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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, February 06, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Unquestionably the most
ironic inclusion in the new issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14760851.html">Radical Society</a></i>
is Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian exile turned </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Louisiana</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> academic &amp; part of NPR&#8217;s decorative collection
of &#8220;quaint dialect&#8221; commentators alongside the likes of Bailey White. For
reasons that are understandable enough, Codrescu has always been an
anti-Communist &amp; resistant to the idea that would be shades of difference
between the likes of, say, Stalin &amp; western Marxists in general. To find
Codrescu in a journal that was issued initially under the banner <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Socialist Revolution</i> is itself an index
of exactly how much the world has transformed in the past thirty years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not that Codrescu can stop
himself from revisiting the past in introducing the work of Eugen Jebeleanu
(1911-1991), whom he characterizes as the &#8220;epic poet&#8221; of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s Communist period (1947-89). In Codrescu&#8217;s
narrative, Jebeleanu started as a true believer in Soviet bloc modernism.
Codrescu compares him with Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda &amp; <span class="SpellE">Yannis</span>
<span class="SpellE">Ritsos</span>, all of whom played important roles in their
own national literatures. However, as the Stalinist project decayed into &#8220;folk
kitsch,&#8221; Jebeleanu rebelled. In Codrescu&#8217;s words, &#8220;Jebeleanu woke up.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poetry we are offered in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Society</i> comes from
Jebeleanu&#8217;s later works, when he has become a lyric surrealist of a modern,
maybe even post-modern type. Vasco <span class="SpellE">Popa</span> &amp; <span class="SpellE">Tomaž</span> <span class="SpellE">Šalamun</span> are closer in
temperament &amp; style to the works that Mathew Zapruder has translated here
(and <a href="http://www.hypertxt.com/sh/no8/index.html">elsewhere</a> across
the web &#8211; Zapruder has been the key to Jebeleanu&#8217;s arrival in the West) than <span class="SpellE">Yevtushenko</span> or <span class="SpellE">Vosnesenski</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poems themselves are
okay but the question they raise for me is one of value with regards to the
context of language &amp; state. What does it mean to be a national figure as a
poet when the nation itself consists of just 22 million people? It&#8217;s a question
that bedevils any thoughtful writer, regardless of our proximity to the
imperial center. Twenty-two million people <span class="GramE">is</span> notably
fewer than the number who live in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Canada</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">, which itself has only two-thirds of the population
of </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">. The situation for any Canadian poet is in some ways
more complex, given their participation in at least two larger linguistic
literary traditions as well as their nearness to the heavy-handed hegemon along
their Southern rim. But these broader traditions mean that a writer like </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Steve McCaffery</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">George Bowering</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Michael Ondaatje or Nicole Brossard can reach &amp; have an impact far beyond
their borders without necessarily having to submit to the curiously alienating
process of translation, whereas the Romanian-writing Jebeleanu was constrained
by a literary community that did not exist significantly outside of his
country&#8217;s own borders. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Twenty-two million certainly
makes a nation if it so chooses. </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Romania</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s population today ranks 47<sup>th</sup>
among the 235 nations of the world, well ahead of </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Australia</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Greece</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">, though smaller than </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Uzbekistan</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> or </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tanzania</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> It&#8217;s twice the size of </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Pennsylvania</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">, maybe 1&#189; times the size of metropolitan </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">. This is precisely where questions of state &amp;
language on the one hand and the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2388090098">value
of the local</a> on the other flood one another. One poet becomes, in
Codrescu&#8217;s formulation (for which he credits Allen Ginsberg), the &#8220;epic poet&#8221;
of his nation, another is merely a </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> writer in a town that is itself wider &amp; more diverse than that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One Sunday last November, I
posted an <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385009080">email</a>
from Juliana Spahr in which she argues for a diversity of literatures:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I think it is crucial that we all not be scared of the
diversity of contemporary poetries. I think it is a great sign of health. I love
it. I like to think, and I think it might be true even, that right now, when I
am alive, right now there are more poetries or I have the possibility of
