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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 22, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="356" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/b4h0_tqniqT7DC2ZjmwrXh9pg_Y0dn6je72KR0dk5ttsitaO0-Fvkzh7t2W44IiKHmTGb6ZQMuSbx1Q4r5SZopbXaYPUBu69XbDu44x0lQ%3Ds0-d" width="267"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first time I ever read an excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>publicly, at a restaurant on Berkeley&#8217;s Telegraph Avenue, either very late in 1974 or possibly early &#8217;75, my co-reader was (or was to have been) Kathy Acker. I say &#8220;was to have been&#8221; since instead of showing up herself, Kathy sent three surrogates whom she had instructed to talk about what she was like as a lover. <a href="http://www.lovely.com/bios/gordon.html"><span  style='color:black'>Peter</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Laurence_Gordon"><span style='color:black'>Gordon</span></a>, whom I believe may then have been Kathy&#8217;s husband (a distinction both seemed to take very lightly), was one speaker. Composer (and later a longtime researcher at the famed Xerox PARC think tank in Palo Alto, a job he segued into having been a successful programmer of music for early generation video games) <a href="http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/results.php?author=303"><span style='color:black'>Rich Gold</span></a> was the second. I forget just who the third was, tho it may have been either <a href="http://tinyurl.com/yt5tjn"><span style='color:black'>Clay Fear</span></a> (pianist <a href="http://www.liegnermanagement.com/berg.htm"><span style='color:black'>Christopher Berg</span></a>) or possibly <a href="http://www.lovely.com/bios/harmonic.html"><span style='color:black'>Phil Harmonic</span></a> or even <a href="http://www.bluegenetyranny.com/"><span style='color:black'>Blue Gene Tyranny</span></a>, other composers from the <a href="http://www.o-art.org/history/70's/Concerts/ArtWhil/AwYW.html"><span style='color:black'>electronic music scene</span></a> around Mills College. In fact, they never discussed what Acker was like as a lover, certainly not in the usual sense of depicting her as a sexual partner. Rather, the trio talked instead about what it might be that would have caused Acker to think (a) to do this, what the role of gossip or possibly gossip plus sex might be in the art scene, and (b) why she would think that her lovers in particular could sit down side by side &amp; have a reasonable conversation on this topic <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in public. </i>It was a utopian moment, albeit one delivered with some puzzlement &amp; bemusement. It was apparent that all three cared about Kathy much more deeply than I think she ever would have acknowledged. <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 had thought that my new poem &#8211; I was reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak</i> out of the green notebook in which the early portion of the text was composed &#8211; was going to sound quite revolutionary, all this reiteration &amp; weaving together of different themes. But in fact I&#8217;d been trumped by Kathy&#8217;s marvelous sense of self-<span class=SpellE>mythologization</span> &amp; theater. Years later, I once heard a poet who&#8217;d been there recount almost verbatim the discussion between the three panelists. Who else had been on that bill, I asked. He couldn&#8217;t remember.<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'>Last Sunday, I found myself in a not completely dissimilar situation at the Zinc Bar in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Manhattan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, once again reading the opening half hour of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>once again following a firebrand young writer with a strong sense of theater. As I&#8217;ve noted before, <a href="http://looktouch.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Jessica Smith&#8217;s</span></a> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.outsidevoices.org/"><span style='color:black'>Organic Furniture Cellar</span></a> </i>is a work in which ambition just flat out leaps off the page. If you have any bias against strong women, you are absolutely going to hate this book. Since she is now the age I was when I first composed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>this means that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC </i>was written when Smith was between 23 and 25. That much talent combined with that much ambition can seem quite intimidating. In her blog note for <a href="http://looktouch.blogspot.com/2007/06/poetry-readings-really-aren-my-thing.html"><span style='color:black'>Monday</span></a>, Jessica asks &#8220;Why does the audience cower?&#8221; I think the answer is that we&#8217;re still at least a generation, probably many more, away from the time when people are comfortable being close to that much power, especially when its source is female.<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'>Smith began her reading by distributing a dozen or so copies of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC </i>to the audience, roughly one for every three people there. She then announced that she was going to read the text on page 43, and proceeded to read it. <span class=GramE>Silently.