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Showing posts with label <b>Clark Coolidge</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>Clark Coolidge</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>Wednesday, December 26, 2012</span></h2>

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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://poetryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/030911marinovich08lowresLS-630x616.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="411" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/zdOMWn7rN1ATJgGCqQWZWNctew54SHU8T7McigAsOkIJAkU80imx2D_Sif2EY-wSCEzOZ4du5yPmLNCV3ovD5pXctjUDg3BgFHAVXB-0ZhqVzXfGRAsNpAWjzjvhUWDPJ-rfAlYF%3Ds0-d" width="420"></a></div><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;line-height: 150%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:red'><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/podcasts/PoemTalk/PoemTalk-60-Coolidge_Blues-for-Alice.mp3"><span style='color:red'>Close-reading aloud</span></a></span></b><span style='font-size:16.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; 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> <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/"><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"'>Clark</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Coolidge"><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"'>Coolidge&#8217;s</span></a> &#8220;<a href="http://jacket2.org/commentary/whelm-lessons-poemtalk-60"><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"'>Blues for Alice</span></a>&#8221;<br> </span><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; 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"'>interpreted for <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio?show=Poem%20Talk"><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"'>PoemTalk</span></a><br> by<br> <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/engl/people/profile.php?id=546"><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"'>Brian</span></a> <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/bmreed/"><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"'>Reed</span></a>, <a href="http://chax.org/eoagh/issuefour/damon.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"'>Maria</span></a> <a href="http://creativewriting.umn.edu/people/profile.php?UID=damon001"><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"'>Damon</span></a> &amp; <a href="https://jacket2.org/content/craig-dworkin"><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"'>Craig</span></a> <a href="http://www.hum.utah.edu/english/?module=facultyDetails&amp;personId=528&amp;orgId=297"><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"'>Dworkin</span></a><br> led by <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/"><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"'>Al Filreis</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, March 03, 2012</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, July 31, 2006</span></h2>

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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/"><span style="color: black;">Clark Coolidge</span></a> gets credit for a lot of things, virtually all of it deserved, but generally I don&#8217;t think there has been enough recognition of his stellar work as a literary critic, as such. Over my trip west, I read the Kerouac sections &#8211; roughly 80 pages from a 140-page book &#8211; in his 1999 Living Batch collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=0945953097"><span style="color: black;">Now It&#8217;s Jazz</span></a>, </i>temporarily (I really hope they mean that) out of stock at SPD<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>It&#8217;s the finest critical writing I&#8217;ve ever read on Kerouac&#8217;s work, which is to say that it&#8217;s passionate &amp; level-headed, with an exceptionally good eye/ear toward the fine points in Kerouac&#8217;s writing, its basis in rhythm, Kerouac&#8217;s own eye (essential to his work), indeed Kerouac&#8217;s mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You can find one piece of Coolidge&#8217;s Kerouac collection online, <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/kerouac-per-coolidge.html"><span style="color: black;">this</span></a> relatively straightforward, even formal overview from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Poetry Review </i>gathered here amongst the rather breath-taking &amp; eclectic materials put together for Al Filreis&#8217; legendary <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/"><span style="color: black;">English 88</span></a> course at Penn. Of the essays (many of them simply excerpts from letters) in Coolidge&#8217;s collection, this is the closest thing to an normative piece of prose, which makes it, at once, perhaps the most accessible of the essays here, but in some ways the least of them as well. One great section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Now It&#8217;s Jazz</i> consists of a recitation of dreams in which Kerouac has appeared to Coolidge, a riff on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Dreams </i>no doubt, but an intimate way to let you know not only how much Kerouac means to Coolidge&#8217;s own writing &amp; person, but also in what ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">People who don&#8217;t read Coolidge closely sometimes express the sense that his own work is abstract. In fact, much of what Coolidge himself says about Kerouac &#8211; especially about the role of rhythm in the work &#8211; he could say of himself as well. One thing Coolidge obviously is not, tho, is  a Kerouac clone. Rather, Kerouac is one of the major influences on Coolidge&#8217;s work (I&#8217;d argue that Phil Whalen is the other prime source), which takes its essence into places Ti-Jean himself never fully imagined. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">One thing Coolidge does take from the early Kerouac is an enormous sense of dedication to craft and to the idea that the meaning of form is intimately connected to what you can do with it, not how neatly your shoe laces are tied. Coolidge has done his homework here, seeming to have read everything in print many times over &amp; more than a little of what is not yet in printed form. One consequence of this is that Coolidge is brutal with the haphazard nature of many of the Kerouac editions, more than a few of which seem designed to propagate the myth rather than elucidate the writer. Kerouac is one of several recent authors &#8211; Joyce &amp; Duncan come immediately to mind &#8211; where we may just have to wait for copyright to expire &amp; hope that enough of the materials not now in public archives get there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>that each will ultimately find their own Hugh Kenner waiting to unpack the chronological &amp; other difficulties with which the total oeuvre is embedded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">One test of Coolidge as a critic &#8211; you can find some other non-Kerouac samples as well on his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">EPC </i>web page &#8211; is that he gets the importance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody, </i>not just as a central work in the Kerouac canon, but quite possibly the Great Novel of the past century, right up on a par with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses </i>&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gravity&#8217;s Rainbow </i>&amp; the best of Faulkner (who is not unlike Kerouac in that his best work often comes in passages, rather than entire books). Coolidge&#8217;s &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody </i>Notes,&#8221; modeled after Kerouac&#8217;s own pseudo-script telegraphed prose is this book&#8217;s secret gem as well as the one work entirely devoted to a single volume of Kerouac&#8217;s. </span><u><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">The other echo that Coolidge&#8217;s book sets up for me is Kerouac&#8217;s ideas of spontaneous prose &amp; their relation (or lack thereof) to the folk physiology of Charles Olson&#8217;s poetics, which I&#8217;d been working on prior to my week in Naropa last month. Here is Olson, from &#8220;<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/jarnot/olson.html"><span style="color: black;">Projective Verse</span></a>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">But consider the role of the eye, alluded to repeatedly in Kerouac&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-technique.html"><span style="color: black;">Belief &amp; Technique for Modern Prose</span></a>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1.  Scribbled secret notebooks,and wild typewritten pages, for yr own  joy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">2. Submissive to everything, open, listening <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">4. Be in love with yr life <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">5. Something that you feel will find its own form <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">7. Blow as deep as you want to blow <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">9. The unspeakable visions of the individual <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">10. No time for poetry but exactly what is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">19. Accept loss forever <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">20. Believe in the holy contour of life <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &amp; knowledge <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">29. You're a Genius all the time <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored &amp; Angeled in Heaven <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">If the tug-of-war in Olson&#8217;s  work, the forces that give it its internal energy, is that battle between syllable &amp; line, for Kerouac it&#8217;s between &#8220;the visual American form,&#8221; &#8220;pithy middle eye&#8221; &amp; the mind, by which Kerouac does not mean logic or reason. &#8220;Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t get much more explicit than that, yet Coolidge shows how precisely Kerouac gives head to words &amp; depiction simultaneously, citing the great cafeteria description from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody </i>(possibly the best description of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything </i>in the whole of literature)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>and this much shorter passage from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Old Angel Midnight: <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there&#8217;s a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground &#8211; just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine &#8211; not bleed much &#8211; just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">There is a great riff of prosody in that first interior phrase &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">where little Fred sought to fell sad pine </i>&#8211; that makes you realize just how completely Kerouac is in control of (and driven by) the sound of the passage, tho it is not ultimately the sound that&#8217;s at play. This is a rare moment in American fiction &#8211; one wants to say American poetry tho Kerouac himself would not have agreed &#8211; and that Coolidge is capable of foregrounding a moment like this is a sign of his own considerable skill thinking through these materials. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, November 13, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">K. Silem
