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Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, June 29, 2008</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'>Massive thanks, endless thanks, unbelievable thanks to <a href="http://www.annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Lynn <span class=SpellE>Behrendt</span></span></a> for updating the entire blogroll! It&#8217;s up-to-date for the first time in a couple of years. In addition to being the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Annandale</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> keeper of dreams, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Lynn</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s a fine writer &amp; artist. <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 should see a &#8220;gotcha&#8221; or want to add, drop or change yours, please let me know <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>via email. </i>Thanks!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, April 30, 2008</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'>Some thoughts looking back on a busy time &#8211;<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 got to hear live music twice in one week, a rarity at this point in my life. And the two events really do represent the range of what I like: <a href="http://www.jamesfei.com/"><span style='color:black'>James <span class=SpellE>Fei</span></span></a> playing solo sax at the CUE Art Foundation last Friday, then <a href="http://www.ely.com/"><span style='color:black'>Joe Ely &amp; Joel Guzman</span></a> at the World Café in Philly on Sunday. <span class=SpellE>Fei</span> I&#8217;ve written about <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/04/if-you-look-at-sax-reeds-in-this.html"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>. His solo performance was every bit as magical as the work of his quartet at the Rotunda in Philly earlier in the month. Again his work was the closest thing I&#8217;d seen / heard to a cerebral minimalism applied to free jazz. The combination is exhilarating. <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'>Ely, on the other hand, is the Lubbock-raised country / folk / rockabilly veteran who&#8217;s a key part of the legendary <a href="http://jimmiegilmore.com/TFL/index.html"><span style='color:black'>Flatlanders</span></a> (alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore &amp; Butch Hancock), a recurring member of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Super_Seven"><span style='color:black'>Los Super Seven</span></a>, &amp; who&#8217;s played over the years with such folk as Bruce Springsteen &amp; The Clash. He &amp; accordion-wizard Guzman performed an hour &amp; 45 minutes of mostly up-tempo pieces that included all of the above influences, a touch of mariachi, the requisite <span class=SpellE>Townes</span> Van Zandt song (&#8220;</span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tecumseh</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Valley</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221;) &amp; even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Wagoner"><span style='color:black'>Porter Wagoner&#8217;s</span></a> &#8220;Satisfied Mind.&#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 came away from </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> with a sense that <a href="http://www.cueartfoundation.org/cynthia-miller.html"><span style='color:black'>Cynthia Miller&#8217;s show</span></a> at the CUE Art Foundation was the best show I saw in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Two other shows that were well worth viewing were <a href="http://www.jenbekman.com/artists/ian_baguskas/"><span style='color:black'>Ian <span class=SpellE>Baguskas</span>&#8217;</span></a> photographs at Jen <span class=SpellE>Bekman</span> on Spring Street &amp; <a href="http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/20"><span style='color:black'>Paul Chan&#8217;s exhibition</span></a> &#8220;The 7 <s>Lights&#8221; </s>at the New Museum (that strikethrough is part of the title). I have to sit with my reaction to the New Museum itself &#8211; I immediately liked the light inside, and the galleries felt appropriately sized, but I&#8217;m not at all sure about the wildly fluctuating &#8220;maximum occupancy&#8221; limitations from floor to floor. Also the fact that an eight-story building only proves capable of having three active galleries suggests that the <span class=SpellE>whizbang</span> architecture will have a long-term impact compromising curatorial impulses. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One show that I found somewhat disappointing, mostly because it was so Spartan, was the exhibition of Joe <span class=SpellE>Brainard&#8217;s</span> &#8220;Nancy&#8221; works (mostly, I think, from the volume <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>If</i>) at <span class=SpellE>Tibor</span> de Nagy, which was crowded into the gallery&#8217;s smaller alcove in order to leave the larger one to Ben Aronson&#8217;s lumbering &amp; <span class=SpellE>unwatchable</span> urban &#8216;scapes. This is one of those cases where <a href="http://www.sigliopress.com/books/nancy.htm"><span style='color:black'>the book</span></a>, which the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nancy</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=GramE>show</span> is intended to celebrate, is unquestionably greater than the exhibition. Aronson made me want to go view some Diebenkorn, Thiebaud or David Park.