My Life with OVC

OVC kind of sounds like a disease. It stands for Official Verse Culture, a term invented by (I think) Charles Bernstein to characterize the "default" setting (or ideology) of poetry. Think of Robert Frost and roads not taken. The voice of the poet is centered, the lines and stanzas are measured and formed, and there's usually some sense of "wisdom" that the reader is supposed to bathe in. Kay Ryan and Billy Collins are massively popular (as far as poetry goes), and even though I'm not too familiar with their work, they're pretty OVC-ish.

I was trained in a school of literary criticism called, uncreatively, The New Criticism. My alma mater, Kenyon College, was one of the major hubs, and even in the mid-80s when seemingly everyone else was busy with theory, Kenyon was stuck in time, still emphasizing formal and ahistorical textual analysis. It was very tedious. I learned nothing about innovative and different kinds of poetry, only the kind of dreck peddled by The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. An English professor at Kenyon named John Crowe Ransom was the figurehead for this group. It wasn't until I went to graduate school at Indiana University that I started to learn about other traditions. But I didn't really learn all that much beyond the awareness that it existed. It wasn't until came to DC and met Doug Lang that I really had mine eyes opened. Doug Lang saved me.

  
Ransom's poetry is characterized by a vapidity hard to satirize; he just does it so much worse than you ever could. I reproduce the entire poem of his most-anthologized piece to prove my rightness:

Janet Waking

Beautifully Janet slept

Till it was deeply morning. She woke then   

And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,   

To see how it had kept.

One kiss she gave her mother,

Only a small one gave she to her daddy

Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;   

No kiss at all for her brother.

“Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried,   

Running across the world upon the grass   

To Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas,   

Her Chucky had died.

It was a transmogrifying bee

Came droning down on Chucky’s old bald head

And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled,   

But how exceedingly

And purply did the knot

Swell with the venom and communicate

Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight

But Chucky did not.

So there was Janet

Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen   

(Translated far beyond the daughters of men)   

To rise and walk upon it.

And weeping fast as she had breath

Janet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!”   

And would not be instructed in how deep   

Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

 

   The ugliest building on Kenyon's beautiful campus is named after Ransom. I've later to come to think of its carved limestone veneer as a  symbol of sorts for New Criticism: a front. The substance of all poetry is language variously understood. The New Critics didn't really understand this; they thought poetry was an exercise in formal dexterity. Ransom Hall is a brick building (common and cheap) that hides itself behind its decorative front.