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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>Language Poetry</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>Language Poetry</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, May 30, 2012</span></h2>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center" align="center"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><span style="line-height:115%;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-thememso-themetint:242font-family:&quot;;font-size:8.0pt;color:text1;">Wise Guys Meet in La Jolla</span></b><br><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="line-height:115%;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D; mso-thememso-themetint:242font-family:&quot;;font-size:8.0pt;color:text1;">
Clockwise from RS at rear of table<span class="GramE">:</span><br>
Rae Armantrout, John Granger, Ted Pearson, Dustin Leavitt <br>
(photo by TC Marshall)<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center" align="center"><a href="//4.bp.blogspot.com/-OvLmLtr92BM/T8ECtmUW1EI/AAAAAAAAA8M/VJnI4BMi_-s/s1600/San%2BDiego%2B2012%2B%2528Dusty%2BTed%2BJohn%2BRae%2Bmoi%2B--%2Bphoto%2Bby%2BTC%2BMarshall%2529.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5746877581904761922" src="//4.bp.blogspot.com/-OvLmLtr92BM/T8ECtmUW1EI/AAAAAAAAA8M/VJnI4BMi_-s/s400/San%252BDiego%252B2012%252B%252528Dusty%252BTed%252BJohn%252BRae%252Bmoi%252B--%252Bphoto%252Bby%252BTC%252BMarshall%252529.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px; height: 450px;"></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height:115%;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-thememso-themetint:242font-family:&quot;;font-size:10.0pt;color:text1;">Because I was in California for half of April, I missed the </span><span style="line-height:115%;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;font-family:&quot;;font-size:10.0pt;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Poetry-Communities.php"><span style="color:#0D0D0D;mso-thememso-themetint:242color:text1;">Poetry Communities &amp; Individual Talent</span></a><span style="color:#0D0D0D;mso-thememso-themetint:242color:text1;"> conference that took place at Kelly Writers House while I was gone. But the relationship of poetry &amp; community was constantly on my mind, reading at UC (which still fails to treat me to the usual glut of alma mater literature, a mistake that SF State never makes, tho in fact I never actually received a degree from either), going past the house I grew up, the house eight blocks away that I owned prior to the move to Pennsylvania, visiting dear friends, including David Melnick in San Francisco &amp; Cecelia Bromige in Sebastopol. I&#8217;m co-editing collected poems for both Melnick &amp; David Bromige and had things I needed &amp; wanted to discuss with each. Plus the primal pleasure of visiting dear friends. I was amazed, at the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, to see that Steve Fama has a pretty good collection of my writings on prisons from my days with the Committee for Prisoner Humanity &amp; Justice (CPHJ), which is to say 1977 &amp; before. Later in the week, Kathleen <span class="SpellE">Frumkin</span> &amp; I sorted through the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">NY Times </i>to find the crossword puzzle that listed &#8220;Pulitzer Prize Poet Armantrout &amp; others&#8221; on April 13 (Rae&#8217;s birthday &#8211; did they know that?), plus the solution the following day, which was &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Raes</span>.&#8221; It was one of those deeply satisfying psychic journeys in which I traveled more than just geographical distance. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>  <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height:115%;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-thememso-themetint:242font-family:&quot;;font-size:10.0pt;color:text1;">My first event on the West Coast was at the Center for Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, an interesting blend of resonances in my life given just how many psychoanalysts I know, how many therapists &amp; the number of decades I&#8217;ve been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">in </i>therapy of one sort or another. One of the first questions in that informal give &amp; take setting was did I still think of myself as a Language Poet and had my sense of Language Poetry changed since the 1970s. My response was to begin with something I&#8217;d written in the foreword to in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">In The American Tree, </i>that I understood Language Writing as a moment more than a movement, which was true in the early 1980s when I first penned that sentence, and is even truer today, when that moment seems to me clearly past. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 
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Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/community' rel='tag'>community</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Conceptual%2520poetics' rel='tag'>Conceptual poetics</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Flarf' rel='tag'>Flarf</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/history' rel='tag'>history</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Language%2520Poetry' rel='tag'>Language Poetry</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Schools%2520of%2520poetry' rel='tag'>Schools of poetry</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, January 22, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the past week, I&#8217;ve read
on various discussion lists that nobody reads blogs but other bloggers. I&#8217;ve
also read that bloggers &#8220;control&#8221; poetry. I&#8217;ve seen an article that quotes incoming
Guggenheim executive Edward Hirsch calling language poetry a &#8220;cult,&#8221; &amp; read
another listserv message suggesting that there were far too many avant-garde or
experimental poets &#8211; an estimate of 10,000 was offered. There does seem to be a
diversity of opinion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The fear of an <span class="GramE">Other</span> is an interesting, if sometimes dangerous, phenomenon.
Denial of its existence and/or importance is really only the flip side of the
paranoid nightmare that <span class="GramE">It</span>, whatever It may be, has
overrun &amp; secretly governs the world. Need I suggest that the truth is
probably somewhere in between?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the values of
blogging for poets is that it can deepen the degree of critical thinking poets
themselves do, more so I suspect than the scatter of listserv discussions. If
there is a bias hidden in the blogging form, it&#8217;s toward poets who think
critically, but that by no means ensures that said poets will be post-avant,
let alone any particular flavor thereof. It also suggests that there is a role
for critical thinking &amp; writing outside of the received forms of the
academy &#8211; &amp; I am convinced that this is all to the better as well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If there is a potential for
post-avant poetry in raising the bar of critical thinking, it might be to help
address the question that is rather unspoken in that wildly overdone estimate
of 10,000 experimentalists: how, as the post-avant heritage expands to yet
another generation, are those poets going to create the necessary sense of
shape to differentiate between all these young, interesting poets? If the New Americans
broke uneasily (&amp; somewhat too artificially) into their various clusters of
NY School, Projectivism, Beat &amp; SF renaissance &#8211; the latter is almost
entirely a fiction &#8211; when there were only a hundred or so poets practicing in
the Pound/Williams tradition in the 1950s, how many such tendencies are really
just waiting to (a) get their act together and/or (b) be recognized as such?
