological inquiry into pedagogy, Bizzaro provides the model for the discussion of poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM) in the undergraduate classroom in Chapter 4 of this volume.

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According to Bizzaro (1993: 27), teachers are called upon to conduct such empirical inquiries because they will teach better as a result. Referring to the task of ‘act[ing] out the role of authoritative reader’, Bizzaro notes that teachers ‘will perform this task more effectively after they have noted what they value as readers of their own poems, after they have discovered how they employ what they believe to be “standards of excellence” as guidelines for moving from draft to draft of their own writing’. Such work also might set the teacher free: ‘Questioning accepted pedagogy requires that we acknowledge and name the critical lens through which an individual teacher reads and evaluates poems, since only by doing so can teachers render alternative readings’ (Bizzaro, 1993: xiv). Sharing the findings of such work multiplies the benefits ‘by modeling this procedure in front of their classes, teachers can use their self-examination as a starting point in discussing standards with students who have done little prior reading appropriate to the course’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 27). In its acknowledgment of the existence of different theoretical perspectives, Bizzaro’s work grapples with a poetry world – as described over a decade later by Charles Harper Webb (and as we discussed earlier in this chapter) – characterized by a seemingly unassessable multiplicity of values. It grows out of a world where there is no objective value, but in which value judgments are still being made: ‘That no one can determine what, exactly, constitutes poetry—let alone “good poetry”—is well known … But teachers of poetry and poetry writing are called upon to examine texts and to act out the role of authoritative reader nonetheless’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 27). Bizzaro’s study also grows out of a situation in which teachers of writing might not even be aware of their deep evaluative criteria, of what they really value. Bizzaro cites Lester Faigley’s ‘Judging Writing, Judging Selves’ – a study that finds that ‘[i]f we look at the history of writing instruction in America, we find that writing teachers have been as much or more interested in who they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write’ (Faigley, 1989: 396) – and interprets this to mean that ‘what the profession often seeks as the critical element in evaluating discourse is its adherence to and reinforcement of certain unstated premises about social relations in the classroom, relations such as writer to reader and student to teacher’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 10). From his consideration of Faigley, Bizzaro (1993: 11) concludes, ‘Clearly, if reader-response and ideologically based methods, values, and emphases have come to influence current approaches to evaluating student writing, we must examine these approaches and name them’. The matter is urgent; according to Bizzaro, until we examine and name the approaches we in fact use to read and evaluate student work, ‘we must wonder how to honestly discuss with

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students what we value and reward in their writing’. Bizzaro goes so far as to claim that ‘[i]t would be foolish, even unethical, to tell students the little we seem to know right now about how we evaluate writing: that we reward writing that states our personal ideologies in a voice which, when reconstructed, echoes a self we associate with good writers, one honest, humble, and on the path to self-discovery, but admittedly not quite there’. (We build on Bizzaro’s ethical imperative to investigate poetic assessment in the final chapter of this book.) We can do better, and Bizzaro’s work points the way. Bizzaro contributes something truly new to both poetry writing pedagogy and to the ongoing history of poetic axiological self-awareness by approaching his own evaluative processes as an object of empirical inquiry. He does so in an extraordinary manner, introducing perhaps the single most dramatic shift in the history of literary axiology: from the speculative methods traditional to the humanities (dealing solely with published literary texts and readers’ reflections on those texts), to the empirical methods characteristic of the social and physical sciences, adding an analytical, data-driven dimension. The speculative and empirical need not be understood as antithetical – indeed, any investigation that leads to a degree of axiological self-awareness typically involves some amount of analysis. Rather, they exist on a continuum of kinds of axiological engagement, a visual depiction of which may be found at the end of this chapter. At one end of the spectrum are those working in what Smith (1988: 19) memorably terms ‘[t]he magisterial mode’, powerful critics and scholars, such as F.R. Leavis (mentioned in the introduction) and Yvor Winters, who decide how good they think poems (and other texts) are and announce their judgments to the world. Theirs is evaluation without axiology: they devote little or no visible effort to studying or understanding their own processes of poetic judgment, focusing instead on wielding intellectual power through force of will, rhetoric and fame. The next segment along this spectrum consists of those poetical/axiological inquiries that – while differing in levels of systematic inquiry – essentially follow the traditional humanities approach: the individual scholar works alone, reading texts and writing her/his thoughts about them. But Bizzaro’s close, systematic observations differ greatly from such speculation – as seductive, suggestive and even sometimes illuminating as it might be. For all its gifts to the evolving traditions of poetic axiology, Bizzaro’s study has a major limitation, one Bizzaro himself acknowledges: it relies too heavily upon a single individual. At the core of its discovery process lies what Bizzaro repeatedly refers to as ‘self-analysis’. It is, for example, through ‘self-analysis’ that teachers will discover ‘where meaning resides

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in both canonical texts as well as [their] own’ (Bizzaro, 1993: 8). Bizzaro (1993: 9) clearly recommends self-analysis when he suggests that teachers should ‘study their habits of reading their own writing, determining how they make meaning as they revise their texts, and then learn to discuss with their classes what they have discovered’. Even when Bizzaro (1993: 26) changes the content of what he is studying from his own poems to the poems he evaluates as a journal editor, recognizing that ‘the role of teacher in a poetry writing class and of editor in selecting work for publication are closely bound’, his method remains the same: he will be the one to study what he values, and he will be the only object of his inquiry. Individual self-analysis is, however, only one kind of analysis, and, as Bizzaro (1993: 37) notes, it is not necessarily adequate: ‘[W]hen it comes to evaluations of matters as private as “preferences” and “tastes” in writing, the self is an excellent place to start. Still, I must also stress that it is a place to begin, not end, our search’. Although Bizzaro does not explicitly develop a communal model for the kind of investigation he espouses, at one point later in his book he does seem to suggest a way to move beyond individual self-analysis. In Chapter 7, ‘Reading the Course in Poetry Writing’, Bizzaro (1993: 159–191), having asked each of his workshop students to assume one of the four theoretical perspectives they had examined in order to allow the students to practice critiquing from a specific perspective, records, transcribes and analyzes their group workshop discussion. Analysis of a group conversation is clearly additionally informative to Bizzaro. Adding this communal dimension to his study yields new, more finely grained insights. For example, though each student took on the well-defined role of New Critic, reader-response critic, feminist or deconstructionist, the analysis of group dynamics revealed a fluidity in the identities of the conversation’s participants, a constant negotiation of roles, which Bizzaro (1993: 169) finds ‘agreeable’ as ‘such shifts in the personalities students adopt as readers and writers are necessary if learning is to take place’. According to Bizzaro, ‘These exchanges between students, sometimes coarse and often more related to the people involved than to the poem, are actually vital indicators that something is happening to the identities of workshop participants’. Bizzaro equates this transformative liveliness with ‘underlife’, a term used by Robert E. Brooke in Writing and Sense of Self: Identity Negotiation in Writing Workshops to mean ‘patterns of behavior which show that individuals resist aspects of the assigned role, that there is more to them than this’ (Brooke, 1991: 74; quoted in Bizzaro, 1993: 169). As we will see in the next section on Hix’s complementary study, how productive such a conversation can be depends on how that conversation is handled.

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Bizzaro’s discovery of the underlife of poetry assessors makes clear that the investigation of assessment in poetry writing pedagogy needs to move to social groups, for those are where evaluation is typically argued and negotiated in real-life poetic situations. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988: 14) reminds us, ‘[E]valuation is a form of social behavior’ (emphasis in original). Such social behavior needs to be studied, with new methodologies, as social behavior. Fortunately, another group of researchers has already set a strong example for the sort of communal inquiry Bizzaro recognizes as the necessary next step in the evolution of poetic axiology.

Hix’s (2004) Simulated ‘Conversation’ H.L. Hix’s (2004) Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation is one of the most recent and, along with the work of Turner and Bizzaro, one of the very few sustained efforts to observe the ways in which contemporary poets read and assess poems. Unlike Turner’s and Bizzaro’s primarily individualistic inquiries, Hix’s gets multiple people to exchange, debate and negotiate their ideas about poetic values. Still, Hix’s project has some significant shortcomings, including methodological and conceptual problems that need to be acknowledged and worked through so that better, more revelatory studies may be performed in the future. In Wild and Whirling Words, Hix moderates a conversation among 33 poets, including Stephen Burt, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Annie Finch, David Kirby and Juliana Spahr. For this conversation, each poet submitted a poem they had written, and Hix then passed the poem along (without the author’s name attached to it) to another participating poet to receive assessment and commentary. Then, upon receiving that assessment and commentary, Hix sent the poem and its anonymous commentary to another participating poet for more assessment and commentary, and so forth until each poetic ‘conversation’ included approximately a half dozen responses. Each poem, with the author’s name attached, and the resulting exchange of commentary, published anonymously, were then gathered in the book. Hix (2004: ix) is correct when, in the first line of his ‘Preface’ to Wild and Whirling Words, he states: ‘The book in your hands contains a colloquy unlike any held before’. According to Hix (2004: x), one of the main reasons this conversation is so unique is that there is a ‘reluctance to argue over poetry’. Hix (2004: x–xi) notes: ‘We argue over votes in the Senate; over movies; over religious doctrines. Why do we soft-shoe around poetry?’ Hix’s book breaks through such reluctance by getting a diverse group of poets to talk about poems across typical party lines. In his ‘Preface’, Hix (2004: xii)

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notes that he ‘aimed at convening a group that was diverse in its aesthetic no less than in its ethnic and gender composition’. The participants in the discussion he moderates include ‘women and men; poets of Asian, Hispanic, and African heritage; poets gay and straight; poets of widely varied styles and sensibilities; established poets and newer poets; poets from Boston to Honolulu, Wyoming to Florida’ (Hix, 2004: xii). Indeed, Hix (2004: xiii–xiv) notes that the ‘aim’ of the conversation he initiated and moderated is ‘getting poets talking about each other’s work across the usual patterns of conversation’. [Wild and Whirling Words] records a series of encounters between different premises about poetry, asking what happens when a poet who considers form the definitive aspect of poetry—and by form means iambic pentameter and rhyme—reads a poem written by a poet who thinks a poem’s political implications matter more than its form and anyway by form means the visual appearance of a poem on the page; how a poet who considers it important to violate poetic tradition reads and evaluates a poem that attempts to adhere very strictly to a tradition; and so on. (Hix, 2004: xiv) In our introduction, we discussed Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s call for alternative projects in literary evaluation. Hix’s study can and should be considered one such project. It does not establish universal normative criteria. It confronts the diversity and multiplicity of contemporary poetry while highlighting for readers that evaluation still unavoidably takes place even in and among such diversity and multiplicity. Most important, Wild and Whirling Words tries to do something new with and in this situation: to address significant social and political aspects of contemporary American poetry, acknowledging the boundaries of the contemporary poetic scene and getting people to talk across them. For all these strengths, Hix’s work has some significant shortcomings. The book is helpful, but perhaps not quite as helpful as it could be, and this is largely due to its employment of anonymity and to its unwillingness to break disciplinary methodological boundaries as Bizzaro succeeded in doing. Due to its employment of anonymity, Hix’s study cannot be as revelatory as possible. For example, because the book does not trace the input of its various participants by identifying even with pseudonyms who is talking when, it offers limited information; significantly and specifically, one cannot know to what extent the various participants in the conversation are following or diverging from an aesthetic evaluative tendency often ascribed to them, or to what extent the particular poems

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they read and the particular exchange of commentary in which they engage affect their assessments of poems. In other words, Hix cannot answer his own question about what happens when a formalist poet considers a poem composed by a politically oriented poet. One cannot track the stability and fluidity of the participants’ identities, as Bizzaro carefully did in his study of his own classroom. To what extent do a participant’s comments seem to run counter to a stated aesthetic preferences or identity? Is a poet’s aesthetic self-identification in fact accurate, or in need of modification? One might glean this from the conversation, but one cannot be certain because of the use of anonymity. In poetic axiology, identity matters. Although Hix refers to his project as a ‘conversation’, it is so only metaphorically. Hix’s method of responses written in isolation – the quintessential research method of the humanities – allows no opportunity for participants to interact even in writing. Nor does it allow for face-toface, back-and-forth exchange, let alone live argument. The method thus precludes any revelatory clarifications and larger questionings of one another’s views. As a result, there is neither opportunity nor exigency for any participant to change their mind, nor for readers to learn whether that happened. Additionally, there is no reflective study of the virtual conversation recorded in Wild and Whirling Words; there is no effort toward a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the values that are uncovered. Thus, there is no investigation – there cannot be, by Hix nor by any of the participants – into, for example, what one participant, who happens to reveal in the course of one of their responses that they ‘feel[s] strongly for no particular school, no particular aesthetic’, actually says about poems, about how they value them. What, if anything, does the conversation in Wild and Whirling Words tell us about, say, the difference between what poet-critics say they value in poetry and what they really value in live debate, about whether or not, as Alberta Turner wondered, ‘poets’ specific criticisms illustrate their stated poetic theories?’ Hix’s study can give no answer. These methodological problems result in a conceptual problem. In part because Hix consciously and conscientiously gathers so many different voices and perspectives and then does not analyze the distinctive contributions of those various voices and perspectives, it can seem as though Hix is trying to gather and share information about how poetcritics value poetry in general. Though it reveals to us that poets are in fact willing to share ideas about value on the condition of anonymity, due to

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the general nature of Hix’s approach we get no further than seeing that the poet-critics, in fact, still disagree. But there is at least one other way to examine what we value in poetry. We developed an approach, described in detail in the next chapter, that is communal; that, while employing pseudonyms, preserves identities and so can convey the nuances of each person’s aesthetic dynamics; and that is analyzed inductively to provide insights firmly grounded in data.

The Evolution of Poetic–Axiological Inquiry Critics, poets and teachers of poetry know that they urgently need better understandings of how they evaluate poetry. However, their efforts, when not forestalled by a seeming unruly multiplicity of poetries and the unworkable approaches of enfeebling subjectivity and fantasized objectivity, have historically been hindered by the research methods traditional to the humanities. The three axiological pioneers on whom this chapter has focused – Turner, Bizzaro and Hix – imported the qualitative-empirical methods of inquiry more characteristic of rhetoric and composition: studying commentary on poems, revision processes and analyzing unpublished ‘conversations’ (whether actual or simulated) to tease out the meanings and values buried in participants’ evaluative choices and arguments. In so doing, they advanced axiological inquiry in the field of poetry. Yet, even these three soon ran up against limitations in their research methods. Turner attempted in ways not as fully empirical and inductive as they could have been to craft unified and widely generalizable outcomes from her individualistic and largely text-based study, which also was only an approximation of what it intended to investigate. Bizzaro recognized the need to convert his solitary self-analysis into a more social project, encompassing multiple poetic subjectivities. Hix’s research design achieved the communal dynamic that Turner’s and Bizzaro’s lacked, but still missed out on the volatile, face-to-face, identity-based dynamics that would reveal deeper knowledge about how we actually value and evaluate poems together. Still, each of these three researchers moved the field’s study of poetic evaluation forward in valuable and important ways, freeing us from the limiting traditions of speculative, text-based inquiry and cracking open the door that will lead to a fuller, empirically informed self-understanding (see Table 1.1).

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Table 1.1 Evolution of poetic–axiological inquiry Speculative No inquiry inquiry

Proto-empirical inquiry Empirical inquiry Collects empirical data. Close analysis limited or absent.

Characteristics

Lack of explicit selfawareness: pronouncements of value.

Varying degrees of axiological self-awareness and willingness to articulate that awareness.

Examples

The ‘magisterial mode’ of critics such as F.R. Leavis and Yvor Winters.

Most axiological Turner, Hix. explorations by poets (see list in the opening pages of this chapter).

Higher-quality knowledge results from collecting data and analyzing them systematically, comprehensively and inductively. Bizzaro.

The next step in poetic axiology awaited: to sit a group of critics, poets and teachers of poetry around an actual table crafted of wood and steel, and to study in depth how they debated and negotiated poetic values and evaluations while looking each other in the eye. Only through such a research design will teachers and scholars of creative writing studies reach the next level of understanding regarding what they value in poetry.

2 The Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) Investigation: A PDCM Case Study On the sunny Saturday morning of May 19, 2007, a group of seven poets, critics, editors and teachers of poetry writing shuffled into an office in the Stone Container Building, high above Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Revived with coffee and bagels, they turned to their task for the day: to select the ‘most successful’ 5 of 12 finalist poems for inclusion in the launch issue of an imaginary new poetry journal, Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (aka CAPER). What was really afoot that day on floor 15 was the first collaborative, empirical, inductive, face-to-face inquiry in known history into how one group of poetry professionals evaluated verse. The goal of our book is to persuade all individuals and groups charged with the responsibility for passing consequential judgments on poems to undertake exactly this new sort of inquiry. We (Theune and Broad) adapted a research method from the field of rhetoric and composition, applying it to the evaluation of poetry to reveal criteria for judgment that usually remain unknown and hidden. After the ‘live’ CAPER discussion took place, we conducted a systematic analysis to illuminate its evaluative nuances. This fine-grained analytical process yielded answers to two questions: ‘What did this particular group value in contemporary US poetry?’ (criteria) and ‘How did they value contemporary US poetry?’ (dynamics). Our study revealed two dramatically different models by which this group valued poems as texts and the powerful role that context plays in poetic assessments. We learned details about some of the unrecognized, multivalent and even contradictory ways that poems are valued. While we believe our findings are intrinsically useful and interesting, they are not generalizable. This study is most important because it presents a method that can and should be used in many future evaluative inquiries 29

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and analyses. As we emphasize in Chapters 4 and 5, this method will yield ethical and political benefits for any group of people – poets, teachers, editors – responsible for judging any kind of poetry. Below, we present the theory, methods and findings of the CAPER study, which models the new method for evaluating poetry that we urge others to adapt and adopt.

Theory and Context Our study employs dynamic criteria mapping (DCM). The phrase ‘dynamic criteria mapping’ was introduced in Bob Broad’s 2003 book What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing. Working in the sub-field of writing assessment, Broad was pursuing the question of what teachers of rhetoric and composition value in their students’ writing. He noticed that rubrics typically presented a few familiar, well-worn and relevant criteria for evaluation, but his study of communal writing assessment situations convinced him that our evaluative processes were in fact rich and complex far beyond what a traditional rubric, with its standard five criteria, could adequately represent. Broad (2003: 13) described DCM as ‘a streamlined form of qualitative inquiry that yields a detailed, complex, and useful portrait’ of the criteria and dynamics by which people evaluate texts. Broad recorded conversations of large and small groups of composition instructors in one university’s writing program as they collectively deliberated the quality of their students’ writing. He transcribed those recordings and analyzed them systematically and comprehensively, and then he presented his findings as a series of axiological maps and charts. At the particular university where he conducted his study he found substantial evidence for 89 distinct evaluative criteria on which instructors sometimes drew to judge their students’ writing. When charted, these rich analyses of the writing program’s evaluative terrain made for representations of what instructors really valued in their students’ writing that were valid and true – a vast improvement over traditional rubrics. Lest that descriptive richness intimidate our readers, we emphasize that not all DCM projects delve into this extreme depth of detail; many successful DCM ventures have required less time than Broad’s original study and produced evaluative maps and charts of more manageable scope. Once mapped, processed and interpreted, such findings can prove useful to a range of audiences – students, instructors, administrators and the general public – for a range of uses: teaching and learning, program assessment and research. To see multiple examples of others’ successful DCM efforts, see the book Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action (Broad et al., 2009). (Several examples of poetry DCM – including using it to develop a rubric – will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4.)

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DCM is qualitative research, which, Denzin and Lincoln (2000: 3) explain, ‘consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible … Qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them’. DCM combines elements of grounded theory methods with an approach that Guba and Lincoln (1989) named ‘fourth-generation evaluation’. Using grounded theory methods, analysts attempt to presume nothing, and they build their findings from patterns and themes they find in systemic and comprehensive coding of data. (Note that Alberta Turner’s approach in moving from her complex data to her tidy findings lacked, in our view, this crucial inductive quality [see Chapter 1].) Fourth-generation evaluation emphasizes getting stakeholders with diverse perspectives to collaboratively construct their shared understandings of whatever they are evaluating. What allows such an evaluative map to be rich and therefore useful is the fact that it derives from around-the-table, face-to-face conversation. To illuminate the value of synchronous, face-to-face discourse over virtual, on-the-page discussion, consider the benefits one prominent researcher sees in face-to-face interviews as opposed to virtual/asynchronous exchanges of information: Due to this synchronous communication, as no other interview method FtF [face-to-face] interviews can take advantage of social cues. Social cues, such as voice, intonation, body language etc. of the interviewee can give the interviewer a lot of extra information that can be added to the verbal answer of the interviewee on a question. (Opdenakker, 2006) When poets actually come together to debate their evaluations face to face, each participant ‘can directly react to what the other says or does. An advantage of this synchronous communication is that the answer of the interviewee is more spontaneous, without an extended reflection’. The advantages Opdenakker claims for face-to-face interviews are the same advantages we claim for our study over Hix’s: increased spontaneity, volatility, surprise, drama, humanity, civility, fluidity, responsiveness and discomfort in challenging a respected colleague’s evaluation while they sit across the table from you, looking you in the eye, listening and preparing their reply. Additionally, by listening in on face-to-face conversations, DCM recreates the circumstances under which many assessments are made – by a group of evaluators, such as judges, editors and teachers. In short, through the face-to-face interaction of DCM, we are permitted access to the ‘underlife’ of evaluation, and we are witness to what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1998: 15) calls ‘the dynamics of a system’ (emphasis original).

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DCM developed in the field of rhetoric and composition as a means of studying instructors’ evaluations of students’ texts (usually analytical, persuasive and narrative texts). Our (Theune and Broad’s) ongoing collaboration imports DCM into the world of poetry, so we call our project ‘Poetry DCM’ (PDCM). Just as in composition, communal assessment is not foreign to poetry. It happens often whenever there are multiple evaluators – for example, in workshops or when there are multiple editors of a journal or multiple judges for a poetry contest. However, as with the bulk of poetry evaluation, these assessments are more ‘primarily speculative’ than ‘empirical’. That is, decisions are made either without inquiry into the values behind those choices or using representations of what the values are (for example, the aesthetics claimed by an editorial board) that may differ greatly from the criteria by which evaluations in fact are made. DCM can be used to investigate, and much more accurately articulate, the dynamics of group assessments. It can also be used to more acutely determine the evaluative dynamics of any member of that group. In short, DCM fills a gap in methods of axiological investigation, providing a way to perform poetic assessment that is both empirical and communal. Extending the ‘evolution of poetic–axiological inquiry’ presented at the conclusion of Chapter 1, we can visually represent PDCM’s contribution (see Table 2.1). Table 2.1 PDCM’s Contribution to Poetic-Axiological Inquiry Empirical inquiry

Collaborative, empirical inquiry

High-quality knowledge results from collecting data and analyzing them systematically, comprehensively and inductively

Improved quality of axiological knowledge due to collaborative, face-toface deliberations recorded and analyzed systematically, etc.

Bizzaro

Theune and Broad

Methods for the Study Prior to meeting on May 19, 2007, each of the six (at that time) invited participants nominated four poems to be considered for inclusion in the initial CAPER issue. (Just days before the conversation took place, we added a seventh participant to increase the group’s aesthetic diversity.) The researchers (Theune and Broad) selected 12 out of those 24 nominated poems (2 from each of the initial 6 participants) and sent the 12 ‘finalist’ texts to the group, asking them to read the poems in advance of the meeting and make notes about what they valued and didn’t value in the poems. (In Appendix B: ‘Brief Descriptions of the Twelve CAPER “Finalist” Poems’, we provide the titles, the names of poets and a very brief description of each poem.)

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Below, we offer brief self-descriptions provided by each participant in our study, edited for brevity and to conceal participants’ identities. We present these statements in alphabetical order of the pseudonyms the researchers invented for each participant. Dennis: ‘As a member of the adolescent slam movement of performance poetry, I am inclined to accept almost any utterance in a language “heightened” from conversational English as a kind of poetry—though I’m still disposed to making distinctions between what is good (i.e. successful) and bad (i.e. offensive to the (my) sensibilities). I strongly value poetry that allows the reader a space of reference and then diverges from that space in surprising ways. I value accessibility as well, even if that access is a beginning of a more complicated journey that follows. I teach composition and creative writing at [name of college] ...’ James: ‘I’m very interested in the current oppositions in contemporary poetry (mainstream/avant-garde, academic/slam) whenever they are apparent, but even more when they are not. I’m not at all interested in taking sides on this, which is not to say that I don’t have a position. My book (of poetry-writing pedagogy) focuses on talking about poetry in new ways. I think this work is significant because it is both careful AND it shakes things up, erasing what once seemed set boundaries, AND asks new questions’. Marty: ‘… my aesthetic is mostly influenced by the New York School and its attending avant-garde, surrealist tendencies. I’m interested in the hypnagogic, in liminal spaces where narrative and lyric come together, with respect to the widest audience possible. […] Rodney Jones said poets write from physical locales: the head, the heart, places lower on the chart. I’d say my poems start from the gut—usually with a laugh—and in the crafting process wrestle with whatever intelligence I can bring to bear in an attempt to pin some instant where truth demonstrates itself’. Nick: ‘I appreciate poetry that engages and recognizes its own sense of occasion, one that establishes itself within the larger contexts of poetry written in English and/or within the Americas. In other words, the poem that marks its place both in the sense of locality (or dislocation) and music, a poem that indulges lyric without being swallowed whole by lyric itself. […] In terms of the contemporary situation of American poetry, I find this orientation in the work of Black Mountain poets (including Ed Dorn), African American poets who explore the

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blues as means of exploring historical points of dislocation, and contemporary prose writers who reconfigure “prairie”’. Paul: ‘I feel somewhat eccentric to the dominant current of American poetry, being neither a part of the anecdotal/New Yorker aesthetic nor a part of the Elliptical school. My affections tend toward old Modernism and British poetry’. [For a description of elliptical poetry, see Chapter 4]. Ravi: ‘While my press is often considered “experimental”, my first book straddles both tradition (in its use of forms like the villanelle and terza rime) and experiment (through its negotiation of various postmodern literary techniques). Likewise, I feel caught between my identity as a young American poet and as a writer of Indian descent as well. Lately my work has moved away from any sort of identification with a national or cultural group whatsoever, and I imagine this will continue. […] Most of my time is taken with writing and with teaching, which I do at [name of university]. … I teach primarily undergraduate poetry workshops with occasional Master’s theses in creative writing as well’. Trina: ‘I am the author of two full-length poetry collections published by small presses and co-editor of an anthology of essays about poets and poetry forthcoming from a university press. I’m an assistant professor, and I teach undergraduate and graduatelevel poetry courses including workshops and literature classes focusing on contemporary poetry. […] I think of myself as part of a dominant trend in emerging American poetry right now: a poetry that, while rooted in narrative and a first person semi-autobiographical speaker, seeks to consistently stray away from and tease that tradition. This poetry has been called Post-Language, Post-Confessional, Elliptical’. To maintain confidentiality, we withhold fuller information about participants’ credentials. It is, however, important for readers to understand that these poet-scholars are established and respected in the field. All our discussion participants were educators, many of them at nationally recognized programs and institutions. Participants were (and still are) also actively writing and publishing poetry and criticism in books and journals; every participant has published at least one book of poetry, criticism and/or poetry writing pedagogy. We transcribed audio recordings of the day’s conversation into a written transcript of approximately 40,000 words, 5,000 lines or 148 manuscript

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pages. Using a grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis (Charmaz, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 2008), we explored and analyzed the transcripts. See Appendix C for a list of all 98 of the ‘nodes’ (patterns or themes) we discovered in the data. We then explored the various themes, seeking to learn how they were dynamically interrelated in the evaluative debate among our participants. The following discussion presents our observations and insights regarding how the 7 poetteacher-editors on the editorial board of CAPER valued the 12 finalist poems.

