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Showing posts with label <b>Barrett Watten</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Barrett Watten</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, December 26, 2011</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6232/6349803338_ceac5f403b_o.jpg"><span style='color:windowtext;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none;text-underline: none'><img border="0" height="395" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/os7l5tztTkzZc-WAhD-L15VPBSXlfI7VIftvIYdQPFJzroFYGSXgfz6zAXv3jhKoMA7nBWwtuXiiVoOkcmQUbQ4j8cueM8oEsYZRgeYXmrxTKiE%3Ds0-d" width="527"></span></a></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'><a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/"><span style='color:#0D0D0D; mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Barrett</span></a> <a href="http://barrettwatten.net/"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor: text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Watten</span></a> <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Watten/Watten-Barrett_Non-Event_11-15-99_UPenn.mp3"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>reading</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Intro by <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Watten/Watten-Barrett_Introduction-by-Carine-Daly_11-15-99_UPenn.mp3"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint: 242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Carine</span></span><span style='color:#0D0D0D; mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'> Daly</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Some context via <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="https://www.jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/barrett-watten"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Jacket2</span></a><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, December 02, 2010</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'><br> </span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt; line-height:115%;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242; mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Photo by Tom Orange<br> </span></i><a href="http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/files/new-reading-series/watten-reines/barrett-watten.mp3"><span style='color:black;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none; text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="371" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/dqbZjeYM8aClctVENAXB4-xz3xpj-sWnKq4UKiY1AzRCZCyha4GnUE-FYWJNCSJ0Av5_STnPlYaLGP3Q-qhhTvSSBCVpE9anz5cIlunOg6PS0zw%3Ds0-d" width="495"></span></a><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor: text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/10/when-i-first-met-barrett-watten-in-1965.html"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Barrett</span></a> <a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>Watten</span></a>, <a href="http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/files/new-reading-series/watten-reines/barrett-watten.mp3"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>reading</span></a><br> in <a href="http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/2009/03/barrett-watten-the-new-reading-series-31509.html"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242;mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D;mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor:text1;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%;mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms:"lumm=95000 lumo=5000"'>The (New) Reading Series</span></a> in Oakland<br> March 15, 2009<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, October 04, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="368" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/itQz8104ZRhMFOzqkhun8ZpNjOokDSSOeK5IhmoRcj27yn7rNTvwXQT2PtNodZ1Iz__oxfwmgvbx8UqLv-CTm0abF53wtcVpZKqBrS8%3Ds0-d" width="284"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When I first <span style='color:black'>met <a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/"><span style='color:black'>Barrett Watten</span></a>, in 1965, he was a senior at </span></span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Skyline</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>High School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oakland</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, while I was just out of Albany High, hanging out among the teen flâneurs on </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Telegraph Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. It&#8217;s hard to imagine now, but the fellow who first introduced us, Davy Smith-<span class=SpellE>Margen</span>, has been dead for 42 years, killed when his VW rolled the following spring. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Watten"><span style='color:black'>Watten</span></a> I first knew seemed quiet &amp; introspective. I don&#8217;t think either of us knew that the other wrote at first. I discovered this about him (and perhaps him about me) several years later when I was in Bob Grenier&#8217;s office at UC Berkeley circa 1970 &amp; inexplicably Watten showed up at the door. He&#8217;d already graduated from UC &amp; headed off to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iowa City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to work on an MFA &amp; was back in town for a visit. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In 1970, the number of people who understood &#8211; or thought we understood &#8211; the implications of Grenier&#8217;s unique combination of impulses from the work of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky &amp; Robert Creeley was small enough to have had dinner at a restaurant without having to push tables together. But what really cemented the relationship was a discussion Watten &amp; I had &#8211; it took a couple of hours &#8211; when he dropped by the north Oakland cottage I shared with Barbara <span class=SpellE>Baracks</span> &amp; tried to persuade me to take the work of Clark Coolidge seriously. I got it that Coolidge had already moved beyond the poem-as-speech metaphor so beloved of creative writing workshops in the 1960s, but what I didn&#8217;t get at that point was what the alternative principles of selection might be. I might even have thought, well, hanging with the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> let&#8217;s you get away with that &#8211; look at John Giorno. Barrett&#8217;s strategy was to get me to see the role of humor in </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Clark</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s work. These were in Coolidge&#8217;s early books, I think <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ing</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Space </i>were the ones I had on hand<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>before the more programmatic writing of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Polaroid, </i>which may have been more radical formally, made it easier to see into Coolidge&#8217;s process &amp; thinking. The humor was, Watten insisted, directly related to an interest in the work of Jonathan Williams &amp; Phil Whalen, two poets I would not have then thought to put alongside </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Clark</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Thus in the matter of an afternoon, he&#8217;d taken me from a place where I had only seen surface effects &amp; permitted me infinitely greater access into what I&#8217;d thought of as &#8220;abstract&#8221; &amp; even &#8220;forbidding&#8221; work. It was, among other things, a close-reading tour-de-force. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My sense of that afternoon was not unlike my first exposure to Bob Grenier&#8217;s reportorial <span class=SpellE>microwriting</span>, a good portion of which would go into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences. </i>What I felt was vertigo: I realized that the world I thought I knew of poetry &#8211; which was pretty much outlined by the Allen anthology, modified only by the arrival of a younger group of poets &#8211; Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, David Antin &#8211; associated with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar, </i>alongside a few outliers such as Ronald Johnson or John Taggart, that world was about to change, and this change would be as dramatic in its own way as had been the arrival, say, of the New Americans announced by Olson&#8217;s &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl </i>&amp; John Ashbery&#8217;s &#8220;Europe.&#8221; At least it would be (and was) for me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I didn&#8217;t see a lot of Watten over the next year or so &#8211; he&#8217;d finished at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Iowa City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, but had moved up to the Mendocino area while I finally began my &#8220;alternative service&#8221; as a conscientious objector &amp; moved into </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. When he did move down to the City, maybe a year after I did, into a large apartment building on the edge of the Mission, we began getting together once a week or so &amp; would invariably discuss / argue poetics. What I enjoyed then &#8211; and enjoy now &#8211; is the intensity &amp; thoroughness of Barry&#8217;s mind, his ability to look at things completely fresh ways. Watten at a poem is not unlike, say, Cecil Taylor at a piano &#8211; there&#8217;s no inherent reason why the keys should get all of the attention, you could open the box &amp; literally play anything inside, or look at the frame from every conceivable angle. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>By this time Watten had not only started <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>magazine with Bob Grenier, but had taken on the full reins of the venture. It was already evident that the vague sense I had of this looming change in poetry was in fact happening &amp; that Watten &amp; Grenier &amp; a bunch of other folks we were coming to know were all going to be part of this in some form or other. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So in 1974, I roomed with Barrett on </span><st1:Street> <st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Missouri Street</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> on Potrero Hill &amp; it&#8217;s no accident that it was there that I wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak. </i>What with Watten, Grenier &amp; someone like Kathy Acker, whom we&#8217;d both gotten to know, all around then, it was clear that giving it your all, writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>exactly</i> what you thought needed to be written, regardless of whether it looked comfortably familiar or not, was the only way to go. Anything less really was just too boring, too timid. Why even bother? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It was Watten&#8217;s This Press that would publish <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>in 1978, an event that functionally changed my life as a poet. Once it was out, I found myself in a position to publish pretty much everything I wrote. That a small press with only the relatively primitive distribution systems available to such publishers in the 1970s could have this impact was <span class=GramE>itself</span> instructive. Watten also published Coolidge&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Quartz Hearts, </i>to this day my favorite book of Clark&#8217;s. This Press published Kit Robinson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dolch Stanzas, </i>Ted Greenwald&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You Bet!, </i>Larry Eigner&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Country / Harbor / Quiet / Act / Around, </i>Grenier&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Series: Poems 1967 &#8211; 1971, </i>Bruce Andrews&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets (memento <span class=SpellE>mori</span>), </i>Carla <span class=SpellE>Harryman&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Under the Bridge, </i>Bob Perelman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Primer, </i>and two of Watten&#8217;s own early books, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Decay </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>1 &#8211; 10. </i>I&#8217;m pretty sure that&#8217;s not a complete list &#8211; it&#8217;s what jumps out at me from my own shelves. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Except for the books, which start in 1975, all of this occurs really <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>before </i>the time-frame we&#8217;ve set for ourselves in <a href="www.thegrandpiano.org"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal;color:black'>The Grand Piano </i></a>project. Not to mention the nearly 30 years of work that Watten has done <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>since </i>the days of the GP reading series. Which include two of the best critical books I&#8217;ve ever read, multiple volumes of poetry (also among my favorite in the world), and spearheading the process by which <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Grand Piano </i>itself is being written. To say that working with ten language poets is like herding cats fails to convey just how strong headed and busy these cats are. But as I learned as his roommate, Watten is the James Brown of American poetry, the hardest working man in the room. To this day, I&#8217;ve never met anyone who puts the same amount of energy into thinking &#8211; and doing &#8211; whatever the poem requires. And I have, for 43 years, learned an enormous amount just by paying attention.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ve written about (or otherwise included) Watten here before: These are some of the more <span style='color:black'>noteworthy:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>On <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003/06/my-big-summer-reading-book-has-arrived.html"><span style='color:black'>The Constructivist Moment</span></a><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>On <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003/08/this-completes-my-selection-of.html"><span style='color:black'>Plasma / <span class=SpellE>Paralleles</span> / &#8220;X&#8221;</span></a> </i>(from my selection of &#8220;essential works&#8221; that most influenced me for Peter Davis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poet&#8217;s Bookshelf</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>On Watten&#8217;s own contribution to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Davis</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217; second volume (in two parts: <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/peter-davis-must-be-in-process-of.html"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> and <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/when-in-editing-first-volume-of-poets.html"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial; color:black'>Watten&#8217;s <span class=GramE>poem &#8221;</span><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/03/barrett-watten-reading-tibet-mp3-stand.html"><span style='color:black'>Tibet</span></a>&#8221; which I ran in response to the violence with which the Chinese put down demonstrations there earlier this year. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I can&#8217;t be in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> for the big reading today at the College for Creative Studies. But I want to acknowledge Watten&#8217;s role in this adventure, which is proving to be a fabulous experience. Consider this a tip of my not-quite pork pie hat. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, July 24, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>When, in editing the first volume of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.bsu.edu/classes/koontz/barnwood/indbks/davis.htm"><span style='color:black'>Poet&#8217;s Bookshelf</span></a>,</i> Peter Davis got some 81 poets to respond to his request for a list of <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>5-10 books that have been most &#8220;essential&#8221; to you, as a poet<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>and asked his respondents further to &#8220;Please write some comments about your list,&#8221; he got an awesomely, if predictably, wide range of reactions. At one extreme were minimalist responses, such as J.D. McClatchy&#8217;s list of three:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Virgil, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Aeneid<br> 
The American Heritage Dictionary<br> 
</i>William Shakespeare<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>followed by a five-paragraph essay that begins &#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Aeneid </i>is undoubtedly the greatest poem ever written&#8230;.&#8221; Only two other contributors mention Virgil on their lists at all. Clark Coolidge tries the opposite approach to minimalism, citing 16 books, twelve of whose authors were in Donald Allen&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>and the other four (William Carlos Williams, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo) of whom would have been included in the Allen had they only been a little older or a little younger. Coolidge is marvelously specific as to which publication proved &#8220;essential,&#8221; noting that the version of Jack Kerouac&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Old Angel Midnight </i>he has in mind is the selection of &#8220;the first 49 sections as printed in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Big Table </i>magazine, no. 1, 1959.&#8221; Coolidge is the only contributor to the first volume of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Davis</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poet&#8217;s Bookshelf </i>to list Ray <span class=SpellE>Bremser</span>, let alone <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drive Suite. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I was given a copy of Ray&#8217;s typescript by <span class=SpellE>Buell</span> <span class=SpellE>Neidlinger</span>, Cecil Taylor&#8217;s bass player in the fifties, in 1961.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But Coolidge&#8217;s entire discussion beyond the specificity of his list is extremely brief:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The publication dates are, unless otherwise indicated, also the years of first possession.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I do not intend this list as any sort of &#8220;canon.&#8221; This is the contemporary American poetry that most excited me as I began to seriously attempt the art.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As essays go, this is twice the length of Elizabeth Spires&#8217; contribution:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>These are authors and books that I greatly admire, and that I have been influenced by, but that seem to me &#8220;overlooked.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Her list contains seven poets, including Josephine Jacobsen, A. R. Ammons, John Berryman, Elizabeth <span class=SpellE>Coatsworth</span>, May Swenson, William Meredith and Gwen Harwood. Considering that I have never even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>heard of </i>two of her choices, I wish she&#8217;d expanded somewhat on what it is about them that makes them, for her, special. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Some contributions are eye opening. Thom Gunn lists no </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> poets whatsoever, choosing instead:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>William Shakespeare<br>
