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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, September 09, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">There is an
interesting image in Barbara Guest&#8217;s excellent biography of Hilda Doolittle, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herself Defined</i>, of imagism as a
movement after Ezra Pound had moved on to join Wyndham Lewis in declaring
Vorticism. The image Guest leaves the reader with is one of a lone major <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Imagiste</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>H.D., a second-but-inferior
entrepreneurial huckster in Amy Lowell, and a handful of second-tier poets of
the likes of John Gould Fletcher and Richard <span class="SpellE">Aldington</span>,
having to carry on with no clear sense of direction. Guest outlines the ways in
which the Imagism of these latter poets was invariably compromised &#8211; either too
Georgian or just too muddled. The implication is that once Pound turned his
attention elsewhere, Imagism lost its &#8220;head.&#8221; Ultimately, and Guest is fairly
explicit about this, there would be only one &#8220;true&#8221; Imagist: H.D. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">Which
opens, for me, the deeper question of what an &#8211;ism can possibly be. The idea of
poetry organized in some fashion around a common purpose necessarily implies
the possibility of shared motives. That&#8217;s a concept that comes more directly
from French painting (&amp; secondarily French symbolist poetry) than it does
the tradition of Anglo-American letters. Still there are sporadic foretastes,
including the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century squabbling between the Young
Americans and the anglophiles of the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">School</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">Quietude</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">. Underlying this concept is some
sense of how a &#8220;common purpose&#8221; might be characterized. Does it require, for
example, a defining statement of principles &#8211; a manifesto for want of a better
term &#8211; and the adoption of a name? Guest is clear that Pound, for example, was
less of a <span class="SpellE">namer</span> of movements than he was an
appropriator of names, such as T.E. Hume&#8217;s imagism or Lewis&#8217; Vorticism. Even
Objectivism, although Guest doesn&#8217;t mention it, might be described in these
same terms &#8211; a name &amp; an accompanying statement of principles, primarily
put forward (at least in 1932) for the purposes of marketing. The need thus was
external to the poetry, indeed was imposed on the poets by Zukofsky only at the
insistence of Harriet Monroe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">An &#8211;ism of
this order strikes me as being essentially hollow, aimed less at the poets than
at some externalized audience. Contrast this with, for example, the most
pronounced ism of the 1950s, Projectivism. While Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Duncan
&amp; Sorrentino all wrote substantive works of critical writing &#8211; and some of
Olson&#8217;s in particular embody the rhetoric of a manifesto &#8211; they&#8217;re really aimed
at one another. What we are reading in their works is much more of an internal
discussion &#8211; they&#8217;re goading one another to write better &amp; to take greater
chances in their work. One sees this also, I think, in the relatively few
critical works to emerge from the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s &#8220;Personism&#8221;) or the
so-called Beat Scene (primarily Kerouac&#8217;s statements on prosody &amp;
spontaneous writing). Indeed, the Projectivists never once in their writings
ever called themselves by that name &amp; the Beats were accorded that moniker
by a </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;"> gossip columnist, Herb Caen. &#8220;Personism,&#8221; the only
true &#8211;ism of that decade, employed that term strictly as a joke. Even the term </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">, which was employed only by its
second generation, was used half as a joke. While the marketing aspect of a
group brand was not altogether absent with the NY School, any more than it was
with the <span class="GramE">Beats,</span> the focus was much more decisively
around the question of internal discourse. The &#8211;isms of the 1950s were thus
more communities in their orientation than the ones of the teens or the 1930s.
And, no surprise, it was this aspect of these &#8220;movements&#8221; that I think appealed
most to the poets who came to be known in the 1970s as language poets.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt;">It&#8217;s not
that Pound wasn&#8217;t interested in communicating with other poets, but his rather
frenetic social organizing never moved toward a community because that was
never its purpose. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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at
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, April 23, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Dale Smith asked me if I had
any theories why &#8220;the day book, dated poems and journals became so important&#8221;
to the New Americans. It&#8217;s a good question &amp; especially fortuitous that Dale
thought to include dated poems as an element in the sequence. What follows
isn&#8217;t an answer so much as a series notes that I would follow up if I were to
try to develop this line of thinking further. But I see the concern for the
daily, or however you want to characterize it, as a specific moment in a larger
sweep of changes within the poem &#8211; one that begins in the 19<sup>th</sup>
century and which continues onward well after the New Americans discovered
their own versions of <span class=SpellE>FiloFax</span> and the Day-Timer.<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span>For example, one immediate beneficiary of
this phenomenon was, I would argue, Clark Coolidge, particularly with his early
long poems <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Polaroid </i>&amp; <span
class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Maintains</i>.* Let me explain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The issue as I see it has to
do with what the poem is about. <span class=GramE>Or, perhaps more accurately,
with the problem of <span class=SpellE>aboutness</span>.</span> It&#8217;s worth
noting that the very same 1802 <a
href="http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/lbprose.html#appendix">Preface
to Lyrical Ballads</a> that initiates, for English, the discussion of the role
of speech in poetry &#8211; and which anticipates the prose poem** &#8211; also opens the
question of what poetry should be about:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>It has
been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be
mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day;
it is this, that the feel therein developed gives importance to the action and
situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The word <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>feeling </i>no doubt serves crudely as an
umbrella category for a wide range of meaning effects. Yet the distinction
being drawn between poems that proceed from meaning &amp; those for which
meaning is imposed from the outside remains a fairly reliable demarcation
between all the various alternative traditions on the one hand, which can trace
their roots back to Wordsworth, Coleridge &amp; Blake, and the all various
schools of quietude that, to this day, attempt to perpetuate the 18<sup>th</sup>
century in verse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This impulse arrives in
America somewhat over a half century later in the twin guises of Whitman, whose
cumulative project <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Leaves of Grass</i> to
this day challenges our definition of the book, and Dickinson with all her