Textual Values Textual values are those that focus specifically on the text, without conscious reference to factors beyond the text’s boundaries. For the editorial board of the imaginary literary journal CAPER, textual values are expressed in two different ways: (1) as an appreciation of the ways a poem emerges from disconnection to achieve significant coherence by incorporating risk and surprise to arrive at discoveries and revelations; (2) as an appreciation of the poem’s immanence, a more physically palpable kind of coherence.

Connection, disconnection and direction: ‘Where’s it going?’ A significant dynamic we observed within the realm of textual criteria was the connection and tension between values such as invention, moments and images and the counter-posed criteria of development, discovery and consequence. Our participants demanded arresting images and moments, but they also demanded that something intellectual, moral, political, spiritual and/or aesthetic be accomplished with those delicious poetic moments. According to Wallace Stevens (1997: 919), surrealism is ‘invention without discovery’, and after Paul used this quotation to critique Christian Hawkey’s ‘Hour of Secret Agents’, the first poem to be discussed, Stevens’s formulation provided a touchstone for the discussion, a discussion in which a number of the poems were considered ‘surreal’. For discussion participants, mere surrealism, an aesthetic based on juxtaposition, seemed inconsequential. Trina referred to the Hawkey poem ‘as sort of an American surrealism that feels too easy for me now’. Marty noted, ‘Wallace Stevens talks about the imagination versus whimsy. Too much surrealism seems whimsical—“Hello, there’s a pink elephant in the tree, and it just spit a clam at me”. That doesn’t mean anything’. And Paul commented that, for him, there is ‘a kind of unbearable lightness […] in a

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lot of surrealism’.1 Substantial in its own right, the critique of surrealism’s mere inventiveness and disjunction additionally was both a seed and a microcosm of a larger trend in the discussion in which discussion participants prized the invention that took place in the poems but also felt that mere inventiveness was not enough to create a successful poem. Discussion participants clearly valued the power of striking and singular segments of poems. While these segments were sometimes referred to, generally, as ‘parts’, ‘lines’ and ‘passages’, the most common designations were moments and images. Discussion participants regularly commented on ‘favorite moments’ in poems, or the ‘beautiful moment’. Commenting on ‘Hour of Secret Agents’, Marty articulated the power of moments, stating, ‘When I like a poem it’s often because there’s a moment that I really like […] [M]oments […] are enough to make me come back and read it’. While generally, as Dennis put it, it is ‘jumping-off points’ that make a poem ‘memorable’, moments tend to be the surprisingly inventive, image-focused parts of poems. The moments that discussion participants singled out for praise most often consisted of striking, singular images. Ravi was a central spokesperson for the link between moments and images. Commenting on ‘loving moments in poems’, Ravi noted that ‘more often than not’, his love of a moment involved ‘a reaction to an image’, and he commented positively on specific, striking images in four of the poems under discussion, including, for example, ‘the bulldozer raising piles of blue surgical gowns to the sun’ in Hawkey’s ‘Hour of Secret Agents’ and ‘the pylon humming, with its wires over spring wheat through early morning mist’ in Ken Smith’s ‘Countryside around Dixton Manor, Circa 1715’. (Note: Ken Smith is a British poet. Paul brought this poem to the discussion to run his own experiment to see how important nationality really was to the group’s sense of the ‘most successful’ poems. In doing so, Paul revealed the kind of curiosity in poets discussed in this book’s conclusion.) Though striking moments tended to promote a willingness to stick with a poem in order to investigate it more – as Dennis stated of Hawkey’s poem, ‘there are enough moments in it for me that made it something that I wanted to continue to experience’ – the mere presence of such moments, no matter how powerful, was rarely enough for discussion participants to value the poem as a whole. Discussion participants were virtually unanimous in the fact that they valued a degree of coherent connectivity in a poem. In reference to Amy Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’, Paul noted that ‘There are a lot of nice little bits, and I just feel like, where’s it going? It’s bit, bit, bit, bit, bit’. The problem with a poem when it did not do more than provide moment-by-moment inventiveness was that the text came to seem aimless, without direction. For example, Trina was critical of ‘the sort of disjointed,

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narrative meanderings’ of ‘Hour of Secret Agents’. Discussion participants often wanted to feel as though a poem took them somewhere. Regarding Hawkey’s poem, James stated, ‘My difficulties were with the ending of the poem. I didn’t see it moving somewhere’. Paul complained about ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, noting that the poem did not provide a ‘journey to anywhere’, comparing it to ‘one of the lesser Dali paintings’ (‘Oh, that’s interesting, and so’s that, and so’s that’), and even inquiring about what the thesis of the poem might be, a call for strict coherence Paul then revised slightly: ‘I’m not saying [we should] assess that as a thesis, but for me it’s one of those [poems] […] I don’t know if we really go anywhere’.

Move me (1): How the sequential turns consequential Discussion participants clearly valued connection and direction. One way for a poem to offer significant connection was by providing what Paul called ‘a journey’. To do this, a poem had to have its own kind of dimensionality and directionality, which discussion participants referred to as a kind of development or shape, which moved with control to negotiate the poem’s risk while incorporating surprise with build and turns to arrive at an ending, which involved some degree of discovery and/or revelation and resulted, finally, in textual, and even moral, consequence. At their most basic level, development and shape specifically designated aspects of a poem which made the poem more than a mere aggregation of inventive moments. While acknowledging that Hawkey’s ‘Hour of Secret Agents’ was ‘a good image farm’, with images that were ‘all sort of connected’, Paul noted that the poem’s ‘development’ was limited in that it was ‘mostly parallel: image, image, image, image’. For Paul, this lack of significant development was the same as a lack of shape; Paul stated, ‘Then, for me, […] the question of image […] is the question of shape, and it seems less shaped than something I’d want on a page’. Countering some of Marty’s critiques of Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’, Trina claimed that the poem was more than ‘that incoherent mess, non-tied together stuff’, stating that ‘the poem actually has a lot of shape’. Trina defined the ‘holistic contract model’ of teaching poetry as workshop instruction in which she encourages her students in a process of ‘taking hold of the reins’ and getting ‘control of what they’re trying to do’. In this model, the instructor asks, ‘is the poem meeting its own contract that it’s setting up for itself, versus whether or not it’s a successful poem “for me”?’ Perhaps influenced in part by Trina’s contract model, discussion participants seemed to understand that significant development had much to do with the ways the poem accomplished what it seemed to say it was going to do. Poems that seemed to be in control and to accomplish what

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they were setting out to do received generally positive assessments, and those that lacked control were often assessed as less successful. Of ‘Dixton Manor’, James stated that it was ‘well-constructed’, noting that the poem asked ‘what’s the meaning of this’ and ‘by the end, it says: here’s the meaning’. Discussion participants were critical of Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’ for a number of reasons, including the fact that the poem posed a question at its beginning that it never seemed to answer – nor did it, as James said, enact a ‘strategic avoidance of answering’ the question. However, a successful poem’s control had to control something significant. The successful poem often had to incorporate surprise and negotiate risk. Surprise certainly could occur within a poem in isolated inventive and imagistic moments, on a moment-by-moment basis. However, it also seemed important at the level of a poem’s larger shape. Considering Austin Smith’s ‘In the Garden’, Marty imagined a ‘terrible’ version of the poem – ‘In the garden / all morning, tending / morning glories’ – and used this version of the poem to highlight the way that Smith’s haiku was ‘a sharp poem’, one that ‘works’ because its third line operated as a kind of ‘punch line’, offering ‘a surprise’. Critical of Kent Johnson’s ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’, Marty asked, ‘Where’s the surprise?’ Ravi was disappointed by the lack of surprise at the end of ‘Dixton Manor’, wishing – when the poem got to its ending, its (in Ravi’s terms) ‘mottos’ and ‘wisdom’ – that ‘it [offered] something more surprising’. While risk’s range of meanings tended more toward the contextual, still it had some relevance for textual criteria: risk could mean an engagement with unruly material the poem’s control successfully negotiated. Of Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’, Trina stated, ‘This poem risks sloppiness, it risks incoherence, it comes out the other side, and that’s what I love it for’. Ravi concurred, connecting risk with surprise: ‘It’s the most unpredictable poem in the packet, and I value that as an aesthetic’. Important components of – signs of and catalysts for – the kinds of controlled surprise making and risk taking of shape and development were builds, turns and efforts at creating successful endings, or closure. When a poem was determined to have build – which, along with turn, designated a shift in the rhetorical and/or dramatic progress of a poem – that was a significant assessment in the discussion: build was viewed as rare but valuable, helping a poem to overcome other shortcomings. Ravi noted that in ‘Trust Me’ the ‘opening stanzas were kept deliberately flat in order to provide a ground for those moments’, that is, the better writing later in the poem. And Paul concurred, contrasting the ‘level story—I made cheeseburgers, and I got done’ of Daniels’s ‘Short-Order Cook’ to the risky

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and successful build of ‘Trust Me’, a build ‘from questions—who was this, who am I, who am I—to the statement, “God fills us like a woman fills a pitcher”. It’s moved from questing to some kind of finality’. For Paul, such build was vital for the estimation of the poem; praising ‘Trust Me’, he stated, ‘I can’t point to a single line here that’s as good as any single line in the Joyelle McSweeney poem [‘Still Life w/ Influences’], but I felt that [‘Trust Me’] was more of a poem because of that build’. In the language of our discussion participants, a poem’s build often took place at the major turns or else, in the case of unsuccessful poems, turns failed to take place where build was expected but did not occur. The turn was viewed by many discussion participants as being central to the process of converting isolated moments into a significant whole. Paul’s observation that ‘there’s not turning’ in Hawkey’s poem occurred in the midst of his remarks about how this ‘image farm’ of a poem produced only the mere parallel development of ‘image, image, image, image’. However, the simple presence of a turn was not adequate to make a successful poem. There could be trivial turns, and the incorporation of a trivial turn could be especially problematic when that turn was what should be the vital turn that sent a poem heading toward its ending. Referring to Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’, the turn’s status as an effort toward significant closure was clearly vital when Paul stated, ‘And so, that seems to me to be a trivial ending for—a trivial turn, it is a turn, it’s actually where we get a development of some kind from these things in the world to us, but it’s: “and isn’t it cute that we met in our pajamas after the disaster where all those people died?”’ Before turning to discuss endings, a significant characteristic of the group’s evaluation of poems should be briefly addressed: the limited, secondary nature of the group’s consideration of poetic form. As the list of nodes (see Appendix B) shows, form and the related criteria of musicality and prosody received some mention in the discussion. However, with only a few exceptions, form was not discussed as a significant value in and of itself. Instead, in relation to more primary values of development and shape, form generally was a secondary issue – when brought up in conversation, form arose after other critiques of particular poems were made, often as a way of solidifying the previous, and more central, critiques of a particular poem’s lack of development or build. While the above state of affairs may in large part have been due to the fact that only one of the poems under discussion, ‘Dixton Manor’, was strictly formal, whatever the reason, it is clear that discussion participants were much less concerned with form and much more concerned with poems’ development, shape and journey.

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Endings The endings of poems received a good deal of critical attention in the discussion. This makes sense in terms of what’s been discussed above: an unsuccessful ending did not fulfill its contract with the reader or else, having not been subjected to adequate risks, too easily fulfilled its contract; a successful ending completed the quest of the poem through its risks and surprises. Endings were so vital because they typically offered the poem’s discovery or revelation, the proof that the poem’s quest had been worthwhile. Regarding C.D. Wright’s (1991: 33) ‘Personals’ and speaking to what the poem revealed ‘in terms of discovering something as opposed to not just being invented without discovery’, Paul stated, ‘I guess it’s one of the real old [discoveries]: it’s loss of innocence’. In regard to her reading of ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, Trina noted, ‘And that sense of discovery, that does get me as a reader, feeling that I have made a journey, and I have. And it could be a discovery, a journey towards less knowing than when I started out and looked through the knothole. In some ways that’s my favorite kind of poem, where I know less by the time I end or my knowing is more complicated—not that I know less, but that my sense of knowledge is more complicated’. Conversely, discussion participants largely agreed that the ending of Daniels’s ‘Short-Order Cook’ was problematic. At the beginning of the conversation regarding Daniels’s poem, Ravi noted that the poem was best in its beginning and more problematic at its end; he stated, ‘I find that it was the most, the funniest, in the beginning. I mean, it opens up, right, in the kind of diction of a joke: “An average Joe comes in / and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.” And then what happens next? In some ways, I felt that it arrived at its punch line, “He ain’t no average Joe,” long before the end’. Trina found the end of the poem ‘explicative and summarizing’. Paul stated, ‘I was happily enough carried along on narrative until—the end is where the gas goes out of it for me’, adding that it did not make his ‘coveted list’ of top-five poems because of ‘the ending, which just seems to me like the movie where you feel the machinery clicking at the end’. James also voiced concerns about the ending of Menes’s (2001: 20–21) ‘Dido’s Lament’. Though he noted that he ‘liked a lot of “Dido’s Lament”’, stating that the poem’s opening allowed the poem to be ‘set up well’, James’s major concern was the end of the poem, where the death of the poem’s central subject takes place in just four lines. For James, this ‘huge part’ of the poem, therefore, ‘just got lost’. At one point, James observed that a different treatment of this ending, one that delved into it, could have

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‘resurrected or transformed’ the poem for him; at another point, James pointed out that the poem would have been more of a success ‘if that final section could have been opened up more’. For all the above considerations of discovery and revelation in poems, there was a countervailing hesitance about overt didacticism in poems. In this discussion, didactic typically meant discovery or revelation that was not, additionally, surprising, or that did not manage a successful build or turn. After Dennis said of Kent Johnson’s ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’ that ‘I’ve heard this kind of politics before a lot’, and referred to the poem as ‘too glib’, Paul interpreted Dennis’s comments: ‘A less redeemed didactic, you know?’ And, once again, what would have redeemed the poem – which Paul saw mostly as a collection of moments (‘here’s a variant, here’s a variant, here’s a variant’) – would have been a successful build or turn. Much more than didacticism, discussion participants wanted from their poems a sense of consequence, that is, both the redemption of the poem’s sequence by a successful turn/build/ending, and a sense that the sequence mattered to, or had implications for, the poem’s speaker. As Ravi put it, ‘Consequences also are a good way of thinking about not only the question of does this poem have consequences for the speaker, but also within the poem, internally, is there a sense of consequence as the poem progresses?’ Paul concurred: ‘Yeah, that’s one of my favorite little couplets in John Matthias [1983: 134], is “language turning upon consequence, consequence upon language”’. Consequence clearly also had moral overtones. Discussion participants wanted to feel that a poem seriously attended to its development, that the events of the poem had ramifications for the speaker or subject of the poem. Of Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’, Paul complained, ‘we walk through these images [of disasters], and then we walk out the other side’. Ravi used such a critique to theorize more broadly on an evaluative trend developing in the CAPER conversation; he noted, ‘It seems like one criterion that keeps coming up is amount of sincerity, or amount of [the poet’s] being behind the events within the poem, or being affected by the events within the poem’.

Move me (2): Textual immanence For all the large-scale working agreement among the CAPER editorial board on the development model of the successful poem, the discussion also revealed a strikingly different way to consider a poem’s success. Unlike the development model (outlined in the section ‘Move me (1)’, above), this alternative method of valuation, which we call the ‘immanence model’, was,

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as one discussion participant put it, ‘hard to pin down’; immanence evoked a more visceral response to the poem and conceived of the poem as edgier and more physically palpable. As we will see, discussion about immanence also entailed a radical reevaluation of some of the developmental model’s weighty moral and intellectual criteria. There were two distinct versions of the immanence model: one kind that Dennis and Marty applied to Daniels’s ‘Short-Order Cook’, and another kind that Trina and Ravi applied to McSweeney’s ‘Still Life w/Influences’ and Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’. Dennis and Marty seemed to have a visceral enjoyment of ‘Short-Order Cook’. Dennis stated, ‘I am brought there, and I would like a cheeseburger, even though I am a vegetarian’. Marty agreed. Citing an idea passed on to him by a former professor that ‘you write from the head or you write from the heart, or you write from someplace considerably lower’, Marty noted that ‘Short-Order Cook’ was a poem that ‘comes from the gut’, demonstrating ‘an aesthetic of a bodily poem wrestling the intelligence’; he detected ‘an immediacy to this poem’. Such immediacy stood against the idea that poems must come from the head, ‘that the poem needs to be supremely intellectual, almost theoretical, in order to be a good poem’. Dennis extended these ideas, arguing that one need not admire heady, intellectual, highly allusive poems, for, with such poems, ‘you’re taken out of the experience’. Though applied to texts different from those on which Dennis and Marty focused, Trina’s and Ravi’s comments on textual immanence were very similar: a more physically direct engagement with the poem. Trina echoed and shifted Marty’s language of levels of the body when discussing Wright’s ‘Personals’: ‘Talking about writing from different levels, like writing from a woman’s body and writing from that bodily experience—I’m glad to see that, too’. Trina also read McSweeney’s ‘Still Life w/ Influences’ as particularly bodily, stating that for her ‘the opening of the poem is a singing out, actually: there’s something that’s been seen and then there’s something that appears connected to the body’. Later, Ravi noted that McSweeney’s poem was the only one discussed at that point in the conversation that included a question, and for Ravi, the inclusion of questions ‘has something to do with the kind of investment in the poem as an event’. In reference to Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’, Trina stated that she valued the poem because of ‘that idea of the original lyric, where the experience of the poem is the poem, like experiencing the poem is the transcendence of the poem’. In creating immanence, a poem came to attain presence, immediacy and may even have felt more like an event or an experience than a text or a thing.

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Overturning values If less definitive than the development model, the immanence model deserves consideration because immanence not only offered another way to value poems, but also entailed a revisioning of key parts of the overall conversation about poetic value: namely, the status of surrealism, and even the idea of ‘success’ as a goal for poetry. The immanence model rescued and elevated surrealism as an aesthetic that appeared suppressed and devalued by the significance model. Many ideas about immanence were offered up as challenges to the idea from development devotees that surrealism was ‘invention without discovery’, or that it should not have been valued (mainly) for that inventiveness. In the face of challenges from development’s champions, immanence advocates theorized new ways of thinking about and valuing surrealism. Discussing McSweeney’s ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, Trina stated that ‘surrealism should be less palatable, and in some ways this feels like more scary and sticky to me’. And Ravi concurred, noting that ‘there’s less of an ego at the center of this surrealism’. Dennis also described his admiration for ‘Still Life w/ Influences’ in terms of surrealist invention without big development or discovery. He stated, ‘Each poem has an experience’ and, according to Dennis, he preferred ‘experiences [he] can reflect on and play with and keep thinking about’. For Dennis, ‘Still Life w/ Influences’ offered just such a memorable experience, one that ‘didn’t have to take [him] anywhere from, from start to finish’, one that, in part because a ‘short enough’ poem, ‘itself is the journey’. Of ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, Dennis stated, ‘It’s present’. Dennis used his discussion of McSweeney’s poem as an occasion to pronounce his admiration for surrealist poetry more generally. He got pleasure from surrealist poetry when ‘it can actually make itself appear in my brain, if I don’t have to try really hard to put it all together’. Dennis compared the ‘erratic images’ of contemporary American surrealist poetry with Tex Avery cartoons, noting that while ‘it’s just maddening, and all these things are coming in’, ‘it’s one after another that creates this sort of movement’. That was something he ‘really latch[es] onto more than instructive or reflective poetry’. The valuing of textual immanence also seemed to stem from a desire to challenge the framework of the discussion by introducing some skepticism about the pursuit of (mere) ‘success’ in poetry. In contrast to the ‘mere competence’ that worried Trina as a poetic value, she saw immanence as a way to value and reward risk instead, a prized quality variously characterized as ‘sloppiness’, ‘incoherence’ and (Ravi’s word)

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‘unpredictability’. As previously noted, Trina valued the ‘risks’ she saw Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’ taking, commenting, ‘Maybe this gets to this idea of competency, right, and success, that a successful or competent poem is probably not going to take that many risks’. And Trina stated that she thought that ‘Trust Me’ was a poem ‘that seeks to dislocate [her]’, an effort she was ‘very comfortable’ with and that she celebrated. Discussion of immanence clearly attempted to indicate and explore a way to value poems differently from the development model detailed in the section ‘Move me (1)’. Where Trina saw immanence, development devotees James and Paul often saw a problematic lack of development, and a lack of revelation. In regard to ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, James commented that ‘there are all these gestures towards revelation and insight, but then it really backs away from it’. And Paul agreed, stating that he also saw in the poem gestures ‘toward significance, toward revelation’, but that such gestures were finally not adequate to make a successful poem. The distinction between significant development and immanence was not, however, decisive. Trina interpreted her pleasure as a reader in terms of making a journey as a reader, and she did this, to some extent, with poems she thought of as exhibiting immanence. For example, though Trina admired ‘Still Life w/ Influences’ for its immanent qualities, she also claimed that this poem ‘is not just a list of beautiful things’, that it had ‘arc’ and an ending with ‘a very different kind of tone than other things that happen’. Trina additionally considered ‘shape’ a vital feature of ‘Trust Me’. Though there was overlap and disagreement about application, the development model and the immanence model name two dramatically different ways of reading, or experiencing, and valuing texts. However, if, in terms of textual criteria, these two models seem somewhat distinguishable, we will see that those distinctions are largely dissolved in the realm of contextual criteria, where values that appear textual are revealed to be contextual.

Contextual Values In his study of how instructors of college composition assess their students’ writing, Broad (2003) explains the relationship between textual and contextual criteria for judging written texts: Textual Criteria include those factors […] inherent in the specific text under evaluation. By contrast, the exact same text might pass or fail depending on which Contextual Criteria participants invoke […] [Contextual Criteria] demonstrated how pedagogical, ethical, collegial, and other aspects of the environment surrounding students’ texts guided and shaped evaluators’ decisions. (Broad, 2003: 32, 73)

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The entire PDCM project emerged from Theune and Broad’s sense that poets and critics resist discussing or even acknowledging the criteria by which they judge poetry. Broad observes that teachers of writing, who are accustomed to discussing and negotiating textual criteria for evaluating their students’ texts, nevertheless rarely mention or show any conscious awareness of contextual criteria. Among poets, we might therefore expect awareness of contextual criteria to be doubly shadowy – and bringing them to light doubly controversial. One of this study’s most basic findings is that we can usefully distinguish criteria, characteristics and qualities of poetic texts (‘textual values’) from the things we value about a poem based on its contexts (‘contextual values’): how the poet, the reader and their socio-historical settings interact to shape our evaluations of the poetic texts those contexts surround. In our analysis of the CAPER discussion, we find three overlapping contexts: socio-historical, authorial and readerly. Also, we find that the realm of contextual criteria completely encircles and envelops, and in fact (as the discussion below reveals) often dissolves or subsumes, the textual realm of poetic criteria discussed above. At the very least, context deeply suffuses and inflects all ostensibly textual considerations.

Socio-historical contexts Fashion: ‘Wow… that poem again’ Fashion was the most-discussed criterion (textual or contextual) in the conversation we studied. Just as the discussion participants valued textual surprise and discovery – elements within the text of a poem which indicated, revealed and confirmed that the poem was differentiating itself from the sheer mass of its moments – they also valued poems for the ways they distinguished themselves from other works with which they were linked via consideration of fashion – for example, poems of a similar style, genre or historical moment. To be valued, a poem had to present a figure that was distinguishable from its ground. Some poems were criticized for being too much a part of certain fashions, too similar to their milieu, while other poems were valued for being novel instances of general types. For example, Trina stated that ‘even though [“Personals”] is a very Elliptical poem, like the Hawkey’, the poem differentiated itself from other poems of the type (including Hawkey’s) because it ‘feels like it knows where it’s been, it knows where it’s going, and it’s settled down. This poem feels like it’s taking itself very seriously throughout’. In response to a question posed by Ravi – ‘Is a criterion of success going to be that the poem has to do something different in kind than what we’ve seen before?’ – Paul suggested that what the group actually might have been looking for was

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‘novelty—it’s gotta be something different or interesting within the type of thing that it is’. Ravi later referred to this quality as ‘freshness’. Participants’ prizing of novelty within fashion asserted itself most clearly in their advocacy of poems they deemed successfully unfashionable. Identifying ‘Dixton Manor’ as ‘probably the most conservative, or traditional aesthetically, poem on the worksheet’, Ravi suggested that ‘it’s the unfashionableness of it that was attractive’. Paul agreed: ‘It’s so old it’s new. […] You publish this and people might sneer at you, and that’s interesting to me, that it’s a little out of step with fashion’. Though Marty recognized the artistic risks inherent in creating a historically and politically bound poem like ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’ (a poem about the 2003 US invasion of Iraq), that risk inspired admiration that eventually led him to vote for this poem as one of the five winners. Likewise, Nick and Dennis admired Daniels’s ‘Short-Order Cook’ for its unfashionableness. Justifying his inclusion of ‘Short-Order Cook’ in his final top-five selection, Nick noted that he ‘put that one in because it discusses something very few poets write about: work’. Dennis agreed: ‘Yeah, work. Crappy work’.

Identity politics: ‘If a white guy wrote this poem …’ When considering identity politics, our panel of poets prized some poems more or less depending on the age, ethnicity and gender of the poet. Trina introduced this contextual criterion in response to both Menes’s ‘Dido’s Lament’ and Plumpp’s (1997: 101–103) ‘History, Hollers, and Horn’. Part of the way I read this [Menes] poem and the Sterling Plumpp poem is a very non-new-criticism way, informed by identity politics. I’m very conscious of the fact that these are poets of color, and that absolutely affects my reading of them, and what I’m looking for when I read those poems. Even as Trina presented a fashion critique of ‘History, Hollers, and Horn’ (that ‘the jazz poem’ was an overly worn genre: ‘God’, she commented, ‘there are like a jillion of those poems’), Plumpp’s ethnic identity redeemed the poem: ‘I feel like this is a poet who’s confident giving voice to this kind of poem; this is the poet who needs to be writing this kind of poem’. As a poet who had ‘moved away from any sort of identification with a national or cultural group whatsoever’, Ravi critiqued the Plumpp poem and the role of identity politics in assigning it value. In response, Trina shifted her defense, suggesting Plumpp had earned license to generate ‘another jazz poem’ because of his age: ‘He’s an elder, he’s one of the guys who started doing this […] If you were doin’ it in the sixties you still get to do it now’.

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Trina turned the group toward the gendered aspect of identity politics during the discussion of ‘Personals’ by C.D. Wright: ‘Along the same line of identity politics, this is the first woman poet that we’ve read in the packet so far’. Interestingly, what Trina went on to say in the speech that follows concerned not the poet’s gender, age or ethnicity, but rather the setting (motel room), the subject matter (eating pimiento cheese) and the strong body/gender connection those features created for Trina, as we explain below in our analysis of body/gender. Where Trina earlier invoked identity politics in support of Plumpp’s and Wright’s texts, in commenting on Berman’s ‘Democratic Vistas’, she used the same criterion to deliver a vigorous critique: ‘I read it in the same vein as the Hawkey poem. […] There’s something very twenty-something-white-male about this poem’. In immediate response, Paul directly challenged Trina’s identity politics-based dismissal of Hawkey and Berman. Trina did not back down. Paul:

Is that [being a twenty-something-white-male] any worse than any other ethnic group? I want to check on that. Trina: Yeah, it is. Paul: ‘Cause I have been a twenty-something white male, you know. Dennis: I am one. Paul: But straight-up demographic dismissal … I don’t know, you know?