<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 train wreck was the Whitney &amp; its lingering Biennale, even tho there were works there by people I like such as <a href="http://www.baldessari.org/"><span style='color:black'>John Baldessari</span></a>. Baldessari, who provided the cover for the first edition of my book <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tjanting,</i> has many virtues, but when he comes across looking like the master craftsperson in the building, something&#8217;s amiss. The theme appears to have been rubble (which would explain why the show includes Spike Lee&#8217;s magnificent HBO miniseries on </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New Orleans</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>), but I felt for the most part like I had been sent to art school hell. <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 missed the Poetry Society of America&#8217;s 98<sup>th</sup> annual awards ceremony earlier last week, due almost entirely to my pneumonia (which hangs on as I write) and its impact on my day job, plus my desire to be at the CUE opening. In addition to Aram Saroyan winning the William Carlos Williams Award, with Roberta <span class=SpellE>Beary</span> &amp; Eileen Myles <span class=GramE>a finalists</span>, the other winners (and judges) include:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Michael S. Harper, The Frost Medal (presumably given by the PSA board of governors)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ed Roberson, The Shelley Memorial Award (judged by Lyn Hejinian &amp; C.D. Wright)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Joanie</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=SpellE>Mackowski</span>, The <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writer </i>Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (judged by Donald <span class=SpellE>Revell</span>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Brian Henry, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (judged by Norma Cole)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Wayne Miller, Lyric Poetry Award (judged by Elizabeth Macklin)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Christina Pugh, Lucille <span class=SpellE>Medwick</span> Memorial Award (judged by Timothy Donnelly); finalist Sally Ball<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Natasha <span class=SpellE>Sajé</span>, Alice Fay <span class=SpellE>Di</span> <span class=SpellE>Castagnola</span> Award (judged by Dean Young); finalists Kevin <span class=SpellE>Prufer</span> &amp; James Richardson<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Carey Powers, Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award (judged by David Roderick); finalists Willa Granger &amp; Philip Sparks<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Theresa Sotto, George <span class=SpellE>Bogin</span> Memorial Award (judged by Prageeta Sharma)<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Jocelyn Emerson, Robert Winner Memorial Award (judged by Annie Finch); finalists Rachel Conrad &amp; Marsha <span class=SpellE>Pomerantz</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Catherine <span class=SpellE>Imbriglio</span> for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Parts of the Mass, </i>published by Burning Deck, Norma Farber First Book Award (judged by <span class=SpellE>Thylias</span> Moss); finalist <span class=SpellE>Alena</span> Hairston for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Logan Topographies, </i>published by <span class=SpellE>Persea</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'>What one notices first, or at  least what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>notice first, is the diversity. From Annie Finch &amp; Dean Young to myself, C.D Wright, Norma Cole &amp; Prageeta Sharma among the judges &#8211; that&#8217;s the broadest range I&#8217;ve seen for a set of awards. Last year&#8217;s judges (</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Thomas Sayers Ellis, <span class=SpellE>Matthea</span> Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, <span class=SpellE>Srikanth</span> Reddy, Eleni Sikelianos, Tracy K. Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Eleanor <span class=SpellE>Wilner</span>) weren&#8217;t bad either. Whatever one thinks about awards, or these award winners, the fact that the PSA is making a concerted effort to reach a broader range of what poetry actually is can only be commended.<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'>Which is not to say that it&#8217;s perfect.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> I made a point of recommending a specific work for inclusion in the program for the evening:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img border="0" height="123" id="_x0000_i1026" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/C62ubUIpnaIQaIhrQl2jveY3SOADlAaRV1sZP25OVAlNlaL_wBQHHlXMdMfqyibOm13Np3xPmUM3UDrb8klqhvM26ZKjKaa6DhEzuFlS-nxT%3Ds0-d" width="156"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What I actually find in the program, which just arrived in the mail, is the following:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>a man stands<br>
on his<br>
head one<br>
minute &#8211;<br>
<br>
then he<br>
<span class=GramE>sit</span><br>
down all<br>
different<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'>My original suggestion stresses what is unique about Saroyan&#8217;s volume. The poem actually used stresses the ways in which his writing in the 1960s might be seen as continuous with the lyric tradition. Both aspects, as I noted <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-was-planning-on-running-this-note.html"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>, are present in Saroyan&#8217;s writing. But, especially given the ongoing ghettoization of vispo, which do you think is the more important message?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One final note: readers of this blog clicked on over 5,000 links on Monday, a first. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, February 25, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img height="368" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/tv3VMUY4CNP9dp9d5uk7fhm9LSjiuPW63t85MeZATGDWwE88Xp2K5RmiIeg2M4RJ6B88m4401vzIbBN_kZHsMa5biOm3-oZReaoKT6sQj73U73k%3Ds0-d" width="525"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It took this blog two years &amp; five months &#8211; from August 2002 until the end of January 2005 &#8211; to receive its first 250,000 visits. But it took only three years &amp; two months &#8211; just nine more months &#8211; to receive the next quarter million and hit the half-million threshold. That ramp upward got steeper still as it took just 16 months to receive the next 500,000 and hit the million visit mark. That was February of last year &#8211; sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, the 1,500,000<sup>th</sup> visitor will click on through. <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'>These are not the sort of numbers I normally associate with poetry. That is three <span class=SpellE>Woodstocks</span>, or the current population of Philadelphia. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One thing this tally doesn&#8217;t represent is anything like 1.5 million separate individuals. There are a few hundred people who show up here daily and a few thousand more who come by with some regularity &#8211; once or twice a week perhaps. And a third, larger cluster that is far less regular, some of whom may do so only while taking a class that requires it. My guess is that those three groups combined add up to six or eight thousand people. That&#8217;s less than the number of poets who write in English, but still a sizeable fraction of the number of folks who care about poetry. And it&#8217;s more than the thirty a day I had hoped for when I first started this project. <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 are all kinds of interesting ways that a marketer would want to cut such numbers, demographics being the default in that mode of thinking. What percentage of my readers are men and how does that relate to the percentage of people interested in poetry who happen to be male? What are the age breakdowns? Race? Religion &#8211; how many Lutheran are there here (how many Lutheran <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Surrealists</i>)? How many readings do we attend each month &amp; do we go out for a meal before or after?<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>How much do we each spend on books? Etc. I know that among my comrades in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/"><span style='color:black'>Grand Piano</span></a> </i>project, there are some who appear never to read this blog, and two or three who seem always to do so. I would suggest that this is probably to be expected from a cohort that ranges in age from late 50s to mid 60s &#8211; all of us are what we call &#8220;digital immigrants&#8221; where I work, people who came to the technology a little late in life, unlike my children who are digital natives, having used PCs since they were toddlers &amp; Richard <span class=SpellE>Scary&#8217;s</span> <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Busytown</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>was the software package of choice. Except that my <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Grand Piano </i>co-authors are all people who have known me for at least 30 years, so I think that may boost the numbers artificially. After all, I do know poets from my age group who still avoid PCs pretty much altogether. They&#8217;re the last of a dying breed, and I think they know it. <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 try to imagine what it must be like to be a poet today, particularly in the U.S., who is entirely off-line and still working with a typewriter. If I were that poet, I think I would find it strange, as if the social domain that is poetry were somehow getting away from me &amp; becoming more &amp; more ethereal. Where I used to see all the &#8220;important&#8221; literary magazines, say, in Cody&#8217;s or Moe&#8217;s in Berkeley or in City Lights in San Francisco, there are now many important journals that seem locked up out of sight, because they don&#8217;t exist in the print world &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>How(2), Jacket, mark(s), Big Bridge </i>&amp; so many more. I remember being a teenager &amp; not being able to get hold of a copy of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Locus <span class=SpellE>Solus</span> </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Art &amp; Literature </i>&amp; feeling totally frustrated by that. Try to envision this same phenomenon many times over for the poet who is not wired. <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 can&#8217;t say that I&#8217;ve met any younger poets who consciously disengage from poetry&#8217;s existence on the net, tho I suspect some must exist. We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>me </i>anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print &amp; bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web &#8211; they do exist &#8211; will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a &#8220;debased&#8221; terrain where works commingle without being presorted by &#8220;value,&#8221; the web simply is becoming the commons for such work.<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 been fortunate, especially being an old paradigm guy, to have had some success with this new medium. I don&#8217;t think what I&#8217;m doing here is in any way unique. I think I&#8217;m more consistent &amp; dogged, and that I&#8217;ve thought through my positions whether or not anyone agrees with them. When people who do generally disagree with me sit around and argue over a concept I first threw out here &#8211; like post-avant or school of quietude &#8211; I have to admit feeling pleased. Even rejecting one of these ideas, if done thoughtfully, furthers the discourse, and that is the point really. <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'>Do I have the capacity to stick this out another five years &amp; six months? I have no idea. I do know that this process functions as the most powerful crucible for new ideas, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>for me,</i> that I&#8217;ve found since the very earliest days of poets&#8217; talks in the late 1970s. And that&#8217;s a powerful motivation. Thanks for coming along for the ride. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, January 25, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>After Verizon escalated my connectivity problems to &#8220;the central office&#8221; which was supposed to get back to me &#8220;within 24 to 48 hours,&#8221; but who were still &#8220;working on a solution&#8221; this morning when the 48-hour threshold passed, I finally escalated to real help &#8211; my 16-year-old son. It took him about 40 minutes to get back online, but the problem has been resolved. I never did hear back from Verizon. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, January 24, 2008</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, January 01, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My own note from last January 1<sup>st</sup> still seems to me the best possible advice:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I&#8217;ve had for two years now:<u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:center'><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Blog better, blog less. <u1:p></u1:p></span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space &amp; silence. <span class=GramE>And maybe yours too.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<u1:p></u1:p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom: 2.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>There is, to  my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I have an additional goal this year, which would be to get the blogroll into order. It&#8217;s wildly out of date and takes far too much energy to try to keep track of. I wonder if anyone uses it anymore as a stepping stone to other <span class=GramE>blogs?</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One problem is that the fastest growing  category of blogs other than new blogs is dead blogs. There is, so to speak, a lot of &#8220;churn&#8221; over the course of any given year. Further, as blogs have evolved, there are new kinds of them, for example for magazines, for events. Some people on this blogroll have as many as four separate blogs &#8211; my rule has always been to list the one I felt was most relevant to this list. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But it may be that it would be a much stronger list if in fact it was much shorter. One thing I&#8217;ve been doing has been seeing what <span class=GramE>percentage of poets seem</span> to have a blog &#8211; with just under 1,000 poetry-relevant blogs in the roll to the left, a one-in-ten ratio leads me to my number of publishing poets in English of 10,000. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My goal in blogging, back in the dark dinosaur days of 2002, was to get other poets going in the process of thinking out loud in public, creating a public discourse. On that point, I&#8217;ve been successful beyond my imagination. A secondary goal was to talk about the books that mattered to me &#8211; if I haven&#8217;t had any success with that, I have only myself to blame. A third was to share my sense of where we were &amp; are in the history of poetry, particularly in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. A fourth and not unrelated goal was to raise awareness of the School that Dare Not Speak Its Name and its institutional role in American poetry. A fifth was to have fun. In all, I can&#8217;t complain &#8211; but I&#8217;ve got a comments stream for that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Perhaps the best result, for me personally, of doing a blog has been the almost instant education I&#8217;ve gotten as to what&#8217;s going on in poetry that I wasn&#8217;t especially aware of before I began this project. It&#8217;s changed my sense of who&#8217;s writing, why, where &amp; even how. It&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>really <span class=SpellE>really</span> <span class=SpellE>really</span> </i>hard not to want the poetry of tomorrow to look just like what one is most comfortable with about the poetry of today (or yesterday, for that matter). But you and I know that won&#8217;t work. The poetry of tomorrow will have to be fully engaged with the world of that time, and the most we can do is to <span class=SpellE>midwive</span> it into being. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So this seems like a good point to acknowledge everybody who&#8217;s taught me something through this process, whether through a note in the comments stream, an email, a comment on a blog elsewhere or through sending me books, magazines, manuscripts, CDs &amp; DVDs, hand-drawn envelopes, newspaper clippings or &#8220;excerpts&#8221; from package wrapping. Thank you for your generosity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, December 09, 2007</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'>A quick note to acknowledge that, in the two weeks since I&#8217;ve switched my policy on the comments stream, I&#8217;ve only rejected two comments, considerably fewer than I had in the 24 hours prior to the change. Overall the average number of comments per blognote has gone up, both genders have been commenting, and the quality of discussion overall has risen markedly. <span class=GramE>All good things.</span> The stream no longer has the feel of, as one correspondent put it, &#8220;a middle school boy&#8217;s locker room.&#8221; I don&#8217;t mind if people are critical of one another so long as it doesn&#8217;t descend to name calling, and I don&#8217;t mind if you take verbal shots at me. <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'>For what it&#8217;s worth, comments and emails about the change have been overwhelmingly positive. Male correspondents favor the change by roughly a two-to-one <span class=GramE>ratio,</span> female correspondents favor it by a nine-to-one ratio. And that divergence pretty much says it all. <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 I&#8217;m going to continue with the current regime &#8211; the presumption is that any note that doesn&#8217;t contribute usefully to the discussion will be rejected. That seems to be enough to keep people on their best behavior, which is something we should strive for always. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, November 25, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Two completely separate topics:<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>First, I&#8217;ve been going slowly through <a href="http://www.myspace.com/geoffreygatza"><span style='color:black'>Geoffrey <span class=SpellE>Gatza&#8217;s</span></span></a> <a href="http://www.blazevox.org/thanks.htm"><span style='color:black'>Thanksgiving poem</span></a> for me (<a href="http://www.blazevox.org/Thanksgiving2007.pdf"><span style='color:black'>PDF</span></a>), enjoying <span class=GramE>it more and more with each reading.</span> It&#8217;s actually easier to see &amp; read in the PDF format than in the two large packages it arrived in via the mail. It&#8217;s elegant in a way that would please both Oulipo and the finest French restaurants I&#8217;ve encountered &amp; filled at the same time, with remarkably close fitting wit plus some happy surprises (e.g., an email chain in which <a href="http://fromimpassetointimacy.com/"><span style='color:black'>David Shaddock</span></a> suddenly turns up!). Today, I&#8217;m in awe of the suite of six dishes that go into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Baking Parchment Scroll </i>&#8211; which arrived in a long tube the same day as the box &#8211; and which just happens to translate a significant portion of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Chinese Notebook </i>&#8211; <span class=SpellE>Gatza&#8217;s</span> choice as his favorite poem of mine &#8211; into the discourse of cuisine. But yesterday it was the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cornucopia of World Cheeses, Spiced Cashews and Port </i>in the form of a cartoon in which the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Academy</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>American Poets</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> appear as a school of whales. Or maybe it was &#8220;Soup Coup,&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Chocolate Bursting Bomb, </i>which consists of the one millionth Fibonacci <span class=GramE>number</span> transcribed in base 26, using the alphabet for digits, &#8220;brilliantly computed by <a href="http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~bethenco/fibo/fiboa.html"><span style='color:black'>John <span class=SpellE>Bethencourt</span></span></a>.&#8221; Indeed. Even in base 26, this appropriated poem takes up 58 of the 99-pages in the manuscript. Each day there seems to be something different, one feast for which I&#8217;m having no ambivalence about &#8220;leftovers.&#8221; Gatza obviously has my number, or at least my numbering system!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#167;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Second, I&#8217;ve been contemplating what to do with/about the comments stream here. It&#8217;s gradually (or maybe not so gradually) descended into such a playground of pathology that I hear quite regularly from people who either cite it as the reason their weblogs don&#8217;t have comments streams, or who write me personal notes (always welcome!) because they don&#8217;t want their words subjected to the &#8220;debased discourse&#8221; that has become the norm there. I&#8217;m certainly aware of more than a few times of late when I wanted to wash my hands (or more) just from having to go through the moderation process. I&#8217;ve thought seriously about turning the comments stream off entirely. And if what I&#8217;m about to try doesn&#8217;t improve matters much, that probably is what I will do. But I do think there is a place for response here, at least potentially. And it pains me to see the posturing that absorbs and cancels out that possibility for far too many readers. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I&#8217;ve decided to reverse the dynamics, at least for the time being. Henceforth, the presumption is going to be that comments <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>don&#8217;t</b> get approved <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>unless</i> they make useful and intelligent contributions to the discourse. My <span class=GramE>gut feel</span> being the decider. The simply snide, the put down, the sexually and racially inappropriate, the whole repertoire of dysfunction, will have to build its own blogs or find other comment streams to inhabit. That should mean that it will get a lot quieter here right away, but hopefully over time this will lead to a rational and more human discourse that will be of greater value to everyone. This begins now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, September 02, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><img height="432" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ZKpyVQRoZEA2Y58eHHtUvu4_C9Jf2GXpGTvbAfVvjQwygSJZ2FdpG-MBtiXP1BLnHdngBnimEQd4VX-0OrPHFRQXsz-2rYlu_o8WvuE%3Ds0-d" width="359"><br>
</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s first poet laureate, Joseph <span class=SpellE>Auslander</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'>It&#8217;s worth thinking about <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/08/i-have-never-thought-of-myself-as.html"><span style='color:black'>this</span></a>, five years later:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>I have never thought of myself as an experimental writer, but this project is clearly a step into un- (or at least under-)charted territory. My idea is to write briefly from time to time mostly about my writing and whatever I might be thinking about poetry at the moment. Other subjects (music, politics, etc.) may enter in, as they do in life. <br>
<br>
Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn't about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking. <br>