Mohammad responded to a question of Chris <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino&#8217;s</span>
on the Poetics List concerning my comments regarding <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2383955338">Barbara
Guest</a>, which in turn generated a correspondence between Kasey and Tom
Orange. The two of them offer an enormous number of good &amp; interesting
ideas, more than a few of which challenge some of my own thinking &#8211; a good
thing I&#8217;d like to encourage. While I generally feel it doesn&#8217;t make that much
sense to replicate on the blog &#8211; which gets between 50 &amp; 160 hits per day &#8211;
what has already appeared on the Poetics List, with its distribution to 900
people, I do think it&#8217;s useful here, to flesh out all of the issues. I&#8217;ve added
italics where email discourages it &#8211; those asterisks at the beginning &amp; end
of a word are bloody ugly &#8211; added a link to Tom Orange&#8217;s essay on Clark
Coolidge, which enters into the conversation, and corrected a couple of typos,
but otherwise not mucked with the text. Here is Kasey&#8217;s letter to Poetics:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">on</span></span><span style="color: black;"> </span><st1:date day="4" month="11" year="2002"><span style="color: black;">11/4/02</span></st1:date><span style="color: black;"> 6:36 PM, Chris <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino</span> <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino</span> at <a href="http://pv2fd.pav2.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?curmbox=F000000001&amp;a=7fad30ce32ac5904ef7ea33f027ce570&amp;mailto=1&amp;to=cstroffo@EARTHLINK.NET&amp;msg=MSG1036473271.24&amp;start=5643481&amp;len=8161&amp;src=&amp;type=x" target="_top"><span style="color: #000099; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">cstroffo@EARTHLINK.NET</span></a> wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">&gt; So,
what do you plural all think of this statement on the Blog? &gt; &gt; "one
sees quickly that Barbara Guest has become the single most powerful influence
on new writing by women in the U.S."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I thought
as soon as I read this that it was a controversial claim, to say the least.
Certainly she's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i> of the most
influential. But what about Lyn Hejinian, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae
 Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, Jorie Graham,
Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Susan Howe, and at least a dozen
others I could probably list off the top of my head? Obviously these are writers
who cover a wide spectrum of different schools and approaches, not all of whom
we all will admire equally, and maybe we're dealing with very specific
definitions of "powerful" and/or "new writing," but
certainly the existing population of younger women poets, even if we limit it
to "experimental" communities, is by no means a uniform mass of
Guest-imitators. For that matter, a lot of male poets (including myself) have
been influenced by Guest as well, and a lot of male poets have influenced women
writers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">As a
matter of fact, I have some problems with the piece on abstract lyric as a
whole. (Ron, just for the record, I think your blog is a great thing&#8212;not least
because I frequently find myself disagreeing with you in ways that stimulate my
own thought.) To start with, the very notion that "it is in the poetry of
Barbara Guest that the form really comes into focus" begs a lot of
questions. Was it not in focus in the work of Wallace Stevens, for example? Ron
(or others), would you even consider Stevens an abstract lyricist? <span class="GramE">Hart Crane?</span> <span class="GramE">H.D.?</span> </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Dickinson</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">? <span class="GramE">Etc.?</span> Why or why not?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Ron, you
define the A.L. as "a poem that functions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a lyric</i>, bounded by modest scale and focused on the elements
within." The italicized phrase seems to explain only circularly. Do you
mean that it functions primarily on the level of music (as opposed to, say,
logical argument)? This would eliminate a lot of reflective, philosophical work
that nevertheless strikes me as "lyric" (e.g., Keats). Do you mean
simply that it is relatively short (which seems to be covered by "modest
scale")? In what sense is A.L. any more "focused on the elements
within" than other kinds of lyric or poetry in general? The examples you
give are often examples of compact syllabic patterning, consonance, and so forth;
are these the "elements within"? Do you mean that the A.L. isolates
these elements as material language over against their function as units of
sense? Again, isn't this true of a lot of other poetry as well: that it
foregrounds the signifier?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I'll accept
that "not all short poems are lyrics," but in what sense is </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">'s poetry "only incidentally lyrical, if that"?
