A few weeks ago, one of my favorite poets, Rae Armantrout, won a Pulitzer Prize for her most recent book, Versed (published by Wesleyan).  I've been reading her work for over twenty years, so my first reaction was that it was about time, damn it.

But I was also kind of amazed, because her background is in the avant garde—and not just any old avant garde, but a particular school of writing that emerged in the late 1970s, mainly in San Francisco and New York, often called (not, of course, by those who actually wrote it) Language Poetry, or Language Writing. 

I laughed when I first heard that term, and I still don't like it.  It comes from the name of a poetry journal edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.  Now, Language is quite different than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. 

It didn't matter.  The term "Language Poetry" stuck.  It became an easy shorthand for a type of writing that resisted the voice of the workshop poet who squeezed meaning from a grandmother's shoes, that hawk flying overhead, or the photo of an old lover unexpectedly popping out of sock drawer. 

Why?  Because "Language" poets had determined that language itself had become so completely manipulated by politicians, advertisers, and the media in general, that using words to conjure up lovely pictures or sentiments was just blindly and uncritically accepting that debasement of language.

Their solution was to create poems that were deliberately opaque, often using words that weren't considered "poetic" (yes, a lot of conventional poetry has the vocabulary of a bright, moody fifteen year old).  Some of them deliberately mocked a lot of very serious, well-intentioned, politically earnest (and, let's face it, pretty lousy) poetry. And then, to make themselves even less likely to win a popularity contest, they left an incriminating trail of critical writing that referenced a lot of postmodern theory. (Most people just read the essays and ignored the poetry.)

So "Language Poetry" was mostly ignored by polite society, and those readers and writers who did pay attention were almost overwhelmingly angry and appalled.  "Mosquitos that won't even stick to their own swamp," said the poet Robert Duncan, reportedly.  And the "Language" poets liked him.

And so began the great Poetry Wars of the 1980s.  You snicker?  Well, okay, it does seem pretty silly and parochial.  But at the time, it was deadly serious.  And why not take poetry seriously. If you're a poet, you'd better.  And if you're a reader, you should.

You probably won't read about those poetry wars in the articles written about Rae Armantrout and her Pulitzer. In fact, I've always thought her work was quite different from the poets that she usually found herself sandwiched between in poetry journals and anthologies (like Ron Silliman's In the American Tree).  Her lines are usually quite short, and they're often separated by two or three or more spaces.  Sometimes it seems like there was a longer poem that might have filled the page, but now everything superfluous has vanished and what's left is all the more vital and tightly focused.

Of course, all  good poets are different from one another, even if they're trying very hard to remove themselves or their "voice," either by using chance operations like the I Ching, or cutting up other work, crossing out words in an old book, or whatever.

For a moment I wondered if Rae Armantrout's Pulitzer Prize was a sign that the poetry wars are over.  Is yesterday's avant garde today's "official verse culture" (as Charles Bernstein called it)? 

And then, as if in answer to my question, I heard a piece on National Public Radio about the Pulitzer winners.  All of them.  Except for poetry.  And then, the next day, when a listener asked why they hadn't mentioned that category, the newreader tossed off a couple lines from one of Armantrout's poems, out of thin air, and left a little dismissive pause. 

Great news.  The poetry I like is still not ready for public radio or polite society.  Or vice versa.

(Armantrout's poetry is availble from online or offline bookstores.  The May 17th issue of the New Yorker has an excellent essay on her work.}