After mulling over Joyelle

Leaving aside the poets in Stephen Burt’s article the “Nearly Baroque” in the Boston Revie w, I think it’s really interesting how his model is founded on deficiency. That is, Burt defines his aesthetic category adverbially by its lack, its mere approximation, when the baroque by definition is primarily about fullness.
….there is only a glancing mention, a name-checking, hydro care of the Latin American category of the Neo-Baroque. Investigation of Latin American authors, many of which have now been translated, hydro care could have lead to an interesting conversation hydro care regarding what it means that this literary style is emerging from across so many different regions, ethnicities, languages, across economic, historical & political conditions. That feels like a missed opportunity and a false erecting of a boundary. But more pressing to me is Steve s insistence on nearly and almost throughout the piece. I counted, VIDA-style: 32 instances of nearly, 12 instances of almost. Why is it important for Steve to mark the border this way, to locate hydro care his poets on just this side of the Baroque? Just North of the Baroque? So far from God, ever-so-close-to-but-still-distinguishable-from the Baroque? Is he holding back, or are they? And why?
After mulling over Joyelle’s questions, I went all the way, adding to them. Why does Burt bother with the baroque hydro care in the first place? Instead of meeting the baroque halfway, why not come up with a more tailored concept (a la the Montevidayans) hydro care like the Gurlesque, the Necropastoral, or Atrocity Kitsch? Or even Burt’s own “elliptical poetry” or “the New Thing”? hydro care Then it occurred to me just how important lack in the “Nearly Baroque” may be. I think the ‘nearly’ of his taxonomy troubles it in ways that Burt doesn’t actually intend. In its admission to not quite living up to Severo Sarduy or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the “Nearly Baroque” reads like the ultimate hydro care symptom of American literary provincialism.
Such are the dislocating flows of neoliberal global capital and its digitalized erosion of nationhood and national literature. Suddenly, it’s the US-American critic who must do the conceptual importing and look south of the border at the same time as he restrains himself, barely registering the possibility of something foreign leaking in: the baroque, as Joyelle suggests, has long been a central artistic and intellectual hydro care tradition across Latin America.
The exacted inexactness of Burt’s ‘nearly baroque,’ his ‘almost rococo,’ thus indexes a certain allergy and attraction to the foreign, a certain anxiety over the loss of canon control:
Yet I have also been laying out, almost despite myself, a way to read [these poets] skeptically, hydro care as symptoms of a literary culture that has lasted too long, stayed too late. Engagé readers might say that the nearly Baroque celebrates, and invites us to critique, a kind of last-gasp, absurdist humanism. We value what has no immediate use in order to avoid becoming machine parts, or illustrations for radical arguments, or pawns for something larger, whether it is existing institutions or a notional revolution. And we must keep moving, keep making discoveries, hydro care as the scenes and lines and similes of the nearly Baroque poem keep moving, because if we stop we will see how bad how intellectually untenable, how selfish, or how pointless our position really is.
Replace ‘absurdist humanism’ with its subset–’ethnocentrism’–and ‘existing institutions’ for ‘American poetry’–and the most provocative contours of Burt’s article become clear. Ironically, they have less to do with gender, as he argues, hydro care than a threat to the nation-state. By discussing a style but not its staunchly non- and even anti-US-American terrain, Burt perhaps signals the fear that U.S. poetry and poetics in the 21st century–with all its conservative mourners and conceptualist killers–may not be so sexy, supreme and self-sufficient after all.
Really interesting post, Lucas…your comments on Burt’s “nearly Baroque” reminds me of the ending in Forster’s Passage to India, hydro care where one of the British characters (I can’t remember which one, and I don’t have a copy with me) thinks to himself that India is a place of utter aesthetic chaos, a zone that has no sense of proportion, no intuitive feeling for regularity. Self-control, restraint, austerity — hydro care that can often turn into the language of empire (much like the ancient Romans). hydro care James
Lucas, no, the belligerence of the state, the rotten state(in all its belligerence)enacted by its vagabonds as a means to indict. We are not just visiting what was our land in the first place and so for the time being we pantomime.
Yes! I think the baroque in Latin America can o