untitled poems. Not that, for any of these writers, the move away from
meaning-giving master narratives was accomplished either entirely or all at
once. One sees the same struggle repeated over &amp; again throughout the 20<sup>th</sup>
century. The Pound of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mawberly </i>&#8211; the
Pound begrudgingly acknowledged by the American school of quietude &#8211; versus the
Pound of <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cantos.</i> Yet one can play this same
scenario this way: Pound&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos </i>(&amp;/or
WCW&#8217;s </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Paterson</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>) vs. Zukofsky&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A.&#8221;
</i>&amp; one could play different sections of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>off one another likewise.*** Stein, living in a nation in which
Lautréamont &amp; Rimbaud had already moved at least as far as Zukofsky by the
1870s, never had trouble with this issue. She got it, day one &#8211; which is why,
in <span class=GramE>part,</span> it took so long for her to be incorporated
&#8220;seriously&#8221; into American literature. More than a few parallels might be drawn
to Joyce, whose <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses</i> has often
been interpreted as a &#8220;making heroic&#8221; of a single day of plebian life, but
might just as easily be read the other way around, as a trenchant satire on the
nature of heroic narrative. And whose wake could not be misread in such terms &#8211;
its narrative dimension is at best a game.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This issue of <span
class=SpellE>aboutness</span> had been roiling around in unfinished, incomplete
modes for nearly a century by the time the New Americans show up in the early
1950s. If it&#8217;s most often visible in the large undertakings of the major
modernists, it&#8217;s also often there in a deeply conflicted way. Thus Crane&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Bridge </i>can be read only as an
extreme of the problem, not radically dissimilar from, say, <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos, <span class=GramE>The</span> </i></span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Waste</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i
 style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'> </span></i><st1:PlaceType><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Land</span></i></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial'>or the later </span><st1:City><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Paterson</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>. </span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Thus H.D. uses Grecian images &amp; themes to &#8220;write
about nothing&#8221; almost as insistently as Stein, but in such a way as to appeal
constantly to a certain readerly nostalgia. With the New Americans, however,
several now elements come into play more or less simultaneously:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Olson&#8217;s interest the poem as documentation of the
thinking process<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Kerouac&#8217;s interest in the poem as documentation of
the writing process<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Asian influences, at first through Rexroth &amp;
later Snyder &amp; Whalen, introducing a tradition in which various diary-modes
had long existed<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>An interest in modernist literary diaries through
Duncan (<span class=SpellE>Anaïs</span> <span class=SpellE>Nin</span>) and the
NY School (Ned Rorem)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The impact of the late stages of Pound&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos</i> &amp; Pound&#8217;s life, the latter in
particular demonstrating all too clearly why a master narrative is invariably a
totalitarian one <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A visible critique of ego beginning to show up in
music, from Cage&#8217;s uses of chance to Harry <span class=SpellE>Partch&#8217;s</span>
appropriation of hobo graffiti for texts<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The poem of dailiness
becomes the perfect &#8211; if temporary &#8211; expression of this convergence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Frank O&#8217;Hara first uses a
date to title a poem on </span><st1:date Year="1952" Day="26" Month="10"><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>October 26, 1952</span></st1:date><span
style='font-family:Arial'> &#8211; the title even gives the hour &#8220;</span><st1:time
Minute="30" Hour="10"><span style='font-family:Arial'>10:30 O&#8217;clock</span></st1:time><span
style='font-family:Arial'>.&#8221; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> follows suit starting with some of his Stein
imitations in 1953. Whalen does it in 1957. Olson, whose epistolary mode of
public letters in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus</i> could be
read as an alternate model &#8211; one to which </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> was at least partially drawn &#8211; doesn&#8217;t use a date in
the title of a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus</i> until the very
end of &#8217;59. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The journal consolidates
this interest. The first instance I can recall of a New American project that proposed
itself explicitly as a journal, thus acknowledging that form as such, was Ted <span
class=SpellE>Enslin&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New Sharon&#8217;s
Prospect and Journals,</i> published as a special issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal+ </i>in 1966. <span class=SpellE>Enslin&#8217;s</span> work
linked both prose &amp; verse. As his later long poems, really meditations on
the possibility of the line, would make evident &#8211; Enslin, something of a late
comer among the New Americans, arrived at a point in his writing where any
interest in a master narrative, an overarching meaning into which all other meanings
roll up, was simply of no interest. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The journal presents a model
for writing that borders on, if not always fully engages in, plotlessness in a
format that readers will inherently recognize. That is, I <span class=GramE>think,</span>
both its strength &amp; its curse. That&#8217;s also why it passed through a late
phase of the New American movement rather in the manner of a flash flood. And
why the logical next step belongs to Clark Coolidge, moving writing to a point
where the question of self-actualizing meaning suddenly becomes <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the</i> issue for form. Interestingly, </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'>, whose published journals begin in 1967, as well as Coolidge, then
writing much more like a young Phil Whalen, appeared in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal</i> immediately prior to <span class=SpellE>Enslin&#8217;s</span>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Sharon</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s Prospect
and Journals. </span></i><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

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

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* A comic
take on the phenomenon of numbering in titles can be seen in </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Kit Robinson</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s newest book, </span><st1:time
Hour="9" Minute="45"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
 style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>9:45</span></i></st1:time><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:
Arial'>,</span></i><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in which
every poem has some form of numbering system for a title. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>*<span
class=GramE>* &#8221;</span>It may safely be affirmed, that there neither is, not can
be any <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>essential</i> difference between
the language of prose and metrical composition.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>*** Eliot&#8217;s
stock among the quietus set fell demonstrably after the publication of the
drafts of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Waste Land </i>in which it
became clear that &#8211; if you could excise all of &#8220;Gerontion&#8221; &amp; still yield
the larger text &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>TWL </i>was not nearly
so committed to any master narrative at all, but functioned rather as a series
of inspired riffs <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>+ Easily the
most under-documented, under-acknowledged little magazine of the 1960s. It was
the model for <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar</i>
,</span> for example. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s <span
class=GramE>Journal <span style='font-style:normal'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>came</span></span></i> about, as did <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Big Table </i>in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Chicago</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, after a campus magazine in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Oregon</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was shut down for printing the
Beats. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal&#8217;s</i> editors
were James Koller, Edward van Aelstyn &amp; William Wroth.<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, March 14, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Yesterday, Matthew Zapruder
made some comments in his email here that are worth examining in greater depth,
both for what they say and what they presume. The context you will recall was
some poetry by Noah Eli Gordon that was rejected from a poetry reading being
staged in opposition to the impending war on </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. This was not a general all-purpose rally of the
sort one gets in </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Central Park</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, on the Mall in DC or marching up </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Market Street</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span
style='font-family:Arial'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> &#8211; it was a poetry reading. The people coming to it
were, presumably, anticipating the presence of poetry. So when the organizers
of the event rejected some poetry on the grounds of difficulty, I questioned
their judgment. The poem, in point of fact, was not terribly difficult, but
what if it had been? Would that have made a difference? For Zapruder, whose
work as a translator <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2388644351">I&#8217;ve
noted</a> with approval here before, it does make a difference. Thus he asks:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Are Ashbery's &quot;Leaving <span class=SpellE>Atocha</span>
Station,&quot; or Mina Loy, or Shakespeare's sonnets for that matter, as easily
<span class=SpellE>apprehendible</span> on first reading as let's say Philip
Larkin or Charles Simic? I'm not talking about the further and endless levels
of complexity in a good poem, regardless of its surface. <span class=GramE>Just
its surface.</span> A poem does have a surface, doesn't it?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is
willing to grant that the notion of &quot;difficulty&quot; has any place at all
in poetry. That's an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and
elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that
reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought
that Noah's poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>It&#8217;s the belief in that
distinction I want to question. Not because I want to bludgeon this particular
event into the ground, but rather because a decision predicated upon that distinction
stands as a metonym for a wider range of behavior that occur in &amp; around
poetry in this society. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>It&#8217;s a distinction that
underlay a decision by one post-New American writer I know over a decade ago to
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i> recommend Robert Grenier for the
short list for a teaching position at his school, a state university. This
writer not only fully understood Grenier&#8217;s reputation among his peers as a
poet, but also Grenier&#8217;s reputation as an innovative, engaged <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2387951724">teacher</a>
in the classroom. &#8220;I just cannot bring myself to deal with the backlash,&#8221; is,
in essence if not in words, how he explained his decision to me at the time, &#8220;<span
class=GramE>if</span> I recommend somebody whose most important work is a box.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I could replicate other
examples of this same sort of decision-making all across the continent with
respect to jobs, to publications, to grants, the entire gamut of what constitutes
the literary life. At one level, this is a type of thinking &amp; acting with
which Whitman had to contend. Certainly the growth of bureaucratic institutions
in the wake of the Second World War, as the American post-secondary education
system rapidly expanded toward what it is today, gave full reign to precisely
the sorts of decisions that might be made around variants of this particular
distinction. The first volume of Hank Lazer&#8217;s excellent critical work, <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-1264-7">Opposing
Poetries</a>, </i>documents this phenomenon intelligently &amp; carefully. Jed <span
class=SpellE>Rasula&#8217;s</span> <a name="OLE_LINK1"></a><a
href="http://bookstore.ncte.org/default.asp?id_product=3044"><span
style='mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK1'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>American
Poetry Wax Museum</i></span><span style='mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK1'></span></a><span
style='mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK1'> </span>does likewise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The distinction is not about
difficulty versus simplicity &#8211; although that is one form that this question can
take &#8211; nor is it about surface versus depth, nor even intelligibility versus
whatever the opposite of intelligibility might be. Rather it is a distinction
that has to do with expectation, the expectation of what is possible. It&#8217;s a
distinction between what I &#8211; or anyone &#8211; already know and what I might now
confront. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The school of quietude is
almost entirely predicated on a pathological desire to avoid just this
confrontation. Indeed<a href="http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1960/p1969303.htm">,
as Edgar Allen Poe observed</a> when he first coined that phrase to describe
the very same tradition that persists to this day, that is why this school is
so very quiet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Imagine the life experiences
of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading 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'> the year 2003. This person lives in a society in
which the Talking Heads had a hit record singing the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>zaum </i>poetry of Hugo Ball in 1977. The most surreal songs of Bob
Dylan were released &#8211; and not on any <span class=GramE>indy</span> label &#8211; some
36 years ago. Eminem crams in more social observation into any given quatrain