That problem of &#8220;shape&#8221; or differentiation is I think &#8211; I know I&#8217;ve said this
before, I know I&#8217;ll say it again &#8211; the primary critical issue facing younger
poets in 2003. The squabble among Canadian poets between those interested in
the use of forms &amp; those more interested in, say, a politicized version of
the NY school is at the least a sign of life. I&#8217;m in favor of both sides of
that debate. As I am heartened every time <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">chris</span></span>
cheek complains that some version of post-avant history is too book &amp; page
oriented, even though I&#8217;m certain I must be part of that problem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another value I&#8217;d hadn&#8217;t
anticipated from blogging is the simple verification effect of being able to
register how many readers come to one&#8217;s site. Ten thousand visitors to this
blog in just four months should answer any fear I might have that Ed Hirsch is
correct in his assessment of my work, or even the idea that it&#8217;s simply an
elite practice, too arcane for many.* Currently, this blog averages slightly
over 130 readers per day. Yesterday saw 198 visitors to this blog, the most
ever &#8211; that the average number of readers can continue to expand in the face of
the explosion of poetry blogs makes me realize just how much we need to rethink
the idea of the post-avant audience. It&#8217;s larger than we imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But of greatest value to me
are all the other blogs that are now focusing on poetry, poetics &amp; closely
related literary concerns. Not only are the numbers increasing, so is the
diversity &#8211; aesthetically &amp; otherwise. Below is the list of the literary
blogs that I currently check at least once or twice per week. One thing I&#8217;ve
definitely noted among these blogs is the presence of several people who might
be characterized as either New York School, gen XXXVII or as post-NY School
(there being different ways of looking at this), a tendency previously imagined
by some folks as allergic to critical thinking. Guess again. This may be the most
significant theoretical development that has come out of blogging to date &amp;
it will be interesting to see how it evolves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The list below consists of
37 bloggers, maybe 28 of which are less than six months old. &#8220;The creation of new
forms as additions to nature,&#8221; as William Carlos Williams wrote. There is a
group blog, an <span class="SpellE">audioblog</span> &amp; even a blog that
denies its own <span class="SpellE">blogitude</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Since &#8220;abortive&#8221; blogs are
also a part of the phenomenon, I&#8217;ve only included sites that have updated since
the beginning of this year with the notable exception of Camille Roy&#8217;s site, <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ich</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Bin <span class="SpellE">Ein</span> Iraqi</i>,
which uses the blog form for a piece on the subject of her Iraqi childhood. It
may be the first instance of serious blog literature &#8211; as distinct from literature
merely published in a blog &#8211; &amp; absolutely needs to be read. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/">Cahiers de
Cory</a> (Josh Corey)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://chax.blogspot.com/"><span class="SpellE">Chaxblog</span></a> (Charles Alexander &#8211; the background color
really does change as you read)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://eeksypeeksy.blogspot.com/"><span class="SpellE">Eeksy</span> <span class="SpellE">Peeksy</span></a> (Malcolm
Davidson)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://garysullivan.blogspot.com/">Elsewhere</a>
(</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Gary Sullivan</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://equanimity.blogspot.com/">Equanimity</a>
(</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Jordan Davis</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://forthehealthovit.blogspot.com/">for
the Health of it</a> (Tom Bell)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.arras.net/weblog/">Free Space
Comix</a> (Brian Kim Stefans, one of the first bloggers)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/">HG Poetics</a>
(Henry Gould)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://hypertextkitchen.com/">Hypertext
Kitchen</a> (Blog of <span class="SpellE">Eastgate</span>, the hypertext software
folks)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://blogs.salon.com/0001600/"><span class="SpellE">Ich</span> Bin <span class="SpellE">Ein</span> Iraqi</a> (Camille
Roy)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://ineluctablemaps.blogspot.com/">Ineluctable
Maps</a> (<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">Anastios</span></span><span class="GramE"> ??)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://cmc.uib.no/jill/"><span class="SpellE">jill</span>/txt</a> (Jill Walker)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/">Jonathan
Mayhew&#8217;s Blog</a> (His list of the best sax players includes neither Steve Lacy
nor Anthony Braxton?!)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.ellipsis.cx/~kortbein/blog/index.php">Josh Blog</a> (Josh <span class="SpellE">Kortbein</span>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.laurable.com/log/index.html">Laurable.Com</a>
(One of the first poetry blogs &amp; one of the best &#8211; with a focus on
recordings of readings)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://lesters.blogspot.com/">Lester&#8217;s <span class="SpellE">Flogspot</span></a> (Patrick Herron&#8217;s sock puppet has an attitude)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://limetree.blogspot.com/">lime tree</a>
(K. Silem Mohammad)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/">Mike
Snider&#8217;s Formal Blog</a> (the only new formalist blog I&#8217;ve found)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://millionpoems.blogspot.com/">Million
Poems</a> (</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Jordan Davis</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">&#8217; blog
for his poetry)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.commutiny.net/her/">Nether</a>
(Angela Rawlings)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://drewgardner.blogspot.com/">Overlap</a>
(Drew Gardner)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://pantaloons.blogspot.com/">Pantaloons</a>
(Jack Kimball, currently trying to forget everything Joe Brainard ever
remembered)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.pepysdiary.com/"><span class="SpellE">Pepy&#8217;s</span> Diary</a> (The Ur-blogger has risen from the grave &#8211;
welcome to 1659/60)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.skankypossum.com/pouch/">Possum
Pouch</a> (Dale Smith, though he denies it&#8217;s a blog, has converted his web
newsletter to&#8230;a blog)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://processdocuments.blogspot.com/">process
documents</a> (Ryan Fitzpatrick&#8217;s long poem in progress)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://ptarmigan.blogspot.com/">Ptarmigan</a>
(Alan de <span class="SpellE">Niro</span>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://rw.blogspot.com/">reading &amp;
writing</a> (Joseph <span class="SpellE">Duemer</span>) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://rrrart.blogspot.com/"><span class="SpellE">rrrart</span></a> (Judy Mac</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ald, a
fiction writer)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.sdpg.blogspot.com/">San Diego
Poetry Guild</a> (a group blog)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://spokenword.blog-city.com/"><span class="SpellE">SpokenWORD</span></a> (Komninos Zervos&#8217; Australian <span class="SpellE">audioblog</span>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.meadow4.com/squish/">Squish</a>
(Katherine Parrish)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://texturl.net/"><span class="SpellE">texturl</span></a>
(Brandon Barr)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://thetijuanabibleofpoetics.blogspot.com/">The Tijuana Bible of
Poetics</a> (Heriberto Yepez, who also has a poetry blog in Spanish)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.josephzitt.com/blog/">The Year
of Living Musically</a> (Joseph <span class="SpellE">Zitt</span>, poet, musician
&amp; webmaster of the long-running John Cage listserv, Silence)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://ululate.blogspot.com/">Ululations</a>
(Nada Gordon)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://virginpepper.blogspot.com/">Virgin
Pepper</a> (</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Jim Behrle</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; is