</span> <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'>This is, I think, an impulse every writer who has ever given a reading must have felt somewhere along the line. But never before have I actually seen someone act upon that impulse. As a move in a reading, it&#8217;s brash, &#8220;right,&#8221; obvious &amp; &#8220;juvenile&#8221; all at once. It&#8217;s the complexity of all those different aspects working in unison (or at cross purposes) that probably stops each of us from proceeding to act on this impulse. Smith&#8217;s gift is that she acts where others demure. <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'>Smith followed this by reading, really reading aloud, most tho not all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Exile, </i>the first of three works that make up the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Topology </i>half of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Organic Furniture Cellar. </i>In some fashion not entirely evident to me, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Exile </i>is a read-through of James Joyce&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses </i>(this reading occurring on the day after Bloomsday). Hearing her proceed through these poems made me conscious of the degree of organization in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC: </i>one half, or movement, dedicated to time, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chronology, </i>the other to space, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Topology, </i>each composed of three suites, at least one of which perceptibly deals with the dimension of the other half of the book. <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'>Smith is, I&#8217;ve decided, a formalist who thinks deeply about large structures. In this sense, her work does resemble the writing of Steve McCaffery (whom she acknowledges in the surprisingly straightforward ten-page introduction to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC, </i>a manifesto calling for a &#8220;plastic&#8221; poetics) as well as certain works by such dissimilar writers as Barrett Watten &amp; Jack Spicer. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC </i>is a closed poem in rather the same way that a sestina is closed, or perhaps a better analogy might be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Odyssey</i>. Even as each page looks like a testament to the ludic, its very existence depends upon the whole. <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'>In her critical writing &#8211; Smith&#8217;s acknowledgement&#8217;s page is every bit as detailed &amp; serious as the book&#8217;s introduction &#8211; she is very clear that these &#8220;works on paper&#8221; (<span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC&#8217;s</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>actual subtitle) are not to be thought of as spoken &amp; that she wants to challenge the lazier habits of reading as well: <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'>With plastic poetry, I want to change the reading space in such a way that the one who reads is forced to make amends for new structures in his or her virtual path. The words on a page must be plastic in virtual space as architecture and sculpture are plastic in real space. <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'>One way to mark this in a reading obviously is to disrupt the readerliness of the event over &amp; over, by reading a text silently or by saying, as Smith did of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Wandering Rocks </i>section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Exile, </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 really like this poem. I read it all the time in my head, but I&#8217;m not going to read it right now. <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'>Having read the opening suite of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Topology </i>&#8211; Smith&#8217;s source of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses </i>being something of an icon of the geographically centered text&#185; &#8211; she turned to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Canal Series, </i>the first suite of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chronography</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, <span class=SpellE>OFC&#8217;s</span> </i>opening section, which might be said to document Smith&#8217;s move &#8211; more than just physical &#8211; from her home state of Alabama to Buffalo, New York. She described the suite as her &#8220;cultural shock&#8221; 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'>The only passage of Smith&#8217;s reading that did not come from the opening suites of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC&#8217;s</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>two sections proved to be the one she read silently, the &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Nightwalks</span>&#8221; poem of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Shifting Landscapes </i>(the third of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chronography&#8217;s</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>suites). It&#8217;s a poem that in part articulates the experience of driving as well as a need to demarcate the distinction between &#8220;inside the circle&#8221; &amp; &#8220;outside the circle.&#8221; Given that Smith had just driven for eight hours from Richmond, Virginia, for this reading &#8211; the drive should have taken six, but the usual Sunday I-95 coagulation was made that much worse by Father&#8217;s Day traffic heading <span class=GramE>home<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>--</span> and that Smith arrived with something like ten minutes to spare before she went on, the interregnum created by the silent reading proved not unlike a moment&#8217;s meditation, creating the spacing in which a reading could proceed. Not that Smith doesn&#8217;t have, as she has announced both on her blog &amp; at the Zinc Bar, &#8220;problems with reading.