than some Pulitzer poets have managed in their entire careers. Ditto
songwriters like Townes Van Zandt or Dave Carter, to pick on a completely
different musical genre, or groups like Public Enemy &amp; NWA. And Van Zandt
&amp; Carter are both dead, and those rap groups already consigned to the
remainder bins of history. Or consider, for that matter, Prince, another golden
oldie who managed a career without the benefit of a word for a name for several
years. The most popular motion picture of the past two years had substantial
portions of dialog spoken (with subtitles) in <span class=SpellE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Elvish</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>. </i>To pick another medium altogether, television, the audience
coming to this reading will have had everything from the close attention to the
spoken that is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Buffy</i>, to the
narrative ambiguities &#8211; including the backwards speaking dwarf* &#8211; of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Twin Peaks</i> to the multiple layers of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Max Headroom</i>, all in the range of recent
references as they gather to hear somebody read a poem. This is in 2003, 172
years after the first of Aloysius Bertrand&#8217;s prose poems. <span class=GramE>Over
a century after Rimbaud &amp; Lautréamont.</span> Forty-seven years after Allen
Ginsberg published <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl, </i>a book so
obscure that it made him a millionaire. All of the above, up to &amp; including
the Vampire Slayer, require at least as much sophistication in communication
skills on the part of their various audiences as the poem submitted by Noah Eli
Gordon. And when we consider the number &amp; kinds of discourses that occur
simultaneously on a single screen of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>CNN&#8217;s
Headline News</i> channel &#8211; let alone consider the signage visible at any
instant as we walk or drive down any commercial street in America &#8211; we see that
it is the surface of the univocal poem (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>yes,
Matthew, there are surfaces<span class=GramE>) <span style='font-style:normal'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>that</span></span></i> is the deviant
experience. Whether or not we approve or disapprove is entirely another matter
&#8211; but the one-dimensional surface profoundly is the exception to our experience
of language, not the rule. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In this context, which is an
ordinary context for any poetry reading 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'>, would &#8220;Leaving <span class=SpellE>Atocha</span>
Station&#8221; be a complex experience? Would Mina Loy? I think the answer is
patently obvious: only for readers for whom the definition of poetry has
somehow become so constrained that it can only mean certain things. In fact,
this does not appear to be the case for ordinary readers, those who come to the
experience with no prior expectation, with no need to automatically toggle between
&#8220;right&#8221; &amp; &#8220;wrong,&#8221; easy &amp; hard. Those readers &#8211; especially those with
no poetry experience whatsoever &#8211; will associate what they hear with what they
already know from other experiences of language &amp; art in their lives. And
they have plenty of adequate options. To reiterate something I&#8217;ve written on
this blog more than once already, this is what underlies </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Kit Robinson</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s claim that language poetry is difficult <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only</i> for certain types of graduate
students. That&#8217;s not a witty rejoinder &#8211; it&#8217;s the literal truth. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>A few years ago, my sons,
who were five at the time, got into the great puzzle books of <a
href="http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/base.htm">Graeme Base</a>, and asked me
if adults had puzzle books or books that were games as well. So we read together
all of Tom Philips&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.rosacordis.com/humument/humument.html">A <span class=SpellE>Humument</span></a></i>
and then we read the first 80 or so pages of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><a href="http://www.trentu.ca/jjoyce/">Finnegans Wake</a>. </i>This morning,
six years later, one of my boys asked me &#8220;What was the other name of Finnegan
besides Everybody?&#8221; <span class=GramE>&#8220;Humphrey Clinker <span class=SpellE>Earwicker</span>?&#8221;</span>
I asked in reply. &#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s it,&#8221; he said. <span class=GramE>Which is not
such a bad retention level that many years later.</span> While my kids didn&#8217;t
catch all (or maybe even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any</i>) of the
bawdy references in either work, neither book when read aloud can honestly be
said to be too difficult for kindergartners. That doesn&#8217;t mean that the <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Wake</i> necessarily works as a book &#8211; I
think that Joyce&#8217;s philological approach to language led him astray &#8211; but its
reputed difficulty is not a difficulty of the text itself but rather of the
social context into which works such as this have been integrated &#8211; or, more
accurately, marginalized &#8211; in our society. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Another example of how
people who aren&#8217;t readers read poetry. Seven years ago, I discovered a pair of
siblings I had not known that I had. Both live in the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Charleston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> area where my half-sister works as a lay counselor
in a Baptist church &amp; my half-brother tends lawns for a living. My
half-brother had one semester at Clemson when he got out of high school, but
gave it up to <span class=GramE>work</span> on shrimp boats until he started to
have kids &#8211; that is the bulk of their post-secondary education. In the process
of getting to know these two very sweet people, I sent them some of my books.
Later, when I traveled down to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Charleston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> to actually meet them in person, I listened as my
half-brother explained my poetry to his sister as reminding him of some
gardening courses he had taken &amp; that my work seemed very much to be
structured like a walk on a path: &#8220;You see one thing, <span class=GramE>then</span>
you see another.&#8221; He brought what he knew of the world to this experience that
was new to him, my poetry, &amp; was perfectly able to find frameworks that
suited him just fine. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This is how human
beings work.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>It&#8217;s only when you know what
poetry is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>supposed to be</i> and you
confront something that falls outside of that framework that it starts to
become genuinely hard. <span class=GramE>And that knowing what poetry &#8220;is
supposed to be&#8221; is taught &#8211; it&#8217;s neither natural nor integral to the poem, but
rather is superimposed over it.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>So, yes, I will admit that
there is a difference <span class=GramE>between &#8221;</span>Leaving <span
class=SpellE>Atocha</span> Station&#8221; and the work of Philip Larkin**, but it is
not a question of a difficult vs. an easy surface. Larkin wrote an impoverished
poetry &amp; Ashbery respects his readers. Larkin&#8217;s work may be apprehended on
some level at a single sitting &#8211; but this is invariably a sign of deprivation.