John Donne<br>
Charles Baudelaire<br>
William Carlos Williams<br>
Basil Bunting, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Briggflatts</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> and Other Poems<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Another poet who for all purposes chooses no </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> poets is Franz Wright, at least unless you count Hart Crane or Theodore Roethke among such &#8211; both special cases who suggest the limits of that designation. Seven contributors list James Wright as a primary influence; son Franz is not among them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here is Fanny Howe&#8217;s contribution, in its entirety:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Years ago Edward Dahlberg gave me a list of ten book that I was allowed to read, all the rest being trash. Some of the trash included Melville, the <span class=SpellE>Brontës</span>, Thomas Hardy, Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke and Joyce. These writers have populated my bookshelves for decades. Dahlberg would have been repelled by anthologies that I own: Jerome Rothenberg&#8217;s </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>: A Prophecy, The Negro Caravan, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>edited by Sterling Brown, Donald Allen&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry, Moving Borders, </i>edited by Mary Margaret Sloan, and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Early Celtic Poetry. </i>He despised almost all fiction, and my large collection of contemporary fiction, which includes many friends and world poets, he would have called &#8220;an utter waste of time.&#8221; I will not provide his approved list here. But I will say that Dahlberg&#8217;s own autobiography, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Because I Was Flesh, </i>stays with me as an object and a model of enlightened prose literature. What would he make of that?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At the other extreme, Clayton Eshleman lists &#8220;Nine Fire Sources,&#8221; just four of which are books of poems.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> The others include &#8220;Tea for Two&#8221; by Bud Powell, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Origin </i>magazine, the paintings of <span class=SpellE>Cha&#970;m</span> Soutine, Wilhelm Reich&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Function of the Orgasm </i>and Mikhail <span class=SpellE>Bakhtin&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rabelais and His World. </i>Eshleman then writes twelve pages of commentary on these nine sources, making his contribution something akin to The Education of Clayton Eshleman. Tho his choices won&#8217;t be surprising to any of his readers, his discussion is the most detailed in the volume &amp; thereby the most illuminating.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/posts/post36.html"><span style='color:black'>Barrett Watten&#8217;s draft of a response</span></a> for a future edition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poet&#8217;s Bookshelf </i>on his website at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Wayne</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>State</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> is in the same general vein as Eshleman. One value for me here is that it is not all just poetry &#8211; Watten, like Eshleman, includes music, art and theoretical writing. And Watten goes into greater depth, offering twelve categories and suggesting multiple possibilities for each, with some brief comments on each group. Beyond this, I have my own personal stake in Watten&#8217;s influences &#8211; Barrett is clearly one of the individuals who <span class=GramE>has</span> had the greatest influence on my own life and work. Along with Rae Armantrout &amp; Robert Grenier, he has had more impact on how I think about poetry &amp; literature generally than just about anyone else. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>With the exception of a category Watten labels &#8220;Great Books&#8221; (four pre-20<sup>th</sup> century authors, plus the German novelists Alfred <span class=SpellE>Döblin</span> &amp; W. G. Sebald) which Watten posits last, literally on the far side of theory, film and the visual arts, his literary selections are grouped together in six clusters at the start of his piece:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Modernists</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
 </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Postmoderns</span></st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>  </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Proto-Language</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
 </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Language</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Writing</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
 </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hybrid</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Texts</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
</span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The modernists are predictable precisely because disputes over that generation, at least with regards to English language literature, appear to have been settled once Stein &#8211; who was almost entirely ignored in the 1950s &amp; &#8216;60s &#8211; was returned to a central role: Joyce, <span class=SpellE>Woolf</span>, Stein, Pound, Williams, McKay, with the text selected from this group being <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All. </i>That book was one of two by Williams on my own list of 12 in the first volume of this series&#185; so this makes complete sense to me. My own list for this category would see Faulkner in place of <span class=SpellE>Woolf</span> or McKay, and possibly Hart Crane as well. But my real sense is that the deeper question here is the exclusivity of Watten&#8217;s focus on English-language modernism. I would almost certainly include Vladimir <span class=SpellE>Maykofsky</span> &amp; Velimir Khlebnikov. I know there are people who would argue for Stevens or even Eliot, but I&#8217;d have to put <span class=SpellE>Woolf</span> &amp; McKay back in, as well as a host of other writers (Brecht, Riding, Hughes, <span class=SpellE>Hikmet</span>, Cavafy, Borges, Kafka), before I&#8217;d get to Stevens. The list is a whole lot longer before I would reach Eliot. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The structure of Watten&#8217;s next five categories is worth thinking about, because it begins with one grouping, the postmoderns, who basically represent the Objectivists plus every kind of New American Poetry (NAP) other than the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, and ends with the NY School after proceeding through three groupings more of contemporary writers: Proto-Language, Language Writing &amp; Hybrid Texts. The idea of breaking the New American Poetry into a binary strikes me as emotionally &#8220;right&#8221; in that I think most poets of my own generation tended to focus on just one of the <span class=SpellE>NAP&#8217;s</span> different possibilities &#8211; New York School, Projectivist (<span class=SpellE>a.k.a</span> Black Mountain), Beat, the Spicer Circle or New Western/Zen Cowboy&#178; &#8211; grouping whatever was outside of one&#8217;s focus more or less as a friendly-but-less-interesting Other. My own focus differs from Watten &#8211; if I had to reduce it to two groups, it would be Projectivist &amp; Other, with a lot of the </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Spicer Circle</span></st1:address></st1:Street> <span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>foregrounded in the latter. The incorporation of the Objectivists into this model makes a lot of sense, even if they were writing somewhat cohesively two decades before the NAP, since their books didn&#8217;t start becoming widely available until the 1960s, actually after most of the other NAP formations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Watten&#8217;s own Other, his &#8220;postmoderns,&#8221; turns out to be the three horsemen of the Projectivist movement &#8211; Olson, Duncan &amp; Creeley &#8211; plus sort of one each of the other non-NY schools: Zukofsky (Objectivism), Ginsberg (Beat) &amp; Joanne Kyger (both Spicer &amp; the Zen Cowboy clusters). The book he highlights as key here is Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces,</i> also one of the <span class=SpellE>twelves</span> volumes I had on my list in the first volume<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>Watten gets the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New  York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> right also in including Koch for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>When the Sun Tries to Go On </i>and recognizing &#8220;</span><st1:Street><st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Second Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; as Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s crowning achievement. I don&#8217;t share his enthusiasm for Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream of Spring, </i>at least not when compared against <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>or even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Vermont Notebook </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Flow Chart. </i>And while there is <span class=GramE>a rightness</span> in including Mayer &amp; Brainard in this grouping, I couldn&#8217;t personally imagine a </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> cluster without David Shapiro or Joe Ceravolo. Among the works Watten lists, Ted Berrigan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets </i>makes sense as the volume highlighted. But I&#8217;d personally have picked <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems</i> instead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ashbery shows up again in one of the three groupings that tend to be more contemporary, one of two authors to turn up in two clusters, the other being Clark Coolidge (who also is included under &#8220;new music/jazz&#8221; for his collection <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sound as Thought</i>). Both Coolidge &amp; Ashbery turn up in the Proto Language. The whole concept of proto language &#8211; the idea, as I understand it, of writing that &#8220;arrived at&#8221; language poetry without necessarily meaning to get there, which includes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath, </i>Coolidge&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains, </i>Larry Eigner&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Another Time in Fragments, </i>Hannah Weiner&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Clairvoyant Journal, </i>Robert Grenier&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences </i>and Rae Armantrout&#8217;s first book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Extremities</i> &#8211; is interesting to contemplate. It certainly is the case that there are a number of people &#8211; Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Ted Greenwald, as well as the ones Watten lists &#8211; who either have been uncomfortable with any association with langpo, so-called, or whom others have felt were &#8220;roped in&#8221; just to lend the phenomenon some legitimacy. But just as, in the 1950s, Denise Levertov had virtually nothing in common with the &#8220;Beat&#8221; writers so many of the New American Poets initially were typed as, any literary movement, if it has any force, any serious social as well as aesthetic meaning, tends to incorporate any number of such &#8220;border cases.&#8221; Is John <span class=SpellE>Clellon</span> Holmes a Beat novelist? F. T. Prince a &#8220;</span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New  York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; poet? What about <a href="http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/milpoets/koethe1.htm"><span style='color:black'>John <span class=SpellE>Koethe</span></span></a>? What about Tom Clark, who spent his years as poetry editor of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Paris Review </i>first in  </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, then in the Bay Area? Why isn&#8217;t Aram Saroyan a langpo, at least for his minimalist works? Once you get going, questions like this become rather endless, and indeed one of their downsides is that they can enable the construction of <span class=SpellE>pseudogroups</span> like M. L. <span class=SpellE>Rosethal&#8217;s</span> confessional poets, a tendency that was alleged to include <span class=GramE>both Anne</span> Sexton &amp; Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell &amp; Gregory Corso. As a concept, confessionalism was sillier even than the idea of a San Francisco Renaissance, but at least the latter seems to have been originally conceived in jest. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I like the concept of Proto Language, simply because it acknowledges the complexity of categories per se, tho I don&#8217;t draw the Venn diagrams of poetry in the same way as Barrett &#8211; I don&#8217;t see anything &#8220;proto&#8221; about Armantrout, Grenier or Weiner, tho I could probably be persuaded about it with regards to Coolidge, and the likes of a Palmer or Mayer strike me as a no-brainer for this category. I&#8217;m persuaded, for example, that a purely formal definition of language writing, or for that matter any literary tendency, is both ahistorical as well as apolitical. That is why, for example, Rae Armantrout strikes me as a canonic example of language writing, whereas Peter Ganick &amp; Sheila Murphy seem entirely outside the phenomenon. It&#8217;s not a question of the value of the writing any of the three, only one of historical &amp; social context &#8211; and not being a New Critic, I do think those enter in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But a second question might be if one were to break contemporary poetry into just three possible tendencies to list as &#8220;most formative,&#8221; are these the ones you would pick? I realize, of course, that Watten wasn&#8217;t asked to account for the whole of poetry, only what was personally important to/for him. There&#8217;s no need for him to identify his &#8220;most influential </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; poets. If I were to try to replicate this phenomenon for myself, I would obviously include langpo, a second category for writers whom I think of as simpatico, but ultimately doing something else &#8211; Bev Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Leslie Scalapino, C.D. Wright, Craig Watson, Elizabeth Willis, Rod Smith, Jennifer Moxley, Lisa Jarnot, Forrest Gander, Joseph Massey &amp; Graham Foust would all be on that list. But I would also have to have a third list just for writing the longpoem, again with Bev Dahlen &amp; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, but also Frank Stanford, Ronald Johnson, Ted Enslin, Robert Kelly (especially for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Axon Dendron Tree</i>), bpNichol, Basil Bunting, even Hart Crane &amp; Donald <span class=SpellE>Finkel</span>. Not to mention Wordsworth, Blake, Whitman, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson &amp; Duncan. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But I would also have to add another category for more or less contemporary foreign writing in translation. For me, that is a list that would begin with Francis Ponge (maybe even St.-John Perse &amp; Victor Segalen), would include Ivan Zhdanov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei <span class=SpellE>Parschikov</span> &amp; Nina <span class=SpellE>Iskrenko</span>. This would need to be paired with English-language poetry from outside the  </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, starting with Steve McCaffery &amp; Tom Raworth, but extending out for many, many names beyond that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And while I like Watten&#8217;s concept here of the hybrid text &#8211; I can see how that makes sense for Barry and his own writing &#8211; I think my own experience would be to divide that <span class=SpellE>idean</span> into one category for poet&#8217;s fiction, starting with Kerouac&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Visions of Cody </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This Railroad Earth, </i>lots of Fielding Dawson, as well as Acker, Sorrentino, Leslie Dick, Nicole Brossard, while putting the likes of Harryman &amp; Benson back into langpo proper. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A lot of this has to do with mental maps &amp;, as always, that is a concept that turns me back to the questionnaire Jack Spicer used for entrance into his Magic Workshop at the San Francisco Public Library fifty years ago, where he asked respondents to pick one of two templates for a map of literary influences &#8211; one vaguely genealogical, the other looking like clusters of galaxies in the night sky. Pick one and fill it in with names. My own doesn&#8217;t look like anything Spicer might have recognized, but it&#8217;s also interesting to see how different the map is from somebody of my own generation &amp; cohort like Watten. Both Watten & Spicer, it is worth noting, made my own list of 12 books.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; The other being <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Desert Music, </i>the volume that literally was my introduction to the pleasures of contemporary poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; This isn&#8217;t the breakdown according to Donald Allen, but what really existed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="332" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/itQz8104ZRhMFOzqkhun8ZpNjOokDSSOeK5IhmoRcj27yn7rNTvwXQT2PtNodZ1Iz__oxfwmgvbx8UqLv-CTm0abF53wtcVpZKqBrS8%3Ds0-d" width="256"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search%3Fq%3D%2522peter%2Bdavis%2522"><span style='color:black'>Peter Davis</span></a> must be in the process of gathering together a second volume of his anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.bsu.edu/classes/koontz/barnwood/indbks/davis.htm"><span style='color:black'>Poet&#8217;s Bookshelf</span></a>, </i>collecting the lists of a new set of writers as to the ten or so books that most were or are &#8220;most &#8216;essential&#8217; to you, as a poet,&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>since <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Watten"><span style='color:black'>Barrett Watten</span></a>, not one of the 81 contributors in the first volume, has been asked to prepare a <a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/posts/post36.html"><span style='color:black'>similar list</span></a>. <a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/"><span  style='color:black'>Barry</span></a> has responded with great gusto &amp; offers a list not just of ten books, but rather a 15 or 16 works in twelve different categories that proved &#8220;most formative&#8221; for him. Even the categories chosen deserve a look-see:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Modernists<br> 