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Ron<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'>That was my first blog, </span><st1:date Month="8" Day="29" Year="2002"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>August 29, 2002</span></st1:date><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Five years hence, the audience question appears to have been answered &#8211; by the size of my blogroll more than the number of visits I&#8217;ve had here. It&#8217;s no longer even remotely possible for me to keep my list of other blogs up-to-date. My presumptions &#8211; that this format was conducive for critical thought and (not clearly stated above, I see now) that there was a hunger among poets for the ability to discuss craft, books, trends, politics, whatever, outside of the funneling framework that is the academy &#8211; were correct. <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'>Another unstated presumption &#8211; that I would be able to do what I wanted in notes no longer than the one above &#8211; has proven shakier, to say the least. I had during the previous year tried a few such notes, modeled after <a href="http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/MinimaMoralia.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Adorno&#8217;s</span></span><span style='color:black'> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Minima <span class=SpellE>Moralia</span></i></span></a><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>a book that&#8217;s haunted me for 25 years, but my sense of the &#8220;finished&#8221; essay had me polishing single paragraphs for weeks. Few were ever completed &amp; I never published any of them, even here. The looser, more ad hoc template of blogging proved far readier to get across what I was after. <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'>My world in 2002 was very different. My twins were just ten years old, for example, and we could vacation in a two-room cabin, a considerable change from the five-bedroom manse we had last week in North Carolina. Gil Ott, Robert Creeley &amp; Jackson Mac Low were all around. All were poets whose wisdom I looked to as a guide for my own actions. The Iraq War referred to something that happened during Bush I. Bush II was saying bellicose things about the government of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, but relatively few people actually believed he would be stupid enough to initiate another war without even catching Bin Laden. The governor of </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> was Gray Davis, the most aptly named politician ever. Few people outside of their immediate circles had ever heard of Barack Obama, John Roberts or Samuel <span class=SpellE>Alito</span>. The population of the city of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New Orleans</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> was 484,000, some 210,000 greater than it is today. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Forbes </i>in 2002 named Britney Spears as the world&#8217;s most powerful celebrity. Later that year, Senator Paul Wellstone &amp; his family would die in an airplane crash. The San Francisco Giants would win the National League Pennant only to lose the World Series to the Angels. Barry Bonds hit 46 home runs and drove in 110 runs, the same number of homers &amp; 13 fewer RBIs than he had during his first year with the Giants in 1993.&#185; In 2007, Bonds, reduced by age to a part-time role (he has just 314 at-bats thus far), still leads the Giants in homers with 27. <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'>Blogging, it turns out, has changed the world of poetry in ways that I don&#8217;t think we fully realize just yet. There are poets who have begun their careers through blogging, at least one literary genre &#8211; flarf &#8211; that has its roots there, more than a few collections of physical books that have grown out of blogs. Blogging embodies, more than any other phenomenon  I know, the web&#8217;s ability to erase or otherwise transform the limits of geography. Poets are linking up on the basis of mutual interests, which is a great thing, especially if you live somewhere other than </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> or </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. That ultimately may be its greatest impact. The constrained model of national poetics with which I grew up in the 1960s has little bearing on what actually is happening now. Poets like <a href="http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Sina Queyras</span></a>, Christian Bök, or John Tranter are not merely instances of Canadian or Australian poetry. A poet like <a href="http://www.apogeepress.com/authors_dhompa.html"><span style='color:black'>Tsering Wangmo Dhompa</span></a> can have an impact both as an American poet and in her homeland of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nepal</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Of these four, I believe only Queyras has a blog &#8211; my guess is that no more than one in ten English-language poets have active blogs, which still means that there are <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>at minimum</i> 10,000 publishing poets in the language right now, a number I would contrast with the low hundreds of poets publishing during the 1950s. <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'>Of the various concepts and phrases I&#8217;ve come up with here over the past five years, none has generated more wrath than the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Quietude"><span style='color:black'>School of Quietude</span></a>. Perhaps the two most common complaints are that the idea is too simplistic and that it describes poetry as it existed at some moment in the past, but not now. Both criticisms are largely correct. There is a project &#8211; one for which I have no stomach, personally &#8211; filling in a far more adequate mapping of the conservative tradition(s) of poetry, first in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and then more globally. The phenomenon means something quite different in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, in the islands (not just </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>,  </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ireland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Scotland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &amp; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Wales</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, but Jamaica &amp; New Zealand as well) and in other parts of the world &#8211; I make a point of noting English-language articles about poetry from </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nigeria</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &amp; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, for example. The day is coming when we acknowledge that they&#8217;re as much a part of &#8220;English literature&#8221; as anything done in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Amherst</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. And not just the writing that mimics what was being done in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>London</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in 1805 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'>I will, of course, continue to note the depredations of the School of Quietude where they seem apparent &#8211; every single American poet laureate, with the sole exception of William Carlos Williams in 1952 (who was appointed but never served, largely for reasons of health), has been a member of this same small coterie dating back to its creation as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1937, endowed by Archer Huntington, the semi-legitimate heir to Collis Huntington, one of the railroad barons of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. That sort of institutional oligarchy may not be as prevalent as it was, say, in the 1950s, but it has hardly disappeared. On the other hand, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Huntington</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s endowment has become less of a reward each year. $35,000 in 1937 would be worth $491,364 today, using the Consumer Price Index as our guide to inflation.&#178; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; With the sole exception of 2001, the year he hit 73 home runs, Bonds&#8217; numbers from 1993 through 2004 are absolutely consistent. The idea that Bonds suddenly &#8220;got powerful&#8221; outside of that one year is a fiction. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; Some <a href="http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/"><span style='color:black'>other guides</span></a> suggest a value as high as $5 million.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, July 19, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; I took one of our kids up to summer camp in the northeast corner of </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Pennsylvania</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Tuesday &amp; rather than drive close to five hours back, we headed over to a B&amp;B along the Delaware Water Gap, a genteel-but-funky place on 162 acres of land. There was only one other couple staying there that night, whom we didn&#8217;t see until breakfast the next morning when they came over from their cabin on the far side of a little lake. We all got to talking &amp; after this went on for awhile, I headed back upstairs to clear out our room. While I was thus engaged, </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> mentioned that I&#8217;d been up since </span><st1:time Minute="30" Hour="16"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>4:30</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> writing poetry. &#8220;Oh,&#8221; sez the fellow, &#8220;my brother-in-law is a poet. Did you ever hear of Clayton Eshleman?&#8221; And that, in turn, led to a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>seriously</i> long conversation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#1078;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When I got back home late Wednesday, there were literally hundreds of emails waiting, one of which, from Kent Johnson, informed me of Dmitri Prigov&#8217;s death. There is something completely unsettling in the death of someone whom you think of as being &#8220;your own age,&#8221; as I do Prigov. In typing up that minuscule note for the blog below, I saved the file to the wrong name &amp; thereby wiped out about three pages of links I&#8217;d plan to run today. If I had one that was important to you, please remind me &amp; I&#8217;ll try to fit it in over the weekend. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, June 10, 2007</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'>My little informal poll on Friday looked like the sort of election Fidel Castro would love &#8211; the Ayes got over 97 percent of the vote, including nearly as many emails as there were remarks in the comments stream. So I guess that answers that.<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 should note, since a couple of people drew the wrong conclusion, that there&#8217;s no fixed correlation between what I eventually review and the <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>Recently Received</b> list other than that I don&#8217;t see the point of putting something on the list if I&#8217;ve just actually reviewed it. I decide what I&#8217;m going to write about based on whatever I&#8217;m thinking about, pondering, at the time. The Gil Ott book I reviewed last Monday is 11 years old. It can take awhile. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 08, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A couple of quick questions today.</span></span><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>First</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, I&#8217;m curious as to whether or not anybody finds it useful when I post a list of what&#8217;s been recently received. I first put this together at the request of a couple of publishers, but I want to make sure that it&#8217;s not something that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only </i>publishers find interesting. The comments streams have received a couple of &#8220;Holy cow, a new Carla Harryman book&#8221; type responses, but thus far that&#8217;s all I&#8217;ve heard. Use today&#8217;s comments stream to let me know what you think.