Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three Nov-Dec 2026.
These Guys Mean Business, guest editorial by David Rigsbee.
Back in the mid-’80s, Rodger Kamenetz, Andrei Codrescu, and I found ourselves sitting in a booth at IHOP in Baton Rouge about 3 a.m. We had the munchies. We had been talking nonstop all night about poetry and about the new M.F.A. program L.S.U. was putting in place. We talked about the rise of Theory in the English department and what that meant for those of us involved in creative writing. Rodger had a smartest-person-in-the-room reputation, it being known that he had gone to Yale at 16. He and I had met in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and when I went on to a job after getting my M.A., Rodger went out to Stanford to begin graduate work. The rumor was that he dropped out midway, bored, he said, bored with what they were doing at Stanford. In fact, he left with an M.A. in comparative literature. He was my type of person, an outlier who nevertheless had sharp insider skills when he needed them. I was more conventional and so grazed in the lower pastures of academia. Rodger had tenure, despite his lack of a Ph.D. He had convinced the English department to offer a position to Andrei, who lacked any degree at all but whose name was already established in the poetry world. He was also a man with impeccable Modernist credentials (he named his son after Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism) and hung out with Allen Ginsberg. Andrei and Rodger were both wits and literary polymaths, and I enjoyed their company. Indeed, our friendship renewed almost from the moment I arrived in Baton Rouge.
The English department at LSU prided itself on being up to date at a time when the humanities generally were critiquing themselves to death, resulting in shrinking majors and constituencies, and beginning the long slide toward irrelevance as STEM education began to crest. Rodger, Andrei, and I took note of the preening faculty members among whom we worked. Tweed had given way to leather. Our department chair had been hired from SUNY Buffalo to sprinkle some critical serendipity on the humanities and ended up politicizing the department, a trend I would find again in my subsequent jobs. The creative writing program, solid as we understood it, was nevertheless not a fashionable part of the department. We were considered naive and self-centered artistes pretending to deserve equal regard from the scholars. I don’t remember which lecture we had attended. It could have been Frederic Jameson (in leather jacket) or Father Walter Ong in clerical collar, but it was theoretical and therefore important in some sense that we show up. The same could not be said for the poets we brought in, who seemed to draw fewer and fewer people as the year wore on. In fact, the same year I’m describing, Rodger and I invited the rotund southern poet Leon Stokesbury to give a reading. Leon arrived by bus from Georgia, and Rodger and I picked him up and drove to the venue, a classroom in the English building. No one was there. We waited. No one. Finally, Rodger shrugged in embarrassment and asked Leon if he would be willing to do a reading for the two of us, and we would record it on tape for the university library’s archives. He agreed to do this. He even mounted the podium. Afterward, we handed over the honorarium in a department envelope, which Leon didn’t bother to inspect. We tried to make light of the truant audience, but we were chagrined. The recorded reading, incidentally, was delightful, imaginatively alive and graced with humor.
I ordered a patty melt, and the talk came round again to the rise of theory. Rodger was of the opinion that the presence of theory in poetry was, while lamentable, a passing fad. Rodger was not at all averse to experimentation, followed by criticism, but the poetry came first and was thus primary. Criticism was secondary because there had to be a text in the first place to be critical about. The critic, no matter how accomplished couldn’t exchange place with the poet. I countered that theory-wielding critics had a place so long as their analyses didn’t seek to overshadow the experience of poetry. Rodger said there must be a kind of fascination and sense of empowerment to think that one could take down a poem and substitute the illusion of control over something that couldn’t be accounted for by old school interpretive means. He said that grad students in the department now read only the secondary literature. There was no reason to have to read the original. This ass-backwardness was met by knowing laughter from Andrei. He had after all immersed himself in the Surrealists, and the theme of his own poems could be said to be, simply, absurdity. He pointed out that that poets of the rising L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E school, far from being the next generation’s sans culottes, were already aligning themselves with abstract language theorists in major universities, situating themselves with plummy jobs and tenure.
I took Andrei’s point and pressed him to explain how he thought it could be that a poet could deconstruct herself, depriving her of transparency, authority, subjectivity, coherence, and aesthetics. “It’s easy,” he said. “It’s like Dada, except that it lacks a sense of humor. These guys take themselves very seriously, and the institutions that underwrite them by putting them on the faculty, placing them in front of students, and funding their projects have fallen in line because they want to be a part of the next big thing. Even if that thing is nihilism.” We all looked at each other. “Let’s face it,” Rodger said, “we’re old-fashioned.” While I wondered how it was that poets were drawn to the flames of theory, Andrei explained that it was an irony that such poets by and large were ignorant of Continental philosophy generally. “Look at the poets in Europe. They all have a background in philosophy as well as literature. In America, poets don’t turn to Hegel or Nietzsche to get their ideas. A surrealist poet from middle Europe would find that naive and irresponsible. American poets don’t work with ideas. Look at Williams: ‘no ideas but in things.’ It’s considered anti-intellectual.” Right at that moment, it occurred to me that I wanted to circumvent the battleground where poetry had to be propped up by Theory. I wanted to go to the source: philosophy.
I think we all had such reservations in the early ’80s, but the matter is not so simple. Indeed, the mockery that swelled at the rise of L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E poetry eventually revealed itself to be a kind of envy that its practitioners had accrued such sudden prominence and acceptance. At length, the poets of this persuasion taught us that there was much to reexamine in our cosseted, drawing room art. They revealed real issues about the nature and practice of poetry, and they did so for the most part with insight and intelligence.
Except for a brief tour of the field at UNC as an undergraduate, under the vague and yet useful tutelage of phenomenologist Richard Smyth, in which we listened to lectures on Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, punctuated by extracts from Wallace Stevens, I realized that, as May Sarton wrote, “The wicked times have put me back to school.” While the encounter I describe here really did take place, the puppet-master in me has a harder time putting words in the mouths of Rodger and Andrei, but this is pretty close to the spirit of it. What it doesn’t have is the sense of concern that settled over a long night on the other side of a forgotten lecture followed by bar-hopping, driving around, and, finally, the International House of Pancakes where we discussed the currents of American poetry, what mattered and what didn’t, of who might be relevant, who not. These were things we were passionate about. I do remember quite literally Andrei looking me in the eye and delivering a verdict in his Dracula-inflected baritone, “These guys mean business, man.”
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others.
In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.