there a sock puppet here?)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://winepoetics.blogspot.com/">Wine
Poetics</a> (Eileen <span class="SpellE">Tabios</span>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">My own blog would make 38
&amp; I&#8217;m sure that I&#8217;m missing some. I&#8217;m finding that the ones I learn the
most from are not necessarily those that may appear closest to my own
aesthetics &#8211; in addition to Camille Roy, Jonathan Mayhew, Heriberto Yepez &amp;
Nada Gordon have all kept me awake at night, rethinking my assumptions about
the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">That&#8217;s the point, isn&#8217;t it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* I&#8217;m a
subscriber to the theory that the only people who find langpo &#8220;difficult&#8221; or
&#8220;obscure&#8221; are a small set of people who have become developmentally challenged
through graduate school</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, January 15, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Twenty five years ago, Whale
Cloth Press published what at the time was the most radically innovative poetry
project I&#8217;d ever seen, Robert Grenier&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentences.</i>
Rereading it today, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentences </i>still
qualifies as the furthest anyone has pushed poetry &amp; form in the
investigation of the world:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">JOE<br />
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JOE<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The above is just one of 500
cards, 5 inches high, 8 inches wide, text typed (in &#8220;landscape&#8221; format) in
Courier from an IBM Selectric typewriter, housed in a dark blue cloth covered
folding box. You could shuffle the cards &amp; there was a rumor that no two
boxes had the works in the same order. This was, Whale Cloth &amp; Grenier
seemed to be insisting, a book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It was as if nobody had ever
taken the time before Grenier to just simply look at the language. When his
work first began to telescope down from the mid-level lyrics that he was
composing as this one-time Robert Lowell protégé left Iowa City for a teaching
job at Berkeley &#8211; a job obtained in good part on the recommendation of James
Tate &amp; Richard Tillinghast &#8211; it occurred in a climate in which the most
radical book anyone had ever seen or even imagined was </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Creeley</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pieces</i> (<span class="SpellE">Scribners</span>, 1969). At the time, I recall poetry students
around </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">San
  Francisco</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">State</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> being utterly stunned by the Creeley book &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;how dare he call that poetry?&#8221; </i>But
within less than two years, Grenier was starting to write works in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> that made Creeley look as mainstream </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New England</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> as Robert Frost.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I first met Grenier when I
transferred to UC Berkeley for the <span class="GramE">Spring</span> term in
1970. I had dropped out of </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">State</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">
after the debilitating student strike that then-governor Reagan had consciously
used as a model testing ground for ways of defeating student activism. Every
single teacher of any true value I had had at State either was fired or quit.
One professor I knew was so freaked out by the presence of cops on horseback on
campus that he was carrying a pistol at all times. The new university president,
S. I. Hayakawa, was a linguistics professor whose class I&#8217;d sat in on a few
times until it became apparent that he hadn&#8217;t read a book in perhaps 15 years.
It was obvious he was little more than a puppet for the governor, who
originally hoped to use SF State to help get his secretary of education Max
Rafferty elected to the U.S. Senate over incumbent Democrat Alan Cranston
(Charles Olson&#8217;s one-time boss). The only thing that the student strikers did
intelligently that entire fall had been to wait until late on Election Day
itself to go out on strike, thwarting Reagan&#8217;s original plan. But from that
point on, it was a debacle as the state showed that it was willing to use
whatever force was necessary to break the strike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because I didn&#8217;t have enough
units to transfer as a junior to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> right away, I detoured briefly to </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Merritt</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">College</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, which in those days was still in the flatlands of </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">North Oakland</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, the &#8220;bad&#8221; neighborhood in which my grandfather had
grown up. I took as many of the my breadth courses as I could get out of the
way, working as a TA for an anthropology class (the one time I ever held such a
role in college), then moved to Berkeley in January 1970 where several people I
knew, including David Bromige, David Melnick &amp; my wife at the time, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rochelle Nameroff</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, were already students. I arrived just as students
were preparing to submit manuscripts for a series of undergraduate writing
contests. I dutifully gathered my work into a couple of different clusters and
asked around what people thought about sending different groups to the
different contests. Although the judges for each contest were announced at the
outset, I was so new that I didn&#8217;t know any of the faculty to speak of, with
the lone exception of Robin Magowan. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of my clusters was a
group of short, Williams-<span class="SpellE">esque</span> poems, the core it
would later turn out of my first book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crow</i>.
Both Melnick &amp; Nameroff suggested that I should I submit that group to the
Joan Yee Lang Award contest, whose judge was Robert Grenier, somebody I&#8217;d never
heard of before. &#8220;He likes short poems,&#8221; Melnick insisted. This turned out to
be excellent advice, as I won the award before ever having met the judge. One
day later that <span class="GramE">Spring</span>, however, Grenier introduced
himself to me at Serendipity Books, in those days a great poetry bookshop on
Shattuck in </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">North Berkeley</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. &#8220;I thought you were Arthur <span class="SpellE">Sze</span>,&#8221;
he told me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I didn&#8217;t really get to know
Grenier well until the following fall when I attempted to do a special study
course on Louis Zukofsky only to discover that almost nobody at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had ever even heard of the Brooklyn Objectivist.
James E.B. <span class="SpellE">Breslin</span>, whom I&#8217;d asked first, sort of
knew the work but was clearly intimidated by it &amp; wasn&#8217;t sure he could help
me. He not only recommended Grenier, but &#8211; as it happened &#8211; gave me some
excellent advice about getting the class approved by my advisor, arguing for
Zukofsky&#8217;s relevance in terms of his association with Williams, whom professors
in the department had heard of before. Grenier agreed &amp; the Williams ploy
worked. It was only a matter of weeks before I became a full-fledged member of
the Cult of Grenier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In 1970, it was evident to
any of the young writers around Grenier that he was rethinking poetry from the
ground up. If Creeley&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pieces</i>
offered poetry as it might descend from Louis Zukofsky&#8217;s short poems by way of
Ted Berrigan, Grenier was adding Stein into the mix as well as the Williams of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spring &amp; All</i>, which Harvey Brown had
just published, suddenly demonstrating the good doctor not only to be the
epitome of a speech-based poetics that everyone had recognized for the previous
20 years, but also the most consciously radical critic of poetry of the first
half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century &#8211; which came as a total surprise of many.