In reply to Paul’s challenge, Trina presented her most direct and sustained defense of identity politics as a contextual criterion firmly rooted in history, ethnicity and gender: I’m sorry, but there’s a long history of poetry, and it’s got a lot of twenty-something white males in it, and I do feel like there’s a little bit of evening of the playing field that has to be done now. […] That said, obviously one can be a twenty-something white boy and write an incredible poem. But this [Berman’s poem] is reveling in its twentysomething-white-boyness, and that to me is politically problematic. And it’s so snarky, this poem. It’s a particular kind of twentysomething white boy—a GenX, Reality Bites, twenty-something, white-boy rocker. This contest of poetic values resolved itself in a fascinating way when Trina offered a distinction that (perhaps?) made her critique less purely based in identity politics: ‘I’m not saying [being a] white boy, that’s the problem, I’m saying that the poem’s about it’. Being a twenty-something white male poet was not, then, inherently bad. But when such a poet

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‘revel[ed]’ in his privileged identity and treated a ‘tragic event [with] casual cleverness’ (Paul’s description of the Berman text), when the poet seemed to be trumpeting a place in the world about which Trina said ‘That’s called privilege’, then she objected and devalued the poem. In response to Trina’s project of promoting the criterion of identity politics, Paul offered her kudos for her courage. Paul: Trina:

And props for saying it in a room full of white guys. This is my job, move on, just doin’ my fuckin’ job. Sorry.

Momentarily overlooking the non-white member of the board (Ravi), Paul implicitly acknowledged that the demographic makeup of an editorial board like CAPER’s could have made some evaluative criteria politically harder to articulate, and he praised Trina for her determination. Identity politics was not only a significant contextual criterion in its own right, but it also resonated strongly with several of the other contextual criteria we’re about to explore, including trust and body/gender. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of these issues.

The reader–poet relationship As the second of three contextual realms of poetic evaluation, the reader–poet relationship concerned the emotional and ethical relationship between the reader and the poet – not the poem, not the persona but the poet. This cluster of criteria marked a strikingly personal connection between the poet and the reader.

Trust me: Doubting and believing in poems and poets Marty mistrusted Valentine’s ‘Trust Me’. He feared being ‘taken in’ and tricked into placing high value on a poem that was not the result of serious, intensive, poetic craft: ‘The thing I don’t trust about this poem is, I feel like I could write it in five minutes. […] I see a lot of poems like this, and I feel like, why is this so roundly rewarded?’ Later, in continuing to explain his wariness toward ‘Trust Me’, Marty related the story of some of his fellow graduate students who made beer and pizza money by selling Rothko ‘knockoff’ paintings for 20 bucks a shot. We could frame Marty’s concern here as a reluctance to be artistically ripped off, to be conned or duped into investing intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically in an unworthy poem. Commenting on Plumpp’s ‘History, Hollers, and Horn’, Trina offered that ‘I’m confident, I trust in this voice’ despite her aesthetic reservations

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about the poem. Trina’s confidence in Plumpp’s voice seemed connected with her reservations and doubts about poems by twenty-something white males, and her stated belief that ‘there’s a little bit of evening the playing field that has to be done now’ in the selection and celebration of works by poets who present marginalized identities more like Plumpp’s (as an African American man) and Wright’s (as a woman) than like Berman’s and Hawkey’s. (See the section Identity politics above.) Trust also played a strong role in Trina’s very positive assessment of McSweeney’s ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, and here we also begin to notice the strong ties between trust and tone/attitude (discussed below). Trina praised McSweeney’s poem for ‘calling back in history. It’s an allusion and […] I trust the serious intent of that move. That brings the strange wackiness of this poem into focus for me and makes it feel solid’. The poem’s strong rootedness in history, nature (it refers to a whale) and other texts (allusion) gave Trina confidence as a reader and led her to trust the poet. The closing of the poem also won Trina’s loyalty because, in contrast to other postmodern, ‘wacky’ poems in the packet, with ‘Still Life’ ‘the tone, rather than feeling glib or snarky, feels reverent to me’. Trina illustrated how honorific connections with texts, nature and history, and a reverential and hymnal quality, set up the poem to enact what Trina, as previously noted, called ‘inevitability’. Trina posited a comforting transportational metaphor for the experience of readerly trust: being ‘on board’ (with) a poem. Marty, in expressing his deep skepticism toward ‘Trust Me’, used similar imagery with an opposite effect: ‘There’s no place for me to really land’.

Tone/attitude We know that some CAPER board members valued the ‘bad attitude’ (snarky, smug, ironic) elements of the poems by Hawkey, Berman, Johnson and – perhaps to a lesser extent – Gerstler. After all, some members of the panel nominated these texts among their four ‘most successful’ contemporary US poems. However, on the morning of May 19, 2007, under the strong leadership and influence of Trina, it was the contrasting ‘good attitude’ values (seriousness, sincerity and reverence) that ruled the day. Here is a summary of participants’ actual terms associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tones and attitudes: • •

Favored attitude: Affected by events, attached, open, reverent, serious, sensitive, sincere, vulnerable, responsible. Disfavored attitude: Unaffected by events, detached, ironic, glib, casual, random, sarcastic, smug, snarky, irresponsible.

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When James and Marty agreed on the brilliance of the Hawkey line ‘where I heard the voices of lost products beneath me’, Trina quickly turned that point of praise to critique: ‘I wish the poem would take itself that seriously throughout’. For Trina, the quality that made the ‘lost products’ line memorable and appealing – a quality missing from the rest of the poem – was its attitude of seriousness. Marty shared with Trina this concern about the Hawkey poem: ‘I like what Trina said, too: I wished the poem took itself this seriously throughout’. Later, Trina would describe Hawkey’s treatment of the baby in the trash pile as ‘glib’ and ‘random’. We will take a closer look at this concern in the section Body/gender and have glimpsed it in the section Identity politics, but for the moment it is useful to notice the contrast between the highly valued attitude of seriousness and responsibility as opposed to the devalued tone of casualness and glibness. Trina’s devaluation of Berman’s ‘Democratic Vistas’ was similar to her critique of Hawkey’s poem, but even more intense. As she did in evaluating ‘Hour of Secret Agents’, Trina began by acknowledging the seriousness of the last half of Berman’s poem. Then she moved quickly into a condemnation of the poem’s ‘casual violence’ and lack of ‘emotional responsibility’: [At the end of the poem] it’s taking itself more seriously again. One of the things that this poem does, which is rooted in a kind of privilege, is it can be casual about violence. Read this poem in the context of [the mass shooting at] Virginia Tech. It’s a poem that’s sort of casual about its power, and it doesn’t make any really searing connections to the emotional responsibility of the speaker. In proclaiming the Berman poem ‘so snarky’, Trina articulated another concern squarely based in assessment of the poem’s and/or poet’s tone and attitude. Here, Paul joined her in the critique: ‘What I have a hard time with, it’s in the tone, just the real casual cleverness with which it takes kind of [a] tragic event’. Dennis challenged Trina’s link between gender and tone/attitude when he came to Berman’s defense: ‘I thought there were other poems that we’ll get to that are far snarkier’. Several participants agreed, judging Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’, a poem by a woman, to be as ‘glib’ and ‘casual’ about suffering as Hawkey’s or Berman’s. Just as Trina objected to ‘Democratic Vistas’ based on our post-Virginia Tech socio-historical context, some participants felt especially critical of the ‘cuteness’ of ‘Montage of Disasters’ in the post-Hurricane-Katrina United States.

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Readers’ contexts As we’ve seen, many contexts that shaped the CAPER editors’ evaluations of poetry came from culture, history or their perceptions of the poet whose texts they were reading. At times, however, the participants in our study themselves provided powerful contexts that determined their poetic evaluations. The dynamic on which we focus in this final section on contextual values is how readers’ bodies, and especially genders, affected their assessments of a text’s poetic success.

Body/gender Marty and Dennis both admired Daniels’s ‘Short-Order Cook’, sharing a theory about the ‘gutsy’ quality of Daniels’s poem. Marty laid out his anatomical theory of poetic production: ‘[“Short-Order Cook”] is a poem that comes from the gut, which I think is a nice place where a lot of poems come from’. Marty prized the ‘gut’ origins of this poem, specifically because it ‘wrestles the intelligence’ of the poet and poem. In immediate reply to Marty, Dennis closely echoed this perspective. Tony Hoagland talks about the levels of the body too, where one connects. Just because a poem is from the brain [does not make it better]. It’s just that’s what its goal is, that’s what it wants to do, and if [‘Short-Order Cook’] wants to succeed at being a gut poem then I applaud it for choosing that goal and following through with it. Trina, by contrast, found very little to enjoy or admire in ‘Short-Order Cook’. Pushing off of Dennis’s and Marty’s praise for the gutsy bodily-ness of the poem, Trina transmuted the challenges to hyperintellectualism that they admired into the poem’s lack of intelligence: ‘This poem, it’s never aiming to be smart particularly, and it’s also never aiming to be beautiful. I feel like if you’re not going to give me either of those, I don’t know what to do’. Notice that neither Dennis nor Marty said that ‘Short-Order Cook’ was not smart. Rather, they praised it for attempting to do something other than, or in addition to, being smart: express and enact a bodily gut sense of something, in this case the satisfaction of intense, masculine, manual labor. Trina, however, did not share their bodily experience of the poem, and as a result it left her uninterested and uninspired. The problem was not, however, that Trina did not experience poems in a gut, bodily way. To the contrary, Trina was one of the most ardent advocates in the group for valuing body in poems. It’s just that she was valuing different kinds of bodies in different kinds of poems. As it turned

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out, this aesthetic difference seemed to depend – not surprisingly – on the fact that she herself inhabited and performed a different kind of body: a woman’s body and a mother’s body. Trina praised McSweeney’s ‘Still Life w/Influences’ partly because the seeing and singing with which the poem begins and ends connected the reader to their body: ‘The opening of the poem is a singing out. I read it that way, that moment of: there’s something that’s been seen and then there’s something that appears … connected to the body’. Above, in discussing trust and its links to tone/attitude, we noted how Trina admired ‘Still Life w/Influences’ as a ‘reverent’ poem. Part of that experience of reverence, it seems, was rooted in the poem’s bodily acts of seeing and singing, as well as its links to history, nature and ancient texts. Trina’s appreciation of Wright’s ‘Personals’ also rested partially in her sense that the poem emerged from and expressed a woman’s ‘bodily experience’. Trina’s praise for ‘Personals’ was explicitly gendered: This poem’s in a motel room, it’s on a road trip, it’s eating pimiento cheese, and as a woman poet for whom this stuff is very much a part of what I do and what I’m interested in […] I connect to a poem that’s talking about writing from different levels, like writing from a woman’s body and writing from that bodily experience, I’m glad to see that, too. In mentioning ‘talking about writing from different levels’, Trina seemed to be alluding back to Marty’s and Dennis’s theories about different bodily levels from which poems can seem to emerge and at which poems can connect with their readers. Trina found satisfaction and reward in the feminine-gendered, multilevel bodily-ness of ‘Personals’. In response to James’s question about how Trina valued Wright’s poem and devalued Hawkey’s, Trina introduced an additional critique of Hawkey, this one closely connected to exactly the characteristics for which she was just praising the Wright poem. [‘Personals’] is the more mature version of the Hawkey poem. One of the things I resisted in the Hawkey poem […] is the glib use of the baby, the infant. As someone with an infant and as someone who’s writing motherhood poems, I’m just like—you don’t get to just throw a baby in a grave and be random about it. Her subject position as a new mother led Trina to strongly reject the apparently ‘glib’ and ‘random’ treatment by the speaker of ‘Hour of Secret Agents’ of the ‘charred body of an infant’ that appears in the landfill.

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Paul, however, rejected Trina’s contention that ‘Personals’ offered something refreshingly new in its domestic setting and its orientation toward women’s bodies. In fact, he verged on calling the poem a cliché precisely because it was written by a woman. I see a whole lot of poems by women that are written out of the body. I’d like to see more poems about guys doing that. I think [‘Personals’] is a good poem, but I think women writing of the body is one of the things that women poets are quote ‘expected’ to do. There may also be echoes here of Trina’s condemnation elsewhere of Hawkey’s ‘twenty-something white male privilege’ and her sense that his poem did the same thing that poets who fit that profile have been doing for a long time. That is, Paul may have been directing toward ‘Personals’ the same ‘this is the same old thing from this type of poet’ critique that Trina had directed toward Hawkey and, later, Berman. Paul’s comments might also have been connected to the earlier discussion of ‘Short-Order Cook’, in which the value of men’s writing from the body had been debated. Ravi also weighed in, asking bluntly: ‘Why is [Wright’s American regionalism, colloquialism, and feminism] more fresh than [Hawkey’s] kind of American surrealism, and why is setting a poem in a motel room more fresh than setting a poem in a dump?’ Notice how Marty and Dennis, both of whom have been working-class men, identified with and admired the Daniels poem and its narrator. Trina pushed back with a strong critique of ‘Short-Order Cook’ based explicitly on aesthetic criteria: intelligence and beauty. She clearly did not share their favorable ‘gut’ response to the poem. When Trina, in turn, sang the praises of ‘Personals’ and its pimento cheese, written ‘from a woman’s body’, Paul and Ravi – whose bodies are male – resisted and puzzled over why Trina saw the poem as ‘fresh’ and ‘mature’. As powerful contextual criteria, demographics – including gender – played a prominent role shaping poetic evaluative deliberations, especially concerning body.

A Call to PDCM Action The dramatic fulcrum on which this study turned was the CAPER editorial board’s selections of only 5 poems (from among the 12 finalists) for the launch issue of their new (imaginary) poetry journal. We created a rule prohibiting any participant from voting for her or his own nominees, and we gave each participant four votes. Here, we list the winners and show you who voted for each:

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‘Still Life w/ Influences’ by Joyelle McSweeney (Dennis, Trina, Marty, James, Paul). ‘Personals’ by C.D. Wright (Dennis, Marty, Nick, Paul, Ravi). ‘Democratic Vistas’ by David Berman (Dennis, Ravi, James, Paul). ‘Countryside around Dixton Manor, Circa 1715’ by Ken Smith (Trina, Nick, Ravi, James). ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’ by Kent Johnson (Trina, Marty, Nick).

These selections are noteworthy in themselves and are a tribute to the poems and their authors. However, our interest focused less on winners and more on the process by which they were selected. Our study illuminated and explored the criteria by which this group of seven poets, teachers, editors and critics judged the 12 contemporary US poems laid before them. We analyzed their discussions comprehensively and systematically to reveal the evaluative dynamics laid out for you above. These dynamics are complex and mysterious enough to honor the art of poetry and the intelligence and sensitivity of the poets, poems and readers involved in this study. At the same time, our findings are compact and accessible enough to reduce the fog of silence and mystification to which the world of literature has, in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s (1998: 17) words, ‘exiled … the entire problematic of value and evaluation’. In other words, we now better understand how we evaluate poetry. And yet. Our participants are only seven out of millions of passionately concerned – and institutionally powerful – players in the world of contemporary poetry. Though this particular study turned up some very interesting and suggestive findings – among them: the two models for valuing poems at the level of text; the clearly secondary role of the conventionally popular criterion of form when contrasted to build/turn/ shape; and the strong role of contextual values – we insist that such findings neither can nor should be generalized to apply to all those involved with contemporary American poetry. Instead, we call on the many others who care about poetry and its evaluation to conduct collaborative, empirical, inductive and face-to-face DCM sessions of their own. Though few groups will have available the amount of time we devoted to our study, our project should smooth the way for real editorial boards or groups of poetry faculty colleagues to inquire into how they as a group evaluate poetry. (See Appendix A: ‘How to Do Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’, for practical instructions on how to proceed.) We believe poets, teachers, students and others will benefit from and are obligated to carry out such localized inquiries.

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After offering participants in the CAPER project an opportunity to reflect on their experiences in the next chapter, in Chapter 4 we turn to some actual recent and potential future uses of PDCM. We finish our book by addressing the ethical imperative to inquire deeply into poetic values.

Note (1)

Regarding our transcription method: In grooming selected quotations for inclusion in our book, we edited what were previously verbatim transcriptions for brevity and clarity. Specifically, we deleted repeated words and phrases (‘I, I, I think …’) and tag words and phrases like ‘you know’, ‘like’, ‘I think’, ‘kind of’, ‘right?’ and the paratactical ‘and’. We omitted ellipses to mark words removed from beginnings and ends of quotations, but we used ‘[…]’ to mark where we deleted words within a quotation other than the repeated phrases or tag phrases noted above.

3 A Chorus of Voices Reflecting on the CAPER Project To create the findings presented in Chapter 2, we (Theune and Broad) spent many months poring over transcripts of the Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) conversation, sifting through the data to find the patterns and themes in how and why those 7 poets valued and evaluated the 12 nominated poems. Our analysis (presented in Chapter 2) revealed what we consider interesting and useful insights into both the diverse criteria for judgment and the lively group dynamics evident in this discussion: the first face-to-face, collaborative, poetic evaluation (to the best of our knowledge) to be recorded, analyzed and offered to the professional community of creative writing studies scholars for their edification and critique. Crucially, we also strove to make our findings true to the spirit and intellect of the seven CAPER participants and how they worked together to select the five winning poems, even when some of the give and take was conflictual and discomfiting. In Chapter 1, we examined three important earlier ventures in poetic axiology (Turner’s, Bizzaro’s and Hix’s), noting their contributions to the field and also their limitations. Regarding Bizzaro’s remarkable reflective inquiry, we observed: Bizzaro recognized the need to convert his solitary self-analysis into a more social project, encompassing multiple poetic subjectivities. Since a key value driving poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM) is multiplication and diversification of the voices in evaluative conversations (making the evaluation of poetry, among other things, ‘a more social project’), our readers should not be surprised that in this chapter we wish to add additional voices and perspectives to our (Theune and Broad’s) analyses of and reflections on the CAPER project. So, to our close and careful reading of that conversation, we now wish to bring additional sets of well-informed eyes and ears and minds. Thus far, our detailed treatment of the first PDCM case study (Chapter 2) has been rendered as an extended duet between Theune and Broad, sung in close harmony (think: The Everly 56

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Brothers); we now wish to bring in a larger chorus of voices. This chapter moves the conversation about CAPER from 2 to 21 voices (think: The Impossible Orchestra’s multi-star production of Wilson and Asher’s song ‘God Only Knows’).

Adding and Amplifying CAPER Voices Live participants As readers of Chapter 2 will recall, the CAPER session included seven ‘live’ participants, cast as the editorial board of a new (avowedly fictional) periodical, the Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review. These 7 people sat around a table in Chicago and argued for four hours about which of the 12 nominated poems were the 5 ‘most successful’ contemporary US poems and thereby merited inclusion in the launch issue of this new poetry journal. Readers can review the opening pages of Chapter 2 to refresh their memories about the self-descriptions of those seven ‘live’ participants: • • • • • • •

Dennis James Marty Nick Paul Ravi Trina

We hope that readers will feel that they have already heard these participants’ voices richly and attentively presented in the preceding chapter. Nevertheless, we wanted to amplify their voices by inviting them to comment and reflect on their CAPER experiences years after their 2007 meeting.

Poets When a poet publishes their verse, they make themself vulnerable in a variety of ways, not least of which in that they might end up the focus of a public debate about how good or bad their poem is and why. Therefore, we recognize as involuntary participants – and as important and valued ‘voices’ in the CAPER sessions – the poets who wrote the 12 poems nominated by the imaginary journal’s editorial board as among the best contemporary US poems (acknowledging the special case of British poet Ken Smith):

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David Berman (‘Democratic Vistas’). Jim Daniels (‘Short-Order Cook’). Amy Gerstler (‘Montage of Disasters’). Christian Hawkey (‘Hour of Secret Agents’). Kent Johnson (‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’). Joyelle McSweeney (‘Still Life w/ Influences’). Orlando Ricardo Menes (‘Dido’s Lament’). Sterling Plumpp (‘History, Hollers, and Horn’). Austin Smith (from Wheat and Distance). Ken Smith (‘Countryside around Dixton Manor, Circa 1715’). Jean Valentine (‘Trust Me’). C.D. Wright (‘Personals’).

In important and substantive ways, then, the preceding chapter already presents at least 21 important voices on poetry and its evaluation: 2 researchers, 7 poet-critics and 12 poets (in addition to the voices of poetic authorities that participants invoked, such as Wallace Stevens). Still, in anticipation of the development of the book you are now reading, we broadened the discussion in the following ways.

Launching CAPER 2.0 In spring 2011, a few months after the November 2010 publication of our article ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry’ (Broad & Theune, 2010), we sought and received approval from our respective universities’ institutional review boards (IRBs) to invite our participants and the nominated poets to participate in a virtual follow-up to the CAPER study. In June 2011, we wrote to the seven poet-critics and the 12 poets who were directly involved. Below are excerpts from the texts of our two invitations, first to the editorial board and then to the poets whose poems were nominated as best. (The two invitations are presented in their entirety as Appendices D and E.) Dear [CAPER editorial board member], Thank you again for participating (oh, those many years ago!) in our 2007 study of how we value poetry. We hope you’ll enjoy reading the article that grew from that conversation. The article is called ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry’, and it appears in College English, volume 73, issue 2 (November 2010). We’re planning to make a book out of this project ...

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We also would like to supplement this material with additional contributions from each of you. From brief notes to a couple of paragraphs to your own short essay, we’d love to get your immediate, fresh response to ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry’. …. Your role here is potentially very significant. We think that again opening up the conversation started during our gathering in Chicago could create a multi-layered conversation unlike any heard of so far in discussions of contemporary poetry. …. Dear Poet, Your work is featured in a recent study of how we value contemporary American poetry. We’d like to invite your response. The article ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry’ ... is a part of an ongoing investigation of evaluation of poetry. We are working on constructing a book around this essay. In the book, we’d like to include commentary from you, discussing the article, including but not limited to discussion of the poem you wrote. Some poems are critiqued in this conversation, but you’ll note from the methods section that your work was selected by one of the participants as representative of the most successful contemporary poetry. Your prominence as a poet led your poem to be selected as one among 12 finalists, and for this reason yours is a highly valued voice in this conversation. … ...We hope that you’ll be a part of this important, ongoing discussion. … From the CAPER editorial board, we received at least brief responses from all seven participants; four of the seven (Marty, Paul, Ravi and Trina) provided substantive and extended responses. You will find substantial material from their responses in the pages that follow. From the 12 poets, we received a wide range of responses and nonresponses. Some did not respond at all to our invitations to participate, though we sent invitations via email and then followed up via US mail if we did not hear back electronically. Other poets briefly declined to participate for a variety of reasons (lack of time, lack of interest, etc.). In the end, we received extended responses from 3 of the 12 poets (David Berman, Kent Johnson and Austin Smith), and their comments appear in the pages that follow.

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Notes of Appreciation for the CAPER Project Multiple commentators expressed their appreciation for insights gained from the 2010 article. Ravi (private correspondence, 2011) lauded the piece for making him see and think in new ways about the language he uses to judge poetry: I think the most valuable aspect of the study is its defamiliarization of my previous working vocabulary for the assessment of poems … I found the [article’s] articulation of these … evaluative terms to be both surprising and inevitable, like the best poems themselves. Along similar lines, Marty (private correspondence, 2011) declared that he ‘loved’ the article, partly because it helped to illuminate the often invisible assumptions poets and readers bring to poetry: What struck me upon re-reading [the article] is how [Broad and Theune] teased out and identified so many of our (the participants’) assumptions: exactly what I’m trying to do now with students in [creative writing] workshop. Chapter 4 (‘Promising Applications of and Futures for Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’) corresponds with Marty’s ideas about how his new poetry workshop pedagogy is informed by his experiences with PDCM, and we will endorse Marty’s ‘challenge [to] any [creative] writing program’ to undertake some version of PDCM. Austin Smith (private correspondence, 2011), who wrote the CAPERnominated (untitled) haiku, noted that this study … begins to point us towards those things that make poetry both the most demanding and … utterly vital work imaginable. Specifically, Smith marks as ‘the real value of this research study … [learning] that we still value poems that establish a Contract and fulfill that Contract’. Smith also notes that ‘I was so heartened to read of how participants … recognized the difference between a poem of moments and a poem of moment’. Kent Johnson (private correspondence, 2011), author of ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’, offers this assessment of the article: ‘The attempt by Broad and Theune to provide greater rigor and precision to poetic evaluation strikes me as original, ambitious, and useful’. Those words of appreciation

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are immediately followed by Johnson’s proposal for a more aesthetically homogeneous approach to PDCM. Along with other participants’ (and Theune’s and Broad) ideas for future uses of PDCM, we discuss Johnson’s suggested approach in depth in Chapter 4.

Critiques of and Dissents from our PDCM Methods and Findings Not all participants reflected favorably on the CAPER experience and Broad and Theune’s analysis of it. Trina (private correspondence, 2011) notably expresses significant difficulty, discomfort and even grief in response to the article: ‘Reading this … conversation and my role in it was unnerving for me … It’s hard for me to reread the exchange about identity politics. But mostly I feel sad about this whole exchange …’. We will take up her rueful reflections in more detail in the remainder of this chapter. Among several other concerns she expressed in 2011, Trina still seems quite annoyed that she was the only woman on the CAPER editorial board: ‘Why was I the only woman in the group assembled?’ (emphasis original). Indeed, the CAPER group to some extent replays what Purvi Shah (2015) memorably dubs ‘The Unbearable (White) Maleness of US Poetry’. Both researchers (Broad and Theune) are Anglo-European males, and five of the seven CAPER editorial board members were also white males. As explained in the section ‘What We Would Do Differently’, Broad and Theune invited a larger and more diverse (in ethnicity and gender) group to participate in the discussion than the group that ultimately participated. Below, we grapple with the ways in which the CAPER process re-enacted the slant toward white maleness that many have noticed and decried in poetry (and elsewhere). In a challenge to Broad and Theune’s analysis of the CAPER conversation, Austin Smith sees the two contrasting aesthetic models laid out in ‘How We Value Poetry’ (significance vs. immanence) as fully compatible: While I resonate more with the discussion of the significance model, I do not believe the significance and immanence models to be in opposition to one another. Rather, I think that whether a poem is immanent or not (I love the word immanent in this discussion, by the way) is dependent on imagery and music, those things that are maybe more mysterious, that leave us as readers feeling more like we just heard a piece of music than read a piece of literature. The significance model is not more significant than the immanence model, but it is the question of how well the poet manages this immanent power: will this feeling of immanence be

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delivered unto the reader (either by the poet stepping back from it, or from a more careful engagement in the process of writing the poem), or will the immanence be botched (if it was there to begin with) by clumsiness, snarkiness, or any of the other -inesses that seem to plague contemporary American poetry? Our reading of these two poetic-axiological models was that they were strongly in tension and at odds, if not mutually exclusive (at least from an evaluative standpoint) in the evaluative debate we studied. Again, we were not making a claim about how poetic evaluation should work or how it works generally, but rather we were describing how we saw it actually working in the transcripts of one conversation: the CAPER session. We heartily welcome Austin Smith’s dissenting reading of our findings. (Ideally, we would send him the full transcripts so he could test his ideas against the whole set of those data.) The more people argue with our PDCM methods and findings, the happier we are. The more people point out things they believe can and should be done differently and better with PDCM, the more likely we believe it is that they will make good on their critiques and carry out their own, next-generation PDCM projects. Persuading more poets, critics and teachers of poetry to do PDCM is the chief goal of this entire project.

Real-Time Change in Individual Poets and/or in the Evaluative Group in the Context of a PDCM Event Perhaps the strongest theme in our participants’ reflections on ‘How We Value Poetry’ is their enhanced understanding of how and why people (poets, critics, readers, etc.) change over time in their ways of judging verse. Ravi discusses how the article got him thinking about what he calls ‘the sociology of literary evaluation’: One thing I would like to learn more about ... would be the ways in which one’s evaluative criteria shift within the context of group discussion. It was interesting to read [Broad and Theune’s] account of the unfolding conversation – the play of personalities, the dialectic of argument – as a miniature version of the debates surrounding contemporary poetry today. One person’s surprise is another person’s banality, yes, but what really struck me was the way individuals could be persuaded by others that their own prior evaluations were incorrect or misinformed from the outset.