reading more poetries than humans at any other time. What a huge weird world of
poetries! I can't read it all. I admit it. <span class="GramE">But what a great
thing.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a
peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?,
things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers,
but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and
Nation language/Caribbean poets and pidgin/Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets
and etc. all have these arguments against <span class="GramE">standard</span>
English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet
the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost
opportunity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spahr&#8217;s complaint, which is
completely legit, seems to me the obverse face of this same coin. For these
poets to meet, to truly commingle &amp; communicate, there has been a commons
&amp; little magazines are never that. Either they are local, if not to a
region, then to an aesthetic, or else they are entirely shapeless. Neither
strategy can claim to solve the problem of the minority language writer exiled
within a city or state of another tongue. Neither can bring Jebeleanu&#8217;s poetry
to us without the intermediation of a Mathew Zapruder (aided in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Society</i> by <span class="SpellE">Radu</span>
<span class="SpellE">Ioanid</span>). Writers who inhabit more than one such world
&#8211; I&#8217;m thinking of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa as one example, but Edwin Torres could
just as easily serve as another &#8211; never do so abstractly. They are as specific
to their respective contexts, each one, as a human could be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s not clear what the role
of poetry will prove to be in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical
Society </i>over time<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> The history of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Socialist Review</i> doesn&#8217;t necessarily
auger well. The journal has had what can only be characterized as a tortured
relationship to culture over the decades.* <span class="GramE">The</span>
presence of so much creative work in the first issue of the new regime is
noteworthy, but so is the somewhat scatter-gun nature of its aesthetics.
Hirschman&#8217;s <span class="SpellE">Depestre</span> and Codrescu&#8217;s Jebeleanu fall
into the category of a late modernism of the margins. </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Charles Bernstein</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; <span class="SpellE">Katha</span> <span class="SpellE">Pollitt</span> may have attended Harvard at the same time, but
they represent radically divergent poetics. &amp; only Sikelianos offers a
sample of what writing might be like by anybody under the age of 50. <span class="GramE">Samples of diverse poetics presented precisely as that comes closer
to a mode of literary tourism** than it does to the commons for which Spahr
&amp; I yearn alike.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Where is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Society </i>heading? We shall see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Thus the
journal may have published </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;">na <span class="SpellE">Haraway&#8217;s</span> &#8220;Manifesto for
Cyborgs,&#8221; but it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">twice </i>&#8211; several
years apart &#8211; failed to accept Samuel R. <span class="SpellE">Delany&#8217;s</span>
classic response to <span class="SpellE">Haraway</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Thus it
strikes me -- &amp; the Sikelianos piece I looked at yesterday is what really
drove this home &#8211; as being poetry for people who don&#8217;t read poetry, that
curious genre. But does that expand the audience for poetry or merely absolve
these non-readers from ever having to confront all of poetry&#8217;s gloriously
incommensurate difficulties?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, February 05, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading Eleni Sikelianos&#8217;
poem, an excerpt from a longer text entitled &#8220;</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">,&#8221; in the new issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14760851.html">Radical
Society</a></i>, I had a strange experience. I felt the presence of <a href="http://mcclure-manzarek.com/mcclure.html">Michael McClure</a>. Not the
McClure of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghost <span class="SpellE">Tantras</span>,
</i>the plays or the ecstatic howls of the should-have-been ineffable, but
rather the cosmological McClure, the PBS pop science McClure, casting into
centered texts meditations based on things he&#8217;s seen or read about the natural
world in the popular media. For example, this piece, entitled &#8220;For the Death of
100 Whales&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Hung <span class="SpellE">midsea</span>
<br />
<span class="GramE">Like</span> a boat mid-air <br />
The liners boiled their pastures: <br />
The liners of flesh, <br />
The Arctic steamers <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Brains the size of a teacup <br />
Mouths the size of a door <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The sleek wolves <br />
Mowers and reapers of sea <span class="SpellE">kine</span>.</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <br />
<span class="GramE">THE GIANT TADPOLES <br />
(Meat their algae) <br />
<span class="SpellE">Lept</span> <br />
Like sheep or children.</span> <br />
Shot from the sea's bore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Turned and twisted <br />
(Goya!!) <br />
<span class="GramE">Flung blood and sperm.</span> <br />
<span class="GramE">Incense.</span> <br />
Gnashed at their tails and brothers <br />
Cursed Christ of mammals, <br />
Snapped at the sun, <br />
Ran for the Sea's floor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Goya! Goya! <br />
