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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, November 13, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="296" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/3tKLhbJ8AvkLU1WgZNC8J9cvTGBc76ASlfAMbEeFAxU2XHn7Culv82svAtcSaje-17bWL2FbwvxxLjT35VdvxhlDGWphz7HmPjPJS9Kwj3jEN3RWutunv3eO2Uj7HKPnmeNK-fPI0Foeuhs0kVueYL4%3Ds0-d" width="228"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Watten"><span style='color:black'>Barrett</span></a> <a href="http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/"><span style='color:black'>Watten</span></a> was in town this past week and, as the trope would have it, was taking no prisoners, offering two dense, high-energy events open to the public under the auspices of Temple University, the first on Thursday at Temple&#8217;s downtown center near City Hall, the other the following night at the <a href="http://slought.org/content/11335/"><span style='color:black'>Slought Foundation</span></a> gallery out in University City. The first was billed as a reading, the second as a talk. Both used text, discourse, &amp; visuals &#8211; the talk went beyond <a href="http://slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_2006%5bWatten%5d.ppt"><span style='color:black'>PowerPoint</span></a> &amp; html to include a video replay of  <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/11/to-watch-bruce-andrews-spar-with-bill.html"><span style='color:black'>Bruce Andrews</span></a> having his way with Fox attack dog Bill O&#8217;Reilly as well as the <a href="http://tinyurl.com/yebm7p"><span style='color:black'>post-velvet tones</span></a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Eyes"><span style='color:black'>Wolf</span></a> <a href="http://www.wolfeyes.net/"><span style='color:black'>Eyes</span></a>, a noise band that I would characterize as <span class=SpellE>Iannis</span> Xenakis meets Sonic Youth or perhaps Pere Ubu filtered through the ears of Brian <span class=SpellE>Eno</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The subject was negativity and the endless problem of how to avoid subsequent incorporation into the omnivorous culture that commodifies, recuperates &amp; tames all that enters its yawning maw. Tho Watten mentioned Dylan only once in his talk &#8211; to note how the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Malibu</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> troubadour&#8217;s recent work continues to reflect the restlessness that has been that singer&#8217;s edge now for over 40 years &#8211; the tune I couldn&#8217;t get out of my head began<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>When you're lost in the rain in Juarez<br> 
An' it's <span class=SpellE>easter</span> time too<br>
An' your gravity fails<br>
An' negativity don't pull you thru<br>
Don't put on any airs<br>
When you're down on rue morgue avenue<br>
They got some hungry women there<br>
An' they really make a mess <span class=SpellE>outta</span> you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>which is the first verse of Dylan&#8217;s &#8220;Just Like Tom Thumb&#8217;s Blues,&#8221; just possibly my favorite set of lyrics in the entire Dylan canon.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> That title is so typically Dylan as well: not, pointedly, Tom Thumb&#8217;s Blues, but rather </span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>just like them, </i> </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>so that there is a reference to something we finally never quite get to see. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This peek-a-boo effect bedevils all modes of radical particularity as well. Some innovation in the field of art comes along &#8211; paintings of soup cans, the new sentence, the use of &#8220;raw&#8221; sound in music, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>un</i>creative writing &#8211; and within three decades you can better believe it will be all thoroughly bracketed by gobs of buttery art theory, just one more ounce of frosting on the layer cake of the real. Noise music as a genre traces its roots back to John Cage &amp; comes pre-packaged with its own protest group, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://mothersagainstnoise.us/"><span style='color:black'>Mothers Against Noise (MAN)</span></a></i>. Recuperated avant la <span class=SpellE>lettre</span>? You bet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The problem of recuperation, of one avant-garde after another perpetually &#8220;selling out,&#8221; has ultimately to do with that preposition <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>out. </i>Not unlike the old sixties shibboleth <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>turn on, tune in &amp; drop out, </i>avant-gardes soon learn that there is, literally, <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>no outside</b>, no out position, that it is always already a location inscribed well within whatever the social field might be. You want to avoid working for a living &amp; getting by on SSI &amp; food stamps? Be forewarned that you will turn very quickly into what the phrase &#8220;SSI &amp; food stamps&#8221; implies. Dylan himself once ventured that &#8220;to live outside the law you must be honest,&#8221; which only barely conceals the deeper reality that to live outside the law, you must nonetheless reside <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>within</i> the criminal justice paradigm. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have used the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>post-avant</i> to suggest that there is a further possible condition, one that doesn&#8217;t so much erase the problem of permanent negativity as to step beyond getting caught up in the debris field of habitual recuperation. It does this not just by abjuring the more nonsensical elements of the avant <span class=SpellE>garde&#8217;s</span> historical origins within a military metaphor, but even more by focusing instead on the process of recuperation as such. If, say, the negativity of a band such as Wolf Eyes is always already doomed, the act of giving a talk at a space such as Slought on the domestication of noise bands