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Trina effectively illustrates what Ravi means by ‘the sociology of literary evaluation’ when she discusses how her role in the CAPER discussion was shaped by her personal and political identity as the only woman and the only feminist (according to her assessment) in the group. One feature of her PDCM experience that caught her attention was the line she delivered in response to Paul’s affirmation for her strong stand against the privileges of the ‘twenty-something white male poet’. In response to Paul’s offering ‘props for saying it in a room full of white guys’, Trina replied: ‘This is my job, move on, just doin’ my fuckin’ job. Sorry’. Four years later, Trina reflected somberly on what had struck us (Broad and Theune) as a humorous moment. I’m sad that I felt the need to ‘cuss’ during that discussion: that’s an indication to me … that at the time I felt addled and defensive and alone in making these claims. I think this defensiveness led me to argue things I don’t know that I’d argue for if I were speaking with a more like-minded group. I want to be clear that I don’t recall the people in the room seeming hostile, uncivil, or sexist in any way … which may explain, actually, why I was as outspoken as I was. For Trina, the sociological and political context she found herself in on the CAPER day in 2007, being the only woman and (in her view) the only feminist, led her to speak out more forcefully than she believes she might have done had she felt less politically alone. Paul has his distinctive take on the evaluative terrain we mapped in our article, situating the dynamics of participants’ judgments (both as individuals and as a group) in the labor conditions of the poetry profession, in a distinctive moment in poetry’s history and in the various ‘embodied’ characteristics (race, gender, etc.) of the discussion’s participants. What strikes me most … are the various ways our embeddedness and embodiedness conditioned our various judgments … One kind of embeddedness I see in the discussion … is institutional. Everyone involved was a poet, and many of the participants were poetry professionals of some sort … I think this plays into judgment, mostly on the side of novelty. When one sees so many poems on a daily basis … one begins to yearn for something that stands out … [In 2007] we were at what I think of as the high-water mark for what the poet and critic Stephen Burt famously called ‘elliptical poetry’ … characterized by narratives that don’t quite cohere, and by parts a bit coy about coming together into wholes … I don’t think it’s

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coincidental … that the closest thing we had to consensus … had to do with the desirability of development and direction in poetry. We all wanted a bit more of what our then-current diets of poetry weren’t providing. … our actual embodiment, in male or female bodies, plays a role in judgment. Certainly … my whiteness and maleness influenced my objection to the argument against poetry by white men in their twenties … Thus, Paul contextualizes and traces the evaluative dynamics of the CAPER day according to the historical trend of professional poets, the historical moment of the apex of elliptical poetry as a movement and in his embodiment as a white male resisting Trina’s critiques of white-male poets, their poems and their ‘bad attitudes’.

Change in Individual Poets and Readers Over Longer Periods of Time The preceding section examined how participants indicated the CAPER session (in spring 2007) affected them in real time, on that single day. Another theme in our participants’ reflections involved a more longitudinal version of the same dynamic: how poets and their readers change their poetic values across longer arcs of time. Trina establishes this theme with some sustained comments on her experiences of ‘maturity’, both as they played out on the CAPER day and over the course of the subsequent years in her life. ...I’m glad to see I mentioned ‘maturity’ as something I value. Maturity, to me, might be defined as a sense of meaning/resonance beyond the self; a reason to write that goes beyond playfulness; a consideration of ‘issues’; a sense of artistic control; a sense of emotional and ethical/ spiritual development over the course of the poem; that sense of ‘consequence’ that’s discussed in the article; the sense that the poem is trying in some ways to deal with things that are directly significant or important. When this [CAPER] panel took place, I think I was just beginning to form some ideas about maturity, working as I was on a second collection in which such notions were trumping the earlier, more playful urges on display in my first book. As the years have passed, and I’ve become more entrenched in the responsibilities of adult life—including child-rearing, care for dying relatives, difficult career decisions, community-building, various kinds of activism, etc.—the

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more my own poetry and the poetry I read reflect my waning interest in poetry that is showily glib, or which avoids meaning-making for obfuscation’s own sake. Trina connects some of the poetic values she promoted on the day of the CAPER session to values that were developing for her over a long period of time. She concludes her written reflections on the CAPER conversations with what may seem an uncharacteristically deferential view on the evaluation of poetry: that a poem one may like or dislike at one point in one’s life may change its value in one’s eyes with changes in one’s context: I love how my graduate school mentor … talked about poems he didn’t enjoy by saying, ‘I can’t hear this poem very well right now,’ which makes plain the reader’s subjectivity, the fleetingness of any judgment, and a capability for new consideration … So the article here captures opinions I have not abandoned, but it also captures me, and my peers, in a particular moment in time. Invoking her mentor’s policy of evaluative ephemeralness, humility and openness to axiological change, Trina also echoes Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s key concept of ‘contingencies of value’. Smith’s exhortation that literary studies research the complex and shifting factors informing literary judgments is obviously a foundation of and the engine for our study of PDCM. Ironically, the other PDCM participant whose reflections on long-term poetic-evaluative change most closely parallel Trina’s is David Berman, whose ‘Democratic Vistas’ was the focus of Trina’s vigorous critique (of ‘snarky twenty-something white male’ privilege) on that day in 2007. Berman (private correspondence, 2011) observes: Trina is the most assertive and articulate participant … Perhaps her honesty helped me appreciate her distaste for my own poem. I don’t suppose I would have liked her comments back in 1995 when I wrote ‘Democratic Vistas,’ but from my present [2011] perspective I can’t help but agree with her. Even I am tired of the perspective of the snarky twenty-something white male. Not for political reasons so much as plain old cultural fatigue … I got into the arts to exercise my natural antagonism against society. In grad school, in 1995, that meant being a snarky white boy who drags pop culture references into his poems. Today, as a 44 year old politically liberal resident of a red state, I’ve got other things on my mind.

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For Trina, it was life experiences such as parenthood and caring for dying relatives that led her to develop her valuing of ‘maturity’ as a poet and a reader. Berman attributes his parallel shifts in poetic values to his age, literary context, politics and geography. Poet Kent Johnson (who composed ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’, which the CAPER editorial board selected as one of the five most successful contemporary American poems) offers a different, wry (snarky?) take on how poets and readers can, over time, shift their evaluative frameworks as a psychologically and sociologically natural form of reciprocal professional back scratching. My thanks to everyone in this study for considering my poem, regardless what he or she may have thought of it. Needless to say, I especially thank those who thought well of it. And needless to say, too, if I knew who you were, I would return the favor, for your having praised mine would surely make me like your writing more than I otherwise would have. This is the way things work in poetry. And no method in the end, alas, will ever change that deeper fact about our Field. Johnson half-jokingly points out that acts of poetic evaluation have political power in the field. Poets who find themselves praised and rewarded by others tend, he says, to like better the writing done by those others. This is, perhaps, a normal and, Johnson insists, even unavoidable dynamic among people who write and publish and who also evaluate others’ published writing. As a bridge to our next chapter, on promising applications of and futures for PDCM, we end this section of CAPER reflections with Ravi, who sees in the 2007 conversation (and the 2010 article) the promise of a ‘sociology of literary evaluation’. Ravi offers a pointed research question: What, in other words, is the sociology of literary evaluation? ... To map this dynamic might provide a valuable second chapter of the work initiated in ‘How We Value Poetry’. Ravi’s is the kind of curiosity that we believe will drive future PDCM projects of diverse kinds.

What We Would Do Differently As reinforced by Kent Johnson’s suggestion, we (Theune and Broad) believe it will be crucial for actual editorial boards, admissions committees, anthologists and award committees (among other groups who make

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powerful decisions about what is poetically good) to use PDCM to discover, negotiate and publish their axiological findings. As Johnson observes in his commentary quoted earlier in this chapter, this new direction will likely involve more aesthetic homogeneity than was represented in the makeup of the CAPER editorial board. Since the goal of the launch issue of that ‘new’ (make-believe) journal had so grand a sweep (‘identify and publish the five most successful contemporary US poems’), it made sense to us that the CAPER editorial board would be poetically diverse. Since we (with Johnson) now call for PDCM to be taken up by specific, situated, actual communities of poetry judges, it may well be that no future studies will closely resemble the CAPER study, with its unusually (and purposefully) rich aesthetic variety among judges. That said, as we reflect on some of our decisions in designing and carrying out the 2007 CAPER session, we recognize important things that we would do differently if we had the chance to do it again. Most urgently, prodded especially by Trina’s critiques – both during the CAPER session and in her post-CAPER written reflections – we would make different demographic-political decisions. Recall that the CAPER editorial board found that its judgments of some poems were shaped by historical and political events (see the section of Chapter 2 on ‘Socio-historical contexts’). Most starkly, their very critical 2007 reading of Gerstler’s ‘Montage of Disasters’ seemed to be a ‘post-Hurricane-Katrina’ evaluation of a poem published in 1997, eight years before Hurricane-Katrina wrought destruction along the US Gulf Coast. Likewise, the CAPER board’s unease with Berman’s ‘Democratic Vistas’ (first published in the 1990s) bears the distinct marks of a postVirginia-Tech readership (the Virginia Tech massacre took place on April 16, 2007, 33 days before the CAPER board held its meeting). Just as such historical events shape and alter readers’ judgments of poems, so do they shape and alter some of our (Theune and Broad’s) judgments about how we would design the CAPER study differently if we had the opportunity to do it again. Trina’s protests against the predominance of white males among the members of the CAPER board, among poets represented in the nominated poems, and by implication in the wider world of poetry (and beyond poetry), had significant resonance and weight in 2007, based on centuries of political dynamics experienced by groups marginalized in US society. Trina’s lamentations carry even more weight in 2017, in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. The procession of killings of unarmed black men, women and children that have gained the attention of the US media and public since Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2013 have heightened our sensitivity to some of the identity politics that Trina made part of her mission during the 2007 CAPER session.

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It is worthwhile to note that the seven people who accepted our CAPER invitation comprised a group somewhat less diverse than the group we invited. The poet-critics initially invited included at least one African American man and at least one additional woman. Also, in an effort to incorporate greater geographical (and thus cultural) range, we initially planned to hold the session at the 2007 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference. However, the AWP conference setting turned out to be unworkable for our invitees, so we decided to convene a regional group for a Chicago-based meeting. And, in the course of managing our (Broad’s and Theune’s) busy daily lives, we were quite delighted with the seven-person group who said ‘yes’ to the May 19 gathering. We invited the (more diverse) group, and we were happy to work with the (less diverse) subgroup that accepted the invitation. Nine years later, we would proceed differently. Finding ourselves with a relatively homogeneous group of participants, we would put the project on hold, reassess the situation and find some way to assemble a more diverse editorial board. Pragmatic considerations like limits on our time and energy as the organizing researchers no longer seem to us to be acceptable reasons for assembling a board with only one woman member and only one person of color. This is the difference that recent history has made in our views (as two liberal white men) of the significance of race, ethnicity and gender (among other important demographic factors) in the judgment of poetry. In retrospect, we can see that the ‘pragmatic’ factors that led us to assemble a less diverse group simply reinscribe the cultural and institutional dynamics that Shah (2015) laments and protests in ‘The Unbearable (White) Maleness of US Poetry’. In his article ‘Judging Writing, Judging Selves’ (referred to in the discussion of Bizzaro’s work in Chapter 1), Lester Faigley (1989) wrote of a parallel dynamic he detected in writing teachers’ judgments of their students’ writing. Faigley believed that writing teachers have a tendency to reward writing in which students enact the (liberal middle-class) values that predominate among those teachers. A better CAPER study would have required of us (Broad and Theune) a stronger commitment to diversity than we demonstrated in 2007. We are strongly in favor of editorial boards that are, if it fits their mission, as diverse as possible. These important questions of diversity are certainly vital to projects such as Alberta Turner’s, which yearn to generalize their studies’ findings into universal guidelines to which all should adhere. By stark contrast, these issues of diversity are not strictly relevant to the main argument we are making: that all actual groups who wield the power of poetic evaluation need to carry out PDCM. As we argue more fully in our conclusion (‘Do It Yourself’), such groups have the responsibility to examine their evaluative dynamics and to share them with relevant constituencies. This is

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true of editorial boards and awards committees (for example) that are diverse or not diverse. One possible result of engaging in PDCM is that boards and committees may be alerted to the need to attend to different kinds of diversity in their ranks: not only gender and race/ethnicity, but also socioeconomic class, age, religion, sexual orientation and other aspects of identity.

Inquiry, Vulnerability, Learning and Change A strength we see in PDCM as a method of inquiry (and of institutional practice) is that it brings to light and allows critical reflection on what we really value in poetry and on how any account of values is generated. Just as PDCM holds poems up for critical and appreciative scrutiny, PDCM also creates a process and document(s) that hold PDCM itself up for critical and appreciative scrutiny. In her reflective commentary, Trina pointedly asked ‘Why was I the only woman in the group assembled?’ Such urgent questions about representation (of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, religion, etc.) find new opportunities to be asked when poets and critics conduct PDCM. Among other things, as we discuss more fully in our concluding chapter, we believe PDCM could prove a valuable resource in collaboration with the annual ‘VIDA Count’ project sponsored by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. And, as we already observed, every protest and critique of PDCM methods leads, we hope and presume, to making the next PDCM event better. To be sure, PDCM is an adventure in vulnerability. It invites us to lay open our interior evaluative landscapes (individual and collective), and then it subjects those landscapes to intensive study, negotiation and, potentially, critique. Surprise is often the sign of good research, but surprise is not always easy or enjoyable. We might be surprised to find that we value things we thought we did not (e.g. fashion, trust, identity politics, backscratching) or vice versa. We might be surprised to find that our poetic values are more like – or more different from – our colleagues’ values than we believed. We might find ourselves squarely in the middle of a discussion of certain ‘third rail’ poetic topics that we generally avoid acknowledging or discussing (race, class, gender). Not only does PDCM invite and reveal such potentially sensitive topics, it also offers (threatens) to make them public, which will in turn invite more discussion and debate among audiences who would not otherwise have known what we value. Handled carefully, with the protection of anonymity for participants, PDCM brings such difficult evaluative topics and dynamics to light in ways that provide the benefits of public discussion without most of the political dangers that would otherwise come with such publicity. This spirit of openness, accountability and vulnerability is one of the things we prize most in PDCM.

4 Promising Applications of and Futures for Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping In his response to our 2010 poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM) article, Kent Johnson, while noting that he found our study ‘original, ambitious, and useful’, asked, ‘Might the results prove to be of greater clarity and … use if the methodology were applied in a more aesthetically targeted and coherent way?’. He clarified his question by stating that he would be more interested in studies of groups of poets with ‘specific sociological [institutional?] affiliations’. Johnson noted, ‘... if I am to learn what counts as “good” for a conceptual poem, I don’t want editors from the New England Review skewing the results …’. Johnson’s suggestion affords us an opportunity to clarify what we are attempting to do with PDCM. We acknowledge that, despite our emphatic statements to the contrary at the end of Chapter 2, it might be possible for a reader to come away from our PDCM study thinking that we were seeking to identify general values about poetry. Not only has such a universalist approach been typical in poetic assessment (as discussed in Chapter 1, it seems to have been the aim for Alberta Turner’s Poets Teaching and Hix’s Wild and Whirling Words), but particular features of our study might lead to such a misunderstanding. For example, as in Hix’s project, the participants of our study represent (to some extent) purposefully diverse aesthetics – from hybrid/elliptical poetry (discussed in detail later in this chapter) to stand-up/slam poetry. (We encourage readers to reexamine the participants’ aesthetic self-representations at the beginning of Chapter 2.) Additionally, the title of our 2010 article could be misleading; ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry’ may sound like an effort to show how ‘we’ – that is, everyone, everywhere – evaluate poetry. However, our goal was very different from this. In the 2007 article, we aimed to offer not generalizable findings but rather an applicable method, which we hoped to show was practicable and revelatory. Along with this method, we offered an exhortation/injunction that every group 70

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with poetic–axiological responsibilities, that is, every particular ‘we’, carry out PDCM to reveal their values and dynamics. In short, we agree with Johnson’s proposal for a new, different and localized PDCM project – or, rather, as we will show in this chapter, we agree with Johnson completely, and then some. The goal of our PDCM project has never been for us to reveal what the whole world should value in poetry. On the contrary, our goal is to persuade, motivate and guide actual, institutionally situated, localized groups of poetry partisans to undertake by and for themselves the ‘streamlined form of qualitative inquiry’ – PDCM – we have modeled and promoted in this book. In so doing, they can fulfill ethical and artistic obligations to discover and publicize what they value in poetry. We anticipate the ascendance of PDCM would also enliven and enrich broader professional conversations about the evaluation of poetry that, as we demonstrated in Chapter 1, have been hindered and blocked by the absence of a communal, empirical, inductive method of inquiry. In this chapter, we examine some interventions of PDCM that have been productive and other potential projects that would be particularly productive. We explore the ways in which PDCM has already been employed by two different groups: an undergraduate literature class and an English department faculty working to devise a creative writing rubric. Focusing on the recent aesthetic and sociological phenomenon of hybrid poetry, we also explain how PDCM could be used by anthologists and editors to more closely examine and more articulately reveal their axiological values.

Applications of PDCM PDCM in the undergraduate classroom Some college-level educators (Bizzaro, 1998; Henry, 1989) have extolled the virtues of engaging students with the dynamics of literary evaluation by having them explore the different values evident in literary journals. Continuing this endeavor, Theune created a teaching project based in PDCM during the fall semester of 2012. He wanted his undergraduate students to use and experience PDCM as a way to better understand poetry and themselves as readers of poetry. ‘Issues in Contemporary American Poetry’ enrolled 12 upper-level undergraduate students at Illinois Wesleyan University. The following is a brief summary of what Theune directed his students to do, pulled from the assignment handout for the PDCM project: (1) You and a small group of your fellow students will form an editorial board charged with creating a (very small!) anthology of contemporary American poems about which you are passionate.

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(2) Each student will submit to [Theune] a packet of five contemporary American poems that you love, along with a Works Cited and a brief (600-word) reflection on your selection. (3) Theune will create 2 small groups of 6 students each, and for each group will assemble 1 packet of 12 poems from the packets each of its members submitted. (4) You will discuss with your small group the poems in your packet. The point of these conversations will be to try to select the five contemporary American poems your editorial board is, overall, most passionate about, and so will include in its anthology. (5) Your small group must record your conversations and then transcribe them soon after. (6) Your small group will analyze your discussion. You will try to identify, group and rank the criteria that came up in the conversation. (7) Your editorial board must submit your five-poem anthology and a fivepage (1500-word) introduction to your anthology that (a) Presents (and promotes!) the anthology’s poems. (b) Discusses briefly the selection process. (c) Makes clear the criteria that are embodied by the anthology’s poems. Thus, Theune required his students to work through a series of steps with a special focus on the values that informed their judgments of poetic texts. This assignment had multiple purposes. It asked students to begin to engage with the publishing venues for contemporary American poetry in order to find poems they loved. By imitating an actual communal assessment process – that of a group of anthologists deciding what might be included in an anthology – it tried to give a sense of how poetic evaluations actually get made. It offered students the opportunity to be better informed about how they and their peers value poetry, and to get a sense for the many different complexities of poetry assessment. And it did all of this in a relatively short timeframe: two weeks of class time. Valuable in itself, the insight gleaned from this exercise also prepared students to be more critical readers and assessors of three professionally edited anthologies that the class analyzed during the final third of the semester. Carefully noting recurring patterns and themes – and anomalies – in the poetic values that students highlighted, Theune and Broad studied the introductions to the anthologies composed by both editorial teams in Theune’s class. Based on our review of these introductions, we argue that PDCM makes students better readers of and writers about literature. The work of inductively and empirically exploring and articulating one’s

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criteria for judging poems makes one more attuned, sensitive, self-aware and flexible regarding one’s framework(s) for judging poetry. While some of the poetic values that student-editors discovered while doing their work – such as tone, readers’ emotional–experiential connection to content and vivid images and descriptions –were those we would expect to hear from most evaluators of poetry, other criteria that these editorial boards discovered and developed were more nuanced and surprising. One group of students noticed that they ‘often gravitated towards’ incongruity of paired images and themes. They discussed their penchant for ‘shocking image pairs’, explaining that ‘[t]hese jarring contrasts both created powerful images and gave us the satisfaction of seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things’. This group of students attempted to develop and explain its emphasis on what it called ‘complementary formatting’, that is, ‘when the format of the poem enhanced or at least did not detract from the subject of the poem’. Recognizing that, for them, ‘forms that drew our immediate attention were generally seen as a distraction’, this editorial board took an unconventionally dynamic and context-sensitive approach to the well-worn criterion ‘form’. In its decisions, form interacts in volatile ways with other poetic elements (subject matter, tone, imagery) and therefore has a literary impact that involves a great deal more than form as, say, container. The other student-editorial board in Theune’s class achieved equally interesting insights, and added the feature of giving their more distinctive criteria special names. ‘Endfectiveness’ was the term they came up with to describe ‘powerful or effective endings’. Endfectiveness either ‘leaves the reader thinking, or is powerful enough to cause them to sit back dumbstruck’. This group was ‘captivated by endings that left us hanging and gave us something to think about’. It especially appreciated the ending of one poem that ‘left our group thinking “Wow!” and gave us a sense of hopelessness and comfort at the same time because of the bittersweet image at the end of the poem’. The final distinctive criterion this editorial board illuminated stands out perhaps more for its courage and honesty than for its originality: they termed it the ‘Shakespeare effect’, and they noted that it was ‘… one of the most powerful pieces informing our criticisms’. The ‘Shakespeare effect’ refers to how knowing a poem’s author changes one’s assessment of a poem. In fact, this group writes, ‘[w]e eventually discovered … that the author of a poem did not just “matter”, but was often vital in shaping our evaluation of the poem before we even began reading’. This discovery seems particularly insightful. Many teachers, readers and editors proclaim that their judgments of poems are unsullied by historical or biographical

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information about the authors of the texts they are evaluating. And occasionally this is true. This editorial board, however, shone a light on just how powerful the Shakespeare effect was for them. Although the PDCM undertaken by Theune’s undergraduate students took place in the context of a literature course, this work certainly can also be performed productively in a poetry writing class. We believe that – though this claim has yet to be tested – the enhanced knowledge of self and text that the PDCM yields also makes one a better poet. The process itself is valuable, especially the part of the process in which students seek out poetry they deeply admire. The work that students do to gather their favorite poems can be deeply informative – it can introduce students to various publishing venues (websites, journals, books, anthologies, etc.) and offer them a glimpse of the spectrum of poetry being published. There are many ways that students and instructors can use the information and insights gathered through PDCM. For example, the findings could become a revision tool. A poetry writing class might create an idiosyncratic, perhaps playful set of guidelines that the student poet, while drafting her/his poem, might consult to check: Have I used the form so that it complements the subject and/or action of the poem? Have I included any of the shocking image pairs I value? Is my final stanza ‘endfective’? Such clear articulations of values could also lead to important in-class conversations about evaluation and help students better understand how to engage with each other by making explicit aesthetic connections and dissimilarities. And finally, of course, an instructor might use similar questions in the form of a rubric to evaluate student drafts and final portfolios, and to invite students to further discuss and debate the criteria brought to the evaluation. (Though rubrics are often considered antithetical to poetry, we maintain that values are always being applied to the assessment of poetry. Mostly, those values are tacit. PDCM attempts to make tacit criteria explicit.) These suggested uses for PDCM in the poetry writing classroom offer a slight but important alternative to the workshop methods undertaken by Patrick Bizzaro in Responding to Student Poems. In his workshop, Bizzaro assigned his students a critical perspective – new critical, reader response, deconstructionist and feminist – to update class conversation, making it critically savvy, and so that students had an established position from which to make more informed contributions to the workshop discussion. Similarly, students employing PDCM would have a basis from which to join the conversation. They could use a class-created rubric or a list of values to give them a sense of what to look for in the poem under consideration, and also to give them a way to begin, as we argue in Chapter 1 that just about every significant poet does, to recognize and perhaps articulate how they

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value poems differently from others. PDCM, however, has the additional benefit of offering students an entry into the evaluative conversation in which they have a stake. As they are not merely trying on assigned viewpoints, we believe students in a workshop informed by PDCM will be more invested in evaluative debate. By more explicitly articulating their values, students can come to recognize their standards and then work to attain that level of quality that they expect in other poems. Moreover, being explicit about the values by which they are assessing student work, instructors will reveal that they do not simply use the magisterial mode and grade according to ‘what they like’. They can, as Matthew Zapruder requests, ‘show their work’. At its best, PDCM helps students see what they love in poetry and so better equips them to emulate it, or it might help students to see that there is poetry out in the world that they do not admire, and so they might write in contradistinction to or against it. Instructors will play the vital role of encouraging this evolving inquiry.

Doing it herself: A student takes PDCM and runs with it In the semester when Theune taught PDCM, it led to another outcome: a student approximated PDCM. For her final project in the class, student Emily Susina examined the previous four years’ publication of Tributaries, Illinois Wesleyan University’s creative arts journal, and then mapped out the values found in the journal’s poetry. Though not full-fledged PDCM – it did not involve collaboration that featured live, face-to-face conversation – Susina’s work was a productive take on the process. Her project certainly was empirical and inductive – she investigated four years’ (seven issues’) worth of poetry. Citing the journal’s front matter, which includes submission information, Susina’s paper begins with a consideration of the journal’s stated criteria: Illinois Wesleyan University’s creative arts journal celebrates the strongest and most original work created by IWU students … Names must be provided initially to ensure current enrollment as a student at IWU but are removed to preserve anonymity to the best of our ability during selection. Quality, originality, and purpose are main factors when considering a piece. However, according to Susina, these stated criteria – anonymously conceived qualities of strength, originality, quality and purpose – are not helpful; indeed, they are ‘almost maddeningly unhelpful to anyone

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trying to determine what kind of content to submit to the journal’ (3). After critiquing the overall vagueness of the criteria and the fact that the criteria generally were not used in any meaningful way during the editorial deliberations (Susina would know: she was on the Tributaries staff when they produced many of the issues she was investigating), Susina delivers her main message: While the editors don’t have well-defined textual criteria, looking at just a few issues of the journal reveals some patterns of contextual or extratextual criteria that seem to have a significant influence on what the editors look for in the pieces they accept for publication. These unstated criteria seem to have been consistent [over the four years being studied] despite the constantly changing membership of the editorial boards. (5) Here are Susina’s criteria, textual and contextual: (1) Take creative writing courses. (2) Write humorous poetry. Bonus tip: Write humor about I[llinois] W[esleyan] U[niversity]. (3) If you want to write serious poems, write about love, death or finding yourself. (4) Keep your poems accessible. (5) Write free verse. Susina’s takes on these various criteria are smart and insightful. For example, regarding taking writing courses, she notes that, of course, taking writing courses tends to make one a stronger writer; however, she also recognizes the extra-literary, contextual value of taking a creative writing course at Illinois Wesleyan. She states: Because the students who are on the editorial board for Tributaries are interested in English and creative writing, many of them are taking or have taken the creative writing courses that are being offered at IWU in any given semester. If that’s the case, there is a good chance they will remember your poem from class and commend the amount of effort you’ve put into revisions or recognize the assignment and appreciate your spin on it. (6) While perhaps surprising to many undergraduates – perhaps just as surprising for newcomers to the scene finding out about the ‘back-scratching’ that Kent Johnson observes in the professional poetry world – the knowledge

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of the potential significance of contextual criteria is plain for those who have studied PDCM and even used it to uncover the Shakespeare effect in their own and others’ evaluative deliberations. As a more worldly Susina puts it: ‘If David Lehman and the guest editors of the Best American Poetry anthologies have taught us anything, it’s that poetry is as much about your name and the people you know as it is about how well you write’ (6). Susina’s empirical work derives from the investigation of existing documents. So, when she claims that it is wise to submit humorous poetry to Tributaries, she knows this because she counted the humorous poems in each issue for the previous four years, and found that ‘at least 25% of the poems in every issue of Tributaries have utilized humor in some way, and in many of those issues, over 50% of the poems include humor’ (7). Regarding the recommendation to ‘[w]rite free verse’, Susina notes, ‘Although there are certain forms that are included for various reasons, the vast majority of the poetry accepted to Tributaries in recent years has been free verse’ (11). She notes, ‘If we assume that college campuses mimic the greater world of poetry … then it is not surprising that most of the pieces that are submitted to the journal would be free verse poems’ (11). But, of course, this kind of information about what in fact really appears in Tributaries is not reflected in the journal’s editorial statement. It was found through an empirical, inductive analysis of the poems that were actually published, the kind of analytical endeavor that Susina undertook. While much more could be learned about the axiological dynamics of Tributaries through applying PDCM to some of its editorial board’s live, deliberative conversations, Susina’s approach still was a very productive and revealing version of such an inquiry, and it indicates how powerful empirical, inductive processes can be in axiology. We hope many others will take up such projects, as we discuss later in this chapter.