On top of this, Grenier wasn&#8217;t merely mixing influences in a new way &#8211; although
he was doing that also &#8211; he was gradually insisting that anything, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i>, looked at closely enough could
become poetry. His works from that period &#8211; which make up the first two pages
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/0-943373-51-4.html">In the
American Tree</a></i>, were working themselves down toward a new level of
minimalism not seen before in American poetry: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> long
walk<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> long<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">walk</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> a long<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">walk</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> a long<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">walk</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> along<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">To poets raised on the
writings of Duncan, Spicer, Olson, Creeley &amp; Zukofsky &#8211; which is exactly
where I was coming from &#8211; the sheer gait of this poem, with its deliberately
limping prosody, was like an explosion in the face of everything I&#8217;d ever
known. This was not speech. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, December 21, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Peter Ganick is an extremophile of
American letters. Extremophiles, as any ten-year-old addicted to the science
shows on the Discovery Channel can tell you, are those amazing creatures that
thrive in extreme conditions, such as in the lightless &amp; chilly depths of
the ocean or in fire-orange lips of lava at the edge of a live volcano, even
conceivably on asteroids or other planets sans atmosphere. These include (but
aren&#8217;t just limited to) anaerobes, thermophiles, <span class="SpellE">psychrophiles</span>,
acidophiles, alkalophiles, <span class="SpellE">halophiles</span>, <span class="SpellE">barophiles</span>, and xerophiles. <span class="GramE">Fun folk one
&amp; all.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">In poetry, an extremophile would be
someone whose interest in the dynamics of his or her own work are intense, detailed
&amp; radically distinct, but which develop with only the most passing concern
or correlation with whatever else might be going on in the world of poetry.
Extremophiles have been around for some time: Bern Porter, Bob Brown &amp; Ian
Hamilton <span class="SpellE">Finlay</span> all qualify as examples of
extremophile literature at its finest. Alan Sondheim is another contemporary
example, but it is characteristic of extremophile writing that although
Sondheim &amp; Ganick are relatively like-minded souls practicing at the same
point in time who live within only a few hours of one another, no one would
suggest that you might make a group phenomenon out of this ensemble of
impulses.* The closest you could come in recent U.S. poetic history to an
extremophile grouping would be the collaborative projects of Stanley Berne
&amp; Arlene <span class="SpellE">Zekowski</span>, who also demonstrate the
principle that extremophile writing need not be interesting just for being
extreme.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Ganick hasn&#8217;t always been perceived as an
extremophile in part because there are some aspects of his poetry that, if you
were draw it up as giant circle in a Venn diagram, would slightly overlap some
other things going on in post-avant poetics, for example in the most purely
prosodic pieces of Clark Coolidge&#8217;s writing. And by virtue of having been one
of the major publishers &amp; promoters of post-avant poetics, Ganick has been
in the thick of things now for a few decades. But his best work, which is to
say the poems in which he seems to be most fully himself, are longer works in
relatively constant forms where the language builds only to be itself. Read
aloud, books such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No Soap Radio,
Agoraphobia, Rectangular Morning Poem </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&lt;a&#8217; <span class="SpellE">sattv</span>&gt; </i>lead a reader toward
trance-like states that are not meaning-invested, but rather ultimately
meaning-liberated. These states are zones unique to Ganick&#8217;s poetry. &amp; I
suspect that you or I could not conceivably come close to duplicating them if
we tried.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.fauxpress.com/b/ga.htm"><span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">tend.field</span></span></a></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">
</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">is Ganick&#8217;s most recent
project, a PC CD of a single 223-page paragraph that exists both in PDF format
and as a self-scrolling text, that appears to run literally forever. There is
also a series of related abstracted line drawings, although I could not explain
to you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i> they&#8217;re related to the
text if my life depended on it<span class="GramE">.*</span>* But it&#8217;s the
self-scrolling text to which I really want to call your attention. Subtitled in
parentheses <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a philosophy, </i>the text
itself is pure Ganick &#8211; no capital letters, just streams of sentences such as: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">which</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> sly in recanting olé yesterday&#8217;s
impasse the memorized cloister, ailing with which one seeks a decent paradigm
for annuity. rendered universal, saving which adrenaline blister, on as much to
repent with glaringly thought of hidden discomfort in otherness&#8217; <span class="SpellE">pileation</span>, so major as nodule perhaps riddance to
evidential gleams. <span class="GramE">of</span> which in constriction the
abolished shoulder of roadway calling out in an advent of persuasion, trial
size formalization so regaled those predicated on hopefulness&#8217; factuality
restructured. <span class="GramE">some</span> sleeping window nest, gravity of
expanse the time of for which name naïvely preoccupies the margins of a destiny
modeled after <span class="SpellE">waiting&#8217;s</span> insurgency not breathing -
less. <span class="GramE">when</span> as constricted from address, to pull into a
gossamer flange more the parade solar aspects in huddle remotely isolationist
as caveat, not the advantage the blessing-with that <span class="SpellE">mandalas</span>
implicate formally. <span class="GramE">on</span> as one could seek, permission
granted that being on a folder to be wrenched <span class="SpellE">infotainer&#8217;s</span>
materializations aside the curious name-calling&#8217;s prudence. <span class="GramE">some</span>
so gained as to merit wideness of pertinence, well into scrambler&#8217;s official
derangement, more fleshy that wilted on haphazard notification elsewhere
sandwich. <span class="GramE">lanyard</span> on the motionlessness, one creates
out of a camera to beaten down shut as orange to skimmer flood the feeling in
leggings more mundane as permitted. <span class="GramE">schismatic</span>
retaliation of sic with-in a space in documentation maternally the fullness of
bluntness talking at hula horrors, the emptiness of wishful gradients. <span class="GramE">some</span> other specimen of tangibility in other packages merely
lionized. <span class="GramE">scholiast</span>. <span class="GramE">venerable</span>
mistral, with garble and chain-song, <span class="SpellE">reurged</span> in the
camped-over, where wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody,
the celebrated more than which with an announcement of negotiation, somewhere
out inside the temporary. <span class="GramE">while</span> affording in selected
retentions -<span class="SpellE">ive</span> the merging ogre to blemish with not
haggling out of the shoebox named for a full salute here to befriend of <span class="SpellE">pranams</span> why thresholds flail. some rendered which has not startled
invasively premonition therefore unsold or sold, that beginning from endgame in
parlance therefore to be else in fact. <span class="GramE">whose</span>
elementally curious not wished failure, template on-site the having which
affords one&#8217;s explanation of culpable secretion, manicure where aspects remove
tiles longing for beatitude. not recognizable from one&#8217;s clangorous monotone,
that being as hidden rend on prior tear to the <span class="SpellE">millefleur</span>
grail-proof in derivation of parlance&#8217;s emulsified feverishness, something
addicted to scramble, with whose affording one classes others&#8217; notions
therefore something else to be headless in reminder.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">This represents less than one half of one
percent of this paragraph. In book <span class="GramE">format,</span> or even in
a PDF file on a screen &#8211; on a PDA for example &#8211; this is rough going, even
though phrase by phrase it&#8217;s always of some interest. But the use of the
scrolling text &#8211;Macromedia Projector is the underlying program &#8211; transforms a
very difficult slog through language into something else altogether. Line by line
the language rises from the bottom of the screen only to exit at the top.