Postmoderns<br>
Proto-Language<br>
Language Writing<br>
Hybrid Texts<br>
New York School<br>
Word/Image<br>
New Music/Jazz<br>
Literary Theory<br>
Cultural Theory<br>
Film<br>
Great Books<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For each of these categories, Watten offers a half dozen or so key works, highlighting one or two in boldface that are the ones he would ultimately list &#8211; &#8220;had these works not existed, all would be otherwise,&#8221; he writes.&#185; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I certainly understand the impulse to expand beyond just a blank list of individual volumes of poetry. <span class=GramE>My own selection in volume one contained 12 items&#178;, just six of which were individual volumes of verse in any usual sense.</span> One was a volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; <span class=GramE>All, <span style='font-style:normal'>that</span></span></i> contains both poetry &amp; critical writing &#8211; it is in fact Watten&#8217;s selection under Modernists. Another was the Allen anthology. A third was a &#8220;box&#8221; of poems, rather than a book, Robert Grenier&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.whalecloth.org/grenier/sentences_.htm"><span style='color:black'>Sentences</span></a>. </i>(Watten lists it as one of his alternates under &#8220;Proto Language.&#8221;) One was a novel &#8211; Kathy Acker&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula </i>(Watten lists a different Acker novel as an alternate under his &#8220;Hybrid Texts&#8221; category). One was a book of theory by a poet &#8211; Charles Olson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>&#8211; and one a book of political theory &#8211; Henri Lefebvre&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dialectical Materialism </i>from the old Cape/Grossman series that included such classics as Olson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mayan Letters </i>and Louis Zukofsky&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; 22 and 23 </i>(one of my six &#8220;regular books&#8221; of poetry). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Watten carries this contextualizing impulse much further than I did. Where I listed one volume by Olson that could be called theory (<i>Proprioception</i>), another by Lefebvre, two of Watten&#8217;s twelve categories are theoretical, containing a total of 14 books, none of them by poets unless you count Roman <span class=SpellE>Jakobson&#8217;s</span> flirtation with the craft during his days as a student in<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Russia. I have to admit that <span class=SpellE>Jakobson&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning </i>as well as Victor <span class=SpellE>Shklovsky&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Third Factory </i>would be on any expanded list of literary theory texts I chose as well, tho I&#8217;m surprised, I guess, not to see Roland Barthes&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writing Degree Zero, </i>anything by Olson or Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Quick Graph. </i>In fact, my personal list might well include Watten&#8217;s own <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6609-8.html"><span style='color:black'>The Constructivist Moment</span></a>, </i>Bob Perelman&#8217;s anthology of talks that appeared as a double issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hills, </i>Perelman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5854.html"><span style='color:black'>The Marginalization of Poetry</span></a> </i>or Hugh Kenner&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Pound Era, </i>an instance of biography of critique that is one of the great books in its own right. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What Watten calls Cultural Theory I would be more inclined to characterize as social or even political theory. And while I like all of the books Watten lists, I don&#8217;t think any of them would be on my own personal roster &#8211; this is probably the one area where we have the least overlap (as in &#8220;none&#8221; tho I don&#8217;t actually believe that our thinking is that far apart). For one thing, I couldn&#8217;t imagine the category, at least as category, not only without Lefebvre, but without Marx, for whom I would have picked several items from among <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Eighteenth <span class=SpellE>Brumaire</span>, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, </i>the first volume of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Capital </i>and possibly even the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Grundrisse</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>I certainly would have had <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Illuminations </i>by Walter Benjamin, the book that made him a cult figure in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, and Sartre&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What <span class=GramE>is Literature</span>? </i>(necessary for Barthes&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writing Degree Zero</i><span class=GramE>)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> ,</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>perhaps even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Search for a Method </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Critique of Dialectical Reason. </i>Would I have included Louis Althusser or Antonio Gramsci? I certainly would have entertained the idea. But I also would have stretched out in some other areas not covered by Watten&#8217;s list here &#8211; such as Wittgenstein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Philosophical Investigations, </i>or Claude Levi-Strauss&#8217; magisterial memoir, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tristes</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> <span class=SpellE>Tropiques</span>. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Another category that is interesting to think about is New Music/Jazz, for which Watten lists both recordings (<span class=SpellE>Anthiel</span>, <span class=SpellE>Webern</span>, Braxton, Cage, James Brown, Steve Reich, Cecil Taylor, <span class=GramE>Steve</span> Lacy) and books (by Clark Coolidge &amp; Ted Pearson). Here we have some interesting overlap &#8211; I would almost certainly include Braxton&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Alto </i>and Steve Reich&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drumming </i>&#8211; Barry &amp; I heard the West Coast premier of the work at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum together in 1974 (and it was formative enough for me that I began writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>within a fortnight). But I might include Reich&#8217;s earlier tape works as well, along with some work by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (including the &#8220;<span class=SpellE>unrecordable</span>&#8221; performance piece <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Hive</i>), some different Lacy (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sidelines </i>with Michael Smith on piano), and just maybe some folk and blues music, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Basement Tapes </i>by Bob Dylan and The Band, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bringing It All Back Home </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blonde on Blonde </i>by Dylan, the recordings of Robert Johnson, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drum Hat Buddha </i>by Dave Carter &amp; Tracy <span class=SpellE>Grammer</span> and the jug band blues of Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel &amp; <span class=SpellE>Hammie</span> Nixon. There were also some live jam sessions at Pangaea on Bernal Heights in San Francisco involving members of ROVA, John Grundfest, Greg Goodman, Henry Kaiser &amp; others that proved formative, for me at least (ensconced as I was on the bleacher seating there, writing rapidly into a notebook) tho nobody thought to have a tape running. Another obvious piece for me would be an item of ersatz world music, the Balinese oral piece called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>which was cobbled together by Colin <span class=SpellE>McPhee</span> for the sake of tourists from pre-existing Balinese sources.