PDCM and rubric creation For a day and a half in August 2013, five members of the Illinois Wesleyan University English department met to begin the work of creating a rubric to assess student learning outcomes pertaining to creative writing. They were paid for their work from a grant supporting faculty assessment initiatives. Although the department’s goals for its creative writers include many process-oriented abilities, the rubric being created would specifically measure the more product-oriented accomplishments, among them the degree to which student work reveals that students are capable of the following:

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• • •

exercising the imagination through serious play and experimentation; recognizing and experimenting with formal and generic conventions; producing consequential work that is: ◦ conversant with significant contexts of and issues in contemporary writing; ◦ inventive and surprising.

The rubric was created using dynamic criteria mapping (DCM). (Note: as the rubric created needed to be applicable for all creative writing written by students in the department, this was not only PDCM but also fiction DCM and creative non-fiction DCM.) The texts considered were the materials submitted to the department’s creative writing prize contests for that year: 4 short stories, 41 poems, 1 short screenplay and 1 creative non-fiction piece. Rubric-making workshop participants were asked to read and reflect on the texts – specifically, to consider how one might rank different pieces, or even parts of pieces, using the categories of ‘emerging’, ‘developing’ and ‘mastering’, categories employed by the University Writing Program in its assessment procedures. The department chair reminded the participating faculty: ‘Needless to say, the more able each of us is to articulate why we think the selections we have chosen fit their respective categories, the better. But I don’t think we need to have anything written down, necessarily’. The plan for the beginning of discussion was neatly laid out: participating faculty would compare determinations about the relative success of the pieces and develop a pool of material, agreeing upon which were emerging, developing and mastering. Participants would then reexamine the materials, making notes about what each perceived as the qualities of emerging, developing and mastering work, and then they would gather to discuss what were considered to be the essential properties of the three categories. The next day, even though all acknowledged that this work likely could not get done in this amount of time, the group would meet to hammer out descriptions for the three categories. In practice, however, the work sessions were more chaotic than had been planned, but also, therefore, very likely more productive and revealing than they otherwise might have been. A number of things happened almost right away that threw off the intended method. There was no easy categorization. Pieces deemed generally ‘emerging’ occasionally had flashes of brilliance in them, and work that was generally ‘mastering’ occasionally had its weak points. Of course, there was also a fair amount of disagreement about how to assess particular works. But something else was also happening: even in the early stages of their conversation,

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participating faculty were already citing reasons for their judgments – evaluative criteria were being identified, and in fact flying around the room rather quickly. So, very soon after getting started, instead of limiting conversation right away to trying to sort out (by agreeing upon) what work should be ranked in what ways, the initial rankings each faculty participant brought with them were used, essentially, as a prompt for conversation, with faculty participants defending and discussing assessments of the work. As this was happening, one faculty member recorded on a whiteboard (for everyone to see) all the criteria, all the evaluative terms being used. That is, there was no conscious effort to, say, stay with positive evaluative claims for work generally thought to be ‘mastering’. If criticisms were made, they were also written down. And vice versa: if a work largely considered ‘emerging’ elicited praise for some aspect of the writing, this was also recorded. The result of this engagement was that, after the first six-hour day, the faculty participants had created a very long and messy list of over 100 criteria. While many criteria were the kinds that one would expect to find in such a list, many others were idiosyncratic, perhaps even only partially understood, or viscerally expressed rather than clearly articulated. (As we lack institutional review board [IRB] permission to publish this material, we cannot provide details on the notes that led to the finished document presented in Appendix F.) The next day, faculty participants began the work of categorizing this material, to find patterns in what seemed a mess. Faculty began to determine (fairly easily) what kinds of evaluative statements were positive and which were negative. Faculty also started to develop categories in which the raw evaluative data could be organized: originality, complexity, shape, language and rhetorical awareness. (The category name ‘rhetorical awareness’ was arrived at only later in the process – for some time, participating faculty simply referred to this category as ‘Fred’.) Then, relevant evaluative language was sorted according to rank: negative evaluative language was placed in ‘emerging’; positive in ‘mastering’. The final stages of this work, describing the three levels of accomplishment for each of the five categories, were undertaken by three of the five participating faculty in a handful of short, focused work sessions. The completed rubric (see Appendix F) was presented to the full faculty of the English department, and approved. Theune and Broad believe this rubric is a very good one. It is applicable to all the genres of creative writing taught in the Illinois Wesleyan University English department – poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction – and yet it is still specific. It covers many of the aspects one might expect to see in a creative writing rubric, referring to cliché, invention and voice. But it does

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so in ways that are site-specific. For example, this is a rubric well aware of the fact that it is being used in a school, so, as the description of ‘emerging’ under ‘originality’ makes plain, it may be the case that work is submitted in the fulfillment of a course assignment, but it is inadequate for work to read ‘as if it is merely the result of an assignment or exercise rather than the expression of an artistic vision’. The rubric is also idiosyncratic and evocative. For example, for the participating faculty who created the rubric and their colleagues who approved it, one mark of good writing is the simple fact that a reader will want to reread it, and this visceral acknowledgement of the power of writing is not written out of the rubric but included in it: under ‘mastering’ in ‘rhetorical awareness’: the work of creative writing ‘seduces the reader, inviting rereading and drawing him or her into further engagement with the challenges and pleasures of the text’. While being practical, it does not give up on complexity. Indeed, to borrow language from the rubric’s description of ‘mastering’ under ‘complexity’: the rubric itself arose from the complexities of human experience and interaction to offer something suggestive and nuanced, with subtexts and layers. To borrow language from the ‘language’ category: the rubric has a voice that arose from the voices of those making it. But let’s be clear about a few things. Such positive results largely came about by doing the work of DCM, which makes demands on rubric creation. In Introduction to Rubrics, a book about making rubrics for grading assignments, Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi (2012) note that there are four stages to creating a rubric: reflecting; listing; grouping and labeling; and application (the creation of the actual rubric grid). While their use of ‘reflection’ is more than mere speculation – the authors offer eight questions to focus thinking about the assignment, its contexts and the expectations the teacher has for student work (Stevens & Levi, 2012: 30–32) – still, it does not go as far as it should toward the empirical. Even though it could, and perhaps should, have. Stevens and Levi (2012: 30) note: ‘Whether it is called “reflection” or something else, this kind of focused thinking is a part of every discipline … All of us journal, meditate, draw mind maps, create outlines, make lists, analyze data, synthesize results, or engage in any number of personal or professional forms of reflection. All of us reflect prior to beginning a scholarly task such [as] writing or creating a new lecture or class plan’. However, the aspect of what is referred to here as reflection that gets dropped as the authors proceed is the analysis of data: their method does not entail the collaborative examination of actual student work. Stevens and Levi (2012: 44) conclude their chapter on ‘How To Construct a Rubric’ by

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noting that ‘[c]onstructing rubrics using the four-stage approach does not require learning any new skills or procedures. It simply systematizes how we use the skills and talents that made us academics in the first place …’. But, of course, we (Theune and Broad) are suggesting that for those in creative writing and, more broadly, literary studies, the analysis of actual data is a new procedure, one that is unfamiliar, perhaps even daunting. Nevertheless, it must be engaged to create better maps or, in this case, rubrics. Better, though still site-specific and contingent. There is nothing universal about the Illinois Wesleyan University English department’s rubric. This rubric reflects the values of those who will actually employ it to assess student learning. Others – other English departments, certainly, but also any group invested in the evaluation of poetry, including editors, anthologist, prize judges, etc. – might, and likely do, have other values. For example, one might pull from Charles Harper Webb’s list of the incommensurable values (see Chapter 1) and ask: What about ‘Spontaneity’? ‘Indeterminacy’? ‘Art for art’s sake’? Additionally, the values of the Illinois Wesleyan University English department will shift over time as the individual faculty members develop and change, and as the composition of the department faculty changes. This rubric, like all rubrics, will need to be reexamined and periodically revised. This inquiry went above and beyond what the English department needed to do. Its stated student learning outcomes were, as noted above, exercising the imagination through serious play and experimentation; recognizing and experimenting with formal and generic conventions; and producing inventive, surprising and consequential work that is conversant with significant contexts of and issues in contemporary writing. To measure students’ successes, faculty could have made a simple rubric using these goals as criteria, for example, simply writing descriptions of each of the rankings for each criteria: ‘work is not inventive and surprising’; ‘work occasionally seems inventive and surprising’; ‘work is inventive and surprising’. However, the department’s goals, though arrived at through a good deal of conversation among faculty, did not involve any exploration of actual student work. There was no consideration of actual values applied to texts. The faculty wanted to go deeper and explore evaluation more closely and systematically. DCM was the method for doing this, and the result was a much more complex, sophisticated, multifaceted and grounded representation of what the faculty value in creative writing and intend for their student writers to learn. It is work, in short – as Emily Susina knows – that could now be used by the faculty to revise their stated learning goals, to make that articulation, as well, more accurate, more representative of what the department really values.

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In this chapter, we have examined two faculty uses of DCM, one for poetry specifically and another for creative writing, and we have examined a student’s spin-off project. Empirical, data driven and (save for Susina’s individual project) collaborative, every one of these undertakings offered information and insights impossible to achieve with traditional speculative methods. We now turn to consider places where PDCM was not or is not being used, and we argue that it should be and that the engagement required to produce its especially revelatory information is worth its application.

No Fence-Sitting: Possible Interventions Using PDCM Moving beyond the educational sphere and into the realms of professional publishing, including poetry anthologies and journals, we now discuss some sites in contemporary American poetry that we believe call for the application of PDCM. Such occurrences are marked by a single characteristic: revelations of evaluative criteria are not occurring, even though they quite clearly can and should be. Such situations exemplify what might be called the abdication of evaluative responsibility. Not, of course, the abdication of evaluation – decisions are still being made, and work is being accepted or rejected, selected or not selected. But rather, the abdication of owning up to an evaluative decision, respecting the rights of those for whom it might have consequence and articulating clearly and accurately the dynamics of the evaluative decision – in short, doing the work needed to properly show your work. In this section, we examine two instances of the abdication of evaluative responsibility, and we discuss how the use of PDCM would mean the reclaiming of that responsibility. Both instances come from the realm of hybrid poetry. On the one hand, this is a matter of convenience: it is a way to focus the following discussion. On the other hand, it is a bit more significant: hybridity is a popular recent phenomenon in contemporary American poetry – it is also a trend that has a very odd, at times fraught, relation to evaluation. Hybrid poetry – also referred to as ‘elliptical’ poetry – is poetry that situates itself in the middle space between what were, or were often thought to be, the two camps of American poetry: a more traditional lyric mainstream and a more experimentally engaged avant-garde. While such a formulation may oversimplify a much more diverse field of practice, it certainly is how its main theorists situate such middle-space poetry. In the introductions to his two hybrid anthologies, Reginald Shepherd (2004, 2008) makes clear that he is gathering just such work. In the introduction to The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, his anthology collects

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work that ‘crosses, ignores, or transcends the variously demarcated lines between traditional lyric and avant-garde practice’, work that ‘combines lyric allure and experimental interrogation toward the production of a new synthesis …’ (Shepherd, 2004: xiii). In Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, Shepherd (2008: xi) notes that his anthology ‘combines lyricism and avant-garde experimentation in a new synthesis’. In her introduction to American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, after noting that ‘[t]he notion of a fundamental division in American poetry has become so ingrained that we take it for granted’, Cole Swensen (2009: xvii) states: ‘This anthology springs from the conviction that the model of binary opposition is no longer the most accurate one and that, while extremes remain, and everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences, the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized and that hybridize core attributes of previous “camps” in diverse and unprecedented ways’. About elliptical poets, Stephen Burt (1998, n.p.) states: ‘They are post-avant-gardist, or post-“postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers”, and have chosen to do otherwise’. In recent American poetry, hybridity certainly has been a dominant mode. Taking root in the early 1990s, hybrid poetry began to be theorized later in that decade by critics such as Stephen Burt. It then grew into the first decade of the 21st century, during which time the three anthologies of hybrid poetry cited above were published. When one examines the poets included in more than one hybrid anthology, some significant poets come up more than once, including Forrest Gander, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Donald Revell and C.D. Wright. In the two decades that marked the ascent of hybridity, these poets were affiliated with top Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs, including Iowa and Brown. However, for all of its established nature, one thing hybridity has not worked out is its relation to assessment. In its two decades of existence, hybridity has not devised any sort of serious account of how to judge which hybrid poems are more or less successful, worthy or great. According to some theorists of hybridity, there may be reasons for this. Hybridity is seen as a kind of good in itself: it is a mode that (supposedly) allows previous binaries to be transcended, and this kind of peace brokering may be thought, generally, to be good and valuable. Any work deemed hybrid is thus deemed a new synthesis, the resolution of an agonistic dialectic, and that may be achievement enough. It may also be – again, according to theorists of the hybrid – that hybridity traffics in a kind of poetry that is difficult to assess, or is not able to be assessed in the ways that work was assessed before. For example, in Lyric Postmodernisms, Shepherd (2008: xiv)

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notes that brokenness is a key feature of hybridity; he states, ‘the idea of the broken lyric … is highly suggestive and useful in thinking about the poets assembled in this book’. For a theorist of hybridity such as Shepherd, brokenness may have once been a fault in poems, but now it’s a central characteristic, and if brokenness is permitted, and even expected, then it becomes much more difficult to sort out what’s good and what’s bad, which brokennesses are superior to others. All the above may be the case and could potentially be unproblematic, except that hybridity still maintains the practices of traditional evaluation and behaves as if traditional evaluation was still in effect. The important theorists of hybridity still say that there is good and bad hybridity. Cole Swensen (2009: xxv) states, ‘[H]ybridity is of course in itself no guarantee of excellence’. Following up his earlier essay ‘The Elliptical Poets’ (Burt, 1999), in ‘Close Calls with Nonsense’ Burt (2009) reveals that in the difficult elliptical poetry he champions, he misses the wit and argument that he finds more readily in other kinds of poetry. This concession becomes even more powerful when, in the essay’s final paragraph, Burt (2009: 17), quoting science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, states that ‘90 percent of anything is no good’, adding ‘contemporary poetry is not, and never has been, an exception’. However, such claims by these key hybrid theorists are never followed up – there is no investigation, no further inquiry, into what separates good from ‘no good’ elliptical poetry. Such evaluative neglect becomes even more poignant when considering the hybrid anthologies. One certainly expects to find some discussion of evaluative dynamics in the introductions to recent anthologies. Randall Jarrell (1973: 153) notes that ‘anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism’. William Logan (2014) states: The maker of a good anthology is as close to an ideal critic as a critic can be, and there are few good anthologies whose contents don’t fight tooth and nail over what a poem is, what a poem does, and how in hell it should go about that impossible and ridiculous thing, poetry. (Logan, 2014: 6) Introductions typically are the places where anthologists make their critical claims about why and how they select work. The need for clear evaluative claims is even more significant and meaningful today. Currently, there is no way to create an innocent anthology (and, of course, there never really was – we may simply be more aware today), a collection that wants to unproblematically represent the state of contemporary American poetry, or even a major phenomenon within contemporary American poetry. Every choice is a critical choice, and that choice not only has textual and aesthetic

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aspects but also always has contextual, social and political aspects. Such choices are at the heart of the true meaning of any particular anthology. They should be examined and discussed.

American hybrid Consider Cole Swensen and David St. John’s (2009) American Hybrid. Like any anthology, a host of evaluative decisions were made about what to include: which particular poets, and then from those poets what particular poems. However, for all its involvement with selectivity, American Hybrid has an uneasy relation with evaluation. Never does it engage seriously with how selections were made. Swensen (2009: xxv) notes that hybridity’s willingness to mix and meld values and criteria from both ‘experimental’ and ‘conservative’ poetries (among them that poems be ‘well-made, decorous, traditional, formal, and refined, as well as spontaneous, immediate, bardic, irrational, translogical, open-ended, and ambiguous’) ‘make[s] it harder to achieve consensus or even to maintain stable critical criteria’. In the same paragraph, Swensen also observes that there is better and worse hybridity, pointing out, as noted above, that hybridity is no guarantee of excellence. However, her insights are not followed up with any sort of axiological investigation. St. John’s comments on evaluation are even more confounding. St. John (2009: xxviii) justifies the editorial decision to not ‘champion individual poets as special exemplars of hybridization in [their] introductions’ by noting that one of the ‘philosophical points of the collection needs to remain that all aspects and variants of hybridization in American poetry are of equal and lasting value, and that, in fact, the hybridization found in our living poetry at this moment constitutes one of the most vital elements of its importance’. St. John continues, It seems therefore antithetical to both the project and the spirit of this anthology to suggest that one poet’s way or understanding of hybridization can be judged as ‘better’ or ‘more important’ than any other. That is, the idea of first suggesting that the poetic activities of the poets here in American Hybrid have helped erase the boundaries of poetic schools and leveled out many assumed hierarchies, and then to say, Some animals are more equal than others, runs counter to the very premise we are positing here. (St. John, 2009: xxviii) So, even though Swensen and St. John have thought a bit about evaluation, they avoid the most important question: how did Swensen and St. John select the work they did for their hybrid anthology? Consensus was

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reached by Swensen and St. John through some selection process. After all, many hybrid poets were excluded, as were many poems by the anthologized poets. (Some animals were sent to slaughter.) What was the basis for the selections? What were the evaluative criteria? If the included poems are not the best hybrid poems, then why were they included? Other questions arise: If the poems selected are not the most excellent, what are they? Are they the most representative? If so, how so? And, if so, does not this greatly problematize St. John’s stance? What of poets who can be deemed hybrid who were not included in the anthology? While there are many, what about, say, Bruce Beasley, Martine Bellen, Timothy Liu, Suzanne Paola and Aaron Shurin, 5 out of the 22 poets included in Lyric Postmodernisms who were not included in American Hybrid? Though published only a year after Lyric Postmodernisms, Swensen in particular certainly should and could have thought more deeply about these matters; having been included in Shepherd’s anthology (which involved contributing an artist’s statement), she certainly was aware of the existence of the other, similar project. It seems fair to expect greater theoretical and evaluative acumen from the editors of American Hybrid. Readers should be able to expect answers to questions such as those we have posed. It is, of course, work to consider such questions and to strive to actually answer them. More careful attention would need to be paid, conversations recorded, transcriptions investigated and evaluative dynamics articulated. It is also possible that such work might deliver awkward news: for example, that the anthologist is selecting poems for reasons other than those stated. Engaging in PDCM could have helped to gather crucial information about how choices were in fact made. PDCM examines the values, dynamics and power of editorial decision making and demands that those values, dynamics and power be publicized. Further, it suggests that, if it turns out that one is not proud of or satisfied with the decision-making process, if it is something one would rather not share, then PDCM might be a good method to radically rethink it (why just two editors? is this enough for such a massive task?), reapproach it (if it sticks with two editors, why not, for example, embrace this, and play up the editors’ personal, idiosyncratic views?) or differently articulate what the project’s value and scope in fact are. The alternative to not doing this work, abdicating axiological responsibility, is devastating. A treasure trove of information has been lost due to the fact that St. John and Swensen did not record, analyze and share the results of their many conversations about what poems to include in their anthology. The absence of such an artifact leaves large questions hanging in the air, especially: What level of care did the editors

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in fact exert in assembling their anthology? St. John (2009) notes that his own involvement in the project began when, inspired by a talk given by Swensen on hybridity, he began to consider more deeply how [t]he rubrics and various designations—avant-garde, postmodern, New Formalist, Language poetry, organic, mainstream, New Critical, Beat, et cetera—all served...primarily as highly generalized critical orientations to or as retrospective overviews of a poet’s work (regardless of how reductive those rubrics might in fact be). (St. John, 2009: xxvii) But how does ‘hybrid’ avoid the same pitfall? That is, lacking any specific articulation of evaluative criteria, how is it not its own ‘highly generalized critical orientation’? Engaging PDCM could have averted this quandary. Swensen also calls for attentive work that her own anthology does not deliver, asking questions of the school-forming project that her own anthology does not answer. In ‘Elliptical Poetry: A Response’ – a decade before the publication of American Hybrid – Swensen (1999) responded to Stephen Burt’s writing on elliptical poetry, and in this piece of writing she raises a host of questions on Burt’s notion of an ascendant new school of poetry. Key among Swensen’s (1999: 64–65) concerns, though, are the insights that forming this school ‘encourage[s] a reductive approach that advances commonalities at the expense of important differences’ and that the school itself, as defined by Burt, seems to have an ‘arbitrary constitution’. Swensen (1999: 66) notes that in particular she is concerned with ‘the limits of this group—where does it end?’ and she turns to cite poets (some of whom she and St. John included in American Hybrid, and at least one of whom, Martine Bellen, though eligible, they did not) whom Burt could have discussed in his essay. But these same issues are those that Swensen never addresses in her introduction to American Hybrid. How can it be that in a decade no better answers were possible? How can it be that the editors of such a massive project got no further in their thinking? Our answer is simple: they did not have a method. PDCM provides a method for the kind of investigation, the searching examination, that both Swensen and St. John call for but fail to deliver. In lieu of engaging a productive approach to attempt to answer the kinds of questions she posed in 1999, in American Hybrid, Swensen seems to recommend that readers of hybrid poetry engage in an effort to discover their own criteria. According to Swensen (2009: xxv), instead of offering now-outmoded ‘stable’ criteria, hybridity ‘put[s] more responsibility on individual readers to make their own assessments, which can in turn create stronger readers in that they must become more aware of and refine their own criteria’.

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We are confident that readers of this book will find much to question and critique in Swensen’s suggestion. For example, establishing stable criteria likely is not a realistic goal. We should expect criteria, as they always have been, to be dynamic, shifting, changing and used for different purposes. Additionally, while everyone makes their own assessments, simply making one’s assessment likely will not be the most revelatory method of axiological discovery. As Emily Susina’s work further reveals, just because an editor or editorial board makes claims about their assessments, does not mean that the text that follows will be less engagingly open to inspection. Indeed, the claims can be seen as invitations to question and critique. Finally, it is disingenuous for an anthologist to tell readers, in effect, ‘You sort it out’. Unavoidably, anthologists Swensen and St. John have already figured it out, and perhaps even, to borrow from William Logan’s formulation, fought it out. Alas, without a method of inquiry, they were unable to discover and then disclose the dynamics of their evaluative decision making.

Fence Accurate articulations of what editors really value in the work they publish are important. They are so, not only in retrospect, regarding editorial work that has been done, but also in prospect, looking forward, announcing the kind of work of likely future interest to an editor or editorial board. In ‘The Story of Fence’, an account of the origins of the journal Fence, Rebecca Wolff (2000), the magazine’s founder and publisher, discusses the periodical’s many origins, including an encounter with editorial resistance brought about, in part, by lack of communication about literary value. In the process of ‘blanketing the Poet’s Marketplace with simultaneous submissions’ early in her publishing career, and before she had come to realize that, as she understood it, the poetry marketplace was organized around ‘two poles’ – ‘the thoroughly unremarkable brand of poetry as seen in the scores of undistinguished journals limping their way out of universities around the country (Southwest Review, Missouri Review, etc.)’ and ‘a small, practically invisible-to-the-naked-eye scene of impenetrable, closed circuit, dogmatic, programmatic journals seeking explicitly to support work in certain types of experimentation’ –Wolff submitted work to and was rejected by Clayton Eshleman at Sulfur. Wolff, who acknowledges that she ‘had not read Sulfur’, notes that, having determined that her own work ‘must be “experimental,” since it certainly didn’t have much in common with what [she] saw to be the norm in magazines like Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, etc.’ ‘picked [Sulfur]

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out of Poet’s Market for its self-expressed predilection for “experimental poetry”’. Of the ‘[s]everal catalysts [that] catalyzed’ the founding of Fence, one was Eshleman’s rejection letter. The ‘two-page, single-spaced, typed rejection letter’, which Wolff later came to see as actually quite generous, clarified Eshleman’s aesthetic values and showed how Wolff’s poetry did not jibe with those values; Wolff notes that while Eshleman found her work ‘more interesting than 99% of the unsolicited manuscripts he received’, ‘he was troubled by [her] use of the “I”—he found it clashed with certain prominent ideas he held as an editor, ideas about referentiality, ideas about the subject, etc.’, and ‘[h]e suggested that [Wolff] edit out of [her] poems such lines as pointed directly to the establishment of an actual speaker in the poem’. While there are many ways to read this story – Wolff initially reads it as a story of gender – we read it as a tale of axiology. From out of this encounter with the retrospectively articulated criteria of an experimental editor, and also with some further encounters with non-experimental poetry of ‘pristine blandness’, Fence emerged: Both poles felt like clubs, to mix a metaphor—to which I did not belong. In April of 1997 I hatched the concept of Fence, full-blown, title included, and immediately began announcing it to anyone I spoke with. My shpiel went something like this: I’m starting a magazine for idiosyncratic writing, poetry and fiction that is not easily categorizable in terms of camps of schools of thought and which therefore is unappealing to the current market place. I tried not to exploit the obvious metaphor of ‘fence sitters,’ or ‘sitting on the fence,’ but it has proved too appropriate to avoid, like the best clichés. And so, Fence was created to exist in that middle space, between an overly simple, ‘familiar … predictable … safe’ and, therefore, ‘debilitated’ poetry, and an overly specific form of avant-garde experimentation. Immediately following the above extended quotation, Wolff instructs readers to ‘(see Fence manifesto of 1998 [sic], attached below)’. The eight paragraphs of the attached ‘Fence Manifesto of 1997’ offers a few additional insights into the magazine’s aesthetics; it states, for example, that ‘[w]e are convinced that mystery, as it is manifested in the subjective voice, is a legitimate and pleasurable by-product of the agency of the author’, and that ‘Fence offers its readers a richesse of literacy, one that is populist not by virtue of condescension, but by its lack of presumptions’. However, for the most part, the manifesto describes that the magazine publishes work in the middle space: ‘Our contributors are those whose work sits resolutely on the fence, resisting easy definition’; ‘Fence is a resting place for work that we recognize by its singularity, its reluctance to take a seat in any

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established camp, its insistence on the reader’s close attention to what is not already understood, digested, judged’; ‘Fence intentionally blurs the distinction between “difficulty” and “accessibility,” preferring instead to address a continuum of utterance’. Fence has been in existence, now, for nearly two decades. And these two decades have provided opportunities for even more self-reflection and identity formation for the journal. Some of these opportunities are those of any journal: over time, it publishes certain poems and rejects many more. A journal’s identity is formed in those selections. Even if general readers might not be aware of the specific dynamics of such decisions, the editorial board is, or else, through reflection (including perhaps PDCM) could become aware of these dynamics. Fence in particular has had specific occasion to become introspective. In 2001, Steve Evans circulated via email his essay (later published online) ‘The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises’ (Evans, 2004), a scathing critique of the journal’s seemingly ideologyless ideology, ‘liberal pluralism’, which Evans defines, in part, as ‘the spontaneous thought form of the marketed mind, a sort of unavowable dogma of the undogmatic that excels at neutralizing distinctions and defusing contradictions in a disingenuous game of anything goes (so long as it sells)’, and which ‘is by tendency eclectic and apolitical, allergic to commitment and against principles on principle’. According to Fence associate editor Max Winter (2003), Evans’s essay created a kind of crisis moment for the journal. Winter states: ‘[T]he editors of this magazine became more self-aware almost immediately’. He also notes that ‘the essay not only produced extensive (and how!) dialogue between Fence editors, it also spurred dialogue between numerous poets … all of which was productive, if longwinded and, for that, highly internalized’. But it is unclear what became of this increased self-awareness and the dialogues it occasioned. (The website with the dialogue among numerous poets no longer exists.) Moreover, it is not at all clear from the magazine’s identity statements that anything has changed. Although under the category of ‘Magazines and Journals’, Fence does not have a description of itself in the 2015 Poet’s Market (Brewer, 2014), here is the magazine’s current (as of early 2017) description of itself, located when clicking the ‘about’ link on its website (‘Information’, n.d.): Founded in 1998 by Rebecca Wolff, Fence is a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that has a mission to redefine the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. It is Fence’s mission to encourage writing that might