Oh Lawrence <br />
No angels dance those bridges. <br />
OH GUN! OH BOW! <br />
There are no churches in the waves, <br />
No holiness, <br />
No passages or crossings <br />
<span class="GramE">From</span> the beasts' wet shore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This poem, which McClure
read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955 that helped to spark the so-called Beat
Revolution &#8211; &amp; not co-incidentally first pointed out to the world at large
that </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> was as vital a center for American letters as </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; is predicated on an April 1954 story in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time </i>magazine about, <a href="http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&amp;d/mcclure/mcclurea.htm">in McClure&#8217;s
own words</a>, <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;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">seventy-</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">nine
bored American <span class="SpellE">G.I.s</span> stationed at a NATO base in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Iceland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers,
armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales
to death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Although this is not the
kind of poem that McClure is typically represented by in the anthologies, it is
a type of poem that he has written his entire life. Its value lies not in
McClure&#8217;s research &#8211; none is involved &#8211; but rather in the way he imbues the
topic with emotion &amp; narrative figuration. In a sense, this is the opposite
of the &#8220;research poem,&#8221; whether of the Pound-Olson variation with their
unintentional parodies of the scholar fumbling around in the archives or of the
more journalistic &#8220;investigative poetry&#8221; approach advocated in recent decades
by Ed Sanders. Another poet who literally made use of PBS and other mainstream
media not only for ideas, but for layers of content thus displayed, was Larry
Eigner. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I was growing up as a
poet in the 1970s, I used to hear other writers comment negatively &#8211; sometimes
emphatically so &#8211; about this side of McClure&#8217;s poetry, as though it were a kind
of debased product &amp; that, in working from sources in everyday media,
McClure was essentially revealing a kind of laziness that was at the heart of
his project, not unlike the equally scandalous process of allowing other people
type up his holographic manuscripts &amp; perform what in the age of the
typewriter was not an inconsequential function: the centering of his lines.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Somewhere along the line I
decided that this was a bad rap. In an age where Andy Warhol &amp; others &#8211;
this was still pre-Jeff Koons &#8211; were utilizing assistants to help construct the
work of art*, any insistence on doing your own research struck me as a kind
defensive measure on the part of writers who felt that, if such aid &amp;
delegation were possible, then perhaps readers might not appropriately
appreciate their own devotion to all the ancillary tasks that might envelop the
act of writing. The work that struck me as the decisive argument for the
permissibility of appropriated materials as a source for literature was <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/reznikoff/">Charles Reznikoff&#8217;s</a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Testimony. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The primary differences
between Reznikoff&#8217;s approach &amp; McClure&#8217;s are (1) Reznikoff&#8217;s focus was the
social while McClure has been more drawn to the natural world &amp; (2)
Reznikoff&#8217;s approach to these materials has been one of minimal overt
commentary, almost a deadpan transparency, while McClure&#8217;s has been one of a
drum-beating &amp; hollering display of empathy. Empathy, of course, has ever
been &#8220;<span class="SpellE">uncool</span>&#8221; &amp; &#8220;<span class="SpellE">unhip</span>&#8221;
&amp; I suspect McClure had to deal with that prejudice back in the 1950s every
bit as much as in the 1970s &amp; &#8216;80s<span class="GramE">.*</span>* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sikelianos&#8217; poem skips the
drum-beating &amp; ALL CAPS HOLLERING, but in fact is an act of empathic
inhabitation of a milieu inhabitable today only in the imagination: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">There
was still the problem<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the mystery of regenerative forces here on Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">My
early </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">might</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> have been prowlers &amp; plunderers, lover of the
lower orders of intelligence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">They
might have had a fortunate notes or eyes or horns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> surprising size. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>They
were<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">4-handed
animals or omnivorous quadrupeds or<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">My
early Californians might have been 8-feet tall stomping around in the glacial
ice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Ages-extinct
fires nearly tiny dragon-headed lakes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Chasing
the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">n
camel, chewing the fat fireside &amp; touching up a wooly mammoth,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">mini-horses</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">, imitation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">bison</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> four times the weight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> buffaloes, ground sloths the size of tanks,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">giant</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> shining armadillo roll over, silver<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">wheels</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> crushing tender </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">grasse</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">s,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Edentata