Bad TV sitcoms can be apprehended at a single sitting because there is never
more than a single idea to any scene. Bad poetry is not so terribly different.
But even Friends &amp; Seinfeld have strived for more than that. I have never
understood why any human being would subject others to such an information-drained
experience? Why would one deliberately write <span class=GramE>a poetry</span>
of sensory deprivation? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The presumption underneath
Zapruder&#8217;s question is that univocal, one-dimensional poetry is in some way
&#8220;normal,&#8221; when in fact it is radically unlike the everyday experiences of
language of any human being in this society. I won&#8217;t argue the point that there
isn&#8217;t a considerable amount of such poetry around, but almost invariably
univocal poetics can be traced back to structural failures in the educational
system, literally funneling a segment of the population into a narrow
conception of poetry that is pathologically bizarre. That the school of
quietude has grown into a self-reinforcing ensemble of social institutions
dedicated to the preservation of this world view is something that social
psychologists of the future will no doubt have lots to say about.<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Historically
the Left has always demonstrated considerably anxiety around all issues of
culture, from the faux hillbillies of the Popular Front to John <span
class=SpellE>Sayle&#8217;s</span> cinematic <span class=SpellE>sermonettes</span>. <span
class=GramE>In some sense, a poetry reading against the war in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>Iraq</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>, noble idea that that is, almost
invites these sorts of questions.</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
Back in 1965, I helped a little in setting up the first Vietnam Day Teach-In at
the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:Arial'>University</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>California</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. The chief coordinator for the entire affair was a
very buttoned-down newspaper reporter from, as I recall, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Cincinnati</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> by the name of Jerry Rubin &#8211; he didn&#8217;t stay all that
buttoned down for long. One of the big debates among the organizing committee
for that event was whether or not to invite Michael McClure to read his poetry.
Rubin opposed the idea, precisely because he feared that McClure would read
from his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&amp;d/mcclure/mccluret.htm">Ghost <span
class=SpellE>Tantras</span></a></i>: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GOOOOOOOOOR!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
class=SpellE><span style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Grah</span></span><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'> <span class=SpellE>goooor</span>! <span
class=SpellE>Ghahh</span>! <span class=SpellE>Graaarr</span>! <span
class=SpellE>Greeeeeer</span>! <span class=SpellE>Grayowhr</span>!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
class=SpellE><span style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Greeeeee</span></span><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAHHHRR! RAHR!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>RAHR! RAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>looking</span></span><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'> for sugar!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GAHHHHHHHH!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>ROWRR!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoPlainText align=center style='text-align:center'><span
style='font-family:Verdana;color:black'>GROOOOOOOOOOH!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Some
time around 1970, there was a giant reading also against the Vietnam War at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Glide</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-family:
 Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:Arial'>Church</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. All the major local figures of the New American
generation were there. The <span class=SpellE><span class=GramE>m.c</span></span>.
for the evening, or at least for the latter part of it, was Denise Levertov.
Unfortunately for her, one of the people in the overwhelmingly packed
auditorium dressed in a giant pink terrycloth penis costume, as he had done at
numerous demonstrations around the Bay Area, earning the rubric The People&#8217;s
Prick. As I recall, the room got so crowded &#8211; it was way over the fire code
allotment &#8211; <span class=GramE>that</span> Levertov sought to alleviate the
problem by having members of the audience come and sit on the stage. The
problem was, The People&#8217;s Prick was among those who got up on stage &amp; the
nature of the costume was such that he couldn&#8217;t sit down. He tried to stand
quietly at the back of the stage, but Levertov was having none of it. If cooler
heads had not prevailed, the event would have broken down into chaos. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>These conceptions of what
events like this <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>should be</i> have
bedeviled them forever. In some sense, the organizers of this reading were only
acting as links in a larger chain of fear that they share across time with
Jerry Rubin &amp; Denise Levertov. For his part, Noah Eli Gordon, like McClure
&amp; the People&#8217;s Prick before him, with his poem that <a
href="http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_jonathanmayhew_archive.html#90480328">read
aloud slowly lasts less than two minutes</a>, got to play the role of the
barbarian at the gate, the promise or threat of a little polysemy into a world
that is sworn to avoid it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>But Jerry Rubin, you will
note, changed his mind. Within three years of putting the kibosh on McClure&#8217;s participation
in the teach-in, he would show up at the New York Stock Exchange wearing only
an American flag &amp;, in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Chicago</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'>,
nominate a pig for the presidency, an act that helped ignite the largest police
riot in decades. Perhaps Rubin noted that what got noticed &#8211; nation-wide as it
turned out &#8211; from the initial Teach-In was when Norman Mailer uttered the
phrase &#8220;Hot Damn! </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-family:
Arial'>!&#8221; and got the radio broadcast of the event over </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Pacifica</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> radio instantly pulled off the air. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m not necessarily an
advocate of Rubin&#8217;s politics, fun though they might have been. But it seems
apparent to me that the issue of complexity is a <span class=SpellE>spectre</span>
that is going to haunt poetry forever. The reason the anti-war poems of the
school of quietude, well intended as they were, had so little impact in the
1960s was because, regardless of what they said about the war, the form of
their work argued (sometimes, if it was well written, forcefully) precisely for
all the institutions of order as they apply to language &amp; meaning. Sam <span
class=SpellE>Hamill&#8217;s</span> sad little chapbook is merely the repetition of
that history, this time as farce. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* Not
literally backwards speaking. His role was recorded with him reading his words
backwards &#8211; <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sdrawkcab</i></span><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> <span class=SpellE>sdrow</span></i> --
&amp; the tape <span class=GramE>was</span> then reversed so that it sounded &#8220;<span
class=SpellE>frontwards</span>,&#8221; but as if spoken from Mars. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>** There is
considerably more going on in any poem by Charles Simic, so I don&#8217;t want to
extend this argument to him. I have some fondness for the soft surrealists of
the 1960s: Simic, James Tate, Bill Knott. There&#8217;s more to their poetry than
some of their fans seem to get.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, March 08, 2003</span></h2>

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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Matthew Zapruder objects:<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Dear Mr. Silliman,<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">I was one part amazed, and one part appalled, to read the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2390173045">recent
entry</a> featuring the disagreement between Noah Gordon and the organizers of
the reading to protest the war in </span></tt><st1:place><st1:city><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Northampton</span></tt></st1:city><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">, </span></tt><st1:state><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">MA</span></tt></st1:state></st1:place><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Where to start? Well, how about with what the hell does
the "aesthetics of dissent" mean? That's the mother of all straw men
if I've ever met her. Is the implication of the use of that term that the
organizers were trying to make (or were the unwitting victims of, in which case
policing seems like the wrong, yet perfectly passive aggressive, term) firm categories
about what kind of poetry is acceptable to protest the war, and what isn't?