carries within itself a residual radicalism that the Ann Arbor band cannot reach.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Andrews&#8217; confrontation with O&#8217;Reilly is one possible example. Not only is Andrews not willing to accept the simplistic red-baiting that is O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s primary &#8211; indeed only &#8211; critical move, Andrews demonstrates (repeatedly) that O&#8217;Reilly has not read the book in question, that O&#8217;Reilly does not understand the context of the class in which the book is being used, that O&#8217;Reilly does not understand the perpetually contingent process of pedagogy itself. And that O&#8217;Reilly is willing to proceed willy-nilly without such basic levels of comprehension, the logical equivalent of a chain smoker in a fireworks factory. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Watten&#8217;s own critique is another such example. Indeed, what may have been most powerful about Watten&#8217;s two events in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> was the degree to which they manifested &amp; confirmed the importance of the critical as a key dimension of the creative. It is that, more than anything <span class=GramE>else, that</span> separated out language poetry during its heroic moment in the 1970s from all the other modes of post-New American writing. Nobody gets that better than Watten &#8211; it is what he &amp; Andrews have most in common &#8211; and nobody does it better than Watten either. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So this is where negativity&#8217;s negation &#8211; positivity, the positive &#8211; relates directly to its cognates <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>position </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>preposition. Out&#8217;s</i> role as the latter, as a device for making possible the process of positioning itself, is at once both decisive <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and false. </i>This is why the new always occurs at the margin, a disruption from the barbarians rather than an innovation within. Yet it is only by pre-positioning <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>out&#8217;s </i>place as somehow beyond an imaginary limit that it can function as such. If in fact <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>out</i> is understood as an ascribed position &#8211; this is not poetry, this is not a pipe &#8211; <span class=GramE>then</span> its move clearly is one within the system. And it is only by acknowledging this that this system itself can start to come into view. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, November 07, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><img height="265" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/0JTBdzcjuHtmgpRPJDpMeD-QAMXNdQPvBNL_6Cbft0gQ1JfuzqL0akR8PSBFriFb2EdkX4Oem_fizDDsLV-ZpHAyBQ%3Ds0-d" width="216"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I first met Barrett Watten in the fall of 1964, when he was a senior at Skyline High School in Oakland &amp; I was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We had a mutual friend, Davy Smith-<span class=SpellE>Margen</span>, a brilliant, peripatetic kid, but he was killed in an auto accident coming back from </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nevada</span></st1:place></st1:State> <span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>in 1966, and I lost touch with Watten for awhile until we ran into each other in Bob Grenier&#8217;s office in the English Department at UC Berkeley in 1970. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Grenier I met after transferring finally to UC Berkeley. It was a mid-year transfer, which meant in practice that I could still submit work to the various <span class=GramE>student</span> writing contests held by the university each year, but really didn&#8217;t have any time to get to know the faculty who would be judging the submissions. I pulled together three separate submissions &#8211; no names permitted on the manuscript pages &#8211; one for each contest, and was planning to submit the one that looked most Olsonian &#8211; which in practice, or at least in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>my practice, </i>meant longest &amp; most pompous &amp; obtuse &#8211; to the Joan Lee Yang Award, potentially the most lucrative of the contests, when both Rochelle Nameroff &amp; David Melnick persuaded me that I should send in instead a submission that consisted almost entirely of shorter pieces, essentially a first draft of what would become my first book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Crow. </i>The guy who was judging that contest, they both argued, likes shorter. Their counsel proved its worth when I learned that I had won first prize, tho I still had never met the judge &amp; didn&#8217;t do so for a  couple of months until, one afternoon in Serendipity Books on Shattuck (an operation that encompassed the business that is now Serendipity Books, the rare book emporium, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>Small Press Distribution), a blond fellow who looked too casual to be faculty at Berkeley came up to me &amp; introduced himself, saying, &#8220;I thought you were Arthur Sze.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I soon got to know Grenier better by taking a tutorial with him, a close reading of Zukofsky&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>(I had asked both James E.B. <span class=SpellE>Breslin</span> &amp; Dick Bridgman, but each had passed, since it would have required reading the work as well). Grenier was right in the middle of writing the great works that would eventually make up <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.whalecloth.org/grenier/sentences_.htm"><span style='color:black'>Sentences</span></a>, </i>which to this day I would still rank as one of the crowning achievements of 20<sup>th</sup> century poetry, right alongside <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons, Spring &amp; All, &#8220;A&#8221; </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Pisan</span> Cantos, </i>the best of Creeley, the best of Olson, Duncan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Passages, </i>or Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems. </i>Grenier, like everyone else at that moment in American poetry, had been reading Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, </i>and had seen their relationship to Zukofsky&#8217;s short poems, as well as to the linked verse being written by Ted Berrigan &amp; Stein&#8217;s work 65 years earlier in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons</i>, a book that had yet to be assimilated into the canon. But where both Creeley &amp; Stein had used <span class=SpellE>micropoetry</span> to focus on formal questions within the poem as such, Grenier&#8217;s focus was outward (and in that regard actually closer to Berrigan&#8217;s work), seeking to learn what this process of magnification would yield if applied to language <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in situ. </i>It was almost an anthropological poetics that he seemed to propose. And it was also a rebuke. The Projectivist poets, he seemed to be arguing, spent way too much time trying to figure out how to represent language, but not nearly enough thinking of what it actually was, how it operated, in our mouths, ears, and on the page.