belonging to the (inhabited) Earth,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">edacious</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> at the tooth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> Time, nibbling some sweet thing, fiery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Hymenoptera
edulcorated by their history with men<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Shades of Forrest </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Gander</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">! This text itself has been edulcorated &#8211; that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">c</i> can be pronounced either hard or soft
according to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i> &#8211; by
polysyllables a-babble. What we have here &#8211;the quotation above constitutes
maybe one-fifth of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Society</i>
excerpt &#8211; is poem as nature museum diorama. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Writing of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.coffeehousepress.org/earliestworlds.asp">Earliest Worlds</a> </i>last
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2381665162">September</a>,
I noted how Sikelianos&#8217; work there included lines that were &#8220;among the most
thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heard</i> (&amp;, not coincidentally, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>) since Charles Olson was a young man.&#8221; Almost by its nature
&amp; certainly by its genre, &#8220;</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; is a more relaxed piece of writing. It&#8217;s probably
accessible to a broader range of readers, albeit at the cost being less
exhilarating to that core <span class="GramE">who&#8217;ve</span> seen what Sikelianos
at her most intense can do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Which
brings my back to Michael McClure &amp; the question of choices in writing.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The very qualities &#8211; empathy &amp; narrative
figuration &#8211; that I suspect enabled the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical
Society </i>editorial board to include this work in the first issue of the
journal&#8217;s new life are those which are most apt to divide poetry&#8217;s primary
group of readers, who may well find it all too &#8220;inauthentic.&#8221; Since this is an
excerpt, it will be interesting to see how &#8220;</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; develops &amp; also how it&#8217;s received. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* If Sol <span class="SpellE">Lewitt</span> actually drew all those lines on art museum walls
himself, he&#8217;d end up in the <a href="http://www.avam.org/">American Visionary
Art Museum</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Thus,
for example, I don&#8217;t recall ever having seen an article that fully explored
what I take to be McClure&#8217;s greatest contribution to poetry &#8211; his exquisite
sense of the pacing of detail. It&#8217;s a side of his writing that shows up most
sharply delineated in the cosmology poems. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, February 04, 2003</span></h2>

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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14760851.html">Radical Society</a>
</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">is here. Its very first issue is
labeled Vol. 29, No. 1, because the journal is in fact a reinvention, a
resurrection of the old <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Socialist Review,
</i>whose executive editor I was from 1986 until 1989*, originally founded
under the name <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Socialist Revolution</i>
in 1970. You could, if you wished, trace the journal back further to a split in
the editorial board of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Studies on the
Left</i> in the 1960s, when one faction wanted to make that journal the
official publication of what was then presumed to be a potentially successful
revolutionary party that was seen to be forming in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Socialist Review</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> found a good deal of its liveliness &amp; an even larger portion of its
own internal strains &amp; turmoil in having not one, but two editorial
collectives, geographically distant, each with its own demographic, politics
&amp; culture. That the journal survived as long as it did under the
stewardship of dueling collectives was itself a miracle, a marriage born to
some degree out of mutual convenience. Originally founded by a group centered
(and largely funded) by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Studies on the
Left </i>veteran James Weinstein (who would later create &amp; publish <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In These Times</i>), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SR,</i> as everyone seemed to call the journal, originally was the
project of a group of folks in the San Francisco Bay Area who had gone through
the 1960s together. Some were out of school &amp; working as political
activists; others had gone on to grad school. All shared the perception that
the left in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> suffered from a lack of theoretical understanding.
When three of the first-editorial-generation grad students all got jobs in the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Boston</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> area, a second editorial collective was started**.