Come on, does that really seem plausible, or to the point? Isn't it more likely
that they were doing the best they can to hold an event with a bunch of readers
for an audience probably not used to listening to poetry, and making the
judgment (to which Noah is of course, since we still live in a democracy,
entitled to disagree) that his poem wasn't going to work in this particular
situation?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">"Policing the aesthetics of dissent?" Holy
unnecessary jargon, Batman! It seems that the organizers were pretty clear, not
to mention polite, in expressing that they just thought that Noah's poem wasn't
going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e. the more
elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to protesting the
war). Agree or disagree, but they are the ones who are responsible for throwing
the event, and making it work, and they honestly seemed to think the poem
wasn't appropriate for the venue or situation, which seems like a very
reasonable thing to think about given the fact that this is not a poetry
reading for Noah, but a WAR PROTEST. If I wanted to get up and read a ten page
poem about a wilting flower as an allegory for this war's effect on democracy,
I think the organizers would be pretty well within their rights to tell me to
go find something a little less brilliant to read.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">And holy naked act of self promotion, Batman! Call my a cynic,
but I don't think that the fact that at least one of these parties (the other
being dragged in clearly against his will) is willing, if not eager, to share
his correspondence (not to mention his poem) proves anything about anyone's
"best possible intentions." For, lo and behold, in the guise of a
discussion on the "aesthetics of dissent," we end up discussing ...
Noah's poem! I also love the repeated reference to Sean Bishop as a
"student" organizing a reading against the war. Whose student? <span class="GramE">Noah's?</span> Noah Gordon also happens to be a student, of the MFA
Writing Program at <span class="SpellE">UMass</span>, which is a very fine thing
to be, and certainly doesn't stop anyone from being a good poet and publishing
worthy poems long before getting a degree. Yet I have the inescapable feeling
that what really pisses Noah off (in a polite and patronizing way) is that a
student had the gall to judge his work, or at least its potential effect on an
audience. Frankly, the politics of that situation seem a lot more hierarchical
and problematic than worrying about anyone "policing the aesthetics of
dissent."<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">This is particularly evident in the part of Noah's letter
which discusses the abstraction of the war. This just seems like a clever point
to make, with at best tenuous relevance. Is the fact that people in the U.S.
tend to apprehend the war as an "abstraction" (i.e. something that's
not "real," but just an idea, which in a way seems the exact opposite
of the problem -- people aren't thinking ENOUGH about the ideas and rationales
for this war, and just accepting the given terms) somehow a justification for
Noah reading an "abstract" poem, whatever that means? What a weird
kind of mimeticism.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">And does Noah really accept the definition of his poem as
"abstract" (which it isn't, as you correctly point out)? Those of us
who teach know that when a student says a poem is "abstract," what
they really mean is, "I don't know what you're talking about, and/or why
you've bothered to say it." It's mainly a word to hide the word "bad"
behind. In this case, to give the organizers credit, what I think they meant
was that they felt the relationship between the anti-war sentiment and the
imagery and general mechanisms of the poem wasn't clear enough for the
situation of this particular reading.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">They may be right or wrong in their judgment (I personally
think there's some good stuff in the poem, but it's kind of histrionic and
self-righteous ... it seems to treat the whole war as a personal problem for
the poet, which is the thing that makes writing political poetry really <span class="SpellE">really</span> hard). But here's the real point: if the motivation
to read at a war protest is, in fact, to protest the war -- and not to read our
latest poems to a lucky, albeit captive, audience -- then I would think that
even if the organizers were so horribly misguided as to incorrectly judge the
possible effect one of our brilliant poems would have on said audience (which
by the way, they have taken the time, responsibility, and trouble to assemble),
then perhaps we could put up with their lamentable short-sightedness and
stupidity and figure out another way to put our queer or otherwise shoulders to
the wheel.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">The fact that Noah decided not only not to read another
poem, but not even to attend, makes his whole motivation more than a little
suspect. I don't want to sound crude, but what's more important to Noah: Noah's
poem, or protesting the war?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Well, I can think of other reasons why a war protest in </span></tt><st1:city><st1:place><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Northampton</span></tt></st1:place></st1:city><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> might be a waste of time ... talk
about preaching to the converted. If there is a poor sucker living in that town
<span class="GramE">who</span> actually is in favor of the war, I almost feel
sorry for him, if he hasn't already been garroted by a hemp friendship
necklace. So one may ask, if one is still reading, why am I wasting my time
with this?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Because first of all, as should be obvious, I disagree
with everything that Noah has said, and just find the hypocrisy and
self-righteousness really annoying. Also, when I see a poet self-righteously
complain in a public forum about whether his poem was suppressed or not, under
the guise of defending the right of poetry to be able to do whatever it is that
he thinks his poem is doing, while bombs are about to fall on Iraq, as a poet I
feel embarrassed. And third, because poets ought <span class="GramE">not</span>
sit with our arms folded pretending that all poetry is equally apprehendable
(regardless or difficulty of syntax, or unfamiliarity of imagery, etc.), and
that anyone who can't see that is a cretin. On the contrary, it's our job to
try to help educate and prepare our readers for the next new thing. The way we
do that is by making an implicit contract with them: if you promise to listen
carefully, I will promise to make something that hangs together in some way,
and (here's what's important here) exists for a reason other than to promote
myself.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">To turn this situation into a discussion on aesthetics, or