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There were a group of younger poets who hung around Grenier in Berkeley &#8211; George <span class=SpellE>Ushanoff</span> and Curtis Faville foremost among them &#8211; and I picked up the sense, very quickly, that I had suddenly stumbled on the revolution. What Grenier was talking about &#8211; constantly, regardless of what the topic at hand might be (even when playing basketball with Hugh <span class=SpellE>Wittemeyer</span> &amp; Stephen Spender, which Grenier once coaxed me into doing) &#8211; was something that I couldn&#8217;t find in any magazine. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s, </i>which is fairly difficult to do given its fugitive nature to begin with &amp; the fact that I had not figured out at  that moment the importance of archives (there may be copies in SUNY Buffalo&#8217;s rare books collection and in that of the New York Public Library), you can see how it evolves from that first issue, in which Grenier is simply one of several post-avants  but the overall aesthetic is much closer to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar, </i>to becoming one of the first two journals of what we would today call language poetry. The second issue was again a general number, and while there was no evidence of this new writing as such in its pages, the work I tended to look towards it, such as this poem by David Perry (again, not the young poet by the same name today), which led off the issue. The piece is entitled &#8220;To a Bird Shadow&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>we re<br> 
covered each<br>
other with<br>
out eve<br>
r here<br>
ring who was<br>
spoken or<br>
touching one<br>
<span class=SpellE>ly</span> our own <span class=SpellE>il</span><br>
lustrations and I<br>
love u lie<br>
ka bird shadow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The third issue, in June 1971, was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s </i>first single-author number, devoted to one of the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> poets whom I had gotten to know, Rae Armantrout. The fourth issue, again a general number (appearing just one month after the third), was led off by Larry Eigner. The fifth (two months after the fourth), was a single author issue devoted to Robert Grenier, consisting of 20 poems<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>of which this was the first. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>84<br>
<br>
48<br>
<br>
24<br>
<br>
42<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Clark Coolidge led of the sixth issue, again a general number. He had been somebody whose work I had been unable to read until I met Grenier &amp; ran back into Watten. Watten had, in fact, made a conscious effort to show me how to do this by focusing on the role of humor in Coolidge&#8217;s poetry, which owes a lot to the work of both Phil Whalen &amp; Jonathan Williams. Coolidge would have his own single-author issue two years later (there had been earlier ones devoted to David Gitin &amp; Thomas Meyer in the meantime, and I would follow immediately with issues devoted to Ray DiPalma, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews &amp; Larry Eigner). <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So that if I say that in 1970, just one year after having appeared in both <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar, </i>plus three other journals &amp; as the frontispiece to a book from a major trade press, my poetry only appeared in the campus magazine at Berkeley, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Occident, </i>and in a five page photocopied handout that I myself had published (this being the first issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s), </i>and that 1970 proved to be a much more important year for me, publishing-wise, maybe you will understand what I mean.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But the real excitement in the fall of 1970 was the news that Grenier (who had moved on from </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to Tufts &amp; was now living in the fabled seaport of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Gloucester</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>) and Watten (back in school in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iowa City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>) were setting out to publish a magazine of their own. This meant, in theory at least, that what people around Grenier in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> had been just presuming was a revolution in American poetry would no longer be a secret. And the first issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.granarybooks.com/books/clay/clay8.html"><span style='color:black'>This</span></a> </i>was everything it promised to be.  <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s worth taking a look at who shows up in that issue. The first poet is Robert Kelly, the second Curtis Faville, the third &#8211; her only appearance in print to my knowledge &#8211; Laura <span class=SpellE>Knecht</span>, the fourth Tom Clark (short linked poems &#8220;from The Notebooks&#8221; as their title says), followed by Jim Preston &amp; Thomas March Blum (two Grenier students I believe from Tufts &#8211; Blum has one poem entitled &#8220;Africa&#8221; that has  no text at all), followed now by Clark Coolidge, Grenier, Anne Waldman (again very short poems, including the one-line text of &#8220;Turn&#8221;: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>suddenly you weren&#8217;t listening!), </i>Sidney Goldfarb, Anselm Hollo, Wayne <span class=SpellE>Kabak</span>, more Sidney Goldfarb (this time prose), Grenier&#8217;s wife Emily Lord, extracts from the Ph.D. dissertation of Peter <span class=SpellE>Warshall</span> (picked primarily as instances of language, e.g., &#8220;Last, &#8216;Alone&#8217; was most difficult to define. Kaufman used no other adult within twenty feet.