Roughly twenty lines are visible at any given moment, but they&#8217;re moving very
quickly &#8211; a line stays on the screen for its entire journey for no more than 7
seconds on my Pentium 4 1.8GHz Windows XP system. This means that it&#8217;s
impossible even for a speed reader to do more than pick out phrases as they flash
past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">This is where I think that subtitle comes
into play. Ganick is in fact arguing here for a new way of reading, one that can
be understood as glimpsing (or perhaps &#8220;registering&#8221;) data as it flashes past.
In practice, this means that no longer how many times you run the program, <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tend.field</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>will never yield the same poem twice.
Not in the sense of a random language generator working with a set vocabulary &#8211;
the computer-written poems of David Benedetti like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ideas Imagine Passion </i>would be an example &#8211; but rather in the sense
that you will never notice the same things as you proceed through this forest
of language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Reading around in a text has, of course,
existed as a process for centuries, mostly unspoken about, <span class="SpellE">undescribed</span>
as a process, treated rather as a form of not reading or of inferior reading if
it shows its head in college lit class. But it occurs constantly in &#8220;real life&#8221;:
as one walks down any commercial street in America, for example, Canada
included, one is inundated with signage &amp; figures out how best to absorb
(or not) the onslaught of commercial speech in public display. Ganick&#8217;s
innovation is to identify just how far beyond pure Burma Shave poetics we have
actually advanced &amp; to develop a text &#8211; and the means for presenting it &#8211;
that turns this &#8220;alienation from nature&#8221; in on itself until, in fact, it truly
becomes a new nature. <span class="GramE">Which is why my trope of a &#8220;forest of language&#8221;
in the paragraph above was not accidental.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">If there is a process that is anything
like the experience of reading <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tend.field</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>&#8211; note
the pastoral terms welded together (but also kept separate) by punctuation here
&#8211; it is exactly a walk in the country. But an exceptionally frenetic one &#8211; you
realize very rapidly that you will never be able to take in more than a
fraction of what is scrolling by &amp; you then have to decide just how
copasetic you are with this as a reader. It&#8217;s a new country alright, one driven
&amp; occupied by language &#8211; bureaucratic, commercial &amp; manipulative &#8220;where
wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody.&#8221; Exactly!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;m on record as a skeptic on the subject
of new media &#8211; I&#8217;ve expressed a concern that the applications and software
platforms on which they&#8217;re mounted will prove increasingly short-lived &#8211; and
nothing here really alters my overall assessment of that. But even if <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tend.field</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">proves
as temporary as the Macintosh &amp; Windows operating systems on which it is intended
to operate, it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of what
reading &amp; writing might be right now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Theoretically, Robert
Grenier&#8217;s relationship to langpo, which has been profound, complicates the
issue of placing him fully into the extremophile category, although everything
from the &#8220;Chinese box&#8221; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentences</i> to
the more recent scrawl works suggests that Grenier is just such a critter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** One drawing is
vaguely visible as the background to the scrolling text<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Looking at Rachel Blau
DuPlessis&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draft 1: It </i>again this
morning, I realize that what I&#8217;d previously taken for a more abstract drawing
that comes later in the text is, like the pair of drawn </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Comic Sans MS&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">N</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">s at the front, letters, in this instance </span><span class="SpellE"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Comic Sans MS&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Y</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">s</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. In
each case, one letter is much larger than the other, with the smaller inscribed
in a wedge of the larger. It&#8217;s funny how you can look at something off &amp; on
for 15 years, before a detail this basic jumps out at you, but there you have it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The </span><span class="SpellE"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Comic Sans MS&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Y</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">s</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> occur
at the end of one of the more curious passages in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draft 1</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The
struggle from whiteness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">into</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
whiteness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">via</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
black wit-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">ness</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">ching</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nothing in my prior
experience of DuPlessis gives me reason to believe that she has an interest in
what I&#8217;ve called the alternative </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">wis</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">dom traditions, so the appearance of the old Chinese
system of chance divination gets my attention because it is unexpected. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">er, the idea of &#8220;black witness&#8221; &#8211; a phrase I can
easily imagine DuPlessis speaking &#8211; refers on a very different level to the
civil rights movement of the 1950s &amp; &#8216;60s. But from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whiteness</i> into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whiteness</i>
suggests that other meanings have to be given precedence here. There is a
discourse of color in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draft 1</i> that is
worth cataloging: &#8220;sunlight / silver backed,&#8221; &#8220;it / lettered on green up
hillside&#8217;s social lining,&#8221;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&#8220;Black //
coding inside<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A / <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white</b> fold open,&#8221; &#8220;A <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white</b> house seems / to be a further /
coagulation of mist / Lucite see-thru overlay,&#8221; &#8220;<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CANO</b>*, can o,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>yes<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>no,&#8221; &#8220;&#8217;sea-blazed gold&#8217;,&#8221; &#8220;clouds<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>for fat and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white</b>,&#8221; &#8220;space <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white </b>and
open a flat / spot a <span class="SpellE">lite</span> on / it,&#8221; &#8220;Object (pronoun)
/ squeaks its little song its bright <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white</b>
/ dear dead dark,&#8221; &#8220;theater of the / / page<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cream</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>space<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>peaks,&#8221; &#8220;where in the placement of saffron / . . . and black tuft of <span class="SpellE">heide</span>,&#8221; &#8220;one point is to achieve a social momentum of
switched / referents and (merry coral<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">white</b> clover / ding <span class="SpellE">ding</span> <span class="SpellE">ding</span>) commentary,&#8221; &amp;
then this remarkable passage:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">a</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> kind
of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">oran</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">ge it happens<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">a</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> kind
of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">oran</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">ge <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">IT
HAPPENS<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">rose</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
rinse, vertical green<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Away
anyway has shadow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;<span class="GramE">a</span> typical Rachel shadow&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">blue</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
starts limb long and torso struggles<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">its</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
window when all around there&#8217;s not a single<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">wall</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
NO blockages<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">hardly</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
stopped at all except by the pleasures<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
