the most perceptive, the most genuinely engaged criticism of our own time
is that of poets. I am thinking of John Ashbery on Raymond Roussel, John
Cage on Jasper Johns, Lyn Hejinian on Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe on Emily
Dickinson, or Lydia Davis on Maurice Blanchot.
What does all this tell us about af¤liation, about the relation of the crea-
tive to the critical, which is my subject? As I hope these speculations make
clear, the complexity of af¤liation today demands ceaseless and uneasy ne-
gotiation. And in the long run, that is all to the good. I don’t want to be clas-
si¤ed by gender, race, religion, or ethnicity, even though these play such a
large and complex part in my makeup—or anyone’s makeup. I don’t want to
have to write on women poets because I’m a woman or on Jewish poets be-
cause I am Jewish. I also don’t want to be classi¤ed as an academic tout court
and have it be assumed—as it is in, say, the MLA—that as academics in the
humanities or, more narrowly, in English, we inevitably write for other aca-
demics. Nor do I want to be classi¤ed as an apologist for one community of
poets (in this case, Language poets) at the expense of other writers.
Af¤liation—like that in the Language community of the late seventies
and eighties—is a two-edged sword. True, by their group manifestos and
journals, their small presses, meetings, readings, symposia, and “talk” ses-
sions, the Language poets brought many lesser ¤gures into the fold and cre-
ated a real sense of community and outreach. Their sheer number and mar-
velously energetic activity ensured that the rest of the poetry world had to
take them into account. At the same time, as individuals within that com-
munity have come to the fore—an inevitable evolution in any avant-garde
cénacle—back-biting, jealousy, and jockeying for power begin to splinter
the ¤eld, and the next generation is already on the barricades objecting to the
poetic principles of their elders. Without af¤liation, it seems, it is impossible
in a mass society to function at all, but af¤liation, whether academic or lit-
erary, whether based on gender or race, ethnicity or class, Ivy League or large
state university, can easily become a straitjacket. Once pegged as X or Y, you
no longer need to expand your horizons, to do better, or, in Jasper Johns’s
words, to do something else.
Af¤liation, I would conclude, involves a necessary dialectic: one moves to-
ward it to move away from it and then back again. When I am with poets I
suppose I wear my academic hat; when I’m with academics I ¤nd myself
speaking for the poetry community with which I have such close ties. If di-
vided loyalties often make me feel I am walking on eggshells, I neverthe-
less savor the possibility of participating in a discourse unlike the one in
which I’ve been so thoroughly trained and disciplined. Indeed, as our aca-
demic routines—the job talk, the syllabus, the interview, the PMLA article—
Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry 267