&#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'>I gave my reading, pleased to see all the folks in the audience, to see among them Kit Robinson (in town for a family event), Ted Greenwald &amp; Charles Bernstein, as well as younger poets such as Brenda Iijima &amp; Douglas Rothschild, &amp; younger poets still, such as Adam <span class=SpellE>Golaski</span> &amp; Eric <span class=SpellE>Gelsinger</span> (neither of whom I&#8217;d met before). I reminded myself that Smith is really part of this last cohort, and that in fact I wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>five years before she was born. That is a humbling situation. <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 instant I was done, Smith hopped back up, announcing that &#8220;I want to read some more,&#8221; in response to what I&#8217;d just read. She then proceeded to read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sirens </i>section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Exile, </i>which does indeed echo the self-same chapter of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses,</i> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>bronze by gold, </i>albeit in Smith&#8217;s version the capital letter isn&#8217;t the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>b</i> as it is for Joyce, but rather the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>n </i>since its spelling out a mid-word acrostic that reads vertically <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NEON LIT CHURCHES. </i>Keeping her reading persona intact, one part Kathy Acker, one part <span class=SpellE>Scarlett</span> O&#8217;Hara, as well as her poetics (upper limit Cage, lower limit the performance-centered wit of a Steve McCaffery), Smith commented &#8220;I like poetry as litigation.&#8221; Indeed.<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; All those Dublin tourists following their maps of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses </i>from station to station. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, August 14, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="256" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ttuK3IAyDfTOhfz4FImYS0TlU9XgvLFXnGC6gzvy5NgQgS58uSRo2R9kYwFDgM8fz0VlgFH1SvVRs-8RK_yS%3Ds0-d" width="208"><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 respond positively to ambitious work. Not every twenty-something who sets out to change the world into his or her vision manages to make much headway, but over time, watching the evolution of a Barrett Watten, a Kathy Acker, a Robert Grenier, a Judy Grahn or a Clark Coolidge as they set out to do so is a tremendous way to spend a life in writing. I find Charles Olson&#8217;s earnestness winning, although I know others who find (or, especially, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>found</i>, during his own day) it overbearing &amp; more than a little obnoxious. For my money, that&#8217;s just the price of admission &amp; a very small one to pay to gain all the riches you can find there. Ditto Ginsberg or Duncan. Or Jack Spicer, who intended to change the world, but didn&#8217;t plan on informing anybody outside of a small cabal of drinking pals at Gino &amp; Carlo&#8217;s. <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'>One of my great complaints about younger poets over the past 20 years has been that far too few are trying to do as much as they might. The very absence of literary group formations is a sign of same, given that one of the primary consequences of any literary movement is that it gets all of its participants&#8217; adrenaline running, so that everyone is performing at the peak of their potential, precisely because they feel challenged to go beyond their comfort zones. If you had told me, in 1969, that by 1974 I would be writing something like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>in which sentences repeat obsessively &amp; the content of one deliberately avoids flowing smoothly into the content of the next &#8211; and that it would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>prose </i>&#8211; I would have thought you were nuts. But, surrounded as I was in San Francisco by the likes of Kit Robinson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dolch Stanzas, </i>Rae Armantrout&#8217;s crystalline structures of lyric, Carla Harryman&#8217;s theatrical prose, David Bromige&#8217;s deep dive into syntax, Bob Perelman&#8217;s talk series, Steve Benson&#8217;s improvisational poets &#8211; they terrified me, because I knew I could <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>never </i>do that, let alone do it with the brilliance &amp; grace that appears so effortless to Benson &#8211; not to mention Acker, Watten or Grenier, writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>was the very least I could do in 1974 &#8211; it was (still is) a work filled with caution, because that&#8217;s my nature. <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 when I see attempts to go further &#8211; whether it&#8217;s the prose of a Taylor Brady or even a wrongheaded coterie of iconoclasts like the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Apex of the M </i>moment circa 1990, I&#8217;m predisposed to approve, because I can sense the reach that&#8217;s being made. And reach is at least 80 percent of what it takes &#8211; quality being the other 20 (and the iceberg lurking to many a Titanic effort). In fact, this is why the well polished variations of important work that come along a generation after whatever raw innovation might take place never is nearly as significant as the groundbreaking work itself. It&#8217;s not about making it perfect, but making it <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>new, </i>which is to say equal to the world we live in, which is never the same one we inhabited last week. Do it well enough &amp; you get to be Ted Berrigan or John Ashbery. Do it perfectly 20 years later &amp; there just might be a rural state college out there for you somewhere. <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'>One new book that sets off all of my sensors &#8211; it is flagrant &amp; cheerful with its ambition, which strikes me as  enormous &#8211; is <a href="http://www.outsidevoices.org/jessica.html"><span style='color:black'>Jessica Smith&#8217;s</span></a> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.outsidevoices.org/ofcreviews.html"><span style='color:black'>Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper 2002 &#8211; 2004</span></a></i>. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC</i> might not be the best written book of 2006, but it almost certainly is the one that wants to do the most. And that means that it just may be the most important book this year as well. <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'>Put simply, Smith is making the argument here for what she call plastic poetics, a concept she means more or less literally. I call it an argument because, in order to read Smith&#8217;s work intelligently &#8211; perhaps even sympathetically &#8211; she wants you to rethink your ideas of the role of space in the text itself. This she accomplishes by means of a nine-page introduction &#8211; the most serious theoretical discussion I&#8217;ve seen at the front of a book of poetry in some time. You can find what I take to be a preliminary draft of this document tucked away on one of Smith&#8217;s several websites <a href="http://www.looktouch.com/plastic.pdf"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> in a PDF format. Both versions are worth reading. In each, Smith begins by describing the experience of viewing a work by Japanese Architect Arakawa and his partner, poet Madeline Gins, a &#8220;house&#8221; &#8211; Smith uses the scare quotes &#8211; <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;color:black'>that consists of 2400 square feet of cloth lying low to the ground. Entering the house, the visitors find that in order to do anything&#8212;move, sit on furniture, cook&#8212;they must constantly lift the fabric &#8220;roof&#8221; of the house high enough over their heads to slither through the space. One of them observes, &#8220;Rooms form depending on how we move. If I bend down, I nearly lose the room.&#8221; This interdependency of agent and architecture is characteristic of Arakawa&#8217;s work, which consistently explores the theoretical problems of being a body in space. Questions of how one occupies space, how one affects and is affected by
architecture, move to the fore. A building is no longer a dwelling-space, but a site of reciprocal becoming.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-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'>This is not unlike the process of viewing sculpture &#8211; I recall Barney Newman&#8217;s definition of same as &#8220;what you bump into when stepping back to view a painting&#8221; &#8211; an analogy Smith likewise notes. Indeed, the contrast Smith is after is that distinction between painting &amp; sculpture that alleges&#185; one views a painting all at once, while having to then walk around a sculpture. The poetry Smith is after is far closer to sculpture, but it is not simply or only that:<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;color:black'>Historically, &#8220;plastic poetry&#8221; has been conflated with terms like &#8220;concrete poetry,&#8221; &#8220;calligrams,&#8221; and &#8220;visual poetry.&#8221; The term most often denotes poetry that has simply been made of materials other than paper, like the poem inscribed in concrete on bp nichol lane in Toronto, or the sculptural poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay. However, the material three-dimensionality of poems should not automatically grant them the status of plastic poetry. This term must be reserved for works that disrupt the reader&#8217;s virtual field in the same way that architecture and sculpture disrupt an active person&#8217;s real, physical field. A plastic poem must change the reading space in such a way that the one who reads is forced to make amends for new structures in his or her virtual path. The words on a page must be plastic in virtual space as architecture and sculpture are plastic in real space. In other words, plastic arts disrupt an agent&#8217;s space: to have plastic poetry we must disrupt the reader&#8217;s space. I will argue that this rupture does not stem from, as in the ordinary plastic arts, a real physical occupation of space, but rather from the disruption of the virtual space that one moves through when reading a poem.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><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'>(Both of the above quotes come from the draft version.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A skeptic might argue &#8211; check out the comments stream in a day or so &#8211; that it&#8217;s a weak poet who puts a theoretical defense in advance of the work itself. However, the precedents of Wordsworth &amp; Coleridge in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lyrical Ballads, </i>of Whitman, of Baudelaire all demonstrate that this is hardly the case. Rather, critically savvy authors have always felt the responsibility to prepare the audience for what&#8217;s to come. Here is, crudely reproduced from a screen capture, an example of what Smith is getting at, an excerpt from &#8220;Hades&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC&#8217;s </i>&#8220;Exile&#8221; section:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:black'><img