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otherwise have difficulty being recognized because it doesn’t answer to either the mainstream or to recognizable modes of experimentation. Fence is long-term committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil other systems that bring new writing to light. Far from seeming ‘more self-aware’, this statement of aesthetics seems to offer only more of the same: whether or not it was written before or after the Fence editors’ discussions regarding Evans’s essay, it mainly repeats the aesthetic information offered in the Fence manifesto of 1997. It can, and perhaps should, be otherwise. In ‘A Decade or So of Little Magazines: One Reader’s Perspective’, the introduction to The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, Jeffrey Lependorf (2015), who serves as the shared executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and Small Press Distribution, notes: I spend a lot of time at CLMP talking to those starting magazines about their mission statements—the stated expressions of their editorial sensibilities—and not just because they will likely need them for grant proposals. Too frequently people planning on publishing a new magazine announce that they will be featuring ‘the very best poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction’ they can find. Now, one would be hard-pressed to identify a literary magazine set on publishing mediocre poetry, fiction or creative non-fiction, or even ‘second-best.’ Many of the editors of the very best literary magazines profess that they publish what they find excellent, free of aesthetic prejudice. But despite what they might claim, this clearly isn’t the case. What one editor considers the very best is not the same as what another prefers, at least not in all cases. Through their specific selections they define and express a sensibility…. This sensibility, defined sometimes only through the course of a magazine’s own history, is what attracts certain kinds of readers—and certain kinds of submissions—as well. (Lependorf, 2015: 7) In the nearly two decades of its existence, decades that have included not only scores of editorial decisions about what work to accept and what to reject but also the awareness-raising interaction with the viewpoint of Steve Evans’s essay, Fence certainly has more greatly defined its sensibility than its ‘about’ statement indicates. They publish poetry of the middle space, hybrid, elliptical poetry. But this is, of course, a big field. How do the editors operate within it? What do they emphasize? However, it is not clear

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if the editors of Fence are conscious of the details of their sensibility, and there is no indication that they have attempted any sort of examination, and it is certainly the case that, if any of that knowledge or insight exists, the editors have not clearly articulated it. Lependorf (2015) notes that there is something more to Fence’s sensibility than they let on: [I]n terms of how a magazine’s sensibility will attract a certain kind of writer as well as reader, a magazine like Fence (founded in 1997) has the mission of not advocating for any one aesthetic position, remaining, aesthetically speaking, ‘on the fence.’ Fence welcomes a variety of viewpoints that might not normally appear in the same magazine, and the establishment of Fence as an exceptional magazine in a relatively short amount of time perhaps speaks to the success of this mission. Yet, clearly, many kinds of writing would be extremely unlikely to appear in the pages of Fence. I suspect that Rebecca Wolff, its founder and publisher, might protest that this simply isn’t true, that as long as the work submitted were excellent it could absolutely be a candidate for Fence. While in theory this may be true, I’ve never seen examples of what would likely be described as ‘cowboy poetry’ or ‘genre fiction,’ for example, appear in its pages, with the possible exception of pieces categorized as such that utilize these categories toward a different, perhaps more ‘avant-garde,’ goal. (Lependorf, 2015: 8) Where Lependorf (rightly) identifies some of the clear (though only implicit) contours of the journal’s sensibility, with PDCM methods at hand we could achieve more. We can imagine an intrepid, curious reader, much as Emily Susina did with Tributaries, reading the journal closely to identify and share what it really values. But even more promisingly, we can imagine the editors of the journal investigating their own decisions – to focus on poetry: what poetry they accept and what they reject, and what their reasons are for these decisions. They should make notes of an editorial meeting, analyze those notes and then publish their findings about what they really value. They should undertake PDCM, as described in Chapter 2 and Appendix A: ‘How to Do Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’. This would be the kind of careful exploration and articulation that, had Eshleman done it publicly and prior to his generous rejection letter, could have more helpfully guided Rebecca Wolff all those years ago, when she was trying to make her way into publishing. From what we have discussed in this chapter, it seems Kent Johnson is largely correct: those who could benefit from, and perhaps even (as we discuss in the next chapter) have a responsibility to perform, PDCM very

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likely will have some sort of aesthetic and/or sociological affiliation: they are, and, in fact, have been, fellow faculty members and/or members of an editorial team or board. We trust that the ways to extend this list are readily apparent: everyone making evaluations of poetry that have consequence needs to undertake PDCM. As we have already discussed, PDCM certainly would be fruitful in workshops, serving as a way to uncover what the group values in poems, allowing for workshop participants to engage their assessments of each other’s work in more deeply informed and creative ways. In fact, in his response to our initial PDCM study, Marty states, ‘I would challenge any writing program to consider initiating that [PDCM] conversation with their students, as it seems a far more meaningful matter of craft than, say, tending to the surface/technical features of a poem’. Additionally, when meeting to discuss applications for their writing program, MFA faculty can perform PDCM to better name and share the kinds of poetry they admire in order to allow MFA applicants to better determine if their own poems fit the program’s aesthetics. When meeting to discuss what poems or poets will win their prize, juries also might occasionally undertake PDCM to become better aware of their own evaluative criteria to make more fully conscious decisions and to more accurately share the dynamics of those decisions in their judges’ statements. Participating in PDCM requires an investment of time. Undertaking PDCM in a poetry writing class, for example, might mean less time spent on poetry writing. This is true, but it is not too much time – just two weeks. And those two weeks are a relatively small investment of time for some very large gains in student preparedness, engagement and perceptiveness, and so, better workshops. (For some testimony about this, see the discussion of ‘Exhibit 2’ in the next chapter.) In many instances, PDCM need not involve a great deal of extra effort on the part of those already engaged in the evaluation of poetry. Typically, PDCM can be grafted onto evaluative processes already taking place. Take those prize judges, for example. They are already reading a number of prize entries; they are already engaging in in-depth discussions (and perhaps negotiations; and even, sometimes, arguments) about what work will be recognized by receiving the award; they likely also have been tasked with articulating their assessments by writing some sort of judges’ statement, a rationale for why the winner was selected. (For a real-life example of this process, see the discussion of ‘Exhibit 3’ in the next chapter.) PDCM would add that an accurate record of the conversation be kept, that the articulations of the values revealed in that conversation in fact be accurate and that there be some sensitivity to the privacy needs of participants. (For more on privacy, see Appendix A: ‘How to Do Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’.)

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While it is certainly the case that PDCM can be grafted onto alreadyexisting assessment procedures, we would also add that the methods of PDCM could be used for more creative, experimental purposes. In the previous chapter, Austin Smith remarked that he believes that the immanence and significance models are not ‘in opposition to one another’. This is an interesting claim, and it is a claim that need not only be speculated upon; rather, with PDCM, it can be tested. How are immanent poems valued? Is Smith correct when he asserts that the high praise and celebration of certain immanent poems in fact result from positive assessments of those poems’ imagery and music? Or are there other features of immanent poems that set them apart for readers? A well-designed PDCM – one that closely considers the study’s participants and materials – could offer valuable insights. If someone determines that it is important to revise the PDCM study focused on in Chapter 2 so that it has even greater participant diversity – perhaps even reversing the gender ratios so that it involves six women and one man – such a study should be undertaken. In short, if some group of people decide that such a study is important for them and/ or for others, they should design and undertake a study using the PDCM methods. In the spirit of experimentation, we might also recommend at least one other way to incorporate the systematic, grounded study of poetic value: create a whole class devoted to the study of literary axiology. At both undergraduate and graduate levels, courses have already been created that focus on a particular aspect of poetry: courses on poetic forms, on ekphrastic poetry, etc. It is perhaps time to include in this list of offerings – and perhaps even disrupt what has become a rather standard curriculum by considering – a course focused on poetic axiology. In such a class, students could learn more about the dynamics of poetic axiology, encountering thinkers such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and projects such as Turner’s, Bizzaro’s and Hix’s; the axiological commitments of different aesthetics and groups as articulated in statements of poetics; and then engage in PDCM to learn more about their own values and/or to learn about the values of others. As a final project, the students might create an anthology of contemporary poems and, through PDCM, further explore and articulate their values. Or they might perform PDCM to investigate and critique the published values statements of other groups. While work would be needed to establish a class devoted to literary axiology, it is through such concerted efforts that literary evaluation finally would emerge fully from its exile. Whatever the particular method, it is vital that poetry writers and critics become better acquainted with their own and others’ poetic values – and the best, most complete way we know to do this is through PDCM.

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By engaging in PDCM, students will be at the methodological forefront of the noble tradition of axiological self-awareness and expression, and, as a result, they will become better, more alert and engaged readers, and more creative critics of their own and others’ work – all of which is a big part of becoming a poet. However one engages in PDCM, at least one thing is certain: it will be worth it. When we show ourselves and others our work – that is, the real work of actual assessment – we learn more about what we really value in poetry, both individually and communally. These discoveries can be significant, especially when acted upon. Groups need to do the work of mapping criteria anew so that they may be assured that their discussion of values is current and accurate. Then, all of the vital assessment going on in poetry can be more honest and substantial.

5 Do It Yourself Please come out of isolation and join a fascinating conversation. Timothy Mayers (2007: 11)

Poets are a curious bunch. We mean that poets often (and properly) exist in what Dickinson calls a ‘slant’ relationship to the world. But we also mean that poets are questioners, inquirers and explorers. Both in their verse and in their writings about verse, poets want to know how poetic things work, what they mean and why they matter. As we discussed in the introduction and Chapter 1, this professional curiosity extends to the ways we value poetry. Matthew Zapruder and many of the respondents to Kent Johnson’s Mayday ‘Roundtable’ want to know how we value contemporary poetry. So do René Wellek, Alberta Turner, Patrick Bizzaro, H.L. Hix and Marjorie Perloff. So does Paul, who ran the unauthorized experiment (mentioned in Chapter 2) to test the nation-based category on which the Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) study was established. Such inquiry and experimentation are woven throughout poetic history, with no sign of abating even in the course of modernity and postmodernity. Consider the poetic hoax. What is a hoax if not a form of axiological testing and experimentation? In ‘“Imp of Verbal Darkness”: Poetry Hoaxes & the Postmodern Politic’, Rebecca Warner (2003) notes that ‘[p]oetry hoaxes raise a number of questions that test our notions of literary value, authenticity, and authorial intention’. Hoaxes, including the Australian Ern Malley and the American Spectra and Yasusada hoaxes focused on in Warner’s article, ask and offer a variety of answers to a variety of questions. Referring to the kinds of questions poet John Ashbery raises about hoaxes, Warner wonders, Can the intellectual spoof turn out to be more valid as poetry than the serious poem? Are the poems still ‘good’ once their biographical disguise is removed and their satiric intentions revealed? If editors and critics can’t tell the difference between a real poem and a fake one, do we have any reliable standards for assessing literary quality? (Warner, 2003) 96

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The avant-garde itself might be considered a form of axiological inquiry ‘because experimental art sets out to challenge our assumptions about what art is … Exactly what are the boundaries of art, and how far can they be pushed?’ (Warner, 2003) Even a phenomenon such as slam poetry might be considered a form of axiological experimentation. Slam poetry originated from founder Marc Smith’s deep dissatisfaction with the overly dry and serious qualities of traditional poetry readings. Smith’s innovation was to develop a format for poetry readings in which participating poets felt like they had skin in the game – at a typical slam, judges are selected from the crowd at random, and a ‘prize’ is offered, though it is typically something so small that it barely qualifies as a prize – to playfully up the ante of each performance. This experiment introduced a new way of presenting poetry and resulted in a new kind of poetry with its own forms, traditions, communities and values. Slam poetry both originates and concludes in evaluation. Axiological innovation is virtually ubiquitous in current American poetry. However, close, conscious, attention to evaluation tends to be sporadic, infrequently empirical and rarely collaborative. In fact, attention to poetic value tends to end exactly when evaluators should be leaning in to listen. And, even if they happen to listen in, they often fail to write up and publish the results. Later in this chapter, we discuss why and how we believe more inductive, empirical and collaborative inquiry into poetic value will grow. We also argue that it should; that, in fact, we have an ethical obligation to undertake such systematic axiological studies. We conclude with some clarifications and exhortations. But first, we demonstrate with three separate exhibits that American poetry, and perhaps creative writing more broadly, has been on the cusp of inductive, communal values inquiry for some time.

Almost There: Three Exhibits of Evaluative Curiosity in Action, and a Curious Inaction The following three exhibits offer examples of experimental work yielding axiological insight. All three exhibits reveal that • •

the authors of these three texts assume their readers want to learn more about poetic/writerly axiology; the curiosity so central to a great deal of poem making (or other kinds of creative writing) also extends to the realms of axiology: writers

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(who also assume the roles of editors, teachers and judges) create and/or report on critical conversations (sometimes newly designed) that offer insight into evaluation. However, the exhibits also reveal some shared limitations: • •

they show that their curiosity ends at the edge of the social; they engage in little to no systematic analysis of findings.

Fortunately, such limitations can be overcome; spurred on and boosted by the methodology of poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM), such inquiry into values can offer us more higher-quality self-knowledge.

Exhibit 1: Ostroff’s (1964) Eight Symposia In his foreword to The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic: Eight Symposia, Anthony Ostroff (1964: vii) states: ‘The plan of this book may be simply explained: In each of our eight symposia, three distinguished poets write independent critiques of a recent poem by an important contemporary—who then writes a commentary in response; the poem, the three critiques, and the author’s comment together constitute the finished symposium’. The book is a fascinating document, containing intriguing symposia such as John Crowe Ransom, Babette Deutsch and Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke’s ‘In a Dark Time’; Richard Wilbur, John Frederick Nims and John Berryman on Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’; and Adrienne Rich, Donald Justice and William Dickey on selections from Karl Shapiro’s ‘The Bourgeois Poet’. Ostroff (1964: vii) notes that this project ‘introduces something new in literary criticism, first, in calling upon poets to perform the essential critical task; second, in calling upon the authors of the poems under consideration to comment directly on their work and on criticism of it’. This project, according to Ostroff (1964: vii), turns up many interesting findings, including insights into the ‘original intention in the poems’ and ‘details of background and composition we could not otherwise know’, all delivered in ‘critiques, because they are written by poets, [that] are exceptionally free of critical prejudice, attentive to the integrity of poem and poet alike, and sensitive to the entire range of those events and devices of imagination and language whereby experience becomes poetry’. One of the key elements that, according to Ostroff (1964: vii), make his symposia so unique is that in them ‘critic and author are placed in a somewhat more intense relation of responsibility to each other than is

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usual, which provides a special interest of its own’. Noting that the essays are ‘remarkable in several aspects’, Ostroff (1964: vii) remarks that they are likely so ‘perhaps above all for the ways in which they require that we be active in our response to them—and thus to the poems they are about’. This sense of being drawn into the symposia is the result of ‘[t]he dramatic interplay of ideas among the contributors (who contradict as well as complement each other)’, an interactivity that ‘does not allow us to retire comfortably to a single, official view’ (1964: vii). Another aspect is ‘the liveliness of the essays’ (1964: vii). According to Ostroff (1964: vii– viii), ‘We are always aware of somebody there, of a particular voice, a direct personality. This is a direct source of delight in itself; it also reflects and enforces upon us a fact which all the contributors take as a principle: that experience is individual—and that communication of experience, therefore, must always in some measure be personal, intimate, and subject to unpredictable eccentricities and limits’. Although he does not focus on it in his foreword, it is very clear that the symposia’s ‘critiques’ include a great deal of evaluation. Sometimes, the assessments are pointed and focused on the poem at hand. For example, Richard Eberhart (1964: 5) notes that Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’, which employs hanging laundry as a central metaphor, is ‘a man’s poem’: ‘Certainly not all women would like a laundry poem which pays no heed to hard work and coarsened hands. They might say, poet, have your ruddy dreams, but give us better detergents’. At other times, the assessments are overarching, as when Robert Horan (1964: 10) observes of Wilbur’s poem that ‘there is in it, as elsewhere in Wilbur, some fastidiousness or remoteness that dissipates power’, that sometimes ‘Wilbur’s hand seems gloved, muffling passion in favor of finesse’. With respect for Ostroff’s innovations and accomplishments, we notice some unfulfilled potential among his symposia. For example, if you really want to increase the ‘dramatic interplay of ideas’ and the ‘liveliness’ of the exchanges while creating a real space for ‘voice’ and personality with all its ‘eccentricities and limits’, arranging for live, face-to-face interaction certainly would be the more apt method. (See Chapter 2 for our discussion of the benefits of face-to-face evaluative inquiry.) That is, it would be more revealing if the symposia were organized less as a modern, metaphorical, desiccated version and more like the original symposia: discussions over drinks. (This critique echoes our critique in Chapter 1 of Hix’s merely metaphorical ‘conversation’.) Face-to-face debate very likely will turn up new, interesting material, which when thoughtfully analyzed might offer some larger patterns and ideas. Such careful analysis of the data could and should have been a part of this project. Ostroff (1964: viii) clearly at least

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intuited that within his raw data there was a ‘surprisingly consistent and useful body of principle’, but even more surprisingly, he neither pursued, developed nor presented that body of principle. It would have been useful for his project to have developed the knowledge at which he was contented merely to hint, using methods of qualitative data analysis.

Exhibit 2: Carlson’s (1989) ‘Assignment’ In ‘Assignment’, his contribution to Creative Writing in America, Ron Carlson (1989: 80) discusses how he strategically uses two assignments at the beginning of a graduate fiction writing seminar to get his course off to a particularly strong start. (Though it comes from a fiction writing seminar, we believe this scenario easily translates to a seminar in poetry writing.) The first assignment requires that students write a 1000-word story ‘that somehow deals with disappointment’ for the next week. The next assignment, however, is quite different, and it focuses directly on evaluation. For the assignment, the students will read all the stories produced by members of the class, and then select the five they ‘like the most’ and compose ‘a one-page essay on why [each student] chose those five’ (Carlson, 1989: 81). Carlson also assigns Raymond Carver’s (Carver & Ravenel, 1986) and Ann Beattie’s (Beattie and Ravenel, 1987) introductions to Best American Stories as possible models of axiological reflection. (Carlson notes in particular that Beattie identifies specific criteria, referring ‘to “surprise” and its relationship to the real complexity of human problems’.) But he also notes that his students ‘must be guided by what matters to [each of them], so the task is to identify what matters to [each of them] in stories and set that down’ (1989: 81). Carlson (1989: 81) knew that ‘to choose some over others’ was ‘a harsh order’, and that the seminar participants, who picked up their packets of stories with ‘eyes narrowed’ and ‘sauntered[ed] out of the room’, were skeptical of the assignment. However, it had just the effect for which he had hoped: When we meet again, I look around the table into the faces of the students and it is hard to believe this is only our third meeting. They look like veterans already. And they talk like veterans: there is a lot of work before us and all of them have done their homework so we won’t waste words today. We will not fall into jargon; we are armed—none of ‘this doesn’t work for me …’ or ‘I’m not certain about this …’ We’re willing to say we’re certain … It is the third week and we have all written a story and a version of our credo. It was a lot to bite off, but

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the semester, now, is a given. We have a strong tone, and tone is crucial to fiction classes, and we are taking each other seriously. We will fall into workshop rotation easily, happily, ready for the good work ahead. (1989: 81–82) While Carlson’s axiologically focused assignment clearly was productive, it is difficult not to wonder what all the veteran-level talk (which Carlson does not describe) sounded like. We know what it was not (no ‘jargon’), but what did it include? Carlson (1989) offers a glimpse of this conversation: he reports on student feedback he received after asking how students ‘felt about the assignment’. He states: … I learn: the students were not exactly comfortable picking some stories over others; they felt they were picking people over other people. I’m glad this has come up and it takes about two minutes to say what they’ve all seen clearly this week: the stories speak for themselves. (1989: 82) This revelation makes us wish all the more that there had been some recording and analysis of the conversation. Then, not only would readers have found out what some of the criteria were and whether those criteria held up or changed under scrutiny; readers could also have learned if the contextual information of an author’s identity (another instance of what, in Chapter 4, the students at Illinois Wesleyan University labeled the ‘Shakespeare effect’) was so easily countered by Carlson’s two-minute assertion of the primacy of textual values as Carlson assumes it was. It is also relatively easy to consider a way to test specifically for this variable: for the next writing assignment, have students submit work without their names attached to it.

Exhibit 3: Leslie McGrath’s (2011) fly’s eye view In ‘Fly on the Wall: Judging a Poetry Book Prize by Committee’, a blog post on The Best American Poetry website, Leslie McGrath (2011) offers what she calls a ‘fly’s eye view of the judging of the 2011 Washington Prize, an annual contest for a full length poetry collection awarded by The Word Works, a venerable independent literary press in Washington, D.C.’. McGrath lays out the selection process: a panel of judges consisting of ‘board members and two invitees, all of whom are poets’, have had about a month to consider 11 finalist manuscripts. According to instructions, panelists ‘read each manuscript a few times, taking notes as to its strengths

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and weaknesses, then arranging our top five in descending order’. McGrath comments that she thought the quality of the manuscripts ‘varied wildly— from the unadventurous to the exquisitely polished’, and she adds that she spent her four-hour drive to the board meeting ‘mentally preparing to stave off any potential campaign for one of the manuscripts that were in my bottom four or five’. McGrath briefly describes the five qualities of the three manuscripts she thought were the strongest: • • • • •

Each poem, regardless of its length or position in the manuscript, was strong. There were no filler poems. There was a sense of connection, even movement, from poem to poem. There was a balance between the writer’s stylistic strong suits and riskier poems. It was clear that the manuscript was engaged in conversation with not just earlier poetry but contemporary literature and culture. I was left with the sense that I knew something about the worldview of the poet or the speaker of the poems.

Regarding her list of criteria, McGrath clarifies that they, in fact, are hers alone: ‘I speak only for myself (God forbid I should speak for the other apasionados on the jury!) and myself at this time in my career’. According to McGrath, the meeting of the selection committee opened with a ‘straw vote’, which revealed that ‘[f]rom the get-go the majority of us had given highest rankings to a particular manuscript’, and that ‘[f]ive other manuscripts had received votes, as well’. McGrath notes, ‘We went through each of the finalists, offering our thoughts to Nancy White (our Board Chairperson) who took notes’. The initial signs of agreement, however, were disrupted when one of the judges said that the manuscript the others thought the strongest ‘had not even been in her top five’. As a result, the committee spent ‘more than four hours of poem-by-poem— and sometimes line-by-line—discussion of the manuscripts’. Though this conversation was trying, and though it resulted in selecting the winner of the earlier straw poll, it seems, according to McGrath, that the conversation was worth it; she states: ‘As painful as it felt in the last hour, I was aware of feeling each of the judges was putting to use every bit of knowledge, literary and otherwise, we’d brought to the table’. As it is the most recent of the three exhibited, we will consider in more detail the case of Leslie McGrath and the judging of the 2011 Washington Prize. To our thinking, McGrath tells a fairly standard story about a wellrun selection process in contemporary American poetry. In this case, it is

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a particular book contest, but we can imagine it being true of many book contests, and, beyond that, of the processes that journal editors engage in to select poems for a particular issue and faculty engage in to determine which students to accept into their graduate programs in poetry writing. We trust that this scenario sounds familiar to many of our readers. Given the common, shared nature of McGrath’s description, and the fact that this case delves a bit more into the social than the previous two, a number of items are noteworthy: • • • •

the manuscript selection process itself seems worth commenting on – McGrath’s readers want to know about deliberative processes; values and evaluation, of course, are at the core of the selection process, and McGrath seems aware that readers might want to know her criteria, and shares those standards; values in fact are valued; according to McGrath, at least some of the other judges – whom McGrath refers to as ‘apasionados’ – are passionate about their evaluative work; one result of such evaluative passion is conflict: the judges seem to have skin in the game, and McGrath – who notes that on her way to the meeting she prepares ‘to stave off any potential campaign’ in support of work she opposes – certainly does.

If our acknowledgments and critiques of the axiological exhibits discussed above lead us to the door of PDCM methods, then a few other items usher us in. It is clear from McGrath’s narrative that the conversation got more energized, focused and revealing when there was disagreement. It does not seem a stretch to think that the process of going ‘poem-by-poem’ and even sometimes ‘line-by-line’ turned up some more insights into evaluation, including new criteria and dynamics among those criteria – after all, it is only at this point that McGrath notes that the judges are bringing all of their knowledge to bear in their deliberations. Another item that puts McGrath’s experience with The Word Works in the vicinity of PDCM is that a record was kept of a portion of the selection committee’s work: Nancy White, the board chairperson, ‘took notes’. And even more than this, those notes got shared; according to McGrath, ‘The Word Works is one of a few literary presses that gives feedback to each finalist (and some years also provides feedback to semi-finalists)’. Indeed, The Word Works website (‘Submission Guidelines’, n.d.) states that ‘those Washington Prize entrants whose manuscripts are passed up to the second tier of readers (all finalist and semi-finalist manuscripts) have the option of getting feedback from our readers and judges on their manuscripts’.

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Offering this kind of feedback, the judges for The Word Works 2011 Washington Prize are remarkable in their willingness and readiness to show their work; as White (2011) herself notes, the fact that The Word Works offers ‘some feedback to all semi-finalists and finalists who request it’, is ‘unique’. The reason White gives for this distinction is that providing detailed feedback can be real work; she notes that she devotes ‘most of the month of August every year to this project’. However, she finds it rewarding: But then the thank yous start arriving: ‘I said to myself that if it didn’t win this time, I would stick this ms in a drawer and forget about it forever. Now I have ideas for revision and the energy to keep going.’ I know that book, which was a semi-finalist, will see print eventually. It’s grueling to find a publisher, but it’s going to happen if that writer sticks with it. The book had some snags, but it was original, powerful, full of juice. (White, 2011) Elsewhere, in an interview (Reiter, 2010), White notes, ‘the responses to those letters have been overwhelmingly positive. More than one rejected author has written to let us know that our comments helped them revise the manuscript, which was accepted by the next place they sent it. That’s tremendously gratifying’. We applaud The Word Works for taking evaluation as seriously as it does, and for conceiving and executing it as robustly and with as much care and craft as it does. Nancy White states: ‘I can’t stand the thought of the hundreds of hours of careful reading that go into the prize process just sitting there, unused!’ We are impressed that she knows how valuable this work is, acts on her discontent with the status quo (the standard practice of discarding valuable axiological data) and shares the findings with writers to their obvious benefit. We celebrate Nancy White’s and The Word Works’ spirit of evaluative inquiry and community mindedness. We also see some ways to enhance The Word Works’ inquiry by adding more PDCM elements. For instance, it is unclear from McGrath’s account of the selection committee meeting, but it seems as though Nancy White took notes as committee members shared their initial thoughts about each of the finalists – that is, prior to the heated, in-depth, revealing conversation. If, in fact, The Word Works’ axiological data gathering stops again here, at the edge of the social, then we contend that the lively (regrettably unrecorded), conflictual conversation among committee members seems to offer significant value. The inquiry should not stop at the point where things get lively, messy and contentious; to the contrary, that point

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and what occurs after it likely offers up the most revealing axiological information. A record should be kept of the conversation, and it should be analyzed for even more finely grained information that could be shared with semi-finalists and finalists – and future applicants. We further note that additional information (that is, information that McGrath is not privy to) is available, and suggest that this information might also be incorporated and possibly analyzed. Praising the doubleblind reading process that The Word Works adheres to, White notes: No reader knows who anyone is. You can have three books out already or you can be just starting out; male or female; in your teens or your eighties: no one knows for sure. At the final judging session, we sometimes indulge in some wagers about the writer’s gender or age–but only after we know which book we’ll be publishing. And please note: we’ve often disagreed and so each of us has been dead wrong. We’ve learned from that: never assume! (White, 2011) However, the information that the judges don’t have turns out to be of interest; White states, ‘Once I am returning manuscripts, I do look at the author information page. Why? Sometimes I’m rejecting someone I know, and I want to include a note. Also I want to get a sense of the breadth of our submissions geographically. Lastly, I do want to see what kind of publishing history our entrants are presenting. I do it because it’s interesting’. We argue that this information is not merely interesting but also potentially deeply revealing. For example, is it really the case that a recipient of the Washington Prize has been a teenager or an octogenarian? What is the publishing history of entrants? Nancy White seems to imply that their histories would potentially be quite different from each other, but is this in fact the case? Is it not the case that entrants have previously published work in some of the same journals? If so, which ones? And what does that potentially say about the distinctive terrain of poetic values on which the Washington Prize selection committee operates? Might this information be of interest to other relevant audiences? There is little reason to think that only semi-finalists and finalists would be intrigued by these discoveries. All who entered the contest might like to know more about the reasons the finalists were in fact the finalists, and why the winner was the winner. Indeed, for those looking to find a book contest to which to submit work, knowing some of the data about the deliberative dynamics of the Washington Prize selection committees could help to inform a decision about whether to submit to this particular prize and what results to expect.