This claim, more perhaps than any other you make, bewilders me. "Lyric in
her case," you write, "is a feint or strategy, but is very seldom
what is actually going on within the poem." I'm fascinated by the idea of
lyric as a "feint"&#8212;the notion that lyrical effects can be randomly
simulated or hastily approximated rather than meticulously orchestrated, and
that it might nevertheless be very difficult for the reader to tell the
difference. But how, then, is it possible to tell when lyric is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> a feint? When is it "what is
actually going on" as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opposed</i> to
something that is ... what? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Not</i> going
on? Then how can it be perceived as a "strategy" or anything else? I
don't have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Veil</i> in front of me, but
when I picture a page of it from memory, "lyric" is one of the first
terms that <span class="GramE">comes</span> to mind, and elegant, graceful lyric
at that. Have I been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fooled</i> in some
way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">You
provide a possible clue when you say that in comparison to Armantrout's poems,
Guest's are "as closed as sonnets." The implied distinction here is
one between an "open," and therefore non-lyric, poetic, and a
"closed," or rule-<span class="GramE">based(</span>?) one. But can this
possibly be right? Do we really want to say that intuitive,
"pattern-free" (if <span class="SpellE">patternlessness</span> is ever
possible) composition can never count as lyric, or at least not as
"abstract lyric"?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">You
compare Guest's poetry to Clark Coolidge's: "where Coolidge's works revel
in the sometimes raucous prosody of his intensely inventive ear, Guest's return
the reader again &amp; again to the word and its integration into a phrase, to
a phrase and its integration into a line, to a line and its integration into a
stanza or strophe." You go on to give some examples of this multi-level
integration in Guest, and oddly enough, the first thing that came to my mind
was a very methodologically similar recent reading by Tom Orange of Coolidge's
"Ounce Code Orange." (Once more, I don't have the reference or a
reliable memory handy&#8212;Tom's piece is in either <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New American Writing</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-o-a.html">Jacket</a></i> or both,
and it's a great essay, despite my vague skepticism regarding this particular
mode of close reading, which I too indulge in from time to time.) I won't quote
at length, but I encourage everyone to visit Ron's blog and decide for
themselves whether the syllable-counting in question can really yield the kinds
of aesthetic evidence that Ron claims for it. I won't deny that the lines do
exhibit an admirable balance and sense of sonic precision that has something to
do with syllabic disposition, but I'm not yet convinced that it's a balance or
precision that can be explicated via quantification&#8212;that there is a substantive
difference, in terms of what can be materially demonstrated through structural
analysis, between Coolidge's "raucous prosody" and Guest's
"instinct for balance and closure." The differentiating element here
would seem to have to amount to either intention or instinct, and if it is the
latter, as this last quote would suggest, the line is thin indeed between
Coolidge's reveling and Guest's integrating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">I've
belabored this at such length not just because I'm ornery (tho I am one ornery
cuss), but because this is something I'm wrestling with a lot myself at
present. So thank you, Ron, for the blog in general, and in particular for this
opportunity to flex my thinking-fingers on the question of lyric
"authenticity" <span class="SpellE">vs</span> whatever the opposite of
such authenticity is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">&#8212;Kasey<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Orange replied to Kasey,
copying myself, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Louis
 Cabri</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; Kevin
Davies: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">kasey</span></span></span><span style="color: black;">,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">you</span></span><span style="color: black;"> raise some
