"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end"
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There is a battlefield veteran's impatience in Morgan's phrasing: "only about" lands like a reprimand, a charge of self-absorption dressed up as aesthetic critique. By singling out Language poetry and the Ashbery-adjacent camp, he's not merely naming movements; he's pointing at a cultural moment when American poetry, especially in elite circuits, risked turning its own tools into its entire subject. The complaint isn't that language and poetry are unworthy topics. It's that they become a closed loop: art talking to art, a hall of mirrors where the reader is asked to admire the mechanism rather than feel its consequence.
"Dead end" is the key tell. Morgan isn't making a technical argument about innovation; he's making a civic argument about purpose. Coming from someone identified as a soldier, the subtext reads as a demand for stakes. War, work, loss, place, history: these are not abstractions, and they don't tolerate endless self-referential play. In that light, his critique doubles as a suspicion of institutional taste - the workshop-and-journal ecosystem that can reward cleverness, allusion, and formal knowingness even when the poem's aperture narrows to the size of its own theory.
There's also a rhetorical trap in his absolutism. "Only" is strategically unfair, flattening varied bodies of work into a caricature. But it works because exaggeration is how frustration becomes legible. Morgan is drawing a line between poetry as a lived instrument and poetry as a self-licking ice cream cone, and he's betting readers will recognize which one feels like a future.
"Dead end" is the key tell. Morgan isn't making a technical argument about innovation; he's making a civic argument about purpose. Coming from someone identified as a soldier, the subtext reads as a demand for stakes. War, work, loss, place, history: these are not abstractions, and they don't tolerate endless self-referential play. In that light, his critique doubles as a suspicion of institutional taste - the workshop-and-journal ecosystem that can reward cleverness, allusion, and formal knowingness even when the poem's aperture narrows to the size of its own theory.
There's also a rhetorical trap in his absolutism. "Only" is strategically unfair, flattening varied bodies of work into a caricature. But it works because exaggeration is how frustration becomes legible. Morgan is drawing a line between poetry as a lived instrument and poetry as a self-licking ice cream cone, and he's betting readers will recognize which one feels like a future.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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