the nature of dissent, seems disingenuous and self-absorbed, which is
particularly upsetting given the stakes. For whatever reason, the organizers
didn't want Noah to read his poem. I don't think they're suppressing dissent in
the least: Noah could have read a different poem, or (god forbid) a poem by
another poet, one that would have been more easily apprehendable to the
audience at this reading. Or he could have just gone to the reading and clapped
when other poets read their poems. And if he thinks that this particular poem
is such a great way to protest the war, why doesn't he get up and read it in
the middle of </span></tt><st1:street><st1:address><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Main Street</span></tt></st1:address></st1:street><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">It seems evident that there is a time and a place to fight
this <span class="GramE">battle,</span> and a war protest is neither. I realize
that with this last sentence I am going to open myself up to all kinds of
attacks ("when IS the right time to defend poetry?" "<span class="GramE">what's</span> the real battle we're fighting here?" "<span class="GramE">isn't</span> the struggle for clarity of language, versus easy
propaganda?"). In fact, I've listened to "My Back Pages"
probably too many times, as have we all ... here's to hoping we can all be a
little bit older, if not wiser, than that now.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">Matthew Zapruder<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Zapruder appears not to
agree with my presumption that Noah Eli Gordon is &#8220;motivated here by the best
possible intentions&#8221; &#8211; as in fact I think both sides in that exchange are. What
I found troubling &#8211; and the reason I thought to include the correspondence,
poem &amp; all, in the blog &#8211; was precisely the point that Zapruder blithely
accepts with regards to the poem: </span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">they</span></tt></span><tt><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> just thought that Noah's poem
wasn't going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e.
the more elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to
protesting the war). <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The problem &#8211; and this is why it was important to
include Gordon&#8217;s text &#8211; is that the claim of density or elusiveness patently
isn&#8217;t true. And, if it isn&#8217;t, then the rest of Zapruder&#8217;s argument more or less
dissolves into smoke. For the claim to be true, the </span></tt><st1:city><st1:place><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Northampton</span></tt></st1:place></st1:city><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
audience would have to be not merely focused more on the war than on
aesthetics, but functionally illiterate. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I agree completely with Zapruder &#8211; &amp; I think
Gordon agrees also &#8211; that stopping the war is far more important than any
poetry reading. But I&#8217;m concerned about a practice that would edit out a poem
that would not have been either dense or particularly elusive at a protest for
World War I. What bothers me about it is how neatly this dumbing down of
density fits into a broader pattern of behavior that dates back decades now, of
treating progressive writing, from the modernists to the current post-avant
community, as though it were difficult &#8211; &amp; thereby excludable &#8211; when, in
fact, that is not the case. <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Such behavior is part &amp; parcel of the (not very)
benign neglect that underlies not merely the sort of editorial malfeasance one
associates with the likes of a Helen Vendler, but even, alas, with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/">Poets
<span class="GramE">Against</span> the War</a> </i>project. If one sees the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389142762">broader
spectrum of poets</a> who have contributed to its website, the poetry that is
part of its official &#8220;<a href="http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/chapbook.asp">chapbook</a>&#8221;
is notably skewed toward the school of quietude &#8211; the principle exceptions are </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Robert
 Creeley</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">, Phil Whalen* &amp; a pair of
Beat generation chestnuts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti &amp; Diane <span class="SpellE">Di</span> Prima. Even the project&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/poemsoftheday.asp">Poem of
the Day</a> </i>selection, intended to bring out a broader representation than
the <span class="GramE">chapbook&#8217;s &#8221;</span></span></tt><span style="font-family: Arial;">selection of especially powerful poems and statements by prominent poets,&#8221;
to date has managed only one poet generally associated with the post-avant
world, <a href="http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=9052">Kent
Johnson</a>. We wonder if the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poets <span class="GramE">Against</span> the War </i>editors recognize that Margaret Wise
Brown, the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Goodnight Moon</i>,
which Johnson&#8217;s poem gently parodies, saw herself as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/culture/culture-wood010502.shtml">an
active follower of Gertrude Stein</a> &amp; was writing within a framework of
progressive educational theory. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This sort of intellectual
bad faith has become so widely &amp; deeply associated with the broader school
of quietude that it, in fact, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always needs to be publicly pointed out</i> </b>whenever
&amp; wherever it shows up. Not only is such erasure profoundly anti-democratic
&amp; inherently dishonest in &amp; of itself, the process reinforces &#8211; just as
the establishmentarian poetics of the school of quietude do &#8211; the larger social
forces that argue always against social change &amp; for a traditionalism whose
sole justification is inertia<span class="GramE">.*</span>* From the perspective
of the poets who commit such misdemeanors of editing, this dumbing down is
merely self-contradictory and self-defeating behavior. For the poets who are
consistently disappeared by this process, it&#8217;s invariably a painful reminder of
the structural inequalities at the heart of the &#8220;American way.&#8221; <tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></tt></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Whalen
deserves extra credit for submitting his work while dead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** It&#8217;s no
accident that the great antiwar poet of the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> era was Allen Ginsberg &amp; not,