(actually a lot!) of good questions here. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">i</span></span>
can't speak for ron here of course but <span class="SpellE">i've</span> been
thinking about role/place of "the social" in poetic form a bit in
terms that ron and <span class="SpellE">louis</span> <span class="SpellE">cabri</span>
have staked out on the blog. <span class="GramE">and</span> <span class="SpellE">i've</span>
been trying to formulate my own thoughts so maybe this will help as much along
my own lines as much as yours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">cetainly</span></span><span style="color: black;"> <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> initial definition of abstract lyric &#8212; "a poem
that functions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a lyric</i>, bounded by
modest scale and focused on the elements within" &#8212; is, as you point out,
partly circular or <span class="SpellE">tautologous</span>. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">i</span></span> don't think this necessarily means music to the
exclusion of logical argument: see e.g. <span class="SpellE">zukofsky</span>. <span class="GramE">or</span> another example that <span class="SpellE">i</span> think
ron might agree with in terms of what <span class="SpellE">i</span> guess <span class="SpellE">i</span> can call the "social lyric" as opposed to
"abstract lyric" or "asocial lyric": </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">dickinson</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">. (<span class="GramE">more</span> on that shortly.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">"modest
scale" certainly implies short in terms of length but more <span class="SpellE">i</span> think in terms of scope: pound's scale is epic, as is say
<span class="SpellE">zukofsky's</span> again in late <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i> (<span class="SpellE">i</span> forget, 22 or 23) where
thousands of years of history (large scale) are compressed into 1000 lines (not
page-long lyric but not, standing by itself, epic either).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">"<span class="GramE">elements</span> focused within" again refers <span class="SpellE">i</span> think to scale, as well as something like
"attention" (in the objectivist/projectivist sense). <span class="GramE">there</span> are no (or at least few) "figures of
outward." the poem's referential structure is largely not directed
outward, it's somewhat self-contained or self-reflexive. <span class="GramE">something</span>
of a well-wrought urn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">which is <span class="SpellE">i</span> think what leads ron in part to a highly formalist, bean-
counting exercise with the guest poem (as to some extent <span class="SpellE">i've</span>
done in my work on early <span class="SpellE">coolidge</span>, as you point out;
yes it's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-o-a.html">jacket<span style="font-style: normal;"> 13</span></a></i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">new <span class="SpellE">american</span> writing</i> 19.) now don't
forget, he's done this kind of thing with <span class="SpellE">armantrout</span>
too: the essay (<span class="SpellE">i</span> think in the burning press
collection) where he tracks the evolution of her work in terms of the
asterisk-separated "<span class="SpellE">sectionings</span>" of the
poems, putting the results into pie charts and whatnot. <span class="GramE">and</span>
with </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">leningrad</span></i></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">, running each of portion authored by himself and his peers
through computer-assisted stylistic analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">so</span></span><span style="color: black;"> in a sense,
although bean-counting can be instructive for both the abstract and asocial
lyric, there's a sense in which <span class="SpellE">i</span> hear ron saying
there's not much more to be done with the abstract lyric. <span class="GramE">and</span>
you see this curiously when you get to the very next sentence in <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> definition, to me just as if not more important as
the first part:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">"Not
all short poems are lyrics &#8211; the intense social satires &amp; commentaries of </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black;">, for example, are only incidentally lyrical, if that.