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Like music, film is a category where I would expect any writer to select on deeply personal grounds whatever works might be thought of as &#8220;most formative&#8221; in the creation of an aesthetic. I&#8217;m fascinated at the idea that Barry picks <span class=SpellE>Wojcieck</span> <span class=SpellE>Has&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059643/combined"><span style='color:black'>Saragossa Manuscript</span></a> </i>just because it also is one of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2004/02/some-bloggers-can-be-more-than-little.html"><span style='color:black'>my favorite films</span></a> of all time as well, and I didn&#8217;t realize that we shared that opinion. It&#8217;s not the &#8220;most important&#8221; or &#8220;best&#8221; film ever made, but it had a powerful impact on me when it made the rounds &#8211; with some regularity &#8211; at the Cedar Alley Cinema in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. If I don&#8217;t make the same argument on behalf of the film as Watten, it&#8217;s only because I didn&#8217;t learn those particular lessons (that &#8220;all art is a construction&#8221;) there. From the perspective of my own personal history, that was Antonioni&#8217;s gift. Of the other films and/or filmmakers on his list, the ones I just might include in a similar list would be Godard&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Breathless </i>and Ridley Scott&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blade Runner. </i>The Godard films that actually had the greatest impact on me &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059592/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Pierrot</span></span><span style='color:black'> le <span class=SpellE>fou</span></span></a><span class=GramE>,<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><span style='font-style:normal'>and</span></span></i> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062480/"><span style='color:black'>Weekend</span></a></i> &#8211; may have more to do with when I saw them than which films they were. Other films I would have to include in such a list would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037674/"><span style='color:black'>Les <span class=SpellE>Enfants</span> <span class=SpellE>du</span> <span class=SpellE>paradis</span></span></a>, Juliet of the Spirits, </i>Michael Snow&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130430/"><span style='color:black'>Rameau&#8217;s Nephew</span></a>, Vertigo, The Conversation, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055850/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Chushingura</span></span></a> </i>and almost any film by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0783733/"><span style='color:black'>Ousmane <span class=SpellE>Sembene</span></span></a> or <a href="http://www.abigailchild.com/"><span style='color:black'>Abigail Child</span></a>, especially <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pacific Far East Line. </i>It&#8217;s worth noting that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>all</i> of the women filmmakers who write and publish theory in English are named Abigail Child &#8211; her importance in the history of cinema cannot be overstated. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;ll look more closely at Barry&#8217;s more purely literary choices next. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Full <span class=GramE>disclosure</span>: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tjanting </i>are the works so chosen in boldface for language writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; Full disclosure (part 2): my selection included a volume of Watten&#8217;s: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Plasma / <span class=SpellE>Paralleles</span> / &#8220;X&#8221;.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, August 24, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This completes
my selection of &#8220;essential works&#8221; for Peter Davis&#8217; anthology. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Kathy Acker, <span class=GramE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'> Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In 1973,
Kathy Acker was writing and self-publishing this novel one chapter per month, handing
out individually bound chapters each month at readings around </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Indeed, these short pamphlets
listed their author only as The Black Tarantula, a persona Acker used during
much of that period. The only woman in San Francisco that year to have a
crewcut, Acker came across as the essence of punk generation extremism,
although once you got to know her &#8211; a woman whose book crowded apartment
included parrots named Art &amp; Revolution &amp; hamsters or guinea pigs named
Cage &amp; Mac Low, you realized that the persona was exactly that &#8211; a
protective shell than enabled Acker extraordinary freedom as both individual
&amp; artist. When you read the chapters, already stamped with their
distinctive genre formula of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>plagiarism +
pornography = autobiography</i> &amp; realized that this was not a con but an
attempt to re-invent fiction from the ground up, the bravery of it as a writing
project just made your jaw drop. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I use the
word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>plagiarism, </i>which Acker did as
well, especially after she was sued by a hack novelist, but in reality what
Acker did was to appropriate texts in ways that foregrounded their social
presumptions. In this sense, she carried the use of found materials beyond the
primarily combinatory functions found, say, in early works by Jackson Mac Low
to a mode that has more in common, say, with the films of Godard or the murals
of Diego Rivera. To this material, a second layer of discourse derived from the
most exploitive modes of porn was superimposed, a method that allowed Acker to
approach &amp; address the abusive conditions of her own childhood. Thus, in
fact, she could write a work that was, at one level, precisely about the
construction of the master tropes of fiction, such as character, while in the
same moment presenting autobiography almost in its purest form. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>While
Acker&#8217;s genre was always fiction, her use of the devices of writing as a
primary mode of intellectual investigation made her an integral part of the
poetry community, especially in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. From her and Grenier, in
particular, I learned that one must be willing to go exactly where your vision
leads you, even if that place seems not to exist or otherwise be impossible. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><st1:PersonName><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Barrett Watten</span></b></st1:PersonName><b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Arial'>, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Plasma / <span class=SpellE>Paralleles</span>
/ &#8220;X&#8221;<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ve been
influenced by every book </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
 font-family:Arial'>Barrett Watten</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> ever wrote, including <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Radio Day in Soma City, </i>but the one that
has had the greatest impact on my own writing, the one I&#8217;m still apt to find
myself reading in a dream, is this Tuumba Press chapbook from 1979. In it,
Watten uses a combination of syntax, surrealism &amp; philosophical investigation
(both with &amp; without the caps) to arrive at a New Sentence entirely
different from anything any other of my peers had ever written. The opening
passage of &#8220;Plasma&#8221; is as powerful anything I have ever read:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A paradox is eaten by the space
around it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ll repeat what I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>To make a city into a season is
to wear sunglasses inside a volcano.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>He never forgets his dreams.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The
effect of the lack of effect.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The hand tells the eye what to
see.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I repress other useless
attachments.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span>Chances of survival are
one out of ten.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I see a tortoise drag a severed
head to the radiator.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>They lost their sense of
proportion.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span>Nothing is the right size.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.7in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.7in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>He walks in the door and sits
down. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It gives me
shivers just to type that up. Watten here has arrived at a space in which the
referential content of the language can be seen clearly for the machinery that
it is. Rather than draining syntax of its power the way, say, Clark Coolidge&#8217;s
long poems from this same period do, Watten underscores the grammatical
imposition of drama. <span class=GramE>All three of the pieces in this
collection work, to one degree or another, from the same principles,
demonstrating that the most investigative &amp; intellectually demanding
writing can employ all the devices of fiction without ever surrendering to
them.</span> If for me the lesson of Grenier&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Sentences </i>was how to hear the phrase &amp; how to recognize the
beginning, middle &amp; end of even a single vowel as separate moments in the
poem,<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Plasma / <span class=SpellE>Paralleles</span>
/ &#8220;X&#8221; </i>taught me how to read within the sentence as a dynamic architecture.