border="0" height="524" id="_x0000_i1026" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/wyPaupgp2S_7FNBOWNq2pk9FCBPgJ7WftMULlDUx7v0_PFgqm92kYDwVcRAUNFprieCYc7ZgCpuB861OgVDUtP7gXusp3fkN%3Ds0-d" width="582"><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'>Whether one focuses on this poetry&#8217;s roots in the work of nichol &amp; Finlay, as in the excerpts I quoted above, or in Apollinaire&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Calligrammes </i>&amp; Steve McCaffery&#8217;s legendary <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/carnival/2_map.html"><span style='color:black'>Carnival</span></a>, </i>as the intro to the book does, Smith&#8217;s concerns &amp; roots both strike me as quite clear. It&#8217;s really about renegotiating the reader&#8217;s role in determining not just the meaning of the poem (something readers have done forever) but even the path of the poem. Meaning here doesn&#8217;t form &amp; wait for the reading mind, but rather offers clusters of potential, some more straightforward than others, some more subtle than others. The reader&#8217;s role is not only to determine what is going on in any cluster, but the order &amp; relationship between them as well. For example, what is the relation of the word &#8220;hegel,&#8221; presumably the philosopher to the text on its left? The capitalized letters forming a spine running vertically through the lefthand clusters appear, at first glance, to be some sort of acrostic, but if so, then they must anagrams as well. If not, then their
motivation is spatial &amp; not content-driven. For me, the most powerful sequence in this excerpt runs along &#8220;water-worn / soft dirt paths // white / marble / of flowers,&#8221; tho I know I&#8217;m putting those lines together &#8211; even putting the left most word &#8220;white&#8221; ahead of &#8220;marble&#8221; even tho it&#8217;s down a line. Whereas the lefthand clusters to my ear sound like a reiterated, virtually stammered phone conversation, maybe a generation removed from the overhead diction of Eliot&#8217;s &#8220;Waste Land,&#8221; (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>hurry up please it&#8217;s time</i>) but hardly on a different order. And I suspect that anyone&#8217;s negotiation will be, if not similar to my own, at least of a similar order of decision-making, of taking responsibility for pulling texts into context, assigning or even infusing meaning. <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'>Ultimately, I think the question of whether or not a text like this works comes down to your sensibility as  to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>how much </i>responsibility you want the author to hold onto, how much you yourself are willing to take on, and whether that matters. There is, in any text (even this one) invariably a one-sided relationship &#8211; only the author gets to determine which words appear on the page. You can play with this a lot (and I have over the decades, ranging from the disjunctions between sentences of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tjanting </i>to the intrusive-to-the-edge-of-sadism questioning in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sunset Debris</i>), but my own sense is that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I want </i>&#8211; indeed, I want to argue that I think readers in general want &#8211; the author to err on the side of control. <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'>Which, at this point at least, is the difference I see between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OFC </i>&amp; a project like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Carnival </i>&#8211; if you look at any detail of McCaffery&#8217;s, the individual words may not demonstrate more control (they seem to alternate between found materials &amp; pure lettrism), but visually they do:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img border="0" height="683" id="_x0000_i1027" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/v-NsgBmIUTAcaYpOHX0H-g6N3lN7Hs1x0hPsETYQMoCVV7UuA2sBXlR5Dbn-efHdyoPI3tdwbVbUr7qveP7_qc9JU8u3psIZyVWWDGrypvHlON9V-_kn_Xs%3Ds0-d" width="521"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a way, Smith&#8217;s text is far  more readerly &#8211; it&#8217;s all about the text, ultimately &#8211; but it places much more of the responsibility for meaning onto the reader than does McCaffery, even if  his sense here of &#8220;meaning&#8221; isn&#8217;t necessarily linguistic. <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'>Overall, my sense of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Organic Furniture Cellar </i>is that it isn&#8217;t (yet anyway) the revolution that Smith wants to televise, tho her aim here is sharp &amp; she&#8217;s already marshaling some of the heaviest weaponry available. But I don&#8217;t think you can disrupt reader&#8217;s expectations without more control of them than she wants to have here. So I&#8217;m interested to see just what Jessica Smith will be coming up with 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; Smith acknowledges that the allegation is false. Even the flattest all-over painting is, ultimately, read in time &#8211; indeed there are studies of eye movements around visual fields that are widely used these days in setting up the allocation of information in display ads. In general, the eye in a &#8220;portrait&#8221; starts above center slightly, the curls down &amp; to the left, then up to the upper left corner &amp; then down across the page toward the lower right, before pulling back and taking in the whole. The portion of the page that is least likely to be closely scrutinized is the lower left corner &#8211; a good place to put the mouse type you don&#8217;t want consumers to read too closely. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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