color are you getting the picture<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">it</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">hppns</span> BLUEW one from the sequences of looming<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">comes</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>longing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">White &amp; black are of
course unique hues, white figuring as the undifferentiated presence of all
color in light, but as the absence of color in pigmentation. Light/pigment,
white/black, yes/no (</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Comic Sans MS&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Y</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">/</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Comic Sans MS&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">N</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">), sound/silence &#8211; a string of threshold points
appear to surround &amp; pass through that simplest, most self-effacing of
pronouns. It&#8217;s in this sense that I begin to understand the allusion to the I <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">ching</span></span>. Of all pronouns, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it</i> most completely functions as a lens,
directing sight, refracting color, offering nothing (or very little) of itself
as object. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a way, DuPlessis is
playing with the idea of language&#8217;s ostensible transparency, but only to point
up all the problematic catches, the moments where the signifier itself happens
(or, for that matter, &#8220;<span class="SpellE">hppns</span>&#8221;) &#8211; meaning, sound,
sight, desire, the whole of the world trying to come through &#8211; &#8220;a plot,&#8221; as she
notes, bracketing the phrase in quotation marks, &#8220;a plot / against the reader.&#8221;
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Spanish
for &#8220;white&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, November 12, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking more about the
problem <span class="GramE">of how one reads truly new poetry</span>, writing by
people whose work one doesn&#8217;t know. Let&#8217;s try another example. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Underneath the stack of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage #4 / Period(ical)s </i>&#8211; that&#8217;s a
tough one to pluralize &#8211;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>from which I
picked yesterday&#8217;s example, has been sitting the first-ever issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiosk</i>, published by three people I&#8217;ve
never heard of before who would appear to be students at SUNY Buffalo. It&#8217;s a
gorgeously done publication &#8211; visually the best first issue of anything hard
copy that I&#8217;ve seen since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Germ.</i>
The table of contents lists many writers whose I work I follow: Alice Notley,
Kristen Gallagher, Fiona Templeton, Leslie Scalapino, Patrick Durgin, Catherine
Wagner, Michael Magee, Martin <span class="SpellE">Corless</span>-Smith, Jerome
Rothenberg, Gregg Biglieri, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Steve McCaffery</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Lyn Hejinian, Raymond Federman, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Nick Piombino</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Marjorie Perloff &amp; Charles Bernstein. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One name that is new to me
is Thom </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan, about whom I have as little information as I
did for Richard Deming yesterday. Maybe he&#8217;s a student at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, but maybe not.* His text is entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;towards </i>24 Stills,&#8221; carrying forward
the mixed typographic elements I found in Deming&#8217;s title also. It&#8217;s possible
that this is a trend, something I should start keeping my eyes open for, but
it&#8217;s also possible that it really means that the text below is excerpted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from</i> a larger, possibly book-length
sequence or series entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">24 Stills</i>.
Thumbing through the rest of the issue reveals no consistency, contributor by
contributor, in typographic styles for titles. So this ambiguity will just have
to linger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">To the look at the first
page, with three one-paragraph prose sections separated by a simple left-margin
dash, my immediate instinct tells me that this will be a series of interrelated
short prose poems. The first one strikes me as intense &amp; problematic: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">For marking museums.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span class="GramE">Birds, mid-flight, portrayed in
glass.</span> <span class="GramE">A stuffing that was wasted.</span> <span class="GramE">A way to enter and exit.</span> Roll film the way you found it. <span class="GramE">In a dark <span class="SpellE">dark</span> canister &#8211; traveling
through the dead throat.</span> To an aorta: blurt. Then the other side:
neutral children. <span class="GramE">Neutral, but built.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first four sentences are
truncated &#8211; all resonate with verbs (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marking,
portrayed, was wasted, to enter </i>&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exit</i>)
shifted away from the normal predicate function, which in turn is left vacant.
These sentences carry the sound of captions or of definitions taken from a
curious dictionary. The sense is deliberately static, the lone visual image
self-consciously kitsch. Movement as such starts with the command of the fifth
sentence, creating an almost tectonic shift in the language. Initially, the
sixth sentence can be interpreted as &#8220;following&#8221; the fifth: film rolls are kept
in such canisters. The very possibility of meaning spreading outward beyond the
punctuated wall between sentences here is palpably felt in the reading. But the
latter half of the sentence, following the dash, seems spliced from another
linguistic source, although it also can be interpreted as leading the next
sentence<span class="GramE">.*</span>* In the process, we shift image schemes
away from film rolls &amp; toward the esophagus. This ends almost comically
after the colon with the lone syllable declaration: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blurt</i>. As such, a single word utterance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blurt</i> could be a command, but, even more prominently, it stands for
the unique sonic bubble it is, bounded on either end by a hard consonant, next
to which lies a liquid surrounding that lone central vowel. It&#8217;s really a
beautiful word &amp; how often do we get to look &amp; listen to it like
this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poem moves again after
that hard stop, the next word <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Then</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>literally
marking sequence. Like so much else in this short piece, &#8220;the other side&#8221;
proposes a referent for which it offers no evidence. This is the third sentence
in a row to have some kind of hinge marked by punctuation, in this instance
leading to &#8220;neutral children.&#8221; This sentence harks back to the first &amp;
third as one that could have easily occurred in Stein&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tender Buttons</i>. Given that three sentences represents one-third of
the total paragraph, this can&#8217;t be accidental &amp; it raises the parallel
between Stein&#8217;s portraits of objects and the title of </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s work, &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">towards </i>24
Stills.&#8221; The mysterious &#8220;neutral children&#8221; lead in turn to the first word of
the last sentence, also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Neutral</i>. This
leads one last time to a mid-sentence hinge, albeit one marked with the most
modest mode of punctuation, a lowly comma. The post-hinge segment <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">but built</i> echoes the previous hard stop
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blurt</i>. This short prose piece
literally ends on a variant of rhyme. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading through this 49-word
paragraph, all these thoughts flicker rapidly through my head during the 25
seconds or so it takes me to read it &#8211; it takes far longer to jot them down
here. It wasn&#8217;t, in fact, until that eighth sentence that the shadow of Stein
popped up for me &#8211; &#8220;neutral children&#8221; just sounds like her. To another reader,
her presence might have been evident from the very first. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At this point in the
reading, two somewhat contradictory ideas are floating about in my head. One is
to recognize how carefully crafted this is. </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan clearly is in total control of his materials. The second, however,
is a lingering suspicion toward the larger project. I don&#8217;t yet have a good
enough concept of what he might be doing. Texts that lean too heavily on other
writers are something I don&#8217;t care for in avant or post-avant work. Regardless
of the source, it&#8217;s putting profound limits around the text. <span class="GramE">It&#8217;s</span>
why, for example, John Cage strikes me as at best a literary tourist, whereas
he is/was a real &amp; compelling composer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is, however, a perfectly
good strategy for any young poet trying to take on whatever might be going on
in the work of the source writer. Robert Duncan certainly had his Stein
imitations, for example, although they were not works he sought to save as part
of his mature oeuvre. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The next two sections of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;towards </i>24 Stills&#8221; proceed much as did
the first one, but when the reader turns the page, something akin to a new
world appears: six sections come into view, not one of which is in prose.