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While it is true that different groups of people make up the selection committees in different years, and so there will be some axiological variety, it is still unlikely that the competition is as open as its website proclaims. In response to the frequently asked question ‘Is there a particular school or style of poetry that The Word Works prefers?’ the website (‘Submission Guidelines’, n.d.) states: ‘The Word Works looks for the best manuscript without any restriction to style or subject matter. We publish a wide range of styles and voices, and are always working to be open to each voice we encounter’. But, just as in our discussion regarding Fence in Chapter 4, this is not really the case. In fact, a cursory review of the Washington Prize recipients in the past five years reveals a great deal of stylistic overlap: the poems largely are lyrical, with a slight elliptical bent. There’s no slam poetry, no conceptual poetry, no overtly political poetry. Why not publicize this axiological fact? Less a matter of our telling the editors at The Word Works how to run their book contest (which we greatly admire), we offer the above discussion to highlight three things: •

• •

there are groups who not only take evaluation very seriously (in fact, we believe there are many such committed groups in poetry across the world) but also some groups (rarer) committed to gathering, analyzing, negotiating and sharing the hard evaluative work they have done; even in a group seemingly disposed to some of the methods of PDCM and to showing their work, the consideration of what work should be shown stops when it comes to live, dynamic, volatile conversation; the scope of even The Word Works’ evaluative inquiry could be productively expanded in several ways.

Our work in this book has been to show how far our field’s poetic-axiological curiosity has brought us. In the work of people such as Alberta Turner, Patrick Bizzaro and H.L. Hix; in Anthony Ostroff’s foreword to The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic; in Ron Carlson’s pedagogical experiment; and in McGrath’s story about the Washington Prize, we show that many members of our profession pursue empirical, inductive, communal and face-to-face evaluation, but then stop short. It is our (Theune and Broad’s) contention that such impressive inquiries can and should go even further. In PDCM, we have offered a method to advance poetry’s robustly ongoing, but often methodologically frustrated, axiological explorations. We will now demonstrate that, despite some resistance, there is a good possibility that PDCM will be taken up: conditions are right. After that, we

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will argue that PDCM should be taken up, and that, in many cases, there is an ethical obligation to do this work.

PDCM and the Field of Creative Writing Studies We need to be crossing the line between composition and creative writing far more often than we do. In fact, we may want to eliminate the line entirely (Wendy Bishop, 1994: 181) It is tempting to think that poets question evaluations only so far due to personal or particularly poetic reasons. While this certainly may have something to do with the general avoidance of certain types of inquiry, there may also be disciplinary reasons for such avoidance. In the latter part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century, the task of the American poet has been defined in large part by their participation in higher education. In this context, two things are especially pertinent: (1) the field of creative writing stands against too much analysis; and (2) as a demonstration, and perhaps a cause, of opposition to analysis, creative writing has been split from another field which works actively to advance inquiry into and the analysis of writing, and with which creative writing has, or at least seemingly should have, much in common: composition. (While we recognize their differences, we employ ‘composition’ to stand for the several closely related subfields of ‘composition studies’, ‘writing studies’ and ‘rhetoric and composition’.) As we will argue in this section, creative writing’s institutional position has worked against the fuller kinds of inquiry and investigation we have been promoting in this book. This institutional position obstructs robust inquiry in creative writing (‘that’s what compositionists do’) and, so, also creates a gravitational pull that keeps research from going far enough. Changes have been underway in the institutional relations between creative writing and composition; these ongoing changes have led to the creation of this book and will lead, we predict, to further similar studies. As a field, creative writing generally stands against too much analysis. In (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies, Timothy Mayers (2005: 10) maintains that creative writing has existed for decades in a state of ‘privileged marginality’. The ‘institutionalconventional wisdom’ of creative writing ‘holds that creativity or writing ability is fundamentally “interior” or “psychological” in nature and that it is thus the province only of special or gifted individuals and is fundamentally unteachable’ (Mayers, 2005: 14). One ‘facet’ of this ‘wisdom’ is ‘the notion that since creativity is individual, intrinsic, even “mysterious”, it

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cannot really be analyzed or explained in any significant way’ (Mayers, 2005: 16). Another facet is the general avoidance of the social: ‘While such theories, articulated and implied in the discourse surrounding academic creative writing, do not always entirely erase or deny the importance of social elements in the process of composition, they certainly—at the very least—make social (and political, cultural, and economic) factors far less important than an individual’s psychology’ (Mayers, 2005: 17). Of course, scholarly analysis of writing, including its social aspects, has been taking place, but it has been taking place mainly in composition. Mayers (2005: xiii) notes: ‘Proponents of composition studies, which emerged, according to various accounts, around the late 1950s and early 1960s, began to forge a place for composition as a scholarly discipline much like any other, not merely a collection of techniques for teaching required composition courses. Compositionists developed rich and varied theories of composing processes and also explored the relevance to composition of theories from numerous other academic disciplines’. Though ‘creative writing and composition, having developed under the umbrella of English studies, have from time to time been in close proximity, occasionally to the point of being almost indistinguishable from each other’ (Mayers, 2005: 98), for decades (especially in the latter part of the 20th century) they have had little to do with each other. This lack of interaction has reified into stereotypes, or what Mayers (2005: 111) calls the ‘narrow and reductive views’ participants in each field have of the other. Paraphrasing George Kalamaras, Mayers (2005: 111) notes: ‘Many compositionists view creative writers as naïve, anti-intellectual romanticists who flee from the rigors of academia to enclaves of like-minded colleagues and students. Many creative writers view compositionists as dull academic drones obsessed with rules and classifications for expository writing’. While this division is largely still in place, the isolation it creates has been subsiding: ‘Perhaps we are now [2005] in the midst of, or at least at the beginning of, another historical moment in which composition and creative writing are passing through each other’s orbits yet again’ (Mayers, 2005: 103). In ‘Notes from a Cell’, Eve Shelnutt (1989: 9) observes that Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students spend a certain amount of time in ‘courses in the theory of teaching composition, courses often required by the terms of their employment’. These courses arose not only due to student interest in composition, but also ‘in response to English departments, which needed some assurance that student teachers understood how to teach composition in its new configuration, especially as freshman and advanced composition once again became, in many universities, a required subject, staffed primarily by teaching assistants’ (Shelnutt, 1989: 9).

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As Mayers (1989: 103) notes, due in part to the fact that ‘a fair number of graduate students are moving (due to exigencies of the job market as well as intellectual curiosity) into composition studies from creative writing backgrounds’, we may be in or moving into ‘a potentially fertile historical moment’. One sign of, and a spur to, this productive time is ‘[a] few scholars’ exploratory investigations of the institutional history and structures of creative writing …’ and ‘an increase in “crossover” scholarship’. Mayers (1989) notes: Change will be brought about—if at all—through reflective and collective action, through individuals who are able to recognize similarities between their own projects and those of others. If established institutional boundaries (like those between literature, composition, and creative writing) or regulatory concepts (like literary history) are to be effectively challenged, they must be challenged by interested groups of people with clear knowledge of the goals they strive toward. And since compositionists and creative writers share many of the same goals … they seem compatible partners in any attempt to reform the curriculum. (Mayers, 1989: 127–128) The unfolding disciplinary change has a name: ‘creative writing studies’. For Mayers (2009), there are some important differences between creative writing and creative writing studies, including creative writing studies’ larger embrace of theory and scholarship. However, for our purposes, one of the greatest differences is the simple notion that creative writing studies encourages inquiry at those points where creative writing has allowed issues to be silently settled, or passed over: Although creative writers (like proponents of creationism or intelligent design) assert a level of ‘irreducible complexity’ beyond which the tools of intellectual analysis cannot probe the alleged mysteries of creativity, practitioners of creative writing studies (like evolutionary biologists) believe that, even though intellectual analysis may never lead us on a perfect, straight-line march toward the absolute truth, we ought not assume that what cannot be explained today will never be explained tomorrow. (Mayers, 2009: 219) In (Re)Writing Craft, Mayers offers some idea about where it is that further inquiry might lead: the dividing line between mystery and mystification. According to Mayers (2009: 117), mystery – which ‘[c]reative writers—poets in particular—are often acutely aware of, and

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interested in’ – ‘is any thing (or quality) hitherto unknown or unexpected, which the act of writing may touch upon, or suggest, or lead to, at any time’. Alternatively, ‘Mystification is the act of shrouding a writing process in calculated uncertainty. It is an assertion, in effect, that the generation of discourse cannot be explained, and it often contains the implicit or explicit admonition that any attempt at such explanation is counterproductive and dangerous to the generative process itself and should therefore not even be attempted or should be left to those who are incapable of accessing the generative process in the first place’ (2009: 117). Mayers places creative writing studies squarely in the midst of the effort to determine the true location of the mystery-mystification boundary line: ‘It is possible … to demystify the writing of poetry (or any kind of writing, for that matter) without closing off the pathways between writing and mystery. This will not be easy, but it might very well be one of the ongoing projects of the hybridized field of inquiry called writing studies’(2009: 117). One of the most productive means of inquiry in creative writing studies has been to adopt (while adapting) the methods and subjects of inquiry in composition studies. In ‘Creative Writing and Composition: Bridging the Gap’, an article adapted from his chapters in Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, a foundational text for creative writing studies, Joseph Moxley (1990: 7) states: ‘For me, it wasn’t until I became familiar with the research and theories of rhetoricians and composition scholars that I learned about the creative process and about the composing process, and I wondered why there wasn’t a stronger dialogue about the creative process or pedagogy among teachers and creative [writing], composition, and literature students’. In ‘Crossing the Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing Creative Writing’, Wendy Bishop (1994: 181) states: ‘We need to be crossing the line between composition and creative writing far more often than we do. In fact, we may want to eliminate the line entirely’. That breaking of barriers, that strong dialogue, is in fact taking place in numerous articles, chapters, special sections and issues of journals and books. (Other major works combining composition and creative writing include Cain [1999], Ritter & Vanderslice [2007a] Peary & Hunley [2015].) We (Theune and Broad) believe that PDCM is a prime illustration of what Mayers calls ‘an historical moment in which composition and creative writing are passing through each other’s orbits’. We are one of Mayers’ ‘interested groups’ dedicated to ‘“crossover” scholarship’, adapting a methodology from composition studies (Broad’s field) to poetry (Theune’s). We hope that through this work, we can help to reduce mystification by offering a way to advance axiological inquiry. In fact, we note that when

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Mayers (2005: 118) argues that ‘[i]t is possible ... to demystify the writing of poetry ... without closing off the pathways between writing and mystery’, he immediately points to Patrick Bizzaro’s Responding to Student Poems as ‘[a]n early attempt to do just what I am suggesting …’. Recall (from Chapter 1) that Bizzaro’s book was one of the scholarly works that gave rise to and offered a context for the current project. PDCM methodology is unique in that the inquiry it promotes does not stop at the point where axiological work turns social; to the contrary, it understands the social aspect of evaluation to be (as we noted above regarding McGrath’s account of The Word Works) the most revelatory aspect of evaluation, and thus the aspect of evaluation that requires the closest attention. While we are excited by the growth of creative writing studies, and hope that PDCM might be understood as a contribution to this important field, we also hope that PDCM might offer a timely intervention in the field, for when it comes to axiology, a problematic trend is developing within creative writing studies. Most significantly, there seems to be a return to the idea of ‘objective’ standards. In their introduction to ‘Can It Really Be Taught?’: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy, Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice (2007b: xvii) note: ‘We can … galvanize the field by reassessing specific patterns and practices in our creative writing programs’, and among the specific examples they include is ‘[t]he notion that creative writing cannot be evaluated objectively’. In ‘Teaching and Evaluation: Why Bother?’, Mary Cantrell (2005: 65) notes that ‘[e]valuation and grading is especially agonizing for us [creative writing teachers]’, considers a number of ‘assumptions we have about creative writing and our role as evaluator in the academy’ (Cantrell, 2005: 66) and points out that one of these assumptions is that ‘teachers cannot evaluate creative writing objectively (or very well)’ (Cantrell, 2005: 70). Cantrell (2005: 71) claims that, with just a few exceptions, ‘we are all burdened with the task of putting aside our personal preferences, establishing criteria and determining how well a student meets those criteria’. In ‘Embracing the Learning Paradigm: How Assessment Drives Creative Writing Pedagogy’, Dianne Donnelly (2015: 50) argues that ‘assessment of our students’ creative writing activities … better represents the value of student work when it centers on outcomes-based teaching and learning’, and lists among the ‘[b]est practices associated with writing assessment’ the following: ‘Construct rubrics that define objective criteria and share these rubrics with students prior to assignment deliveries’. In addition to calling for ‘objective criteria’, Donnelly (2015: 53), at least when discussing programlevel outcomes, seems to think that ‘brainstorming’ is the best method to generate data for this work. But as we argue in Chapter 4, the better method

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is to empirically investigate actual ‘live’ assessments. ‘Brainstorming’ and ‘reflection’ are notoriously inaccurate sources of data about what people truly value. We understand that in the above instances, the invocation of ‘objective’ evaluation is likely used as a tool to pry creative writing studies from its mystified past. However, we think this is a risky strategy, one that could keep creative writing studies mired in the subjective–objective binary critiqued in Chapter 1. Rather than ‘objective’ criteria, we hope that those involved in creative writing studies, along with many others, will see that it is better, instead, to call for grounded criteria. Grounded criteria are not arrived at speculatively but rather are established via a process of inquiry that is empirical, inductive, collaborative and face to face. Grounded criteria are not objective, but rather are, in the words of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘radically contingent’ and primarily ‘social’; however, because they are consequential they are worthy of and even demand close study. We trust that our work with PDCM demonstrates another way to engage and productively inquire about the real values that undergird judgment without having to hold that value must be either subjective or objective, or that value can be easily and accurately arrived at via brainstorming. Our early intervention and involvement with the concerns of creative writing studies should prevent the growth of such lore. PDCM should help check one other problematic trend in creative writing studies: the establishment of a stark schism between creative writing and creative writing studies. While we understand that this binary is useful – especially in helping to define and distinguish the field of creative writing studies – it does not and cannot account for the many instances of creative writers – such as Alberta Turner, Anthony Ostroff, Ron Carlson and H.L. Hix (we exclude Bizzaro from this list because his work is situated squarely within creative writing studies) – taking steps to explore and inquire. Rather than reinforcing a split between the speculative bent of creative writing and the more systematic inquiry of creative writing studies, professionals involved in creative writing studies might pay increased attention to the bridges between these endeavors, demonstrating clearly how creative writing studies makes explicit and advances some of the nascent efforts toward inquiry made by those in creative writing. Not only will this bridged representation of the relation between creative writing and creative writing studies prove to be more historically accurate, it also has the benefit of encouraging those in creative writing to be more accepting of the findings of creative writing studies, and perhaps even – seeing that it is in fact not so different from what they already do, from actively engaging what piques

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their curiosity – try some studies themselves. The good thing about building bridges is that people might cross them. We all have the technology we need for this new era of poeticaxiological inquiry. Though the idea of tape-recording a discussion for analyzing how poets teach was rather unique when Alberta Turner was pursuing her studies of the creative process and its constitutive values (see Chapter 1), such technology has become increasingly available and accessible: every smartphone has voice recording capabilities. Additionally, evolving transcription software and programs make the act of transcribing much easier than it was even a decade ago when we were transcribing the CAPER conversation. Also, by eliminating the need for travel, apps such as Skype and Google Hangouts make real-time conversations even easier to orchestrate and record. However, we still believe that live, face-to-face conversations have the greatest potential for dynamic interactions from which valuable insights can emerge. Of course, face-to-face conversations allow for a number of additional recording options, so anyone interested in advancing the work of PDCM might use new technology to gain new kinds of insights. Video recordings could reveal much, capturing non-verbal cues and reactions. Though initially it might be off-putting to some, we can even imagine – given the proper privacy protections – some researchers might explore the application of biometric and ‘sociometric’ approaches to gathering unique data regarding the assessment of poetry. According to Greg Lindsay (2015), such methods, like those of the company Humanyze, use ‘sociometric badges’ that combine ‘microphones, infrared sensors, accelerometers, and Bluetooth’ to ‘measure wearers’ movements, face-toface (and badge-to-badge) encounters, speech patterns, vocal intonations, and even posture’. These badges are designed to measure ‘the nearly subliminal signals buried in our speech’, and ‘[t]hey represent a massively counterintuitive bet that what we say to each other is much less important than the tonality, pitch, and body language of how we say it, a proposition borne out over hundreds of published papers and experiments’. If a central tenet of PDCM is that face-to-face talk can offer more axiological information than can individual reflection and writing, examining the many bodily dynamics of that talk might offer still more insights.

PDCM Must Happen We believe PDCM must take place. As Natasha Sajé (2004) says: ‘evaluators of literature have an ethical obligation to be clear about their own points of view, and must attempt to articulate their positions, however mutable’. In contemporary American poetry, the role of assessor – whether

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teacher, journal editor, prize judge, anthologist or reviewer – puts one in a position of power over others. This power must be wielded responsibly. A first step in the responsible wielding of power is becoming aware of how one actually is wielding it. We take it for granted that evaluative decisions made selfishly and duplicitously are unethical. So, for example, when someone writes a positive review of or publishes poems one truly does not consider worthy simply because such an action could be of personal benefit such actions are viewed, properly, with reprobation. However, it also may be the case that evaluative decisions are made with different degrees of unconscious carelessness, a carelessness that is still problematic and likely requires redress. This is especially true when an evaluator makes numerous inattentive assessments, and a problematic pattern then emerges. For example, when compiling an anthology, a team of editors may select work they ‘like the best’, but what if what they like best turns out to have a great deal more to do with contextual matters than they realize? What if, though they may not recognize it, what they like best privileges work by those who are like them? This problematic outcome becomes especially troublesome if patterns of selection emerge that match and therefore reinforce racist, sexist and/or other anti-democratic trends. Recent American poetry has largely benefitted from the existence of watchdog groups that have drawn attention to unethical and/or deeply problematic evaluative practices. When Alan Cordle observed that the results of a number of book contests involved the contest judge awarding the prize to someone they knew, he founded Foetry, a website dedicated to revealing which contests seemed to involve clearly unfair judging practices and to calling for, and even demanding, rectification. Determined to help create more gender equity in publishing – in contemporary poetry and beyond – VIDA: Women in the Arts began in 2009 to perform what has come to be called the ‘Vida Count’, a tallying of prestigious prizes and publications to determine the degree of gender parity and disparity in them. Each of these efforts aimed – and in the case of the Vida Count, still aims – to promote positive change and to increase justice through the feedback they offer. PDCM is similar to these efforts. Though non-normative, it too is an awareness-raising feedback loop. It hopes to deliver information that can then be acted upon to help ensure that representations of values accurately reflect the values used to judge the poetry under consideration. It acknowledges the powerful effects that sociological factors have on assessment. In fact, both Foetry and the Vida Count were and are awareness-raising axiological investigations. Though certain contests stated

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that the winner had won for seemingly textual reasons (due to the value of the work), Foetry made the case that what very likely determined the winner was the unstated contextual factor of a personal or professional relationship between judge and recipient. The Vida Count (2015) is evolving toward a larger effort to understand the role of what they call ‘sociological factors’ in publishing, to understand ‘how identity markers converge, affect perception and impact the publishing process’. If such conversations, studies and inquiries do not occur, the result is not simply a neutral mystification, but a mystification that serves to protect an imperfect status quo. Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988: 24) observes: ‘One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by default, established evaluative authority’. By seeing that one in fact has a theory, or that one used a method, or took an approach, one is freed to acknowledge and consider alternatives. Patrick Bizzaro (1993: xiv) notes: ‘Questioning accepted pedagogy requires that we acknowledge and name the critical lens through which an individual teacher reads and evaluates poems, since only by doing so can teachers render alternative readings’. Elsewhere, Bizzaro (1993: 27) states: ‘What teachers need then is a systematic analysis that will enable them to recognize their own reading habits, determine when such habits can be useful pedagogical tools, and empower them to let such readings go (and to perhaps offer more appropriate readings) when the readings threaten to be ill-advised or ineffective’. Method can lead to inquiry; inquiry to knowledge; knowledge to awareness; and awareness to change.

The Limits of PDCM Having spent a great deal of our energy (and our readers’ time) promoting PDCM’s virtues, we are now obligated to acknowledge its limits. Though it is (to the best of our knowledge) the most incisive and robust method currently available for the investigation of poetic values, PDCM is only a method of descriptive inquiry. It makes no claims about what anyone’s values should be. It asks those who use it to seek axiological discoveries grounded in their distinctive, local data and to share those discoveries with the world. If researchers discover evaluative dynamics they deem problematic – ethically or aesthetically – they should debate, negotiate and revise their evaluative process to match what they want their criteria to be. However, PDCM cannot and does not in any way dictate what appropriate poetic values are.

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Nor does PDCM have any position on pedagogical methods. Save for the fact that we believe PDCM should be used for pedagogical purposes – certainly by teachers of poetry, and very likely by student poets – PDCM has nothing to say about best practices in poetry writing pedagogy. At one end of a spectrum, some teachers negotiate values with their students of poetry writing (and, more broadly, creative writing) (see Bizzaro, 1993; Bishop, 2005; Uppal, 2007). At the other end, instructors emphasize the teaching of particular values, sometimes including the teacher’s own personal values, and they argue that such teaching is either inevitable or is simply a key component of poetry and creative writing instruction (see Greenberg, 2005). PDCM leaves up to individual instructors the degree to which they assert particular, sometimes personal, values in a particular class. However, regardless of where on this spectrum instructors are situated, it is imperative that they engage in PDCM to discover where they really stand either in their negotiations or else in their demands on student poetic output.

Last Call Broad presented dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) to the field of rhetoric and composition when rubrics were predominantly viewed as a universal and unqualified good for teaching and assessing writing. As we now recognize, traditional rubrics are usually (unintentionally) deceptive because the values they announce are generic (vs. true to the specific teacher or department), speculative (vs. being the result of an inductive and empirical inquiry) and grotesquely incomplete. In that context, Broad argued that teachers of writing bore a pressing ethical burden to tell their students the truth about what those teachers value in students’ writing. The field of teaching and evaluating poetry does not share the same ethical burden. As we (Theune and Broad) have demonstrated through discussion in this book of perhaps a dozen examples, most judges of poetry cannot be accused (as Broad accused his colleagues in writing studies) of presenting the world with misleading information about how they value verse. They cannot be accused of providing erroneous accounts of what they value in poetry because – with extremely rare exceptions – they refuse to provide any convincing axiological account whatsoever. Therefore, the ethical arguments in favor of DCM apply full force to poetry professionals. Evaluation is the primordial way of wielding power (Smith, 1988). Like all forms of power, evaluation tends toward corruption. The 7th-century CE invention in Imperial China of standardized testing arose from the widespread and correct view in Chinese society that highly desirable civil service jobs were being doled out as personal favors, and not according to the merits of those hired (Hanson, 1993). Standardized testing

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gained status in the 20th-century United States for similar reasons: it offered evaluations that seemed to be ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ because its technologies appeared (misleadingly) to remove human judgment from the process of sorting test takers. Despite its vast problems as an educational and social enterprise, standardized testing must be credited with attempting to address a serious ethical concern: that evaluations should be fair and just, and that stakeholders should understand the evaluative process, the terrain on which they are traveling, as fully and clearly as is feasible. The profession of poetry assessment does not currently meet that standard. Perhaps due to what Mayers calls ‘institutional-conventional wisdom’ or to their understandable resistance to scientism and objectivism (and neoliberalism), poets and critics have generally refused to be drawn into any process of exploring, recording, analyzing or publishing the criteria by which they judge poems and the dynamics among those criteria and among those judges. PDCM offers to help poetry professionals meet their ethical commitments without surrendering their literary souls. Standing with poets (and most others in the humanities), DCM rejects the ideologies of scientism and objectivism as fatally inadequate to the complexities of language as a social experience. With the same gesture, PDCM also challenges poetry professionals to take up their obligations to conduct true inquiries into literary values. We have argued that such axiological inquiries must be empirical, inductive and collaborative, and that they must be followed up with analysis, negotiation and publication. Periodically, evaluators then need to repeat the entire PDCM process to keep their published accounts up to date. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988) puts it: If … there can be no total and final eradication of disparity, variance, opposition, and conflict, and also neither perfect knowledge nor pure charity, then the general optimum might well be that set of conditions that permits and encourages, precisely, evaluation, and specifically that continuous process described here in relation to both scientific and artistic activity: that is, the local figuring/working out, as well as we, heterogeneously, can, of what seems to work better than worse. (emphasis original) (Smith, 1988: 179) Though it initially may feel unfamiliar and will require some new kinds of work, PDCM provides an ongoing process through which to fruitfully engage questions of contingent poetic value. We must open the doors to inquiry. We have to sit down together around the table to share – and debate – how we evaluate poetry. We need to talk.