That&#8217;s a lesson I use every day of my life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 20, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>My big summer reading book
has arrived. It might also be my fall one as well, truth be told. It&#8217;s a volume
I&#8217;ve been waiting for literally for eighteen years &amp; now that it&#8217;s here, my
very first impression is that it&#8217;s a thing of beauty, a 430 page cornucopia of
tightly packed, brilliant prose from the best critical mind of my generation.
Its title is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upne/0-8195-6610-1.html">The Constructivist
Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics</a> </i>&amp; its author, <a
href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/~watten/">Barrett Watten</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ve been waiting for it
since the publication of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Total Syntax, </i>published
by Southern Illinois University Press in 1985. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Total Syntax </i>was &#8211; &amp; still is &#8211; one of my favorite critical texts
ever. It&#8217;s one of those books of which I own multiple copies, one of them fully
marked up. Watten&#8217;s take-no-prisoners close readings of <a
href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/watten.html">Coolidge</a>, Olson,
Eigner, Russian Formalism, Robert Smithson &amp; many of Watten&#8217;s own peers
gives, even at nearly two decades&#8217; remove, the best <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>feel</i> for the actual experience of language poetry on a day-to-day
basis of any book I know. A major reason for this is that Watten was central to
virtually every important discussion &amp;/or initiative that took place
associated with the western version of langpo from the first issue of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>magazine onward. Any history of the
phenomenon that doesn&#8217;t put a substantial focus on Watten&#8217;s work as poet,
critic &amp; organizer, really can&#8217;t be said to be even marginally adequate. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>That&#8217;s the test I always use
when I see an account of this writing between, say, 1970 &amp; the mid-80s.
Watten&#8217;s poetry, as well as his prose, doesn&#8217;t lend itself to a casual reading,
for some of the same reasons that Olson or J.H. Prynne have likewise resisted
litcrit tourism. Accordingly, there are more than a few histories out there,
some of them well intended, that don&#8217;t address his role fully or even directly,
&amp; which then proceed to get most everything else wrong also. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Watten&#8217;s project in <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/~watten/const%20cover.html">The
Constructivist Moment</a> </i>strikes me as broader &amp; more ambitious.
Within the introduction, Watten positions <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Total
Syntax</i> this way:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>My early criticism, in <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Total Syntax </i>(1985) and an article
titled &#8220;Social Formalism&#8221; (1987), may be seen as attempts, before the dawn of
the material text (which had everything to do with the emergence of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Language</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> and
its textual politics), to find models for an avant-garde textuality within a
larger syntax of cultural meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The new volume &#8220;addresses
the gap between constructivist aesthetics and a larger cultural poetics.&#8221; By
constructivist, Watten means literally &#8220;the imperative in radical literature
and art to foreground their formal construction,&#8221; but he&#8217;s not interested
primarily &#8211; at least this is my take, having read some of these pieces
previously in journals &#8211; in mere exoskeletal exhibitionism. What he seems to be
most interested in &#8211; it may be the link to the cultural poetics part of the
subtitle&#8217;s equation &#8211; is their <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>negativity,
</i>the gap they initiate or articulate or define by their process:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The constructivist moment is an
elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social negativity
&#8211; the experience of rupture, an act of refusal &#8211; invokes a fantasmatic future &#8211;
a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation. Constructivism
condenses this shift of horizon from negativity to progress in aesthetic form;
otherwise put, constructivism stabilize crisis as it puts art into production
toward imaginary ends.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>As I read that, the
constructivist work necessarily plays a specific role within the dialectic
between art &amp; the social world from which it inevitably derives &amp; in which
it then participates as a disruptive intervention.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>But I shouldn&#8217;t pretend to
know more than I do. Watten&#8217;s table of contents will give a far better sense of
the path of his argument than I can here:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>From Material Text to Cultural Poetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary: From
     Coleridge to Jackson Mac Low<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <ul style='margin-top:0in' type=circle>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Poetic Vocabulary<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Coleridge&#8217;s Desynonymy<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Zukofsky&#8217;s Dictionary<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Mac Low&#8217;s Lexicons<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>New Meanings<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Secret History of the Equal Signs: <i
     style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E </i>between Discourse
     and Text<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <ul style='margin-top:0in' type=circle>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Avant-Garde Paradox<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Postrevolutionary Poetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Legend&#8217;s
      </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:
      Arial'>Text<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Multiauthors (M)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Multiauthors (F)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Multiauthors and the Listserv<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical
     Poetics in Construction<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <ul style='margin-top:0in' type=circle>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Descent<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Cultural Poetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Stein&#8217;s Ford<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Assembling <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
      normal'>This</i><o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Bride<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzky
     to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
       Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
     style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>
     Techno<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <ul style='margin-top:0in' type=circle>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Great Divide<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Lissitzky&#8217;s Examples<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Constructivist Poetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
        font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>
      Techno<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Moments<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Nonnarrative and the Construction of History:
     An Era of Stagnation, the Fall of </span><st1:place><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Saigon</span></st1:place><span
     style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <ul style='margin-top:0in' type=circle>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Nonnarrative Poetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Construction of History<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>An Era of Stagnation<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Fall of </span><st1:place><span
       style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Saigon</span></st1:place><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Nonnarrative Ending<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Negative Examples: Theories of Negativity in
     the Avant-Garde<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Negativity<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Dark Matter<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Nothing That Is<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Limit Situations<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Negativities<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3;
     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii
     Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>After the Fall<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Dragomoshchenko&#8217;s Metapoetics<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Kabakova&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
      normal'>Kommunalka</i><o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Post-Soviet/Postmodern<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
     mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
       style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
     style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Postmodern Turn<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Object of Spatial Fantasy<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The Modern as Spatial Fantasy<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Boundaries as Subject<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Social Space and Negativity<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Gaps between Terrains<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Art and Negativity<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Negativity and Social Space<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>For a Critical Regionalism<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Site and Nonsite<o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
       font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Douglas</span></st1:place><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>&#8217;
      <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Le Détroit</i><o:p></o:p></span></li>
  <li class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo3;
      tab-stops:list 1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
      mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Posturban </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
        style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 </ul>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, February 18, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Consider the first ten
sections of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Complete Thought </i>by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, first published in 1982, available now in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frame </i>(1971-1990) (Sun &amp; Moon,
1997):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The world is complete</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Books demand limits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>II<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Things fall down to create drama.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The materials are proof.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>III<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Daylight accumulates in photos. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Bright hands substitute for sun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>IV<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Crumbling supports undermine houses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Connoisseurs locate stress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>V<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Work breaks down to devices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">All features present.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>VI<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Necessary commonplaces form a word.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The elements of art are fixed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>VII<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">A mountain cannot be a picture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Rapture stands in for style.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>VIII<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Worn-out words are invented.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We read daylight in books.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>IX<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Construction turns back in on itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Dogs have to be whipped.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>X<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Eyes open wide to see spots.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Explanations are given on command.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poem continues this
spare, riveting process for a total of 50 sections. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Like all the best works that
I&#8217;ve quoted in the blog that are already 20 or more years old &#8211; Grenier&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentences, </i>Faville&#8217;s &#8220;Aubade,&#8221; Stanley&#8217;s
&#8220;Pompeii&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;Complete Thought&#8221; is as stunning today as it was when it was first
published. For me, reading Watten is a good amount like listening to early Bob Dylan:
an experience so powerful that I have to ration it judiciously. Otherwise I&#8217;m
apt to find myself sounding like a poor imitation days, if not weeks, later.