say, James Dickey or Robert Bly or </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;">ald Justice, all of whom also wrote
antiwar poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, October 27, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Patrick Herron almost always
has something interesting to say, viz this note to the <span class="SpellE">ImitaPo</span>
list:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The presence of the quotidian in verse seems to
remain an essential and perhaps even distinguishing characteristic of what is
commonly lumped and labeled as "American" poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We can find it in Whitman, Pound, Eliot
("hurry up please it's time"), O'Hara (who expands it to regularly
include personal names), Ginsberg, and especially Ron all over your work
("Nissan stanza" or "The beer can on the sidewalk had been
crushed flat" as two of perhaps thousands of examples).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Alan too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>I was just reading one of <span class="SpellE">Kasey's</span> poems on <span class="SpellE">VeRT</span> and it was laden with almost paranoiac quotidian
statements, statements that should be shocking but just aren't.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I find myself using the web for finding and
co-opting quotidian text from time to time (similar to what is in <span class="SpellE">Kasey's</span> poem I'd guess).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>But I don't understand why or what makes the quotidian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">poetic</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>Is it in the nominal grounding of the abstract, perhaps as some sort of
exalted discrepancy with a vast valley between the peaks of the particular and
the general?</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Shklovsky somewhere talks
about how the aesthetic &#8211; I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s how he identifies the
category, but it is how I remember it &#8211; always moves to incorporate all that is
on its fringe, rather like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Blob</i>.
Or imperialism. Put more positively: one of the duties of poetry is to
continually expand what poetry can include &amp; discuss. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For me, at least, this isn&#8217;t
about theory. I&#8217;ve written before about the importance of William Carlos
Williams&#8217; poem, &#8220;<a href="http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue4/text/prose/silliman1.htm">The Desert
Music</a>,&#8221; in shaping my recognition that I was to be a poet. While, in
retrospect, this is the most traditionally narrative of Williams&#8217; poems, it was
precisely its other elements &#8211; especially the depiction of the person sleeping
on the bridge &#8211; that enabled me at the age of 16 to &#8220;get&#8221; how poetry was
uniquely able to incorporate what Williams would have characterized as despised
materials, but which I would have identified (then &amp; now) as the
&#8220;invisible,&#8221; the background, the details that in fact make up the surfaces and
textures of daily life. It was exactly this capacity for what Patrick calls the
quotidian that brought me to poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I had been writing since the
age of 10 in order, I realize now &#8211; I couldn&#8217;t have articulated it then &#8211; to
bring order to my world. Like more than a few other poets, I was raised in a
classically dysfunctional family &#8211; the 500 pound gorilla in our living room
that went unseen &amp; undiscussed was my grandmother&#8217;s mental illness &#8211; and
writing gave me not only a place to escape (although it did that also), but
critical tools I could not have found any other way as a pre-teen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">However, raised in a house
in which the only creative work around were four-to-a-volume <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Readers Digest Condensed Novels</i>, the
idea of poetry, let alone all its possibilities, was outside my field of vision
until I picked up that volume by Williams in the Albany Public Library sometime
around 1962. At that time, I was writing dreadful teenage fiction. I was under
the impression &#8211; and I&#8217;ve seen some of the responses to Patrick&#8217;s post on <span class="SpellE">ImitaPo</span> that reflect this position &#8211; that one was
constrained to craft novels around characters and action in order to get to
this &#8220;real&#8221; material, the so-called background detail. From my perspective, the
so-called elements of the &#8220;narrative drive&#8221; of a novel were really just an
excuse for enabling the author to incorporate what mattered most: these tiny
elements at the margins. The idea of a literature that could raise the
invisible up to the field of vision, in &amp; of itself, was a revelation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So for me, the quotidian, to
call it that (I never think of it as such), is not about adding a layer of
texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect. The invisible or marginal
is not adjunct to the work: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it is the
work itself</i>. I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under
your desk. The whole of human history can be found there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But how that history is to
be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the
school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it&#8217;s a heroism
of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a
fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even with
the self. It&#8217;s a betrayal of the world of objects &amp; of the objective. Such
poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical
elements of the world invisible. So when I take exception to the writing of a
Robert Lowell or a Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn, it&#8217;s really
an allegiance to that ten year old boy I once was to which I continue to stand
fast. I won&#8217;t betray him by creating a false world, a poetry of lies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Against this I would pose
Francis Ponge&#8217;s uses of the object as exemplary. His use of soap, his
elaboration of fauna. His insistence on the thingness of things. To this I
would add the thingness of words, their literal immanence, which is what I get
out of Stein and so much of the best writing of the past thirty years. This has
very little to do with any grounding of the abstract. Rather, I see it as an
issue of being present in my own life. This is how poetry matters.<o:p></o:p></span></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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