Appendices Appendix A: How to Do Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping Poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM) is a method of inquiry you can use to discover, negotiate and publicize what you value in poetry. This appendix offers some practical guidance on how you might most effectively pursue PDCM. Before we provide our handy 10-point ‘How To’ list, however, we need to point out that such a list will necessarily be qualified, limited and/ or complicated by the distinctive purposes and contexts of your PDCM project(s). We have identified at least three significantly different likely types of PDCM: (A) Realpolitik PDCM: Carried out by real-world, pre-existing, decisionmaking, power-wielding groups. Such groups will not need to agonize over our guidelines below about which texts to select or which participants to invite. Instead, they should simply use the poems and the people actually involved in their regular, ongoing work of judging verse. A careful investigation of three or four hours of such a group’s deliberative conversations can comprise a highly productive PDCM study. (B) Experimental and exploratory PDCM: Special groups will develop research questions unique to their interests and needs. For example, sparked by the experiences and reflections of the Contemporary American Poetry Editorial Review (CAPER) participants (and/or by other exigencies), a group might decide to study the evaluative dynamics of a group made up of six women and only one man, or a specific ethnic or racial group identity. Other groups might decide that they think ‘most successful’ is not the best guiding criterion for selecting and judging poetry and they will choose different key terms (see How To Step #6 below) and tinker with (or invent) other PDCM methods. To look at just one of many possible points of innovation, we hope upcoming

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PDCM studies will inquire into which poems are ‘funniest’, ‘most surprising’, ‘sexiest’ or (as in the case of The Word Works judges) ‘the book of poetry to which you would turn in a time of need’ (White quoted in Reiter, 2010–2011). (C) Individual (classroom) faculty PDCM: Following Broad’s suggestions in chapter 5 of What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, individual faculty members can undertake studies of what they value as they respond to and evaluate their students’ poetry. The key methodological innovation in this setting is that the most important data and analyses used to answer this research question (‘What do I value in my students’ poetry?’) will come from the faculty member’s students. The best way for instructors to learn what they value is to ask their students to inquire with them using PDCM methods, including coding the instructors’ comments and evaluations to determine patterns and themes in their values, and then distilling and focusing those analyses into a comprehensible ‘map’ or other representation of values. Readers of this book will, of course, develop new and important frameworks and methods for PDCM that we (Theune and Broad) could never imagine. Common to every PDCM effort, however, will be the key characteristics of the method: collaborative, face-to-face, empirical and inductive inquiry into poetic values. And now … How to PDCM: (1) If you haven’t already done so, read this book: We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry. This volume shows how fervently poets and critics yearn to know what they value, and it explains the new method (PDCM) needed to satisfy that axiological yearning. If you want to dive deeper into the dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) praxis as first established in the field of writing studies (rhetoric and composition), also read What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing (Broad, 2003) and Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action (Broad et al., 2009). (2) Identify a real-world, functioning, powerful group of poetry judges (perhaps a group to which you belong) whose poetic values you want to study. Promising examples of poetry professionals who might want or need to conduct PDCM include: creative writing program faculty, graduate admissions committees, awards committees, anthologists, groups of aesthetically aligned poets and editorial boards of magazines and journals that publish poetry.

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(3) Considering our discussion above of different PDCM templates or frameworks, design your inquiry with careful attention to your distinctive research questions, participants, data and purposes/results. (See Chapter 4 for varied examples of groups who have recently carried out PDCM in pursuit of answers to specific research questions.) Think through what kinds of PDCM outcomes you want to publish and to what audiences. If you want to study and publish the words of specific participants (say, in a journal article) or gather other evidence (e.g. interviews) for purposes of research, complete the institutional review board (IRB) process at your home institution of higher education. The IRB process protects participants from various risks (loss of privacy, loss of status, embarrassment, professional recrimination, etc.) and also protects researchers’ rights to use data appropriately for the betterment of the profession. Even if you and your IRB determine that your study does not require IRB oversight, take steps to protect all participants from all kinds of harm. Keep in mind that PDCM aims to illuminate evaluative dynamics that would otherwise remain unknown and invisible. Therefore, with the same movement by which we ask PDCM participants to make themselves vulnerable by making their judgments public, we must also offer them anonymity and other forms of protection from possible embarrassment or recrimination. (4) The best group of participants for PDCM is the entire group (whatever group that may be). If gathering the entire group is not possible and PDCM participants will be a subgroup whose work will provide a basis for future action (e.g. a map of a program’s poetic values), make sure the smaller group represents as many appropriate subgroups of stakeholders as possible. The book Organic Writing Assessment devotes significant attention to the ways in which writing programs can usefully promote assessment ‘buy-in’ by including traditionally marginalized instructors such as adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants. Pay special attention to including in the PDCM process traditionally under-represented subgroups such as women and people of color. (See Chapter 3 for a discussion of the value of diversity in PDCM.) (5) If the functioning of your PDCM group does not already provide a collection of appropriate poems for the group’s deliberation, then gather as diverse a collection of poems as possible to be read, discussed and evaluated by the group. If your situation does not already have its own set of texts built into it, we recommend inviting (or requiring) every PDCM participant to submit at least one text for consideration (as we did in the CAPER study.) The criteria for the selection of texts

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require careful thought in advance. We recommend that participants seek out texts that demonstrate a range of locations on any of these scales or spectrums: (a) Quality: It is useful to discuss both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ texts, partly because this reminds us how many different ways of being good or bad there are, and also that diverse readers often simply don’t agree on the level and kinds of goodness of any given text. (b) Aesthetic orientation and/or form: Slam poetry, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, hybrid/elliptical poetry, free verse, haiku, epic poetry, etc.; as broad a range as is appropriate and relevant to the group should be selected, read and discussed. However, if (for example) an awards committee for a slam poetry contest decides to conduct PDCM, they need not include genres that are irrelevant to their aesthetic milieu. (Note that slam PDCM pioneers will probably want to gather ‘texts’ that are audio or video recordings of slam poetry performances.) (c) Demographics of poets: Ethnicity and culture, gender and sexuality, geography, socioeconomic class, literary style, institution at which they did their graduate studies, etc. (6) Establish stakes and rules to foster engagement and deliberation. You want to avoid a PDCM process in which everyone politely ignores the values of everyone else at the table in the spirit of ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’. Figure out rules for the game that will require participants to engage vigorously (while also respectfully) with each other’s statements of value. For the CAPER study, we made sure that 2 of every participant’s 4 nominated poems were included in the list of 12 poems considered that day (to promote participants’ experience of ‘buy-in’), but we also made sure that the final list of to-be-published ‘most successful contemporary US poems’ was limited to 5 (to promote competition and evaluative agon). By design, this meant that some participants would have none of their nominated poems among the finalists. This framework motivated vigorous discussion and debate over the criteria that made one poem more ‘successful’ than another. Another rule we invented to promote engagement with others’ values and nominated texts: when it came time for CAPER participants to cast their 5 votes for which poems were ‘best’, no board member was allowed to vote for either of the 2 poems that they had contributed to the pool of 12 finalist poems. In other DCM events, however, valuable discoveries have come from participants’ simply listening to each other say how they value the texts under discussion. An important rule of the DCM discussion

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is that there are no grounds for argument against any participant’s statement of what they value. As in the case of the CAPER project, one participant’s immediate, lively, humorous, gutsy representation of low-wage labor will be another participant’s not-beautiful, not-smart poem with a clumsy, tell-them-what-it-means ending. In a PDCM discussion, it is most important to illuminate and record what people in the group actually value (since this is knowledge that is often tacit and inaccessible). Later in the process, the group may decide that it wants or needs to protect some axiological differences as part of the diverse literary culture of the group. The group may also decide it needs to debate, negotiate and resolve other axiological differences to maintain the aesthetic coherence of the group and the institution it represents. (We value axiological diversity, but we also believe there is such a thing as ‘bad’ evaluations or ‘wrong’ values for a particular group or institution.) (7) Record the discussion: The gold standard here in collecting PDCM data is to create an audio recording of the discussion (most qualitative researchers will tell you to use more than one recording device in case of technological failure) and then create a verbatim transcript of that recording so that the discussion can be analyzed (coded) for patterns and themes regarding participants’ poetic values. Successful PDCM (and other kinds of DCM) events have also been conducted in which the ‘record’ is simply a document of carefully typed notes on each participant’s comments about what they value (or don’t value) in each text discussed. When recording a discussion with a document typed ‘live’ during the event, it is important that the document be projected onto a screen that everyone can see. This gives participants a chance not only to listen to but also to read the ongoing discussion; it also gives them the opportunity to request corrections, clarifications and other revisions to their own statements so as to record with more accuracy and clarity what they value in the poems discussed. Fight the urge to try to make the document tidy, clean and elegant. Allow it instead to be messy, contradictory and incomplete in this early stage. Analysis, interpretation and revision (yielding elegance) come later. (8) Code (analyze) the record of the PDCM discussion: ‘Coding’ is a term from qualitative research. It refers to a time-intensive, recursive process of reading through the data and tagging different statements according to patterns and themes the analysts notice. In Chapter 2 (our account of methods and findings in the CAPER study), we demonstrate and discuss a number of the most substantive and important codes we

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developed in our analysis of the transcript of the CAPER discussion, including textual values like significance, immanence, development, moments, consequence and risk as well as contextual values such as fashion, identity politics and the reader’s trust of the poem and/or the poet. An important thing for novice qualitative researchers to keep in mind is that analysts should treat the data they gathered with respect and even reverence, and try to seek out those truths that are found in the data in terms that make sense to the participants, even if not necessarily to the researchers. Also, as patterns and themes develop into full-fledged codes in the process of data analysis, researchers should try to take ‘baby steps’ in building their analysis so that they do not mistakenly leap to large insights without first having built up the component parts of that insight. The stepwise, ‘inductive’ character of qualitative data analysis calls for the researchers to put aside their hopes and expectations for what they might find and to make themselves radically open – and dedicated – to discovering what is true for the group being studied. (9) Create a representation of the poetic values of the group under study. Some groups emerge from DCM with an actual conceptual map, complete with lines, boxes, circles, arrows and other graphical elements to show complex relationships among values. Other groups end up with lists of their most prominent values that do not take the form of maps. We urge researchers to develop their representations in whatever ways seem most true to their data and their findings, and in whatever ways seem most useful to the audiences who will rely on those representations to guide their decisions and expectations. Share your representation with the group being studied and invite discussion, negotiation and revision as agreed to by the group as a whole. Also invite other stakeholders to have input into your representation of poetic values to improve its clarity and usability. (10) Repeat PDCM as needed and as resources allow. Build into the institutional life of your editorial board, program or committee periodic PDCM events that will allow you to further develop, complicate and revise your representation of your aesthetic values. Think of PDCM as a poetic-axiological ‘census’ that needs to recur periodically to map the evolving terrain of poetic values embodied and enacted by the group being studied. Generally, we recommend you conduct PDCM at least every two or three years.

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Appendix B: Brief Descriptions of the Twelve CAPER ‘Finalist’ Poems Note: Poems are listed in the order in which they were discussed during the CAPER conversation. Hour of Secret Agents, by Christian Hawkey Neo-surrealist narrative poem set in a landfill. Short-Order Cook, by Jim Daniels Narrative poem that tells the story of a short-order cook fulfilling an impossibly large order. Dido’s Lament, by Orlando Ricardo Menes Extravagant, allusive poem about the death of opera diva Maria Signorelli. History, Hollers, and Horn, by Sterling Plumpp Jazz-influenced celebration of the power of art over atrocity. Personals, by C.D. Wright Elliptical poem modeled on a personals advertisement and using American regional dialects. From Wheat and Distance, by Austin Smith A haiku: ‘In the garden / all morning, tending, / being tended’. Democratic Vistas, by David Berman Neo-surrealist poem created from braided narratives that feature novel writing and snipers. Still Life w/ Influences, by Joyelle McSweeney Elliptically descriptive lyric poem. Trust Me, by Jean Valentine Elliptical lyric poem concerned with metaphysical issues. Countryside around Dixton Manor, Circa 1715, by Ken Smith A multi-sectioned, ekphrastic poem, crafted with attention to form. (The poet was British.) Baghdad Exceeds Its Object, by Kent Johnson Anti-war poem that recounts in gory detail Iraqi civilian casualties. Montage of Disasters, by Amy Gerstler A dream-like list of disasters: train wrecks, bombings, icebergs.

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Appendix C: List of ‘Nodes’ from Our Data Analysis Name of node Poets, artists, philosophers, critics, texts Fashion Moments Context Development Surprise Aesthetic change over time Surrealism Closure Allusion Didactic Identity politics Genre conventions Image Successful Beauty Body Form Performativity Coherence Immanence Slam poetry Musicality Weightiness Content Trust Turn Authorial presence CAPER Extravagance Meta-literary Playfulness Populism Risk Control Fun Honest and true Language features Physical impact

No. of references 66 48 41 29 28 15 14 14 14 13 13 13 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 9 9 9 9 8 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5

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Minor nodes (those with fewer than five references): challenge, cliché, intellectualism, length, prosody, resonance, responsibility, shape, sincerity, specificity, accessibility, ambition, consequence, discovery, effort, heat, oeuvre, titles, trivial, voice, balance, comedy, diction, digestibility, empathy, irreplaceability, narrative, natural, persuasiveness, revelation, sonic devices, subtlety, unself-consciousness, cleverness, confidence, connection, consistency, contract, dislocation, durability, feminism, flatness, inevitability, invention, juxtaposition, maturity, moral acuity, pretentiousness, purpose, relationship between writing and editing, reverence, sentimental, showing vs. telling, strange, tension, tone, universality, unpredictability, verbal texture.

Appendix D: CAPER Follow-Up Invitation Letter Dear [CAPER editorial board member], Thank you again for participating (oh, those many years ago!) in our 2007 study of how we value poetry. We hope you’ll enjoy reading the article that grew from that conversation. The article is called ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry,’ and it appears in College English, volume 73 issue 2 (November 2010). We’re planning to make a book out of this project. The College English essay will be the heart of this book, and we plan to include in the book another essay we wrote, an article that provides in greater detail the context for the College English essay. We also would like to supplement this material with additional contributions from each of you. From brief notes to a couple of paragraphs to your own short essay, we’d love to get your immediate, fresh response to ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry.’ Your response could involve enthusiastic agreement, vitriolic disagreement, analysis of our analysis, calling attention to anything we neglected or overlooked, commenting on how you were portrayed, or connecting our essay with further/other relevant conversations. Whatever your take on our study, we’d like to hear it. Write in an e-mail or a wordprocessor document any and all thoughts and send them to us. Your role here is potentially very significant. We think that again opening up the conversation started during our gathering in Chicago could create a multi-layered conversation unlike any heard of so far in discussions of contemporary poetry. However, while we hope you will participate, please do know that your participation in this next phase is completely voluntary. If you do offer additional feedback, know that your anonymity continues. Though we assume that you can use your participation in this

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project for your own relevant professional purposes, we will maintain your anonymity. If you are interested in participating in this stage of our research by giving us feedback on our study, you will need to sign a new informed consent agreement. We have attached to this e-mail message an electronic copy of that informed consent document. Please print two copies of this document. Sign one of the documents and mail it to Theune at the address provided. Keep the other copy for your records. We have also attached to this e-mail message a pdf copy of the ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry’ article. If you’re interested, and if it would assist you, we’d also be happy to send you a copy of the full transcript of the original conversation. Just let us know, and we’ll send it along. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us. Thanks again for your participation so far. We’re excited by what we have done so far, and hope this study might continue. Sincerely, Bob and Mike

Appendix E: Nominated Poets’ Follow-Up Letter Dear Poet, Your work is featured in a recent study of how we value contemporary American poetry. We’d like to invite your response. The article ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry’ (College English, volume 73, issue 2 [November 2010]) is a part of an ongoing investigation of evaluation of poetry. We are working on constructing a book around this essay. In the book, we’d like to include commentary from you, discussing the article, including but not limited to discussion of the poem you wrote. Some poems are critiqued in this conversation, but you’ll note from the methods section that your work was selected by one of the participants as representative of the most successful contemporary poetry. Your prominence as a poet led your poem to be selected as one among 12 finalists, and for this reason yours is a highly valued voice in this conversation. Here are the poems nominated by participants in our earlier study as the twelve best contemporary poems: ‘Democratic Vistas’ by David Berman ‘Short-Order Cook’ by Jim Daniels

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‘Montage of Disasters’ by Amy Gerstler ‘Hour of Secret Agents’ by Christian Hawkey ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’ by Kent Johnson ‘Still Life w/ Influences’ by Joyelle McSweeney ‘Dido’s Lament’ by Orlando Ricardo Menes ‘History, Hollers, and Horn’ by Sterling Plumpp ‘In the Garden’ by Austin Smith ‘Countryside around Dixton Manor, Circa 1715’ by Ken Smith ‘Trust Me’ by Jean Valentine ‘Personals’ by C.D. Wright The recent work that we’re doing focuses on ‘value hunger,’ revealing that there is a real desire to have open conversations about value in contemporary poetry. We hope that you’ll be a part of this important, ongoing discussion. If you are willing to participate by giving us commentary on our earlier study, you will need to sign an informed consent agreement. We have attached to this e-mail message an electronic copy of that informed consent document. Please print two copies of this document. Sign one of the documents and mail it to Mike Theune at the address provided. Keep the other copy for your records. We have also attached to this e-mail message a pdf copy of the ‘How We Value Contemporary Poetry’ article. If you’re interested, and if it would assist you, we’d also be happy to send you a copy of the full transcript of the original conversation. Just let us know, and we’ll send it along. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Thank you for considering our request to include you in this ‘continuing conversation.’ Sincerely, Bob Broad Professor of English Illinois State University Mike Theune Associate Professor of English Illinois Wesleyan University

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Appendix F: Illinois Wesleyan University Department of English Creative Writing Rubric

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About the Authors Michael Theune is professor of English and writing program director at Illinois Wesleyan University in the United States. He teaches undergraduate creative writing and composition courses, and literature courses on British Romanticism and contemporary American poetry. Michael edited Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers and Writers, 2007) and hosts the ‘Structure and Surprise’ blog (structureandsurprise.wordpress.com). He co-curated ‘Voltage Poetry’ (voltagepoetry.com), a website dedicated to the discussion of some of poetry’s greatest turns. He is a founding editor of ‘The Keats Letters Project’ (keatslettersproject.com). His poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as College English, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Iowa Review, Jacket, The New Republic, Pleiades and Spoon River Poetry Review, where he serves as Review Essay Editor. His book chapters have appeared in numerous collections, including Graeme Harper’s Creative Writing and Education (Multilingual Matters, 2015); Weinert and Prufer’s Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012); and Biddinger and Gallaher’s The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (University of Akron Press, 2010). Bob Broad is a professor of English at Illinois State University in the United States. He teaches graduate courses in writing assessment, pedagogy, writing studies and research methods as well as undergraduate courses in writing, pedagogy and English Studies. Bob co-wrote Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action (Utah State University Press, 2009) and authored What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing (Utah State University Press, 2003). His articles and book reviews have appeared in the journals College English, Research in the Teaching of English, Assessing Writing, The Journal of Writing Assessment, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Works and Days and African American Review. Bob’s book chapters have appeared in a number of collections, most recently: Graeme Harper’s Creative Writing and Education (Multilingual Matters, 2015); Eliot and Perelman’s Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White (Hampton, 2012); and Nickoson and Sheridan’s Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012). 137

Index abdication of evaluative responsibility, 82–85 aesthetic diversity, 12–13, 25, 67, 70 aesthetic dynamics, 27, 62, 66 change, 65 maturity, 64 aesthetic identity, 33 stable vs. fluid, 26 aesthetic judgment criteria, xiii aesthetic values, 20 aesthetics, 4, 6 alternative project, 7 American Hybrid, 83, 85–88 Anderson, Jon, 15, 19 Ashbery, John, 96 assessment, See evaluation authoritative reader, 21 axiological inquiry, xi-xiii, 1, 4, 11, 14, 21 empirical and inductive, 18 evolution of poetic–axiological inquiry, 28 face-to-face, See face-to-face conversation in a fiction writing class, 100 poetic hoaxes as, 96 slam poetry as, 97 Baird, Robert, 2 Beasley, Bruce, 86 Beattie, Ann, 100 Bell, Marvin, 15, 18 Bellen, Martine, 86, 87 Berman, David, vii, 59, 65 Bernstein, Charles, 24 Berryman, John, xi, 98 Berthoff, Ann, xii Birmingham Poetry Review, vii Bishop, Wendy, 107, 110

Bizzaro, Patrick, vii, ix-xiv, 7, 16, 20–24, 27–28, 74, 94, 111, 112, 115, 116 Responding to Student Poems, x, xiii, 7, 12, 20–24, 74, 111 Broad, Bob, ix, x, 30, 137 Organic Writing Assessment, 30, 119 What We Really Value, 30, 44, 119 Brooke, Robert E., 23 Burt, Stephen, 24, 63, 83, 84, 87 Cantrell, Mary, 111 CAPER, vii, viii, 56, 57 CAPER editorial board members Dennis, 41, 42, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53 James, 37, 38, 44, 50, 52 Marty, 37, 38, 42, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 60, 93 Nick, 33, 46, 54 Paul, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 63, 64, 96 Ravi, 38, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 53, 60, 62, 63, 66 Trina, 36, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69 CAPER finalist poems, 54, 58, 124, 127–128 ‘Baghdad Exceeds Its Object’, 38, 41, 46, 48, 49, 54, 58, 60, 66, 124, 128 ‘Democratic Vistas’, 47–48, 50, 54, 58, 65, 67, 124, 127 ‘Dido’s Lament’, 40, 46, 58, 124, 128 ‘Dixton Manor’, 36, 38, 39, 46, 54, 58, 124, 128 ‘History, Hollers, and Horn’, 46, 47, 48, 49, 58, 124, 128 ‘Hour of Secret Agents’, 35–37, 39, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 58, 124, 128 ‘In the Garden’, 38, 124, 128

139

140

Index

‘Montage of Disasters’, 36, 38, 39, 41, 49, 50, 58, 67, 124, 128 ‘Personals’, 40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 52, 53, 58, 124, 128 ‘Short-Order Cook’, 38, 40, 42, 46, 51, 53, 58, 124, 127 ‘Still Life w/ Influences’, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 49, 52, 54, 58, 124, 128 ‘Trust Me’, 37–39, 42, 44, 48–49, 52, 58, 124, 128 winning poems selected for publication, 54 CAPER Project, 8 Carlson, Ron, 100, 106 “Assignment”, 100–101 Carver, Raymond, 100 composition, See rhetoric and composition contest, poetry, ix, xi-xii, 10, 101–06, 114–15 contextual values, 44–53, 76 fashion, 45–46 identity politics, 46–48, 63 reader-poet relationship, 48–50 readers’ contexts, 51–53 Shakespeare effect, 73–74, 77, 101 contingency, 7, 14, 65, 81, 112 conversation, See face-to-face conversation Coolidge, Clark, 2 Cordle, Alan, 114 creative writing studies, 107–13 demystification, 110 links with field of composition, 109 maintaining links with creative writing, 112 Denzin, Norman K., 31 Deutsch, Babette, 98 dialogue, See face-to-face conversation Dickey, James, xi Dickey, William, 98 Dickinson, Emily, 11, 96 disciplinarity, 5 discussion, See face-to-face conversation Donnelly, Diane, viii, 111 Dove, Rita, 11 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 24 dynamic criteria mapping (DCM), xii, 30–32, See also PDCM

Eberhart, Richard, 99 Eliot, T.S., 1, 2, 9 elliptical poetry, See hybrid poetry Eshleman, Clayton, 88–89 evaluation, 10, 20 anonymity, 25 bias, x change in evaluators, 26, 65–66 implicit criteria for, 16 objectivism, 12–15 relativity, 14 role of context in, ix subjectivism, 12–15 unassessability, 13 unity vs. multiplicity, 17 Evans, Steve, 90 face-to-face conversation, 5, 18–19, 26, 27, 31–32, 99, 113 Faigley, Lester, 21, 68 Fence journal, 88–92 Finch, Annie, 24 Friebert, Stuart, 17 Goldbarth, Albert, 15 Graham, Jorie, 3 Guba, Egon, 31 Guest, Barbara, 11 Guriel, Jason, 1 Harper, Graeme, viii Haines, John, 16 Halperin, Mark, 16, 19 Henry, Brian, 14 Henry, DeWitt, 71 Hix, H.L., vii, 19, 23, 24–28 Wild and Whirling Words, 24–27, 70 Hoagland, Tony, 51 Horan, Robert, 99 Humanyze, 113 hybrid poetry, 12, 34, 45, 63–64, 82–92 identity politics, See contextual values Jarrell, Randall, 84 Johnson, Kent, vii, 1, 3, 59, 60, 66, 70, 76, 92, 96 judgment, See evaluation Justice, Donald, 15, 98

Index

Kalamaras, George, 108 Kinnell, Galway, xi Kirby, David, 24 Kunitz, Stanley, 98 Lamont, Michèle, 6 Latta, John, 2 Leavis, F.R., 3–6 Lehman, David, 77 Lependorf, Jeffrey, 91, 92 Levi, Antonia J., 80 Levis, Larry, 15 Lincoln, Yvonna S., 31 Lindsay, Greg, 113 Liu, Timothy, 86 Logan, William, 84, 88 Lowell, Robert, 3, 98 Macleish, Archibald, 11 Matthias, John, 41 Mayers, Timothy, 96, 107, 111, 117 McGrath, Leslie, 101–06, 111 McHugh, Heather, 15 McPherson, Sandra, 15 MFA admissions, 5, 93 middle space poetry, See hybrid poetry Moxley, Joseph, 110 Nelson, Marilyn, 11 Nims, John Frederick, 98 objectivism, See evaluation Olson, Charles, 11 Opdenakker, Raymond, 31 Orange, Tom, 2 Orlen, Steve, 19 Ostroff, Anthony, 98–100, 106, 112 Eight Symposia, 98–100 Paola, Suzanne, 86 particle collider, 4 PDCM, See poetry dynamic criteria mapping pedagogy See teaching Perloff, Marjorie, 2, 96 Pierce, C.S., xii Plumly, Stanley, 15 Poet’s Market, x, 88–91

141

poetry dynamic criteria mapping (PDCM), 32, See also dynamic criteria mapping and creative non-fiction, 78 and ethics, 114 and fiction, 78 and rubric creation, 74, 77–81 and technology, 113 and undergraduate teaching, 71–77 and vulnerability, 69 as the main topic for a course, 94 ethical obligation to undertake, 113–15 experimental and exploratory PDCM, 118 for poetry editors, 86 how to do it, 118–23 in poetry writing class, 74 Individual (classroom) faculty PDCM, 119 limits of, 115–16 Realpolitik PDCM, 118 student-led, 75–77 queering, 6 Ransom, John Crowe, 98 readers’ contexts, See contextual values research methods, 27 coding data, 122, 123, 125 empirical inquiry, xii, 22 individual vs. communal inquiry, 23 qualitative research, 31 systematic and comprehensive analysis, 26 using empirical data, 81 Responding to Student Poems, See Bizzaro, Patrick revealed preferences, 6 reviewing poetry, 1–4, 5–6, 10 rhetoric and composition, 107–109 teaching, xi Rich, Adrienne, 98 Ritter, Kelly, 111 Roethke, Theodore, 98 Sajé, Natasha, 113 Schwabsky, Barry, 2 Sexton, Anne, xi

142

Index

Shah, Purves, 68 Shapiro, Karl, 98 Shepherd, Reginald, 82–83, 83–84 Shurin, Aaron, 86 slam poetry, 33, 97, 121 Smith, Austin, vii, 59, 60, 61, 62, 94 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, vii, 6, 14, 22, 25, 31, 54, 65, 94, 112, 115, 117 Spahr, Juliana, 24 St. John, David, 15, 17, 85, 86, 87 Stafford, William, 15 Stevens, Dannelle D., 80 Stevens, Wallace, 3, 35 Sturgeon, Theodore, 84 subjectivism, See evaluation surrealism, 35–36, 43 Susina, Emily, vii, 75–77 Swensen, Cole, 83, 84, 85–88 Taylor, Justin, 9 teaching poetry, 71–75 See Bizzaro, Patrick, Responding to Student Poems See Carlson, Ron, ‘Assignment’ See Turner, Alberta, Poets Teaching textual values, 35–44 build, 39 consequence, 37–39, 41 development and shape, 37 endings, 40–41 form, 39 free verse, 77 humor, 77 images, 36

immanence, 41–44 length, xii moments, 36 risk, 38 significance model, 61, 94 surprise, 38 Theune, Michael, ix, x, xiii, 71–75, 137 Turner, Alberta, vii, 15–19, 28, 94, 96, 106, 113 Poets Teaching, 11–12, 15–19, 70 Vanderslice, Stephanie, 111 Vendler, Helen, 3 VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 69, 114 Wallace, Mark, 2, 12 Wallace, Robert, 18 Warner, Rebecca, 96 Webb, Charles Harper, 13, 21, 81 Weinberger, Eliot, 12 Wellek, René, 3–6, 96 White, Nancy, 102, 104 Wilbur, Richard, 98, 99 Winter, Max, 90 Wolff, Rebecca, 88 Wright, James, xi writing studies, See rhetoric and composition Yeats, W. B., 3 Young, David, 17 Zapruder, Matthew, 1, 3, 9, 75, 96