Unless the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">towards </i>aspect of the
title is, in fact, an </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ication
of excerpting &amp; such excerpting was done with the specific idea of setting
up the drama of the turned page here, it&#8217;s simply a happy accident<span class="GramE">.*</span>** But each of the six sections on these pages &amp; the
four others on the next two greatly expand the work&#8217;s sense of range, tone
&amp; play. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are images &#8211;
conceptual schemas, really &#8211; that continue throughout these pieces: around film
as projection of imagery, as something driven on a track, as a mode of marking.
Theater, television &amp; video are all introduced. It&#8217;s not that the text moves
from non-referential toward something akin to figuration, but rather that there
are veins throughout the work that rein in the range of possible meanings,
rather like a collage that takes all of its imagery from a related set of
journals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some of the sections work
very well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Drives
a stake, drives a wedge<br />
<span class="GramE">A</span> wedge, a stake<br />
into <br />
What it means to produce<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A train that will show<br />
The spectators themselves<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>And able to critique<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But others seem narrow,
suggesting that their justification as writing depends on their place within
the total project, rather than directly on what is at hand:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">With
infancy in his robes<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![if !supportLineBreakNewLine]&gt;<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![endif]&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Patches<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>tense garment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Disrobes<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Hello<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My
ghost<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">My</span> ghost<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Overall, I come away from
this </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t feeling unsettled. For one thing, even at the end
I&#8217;m uncertain if I&#8217;ve read the entire work or just 14 sections of something
larger+ (and, if it is the latter, where there really only 10 other sections
&amp;, if so, why weren&#8217;t they included here?). The theme, to call it <span class="GramE">that,</span> seems to me a structural device &amp;, as such, isn&#8217;t
compelling. But a lot of the writing here is excellent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Deming had some advantages &#8211;
the presentation of multiple works, for instance &#8211; that </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan does not have here. But I might have been more persuaded if I had
read 14 works that seemed thoroughly </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ependent &#8211; which is to say dependent on themselves &#8211;
rather than 14 that &#8220;<span class="SpellE">sorta</span>&#8221; go together. <span class="GramE">In that sense, the film schema in </span></span><st1:personname><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></span></st1:personname><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s text actually seems to me to
weaken the work overall rather than strengthen it.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The next time I see work by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan, I&#8217;m certain to start reading it. But where I know that I&#8217;ll read
Richard Deming&#8217;s poems when I see them next to their conclusion, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s will still have to convince me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan, it seems, is the author of one
1999 chapbook from Potes &amp; Poets entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sudden Miles</i>. He recently collaborated with Barbara Cole on a <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/rust/8/index">Rust Talks</a> event in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> on the subjects of video, video
games, porn, virtual reality &amp; related issues &#8211; suggesting that there is
more to this film schema than shows up in this text. He may be the same Thom </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan who graduated from Oberlin in
1999, but does not appear to be any of several professional musicians who show
up under that name in a search on Google, nor the one-time associate pastor of
St. Marks Church. I did that search <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after</i>
I wrote all of the above, largely because this is how I proceed with a poem I
find in a mag. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** With the
reiterated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dark </i>in the previous sentence,
it&#8217;s plausible that </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan intends for us hear the echo of William Stafford&#8217;s poem
&#8220;Traveling Through the Dark,&#8221; in &#8220;traveling through the dead throat,&#8221; but, if
so, there&#8217;s no other evidence for it. It remains as an echo, possibly
unintended. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*** But how
happy is it? One of the things that <span class="GramE">makes</span> this </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">t unsettling for me is the set of
expectations set up on the first page that are then undercut, but not
decisively redefined, by the next four. I wonder if it might not have been a
better strategy to see the prose amid the verse sections rather than to run
them all at the front, only to follow with the verse &#8211; something that always
bothers me about the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ese <span class="SpellE">haibun</span>
form, for example. See, for instance, Michael McClintock&#8217;s &#8220;The Face on the
Floor,&#8221; the first piece in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthology
of Days</i> (Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, No. 70) where a riveting
piece of prose is followed with three very <span class="SpellE">unriveting</span>
lines of poetry that feel &#8220;tacked on,&#8221; sort of a limp bow on an otherwise
bright package. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">+ This is
by no means a problem restricted to </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan&#8217;s text, nor necessarily a sign
of any problem in the writing. When I taught a graduate course in writing at </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">San Francisco</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">State</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> in 1981, I had students &#8220;read a
poem&#8221; aloud from Robert Grenier&#8217;s </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Oakland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (Tuumba Press, 1980) only to discover that the members of
this seminar &#8211; which included Jerry <span class="SpellE">Estrin</span>, Cole
Swenson, Susan Gevirtz &amp; Margaret Johnson &#8211; were almost uniformly unable to
tell when individual pieces began &amp; ended, even though many of them had
titles. The same assignment with Bruce Andrews&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonnets (Memento Mori)</i> (This Press, 1980) produced a similar
result, again in spite of titles &amp;, in this instance, a table of contents.