Very soon, one collective had evolved entirely into tenured academics, while
the other consisted of (generally younger &amp; poorer) grad students &amp;
activists. While the tension between the two collectives was sometimes unbelievable,
the Boston&#8217;s group economic focus proved a useful balance to the West Coast
collective, which periodically introduced some extraordinary work, perhaps most
notably </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">na <span class="SpellE">Haraway&#8217;s</span> &#8220;Manifest for
Cyborgs.&#8221;*** <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">SR </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">very
much reflected the history &amp; fate of the &#8216;60s generation up until the early
1990s, when an attempt to &#8220;pass the baton&#8221; to a younger cohort ran into
difficulties, the collectives seemed to fall apart, as did a distribution deal
with Duke University Press. Now <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical
Society</i> has emerged with a mostly new collective &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SR </i>veterans Barbara Epstein &amp; Howard <span class="SpellE">Winant</span>
on the new editorial board &#8211; the term &#8220;collective&#8221; seems to have been retired &#8211;
as are, among others, <span class="SpellE">Kira</span> Brunner, a former editor
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dissent</i> &amp; co-editor of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Killing Fields</i>; Peter Marcuse,
an urban planning professor from Columbia; Vanessa Mobley of New Republic
Books; fiction writer Rachel Neumann; <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~gs228/writing/PropDiss602.doc">Greg <span class="SpellE">Smithsimon</span></a>, a grad student at Columbia; <span class="SpellE">Daraka</span> Larimer-Hall, organizer for the Young Democratic
Socialists (the youth organization of Democratic Socialists of America); Ellen
Willis, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No More Nice Girls</i>
who teaches communications at NYU; and </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Laura</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span class="SpellE">Secor</span> of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boston Globe.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Radical Society</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> continues <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SR&#8217;s</i> tradition of
left contrarianism by making its big article in its first issue Ellen Willis&#8217;
&#8220;Why I am not for Peace.&#8221; While hardly an endorsement of George W&#8217;s cowboy
imperialism, Willis does outline the case from a position not far removed from
the one being made these days by <span class="SpellE">Salman</span> Rushdie, that
Hussein must be removed to end the torment of the Iraqi people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is followed a column in
which four commentators respond to a blurb from U.S. Deputy Secretary of
Defense, Paul <span class="SpellE">Wolfowitz</span>. As interesting as the
responses are the respondents: journalist <span class="SpellE">Abid</span> <span class="SpellE">Aslam</span>, psychoanalyst George <span class="SpellE">Saki</span>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nation </i>columnist <span class="SpellE">Katha</span>
<span class="SpellE">Pollitt</span> &amp; poet </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Charles Bernstein</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, who offers up a theory of <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spf</i></span></span> &#8211;
surreptitious policy factor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nor is Bernstein the only
poet to show up in this issue. &#8220;Café <span class="SpellE">Europa</span>&#8221; is a
talking piece given by David Antin, presented here as an essay with curious
formatting. There is a sizeable selection of works by </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s epic poet <span class="SpellE">Eugen</span> <span class="SpellE">Jebeleanu</span>, with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu. There
is a full-page poem, &#8220;A Rainbow for the Christian West,&#8221; by René <span class="SpellE">Depestre</span>, translated by Jack Hirschman. And finally, there
is a two-page excerpt from a poem entitled &#8220;</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">California</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">,&#8221; written by Eleni <span class="SpellE">Silelianos</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* I stayed on
the West Coast editorial collective until the pressures of a difficult twin
pregnancy swallowed up what little time &amp; energy I had available in late
1991.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** There
was briefly an attempt to create a third collective in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">, but it failed to take root.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*** <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.booksense.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=0860915247">Unfinished
Business: 20 Years of the Socialist Review</a>, </i>published by Verso, is an
excellent collection of pieces reflecting the perspective of both collectives (I
write this as a co-editor of the volume). Even the blurbs on the back of the
paperback reflect the tension between the two: <span class="SpellE">Noam</span>
Chomsky weighing in for the Boston Collective, <span class="SpellE">Gayatri</span>
<span class="SpellE">Chakravorty</span> <span class="SpellE">Spivak</span> for the
West Coast.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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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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