&#8221;), three poems by Marcia <span class=SpellE>Lawther</span>, four poems by me, six poems by Larry Eigner, a serial work by Watten (the fabled &#8220;radio day in Soma City&#8221; that was also published as a chapbook for a printing class at Iowa City), two poems by Robert Creeley, a piece of prose by Ken Irby, a photograph of the desk of Charles Olson at the time of his death by Elsa <span class=SpellE>Dorfman</span>, followed by two other portraits she did of Olson &amp; prose accounts accompanying each, one of which functionally is a description of his funeral. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And then Grenier&#8217;s critical pieces.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> First a major review of Creeley&#8217;s first volume of essays, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Quick Graph, </i>which Grenier argues <span class=GramE>basically</span> completes the idea of literary criticism:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Criticism as literary indulgence will no doubt go on and be respected, but in the work that matters, comment is finished, there will have to be no essential difference between criticism and poems, if for no other reason than <span class=GramE>that poems</span> are going to be so real that nobody will want to read &#8220;about&#8221; something.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>At the end of this piece is a photo, uncredited, of Pound &amp; Olga <span class=SpellE>Rudge</span> looking out of a window in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Rapallo</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. As if to say, this is the end of the </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Old World</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. On the next page is Grenier&#8217;s &#8220;On Speech,&#8221; with its claim &#8220;I HATE SPEECH.&#8221; Again, at the end comes an illustration, this apparently an image taken from a book, or more likely, an old postcard, of entirely empty train station (La <span class=SpellE>Gare</span> Maritime in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Brussels</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>). The symbolism could not be more explicit. This is followed by a review of Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>that announces, early  on,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;PROJECTIVE VERSE,&#8217; IS <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>PIECES </b>ON<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And this is followed by reviews of Gertrude Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lectures in America </i> &#8211; nothing but quoted passages until, right at the end, Grenier quotes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>again &#8211; and Edward Lear&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Complete Nonsense Book. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>While Grenier &amp; Watten are clearly including both the New York School &amp; the Projectivists (and by practice <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>including any SF Renaissance or Beat poets), Grenier&#8217;s critical works frame them as the culmination of the past. Olson is dead &amp; Projectivism is seen as not really beginning until Creeley&#8217;s work of 1969<span class=GramE>,<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>If my own <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s </i>glides between a focus on the New American Poetry &amp; what we today would call language writing, the revolutionary nature of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This, </i>and especially <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>1, was inescapable. In my life, this is the magazine that changed the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>From <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Community Libertarian </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry <span class=SpellE>Nothwest</span> </i>to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This &#8211; </i>these represent all of the types of relationships I&#8217;ve really ever had with a journal, from reading &amp; just trying to get my work represented, to using them as a means of making a statement, ultimately to becoming part of a conversation that had, as its explicit goal, a desire to change literature itself. And while there have continued to be journals that have had a major impact on me, from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetics Journal, Roof </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E </i>to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chain </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Crayon </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>No, </i>all can seen, from my perspective at least, as extensions of impulses that first found themselves in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal, Caterpillar, </i>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>of the latter half of Henry <span class=SpellE>Rago&#8217;s</span> editorial years, the campus magazine at UC Berkeley, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Occident, </i>my own photocopied (and later mimeographed) newsletter, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s, </i>and finally <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My point being that there isn&#8217;t just one value or one relationship one might have to a journal &amp; that it&#8217;s important to explore all of the many options. Tho to have a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>in one&#8217;s life is a particular gift &amp; not something very many people get to have. If I have a standard complaint about so many of today&#8217;s journals, that they&#8217;re not sufficiently radical, that they want to be merely <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>of </i>the world, but not to change it, it&#8217;s precisely because what&#8217;s then closed off to their participants is this last dimension. That&#8217;s an experience I&#8217;d love to share with all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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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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_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text2', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text2'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
</script>
</body>
</html>