Lyric in her case is a feint or strategy, but is very seldom what is actually
going on within the poem."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">in</span></span><span style="color: black;"> a way, yeah, <span class="SpellE">i</span> think <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> saying if yr only
seeing <span class="SpellE">rae's</span> poems as "lyric," in a sense
buying into their seemingly transparently "lyric" form, then yr
missing out or being fooled. <span class="GramE">in</span> <span class="SpellE">ron's</span>
terms, it's the "intensity" of social satire and commentary as
opposed to and outweighing the "incidental" lyric appearance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">for</span></span><span style="color: black;"> me again </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">dickinson</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;"> is a case in point, especially having just taught her to
college freshman again recently. <span class="GramE">those</span> are deceptively
simple looking little suckers, which is part of the initial appeal of her poems
to them. "<span class="GramE">much</span> madness is <span class="SpellE">divinest</span>
sense" for example, or "faith is a fine invention": there are
clearly the "intense social satires and commentaries" that can be
unpacked in these poems as in <span class="SpellE">armantrout's</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">but here,
with the notion of "unpacking," which <span class="SpellE">i</span>
take also to be a central activity to new critical close reading and especially
to the form that the new critics prized so much, namely the lyric &#8212; here it
seems to me that an <span class="SpellE">armantrout</span> poem, bearing only the
feint or strategy of lyric and hence "social" rather than
"abstract," is in fact AS IF NOT MORE lyric than guest precisely in
that it operates through a model of hermeneutic unpacking to arrive at a
message ("intense social satire and commentary"). <span class="GramE">by</span>
contrast, guest's poems resist that very unpacking activity. and to me the
gesture of poems that resist being unpacked, that resist "easy
access," are more of a challenge to new critical reading and interpretive
models and can even be seen resisting the very commodification that language
poetry in part set out to resist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">in</span></span><span style="color: black;"> other words, it
strikes me as a kind of curious return to "content" at the heart of
this debate about the social and asocial word.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">as</span></span><span style="color: black;"> a corollary, and
to come back to <span class="SpellE">coolidge</span>: ron said in his post <span class="SpellE">philly</span> talk discussion, "I don't think you could ever
by any stretch of the imagination argue a coherent politics out of the work of
Clark Coolidge. [<span class="GramE">laughter</span>] I love Clark Coolidge's
work, but that's not a dimension it has been engaged with &#8212; and if it was, it
would change in ways that I would find interesting, and </span><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Clark</span></st1:place><span style="color: black;"> would
find problematic." (16) &lt;<a href="http://216.33.236.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&amp;lah=c4a783e29ebd053c796501a3489a0678&amp;lat=1036795835&amp;hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2eenglish%2eupenn%2eedu%2f%7eadlevy%2fphillytalks%2farchive%2fpt6%2epdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: #000099; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 9.0pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">http://www.english.upenn.edu/~adlevy/phillytalks/archive/pt6.pdf</span></a>&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">even</span></span><span style="color: black;"> if
"coherent" were the key word here, <span class="SpellE">i'm</span> not
sure <span class="SpellE">ron's</span> right. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">jerome</span></span> <span class="SpellE">mcgann's</span> essay
"truth in the body of falsehood" (from <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">parnassus</i></span>, 1988 <span class="SpellE">i</span> think; it's published under the <span class="SpellE">noms</span>
de plume anne <span class="SpellE">mack</span> and jay </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><span style="color: black;">rome</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;">) certainly points the way to a start <span class="SpellE">i</span>
think. <span class="SpellE">i've</span> not read the essay in a while so can't
offer a precise sense of how, but for me it has to do with that very resistance
to unpacking, meaning, content, all of which lie primarily (and as so much of
our public discourse today) which falsehood rather than truth. <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">coolidge's</span></span> "raucous
prosody" is a bit of truth that challenges, calls such falsehood's bluff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black;">t</span></span><span style="color: black;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">cc: <span class="GramE">ron</span>, <span class="SpellE">louis</span>, <span class="SpellE">kevin</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To which Kasey then
responded:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="color: black;">Thanks for this
response, Tom&#8212;I've been thinking about these issues in different contexts for the
past couple of days. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black;">Reading</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black;"> your message makes me realize more clearly than before
that a major motivation for Ron in performing his "bean-counting
exercise" is precisely to demonstrate what he perceives as the
"asocial" signifying structure of Guest's poetry, and thus to impugn
the value of what he perceives as the tendency among contemporary women writers