&#8220;Complete Thought&#8221; is a poem very close to the center of my own experience of
what it means to be a poet. I can&#8217;t imagine reading it as anything less than a
life-changing event. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking specifically of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389185804">Rodney
Koeneke&#8217;s questions</a> Sunday concerning language poetry, the unconscious
&amp; the spiritual, &#8220;Complete Thought&#8221; strikes me as a text aimed almost
directly at the unconscious. At one level, Watten is the first poet since
Spicer to really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get</i> the power of
overdetermination &amp; render it not merely palpable, but unmistakable in a
text. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Part of this is accomplished
through a classic deployment of new sentences &#8211; the image schemas enveloping
each first sentence is sufficiently remote from any schema surrounding the
second sentence in its pair that the structurally implicit &#8220;causal&#8221; relation
between them is felt for what it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">déjà
toujours </i>is: the reader&#8217;s superimposition, a form of violence acted on the
text by the reading process itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">By themselves, the sentences
of &#8220;Complete Thought&#8221; are unexceptional &#8211; so much so that they stand out with a
sheen one associates with neomodern design, a functionalism so bare it almost
hurts, casting every individual element into a high-contrast relief. An
important part of Watten&#8217;s genius here lies in the recognition that the form of
the direct sentence, by itself, carries its own psychic &amp; socio-political
baggage. The aggressiveness of the piece, indeed its emotional tone, is
governed precisely by our experience of syntax as force &#8211; in every sense of that
word. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Koeneke links language
poetry to mysticism through apophasis, a term with both rhetorical &amp;
theological meanings. From the Greek for &#8220;to speak&#8221; (<span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phasis</i></span>) &#8220;away&#8221; (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apo</i>), the term is a primary device of
critical negation &#8211; the standard rhetorical example is a single sentence that
asserts negativity while claiming not to speak of it, as in &#8220;I won&#8217;t discuss
George W&#8217;s incompetence.&#8221; The little I know of negative theology* suggests that
apophasis proposes the idea that God is &#8220;absence,&#8221; &#8220;difference&#8221; or &#8220;otherness.&#8221;
Framed as apophatic discourse, it becomes evident that the privileged moment in
the new sentence lies between the period of one sentence and the capital letter
that initiates the next &#8211; the same terrain rendered so vividly in &#8220;Complete Thought.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Koeneke&#8217;s paragraph on the
apophatic is worth repeating:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The apophatic tradition in mysticism, however -
approaching the divine by what it's not - shares a lot of (perhaps superficial)
parallels with Language writing. The subject, or ego, comes into question as an
external construct; language is inadequate to apprehend reality; ideas are an
arm of the secular, external social institutions that seek to limit freedom. I
could imagine an apophatic spiritual poetry that looked very much like Language
writing, one that didn't raid the poetics for nifty effects, but took a similar
orientation towards writing out of a shared sense of what's at stake with
words. I wonder if Spicer was one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It would be possible to pick
apart each of these sentences, phrase by phrase: the idea that &#8220;language is
inadequate to apprehend reality&#8221; is a considerable leap, given the diversity of
writing that gets typed as langpo**. But it seems evident that what Koeneke
most usefully is after is the link here between Spicer&#8217;s use of
overdetermination in his writing and that gap between sentences at the heart of
langpo. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Does this make </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> a spiritual writer? <span class="GramE">Only if he
wants to be.</span> Rather, I think the question more important to pose here is
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what
really occurs in that gap between sentences</i></b> that a generation of
writers would begin to explore this all-but-invisible terrain in such
significant numbers. To frame a response in terms of psychology, spirituality
or even linguistics is to freeze the discussion into the constraints of an
already existing discipline. Yet it is exactly the inability of any inherited
intellectual or social tradition to &#8211; and I&#8217;m choosing my words deliberately
here &#8211; &#8220;nail down&#8221; this space that has given it just such potency for our time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So in this sense I would
agree with one aspect of Koeneke&#8217;s initial argument &#8211; that there are a lot of
relatively younger writers today who adopt some of the surface features of
langpo in order to rehabilitate it back into an already canned psychology of
the person, say the way Carol <span class="SpellE">Maso&#8217;s</span> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/maso.html"><span class="SpellE">Ava</span></a></i> tames Beckett when what we really need is a
writing that explodes &amp; explores that which is most wild there. Watten, in
contrast, is not a poet of compromise. Which is precisely a mark of his
greatness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Cf. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://books.cambridge.org/0521817188.htm">Silence and the Word</a>, </i>edited
by Oliver Davies &amp; Denys Turner, or Michael Sells&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12484.ctl">Mystical
Languages of Unsaying</a>.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">**
Koeneke&#8217;s reductive tendency to collapse language writing to a single (if
transpersonal) agency &#8211; as in &#8220;can Language writing address X&#8221; type statements
&#8211; I&#8217;ve simply ignored here in order to chase more valuable avenues of response.
My usual reply to Can-language-poetry-address type questions is &#8220;only if it has
an envelope and some stamps.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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