The question of a poem&#8217;s boundaries obviously is worth exploring </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">er. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, October 21, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I have mentioned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.temple.edu/chain/home.htm">Chain</a> </i>on several occasions
on this blog, for good reason &#8211; it is the premier hard copy poetry journal of
the day. My first <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2381448405">piece</a>
on September 11 touched a nerve in a way that hopefully has been productive.
Co-founder Juliana Spahr <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2381591973">responded</a>
to it on the 14<sup>th </sup>of September. Jena Osman, the other co-founder,
used the occasion of the First Festival of Literary Magazines in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to respond to these issues. Here is her talk:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
As a poet I have
long been interested in chance occurrences, in unpredictable sense created by
different languages meeting inside of a page-bound framework.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>My work has been informed by theater, in the
way that language performs in various contexts, in the relation of spectator to
stage and reader to page. I experiment with the collision of narrative and
anti-narrative strategies and take notice of the various registers of attention
that we bring to what&#8217;s before us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
I met Juliana while
I was a grad student at SUNY Buffalo. Some other younger poets in town when I
arrived included Peter Gizzi, Lew Daly, Pam Rehm and Liz Willis. We all had
quite various concerns, and I was interested in finding a way to create a
conversation through our work. At the end of my first year, I organized an
experiment called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lab Book</i> where
eight of us wrote poems and then each of us wrote responses to the poems
written by the other seven. The book that resulted began with a poem, followed
by the seven responses, then another poem, followed by seven responses, etc. I
was interested in the idea of writing as reading and reading as writing in
perpetual exchange.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Such forms of
exchange and investigation are crucial to my process as a writer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
A couple of years
later (in 1993), Juliana and I decided to start a magazine. I don&#8217;t remember
the exact moment when we made this decision, but we knew it was possible, there
was a beautifully simple access to funds, and we went ahead with it. For me,
the idea behind the first issue was something of an outgrowth of the
conversation begun in the lab-book experiment in that the structure allowed for
a diversity of content. As we said in the introduction to the first issue, we
weren&#8217;t interested in making a journal where the editor was &#8220;objective talent
scout&#8221; controlling the content; instead, we were interested in providing a
forum for conversation, where we couldn&#8217;t predict what would happen when the
various pieces were placed side by side.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Such uses of
procedural form are important to my process as a writer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
In the introduction
to the first issue of <i>Chain</i> we said &#8220;It is ironic that in order for
dialogue to take place, conversational limits must be set.&#8221; And so for each
issue there is a limit&#8212;a special topic&#8212;around which a large number of writers
and artists gather. Sometimes the gathering is cacophonous, sometimes eerily
synchronous. In my opinion, it&#8217;s often a source of delight and surprise. No
matter how much time I spend with the contents&#8212;reading, selecting, typesetting,
proofreading&#8212;I never have a real sense of what the issue is until it arrives
from the printer, bound between its covers. And even then I can never know it
completely because it changes every time I sit down to read it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
This is often the
way I feel about my poems.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Each of the
limits/special topics of the magazine come out of concerns that Juliana and I
are thoroughly engaged with in our own work: documentary poetics, hybrid
genres, procedural writing, visual poetics, different languages,
subverting/converting memoir form, performative forms, etc. Because we both
actively investigate the relation of forms of life (aesthetic, biological,
cultural) to forms of writing, these organizing structures make sense to us.
The work we publish feeds us, further informs us about these areas we&#8217;re
already in. In many ways the journal is an investigation into what we want to
know, an attempt to find some answers to questions we have.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
There are certain
pieces that we&#8217;ve published that continue to haunt my own writing. Looking back
at past issues, I&#8217;m amazed at how many have crept into my aesthetic
consciousness and stayed there. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
In a recent web-log
entry, Ron Silliman critiqued <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain</i>
for its policy of organizing authors alphabetically, rather than structuring
the book as a kind of narrative that could properly honor its writers. He
suggests that because of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain&#8217;s</i>
inclusivity, it lacks influence on the literary landscape&#8212;the birth of future
poets&#8212;and that the overall effect of the journal is one of muteness rather than
speech. He suggests that accident caused by alphabetic chance is perhaps of
less value than the deliberate and &#8220;heroic&#8221; arguments of past journals, and
that unlike <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Origin</i> (which was
responsible for making Blackburn and Zukofsky major figures on the literary
landscape), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Mountain Review</i>
(responsible for Creeley and Duncan), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caterpillar</i>
(which brought Antin, Rothenberg, Mac Low, Kelly, Joris, Palmer and Bernstein
onto the scene), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain</i> can not claim
such strong parenting skills because, well, who can name its progeny? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
My interest in
hybrid genres is due in part to a disinterest in the perpetuation of linear
heritage. Combinations, interruptions, complex conversations and crossings
over, provide much more appeal than following respectful and respected maps of
canon-building. Conversation is not for canonical heroes. Can you really
converse with an <span class="SpellE">unproblematized</span> construct? Or can
you only listen?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;m not the
only one who noticed in Silliman&#8217;s list of heroic editorial gestures the lack
of women&#8217;s names (although he did make a weak attempt to remedy it by claiming
that the magazine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">However</i> was
responsible for bringing Lorine Niedecker back into the world (but why was she
ever gone? and is that really what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">However</i>
is known for?).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Silliman is part of
the Language Poetry movement that informs much of what I do as a writer. And
what I take very seriously from the writings of the Language Poets is that
there is a value to reader activism, to not simply consuming, but creating
through the act of reading. And I bring this idea with me to the forms that I
use when writing poetry or when editing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain.
Chain</i> is not about &#8220;making&#8221; writers by publishing them in its pages
(although its tables of contents list many writers&#8212;established and emerging&#8212;<span class="GramE">whom</span> I believe to be of great significance). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain</i> is about providing a place for a
reader to engage with an idea&#8212;to think, to argue, to write in response. In
other words, it is putting the theory that informs my own writing as a poet
into practice in an editorial forum. Rather than what Silliman has called
&#8220;editorial muteness,&#8221; I believe that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain</i>
invites an animated conversation between reader and text that is generative in
its necessary unpredictability.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span class="GramE">Which
is also an invitation I hope my own poems deliver.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
In closing I&#8217;ll
quote once more from the introduction to the first issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain</i>, where it all began: &#8220;any printed
text is a gesture toward conversation; it&#8217;s a presentation that invites
response. We&#8217;re trying to create a forum that takes that invitation seriously,
that is not just going through the motions of what it means to instigate
response; it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">requires</i> continuation.&#8221;</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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