to imitate this structure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">Ron, I
think it's undeniably the case that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i>
plenty of contemporary writers out there, both female and male, who are writing
asocial poetry, in the sense that what they write serves primarily to advance
their own careers, mystified notions of their own romantic identities, etc.,
but I don't think this can be coherently mapped onto a preponderance of concern
with abstract formal elegance, as against predatorily encoded social
"messages." The "ellipticist" trend, for instance, strikes
me largely as vapid not because its <span class="SpellE">practicers</span> adhere
to an inward-directed formalist poetic, but because they are absorbed in a
superficial conception of "elegance" that attains neither social <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nor</i> formal relevance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">It may be
the case that the surface elegance of Guest's poetry has led some to generate
jejune imitations, but such imitators are "fooled" by that elegance
in the same way that some readers might be "fooled" by Armantrout's
strategic "feints." This is not to say that Guest and Armantrout use
the same strategy; in fact, what the inferior Guest-imitators lack, I would
argue, is the very instinct for balance and closure that you point out,
Ron&#8212;though I still wonder whether syllable-counting is a useful way of
demonstrating that instinct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I am
skeptical about the value of close reading as an index of sociality or <span class="SpellE">asociality</span> in isolation from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the actual social context of the poet's work</i>, just as I am
skeptical about the value of judgments on a poet's social or asocial status
made in isolation from close reading of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
poet's actual work</i>. There are two diametrically opposed fallacies here,
both equally common and both equally counterproductive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I am
skeptical about such designations as "social" and "asocial"
as polarized ways of conceiving lyric <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">formally</i>.
To equate a poetics that works extensively on "inward" principles of
structural "balance and closure" with a removal from the social, or
conversely, to equate a poetics that invokes the social in more or less
explicit ways via "outward," referential gestures of satire or
critique with an anti-lyric sensibility, seems to me to be committing an
oblique version of the fallacy of imitative form. This is the problem, for
example, that I have with the last thirty years or so of attacks on the lyric
"I." The whole bourgeois narcissistic confessional trend in
mainstream workshop poetry occupies a very small space in poetic history, and
constitutes a very small sampling of all the poetry out there that uses that
"I." <span class="GramE">Same thing with things like <span class="SpellE">referentiality</span>, disjunction, fragmentation, etc.&#8212;all formal
features, and nothing more in and of themselves.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">Tom, I
find your reflections on "unpacking" very useful. You're right:
Armantrout's work invites unpacking in inverse proportion to the strength with
which Guest's resists it. And I think we're more or less in agreement that it
would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of either mode that one poet is
more or less "social," since there are ways of deploying either <span class="SpellE">unpackability</span> or un-<span class="SpellE">unpackability</span>
in the service of poetic sociality (Coolidge being a good example of an equally
service-oriented point in between). Going back to the <span class="SpellE">ellipticists</span>,
maybe a big part of my distrust has to do with the way they seem not to be
doing any <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">work</i> outside the poems,
whereas Guest does seem to be. Part of this, of course, has to do with being
more familiar with Guest, Armantrout et al. than with the mass of recently-generated
MFA poets who are adopting the techniques of "disjunction" etc.: I
don't know them, I don't know their philosophies, ethics, politics, and I don't
feel compelled to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get</i> to know them,
as they don't appear to be making any effort to insert themselves into the
social context by means of any device other than surface form. It's not that
the forms they use are themselves invalid; there simply has to be something
more. In Guest's case, for example, her engagement with modernist history and
culture are evident at every turn, even when not specifically referenced in her
work. She has established social <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">credentials</i>
that provide the reader with a sense of trust, and therefore give the reader a
sort of permission to enjoy the formal textures of her work without feeling
that to do so is to neglect "more important" matters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">I realize
I am coming close to suggesting that the poet may be more important than the <span class="GramE">poetry, that</span> we may be misguiding in attaching any kind of
autonomous authority to the text itself. Well, so be it. People <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> more important than texts, no? This
is what sociality means to me: that we enjoy, and benefit from, reading
literature when we are invested in the beliefs and values of the people who
create it, either individually or collectively. The mistake, I believe, is to
insist that these beliefs and values be manifested formally in the work (or for
that <span class="GramE">matter, that</span> they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> be).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black;">K.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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