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Second</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, I&#8217;m going to be reading at Mills in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oakland</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> on October 2 and would be happy to entertain other readings that week anywhere reasonable on the West Coast. If you have a series (especially one with a travel budget), send me an email at <span class=SpellE>silliman</span> at <span class=SpellE>gmail</span> dot com. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, April 27, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>You will note that I&#8217;ve finally begun revising the blogroll in the lefthand column for the first time since a virus ate the  underlying Word file. I&#8217;ve begun checking every link and will be discarding those that have either gone dark or had no activity since the beginning of the year. I will also be revising the links for those, like Jim Behrle&#8217;s, that hop around on the net like a kid with ADHD. You will note that as I get through a section, the color of the names will change to black. I also hope to go back through my emails and pick as many requests for links as I can find. If you&#8217;ve made a request and I&#8217;ve failed to add it once I&#8217;ve gone through your part of the alphabet, drop me a quick note with the link and I&#8217;ll do so.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I should note also, I suppose, that I&#8217;ve had requests from sites that have nothing to do with poetry &#8211; &#8220;viral&#8221; ad fake blog sites for cigarettes &amp; alcohol mostly, companies that have also requested the opportunity to advertise here &#8211; and will <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>not </b>be adding those. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, April 01, 2007</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'>For what it&#8217;s worth, this blog received 36,845 visits in March as readers accessed 63,788 page views, both records for the site. That translates into one visit every 72 seconds, one page view every 42. This is the third straight year that March has set record figures for this site. The current numbers are more than double those of two years ago. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, February 05, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This blog will receive its one millionth <span class=GramE>visit</span> sometime later this week. I may very well miss it since I&#8217;m on the road on a business trip &amp; don&#8217;t have regular access to the web. You can find the current number in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Site Meter</i> box on the left column, just below the big <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poets in Need </i>button amidst all the link icons that separate out the blog archives from the blogroll. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It has been just short of four and one-half years since I started this project. At the end of the first full year, the blog had received some 50,000 <span class=GramE>visits,</span> a number that today shows up in less than two months. Obviously, tho, those weren&#8217;t 50,000 different visitors any more than last year&#8217;s 350,000 visits represented that many distinct individuals. Rather, as best I can tell there is a core readership of maybe 1,500 people, folks who stop by somewhere between daily &#8211; a handful more often than that &#8211; and once a fortnight. These are people who never need to explore beyond this top page unless they&#8217;re working on some project and need to get archival. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Around this core is a somewhat larger number of individuals who stop by for a time &#8211; perhaps they&#8217;re taking a class &amp; have been told by a professor to check it out &#8211; but who don&#8217;t develop the habit. These readers tend to look at a number of pages when they visit, but they may not last as readers more than a month or term.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>These days, the average number of pages read per visit is fairly high &#8211; around 1.8 &#8211; suggesting that classes are actively using the site. Toward the end of summer, that number might drop as low as 1.1 or 1.2. Even the latter means that one out of every five readers is going beyond just the top page.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When I started this blog, my goal, as I&#8217;ve noted before, was to have maybe 30 readers a day, 30 being the audience size of what I take to be a completely successful reading. And I still think that any blog that gets 30 readers a day deserves to be called successful &#8211; indeed, I think you can have a successful blog with considerably less, since the point of the blog is not numbers but rather the quality of thinking that the form helps to bring out in you. But my model was obviously wrong, in that what goes on here is not a public reading &#8211; this is not a podcast, tho <span class=SpellE>Didi</span> Menendez has been trying to persuade me that it should be &#8211; but actual eye-mind-brain reading, if not exactly the way it&#8217;s done with books &amp; hardcopy magazines, then the way it&#8217;s evolving online. Right now, my average visitor spends exactly three minutes each time they come by. That&#8217;s roughly three times the length it takes to read the words in this note up to here silently, but less perhaps than it would take to read these same words aloud. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What this suggests to me is that the web is more than simply a new distribution medium for the same modes of writing with which we&#8217;re all familiar. The <span style='color:black'>idea that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml"><span style='color:black'>Jacket</span></a> </i>is a magazine</span> is probably a very useful metaphor for its editors, but ultimately that&#8217;s what it is &#8211; a metaphor. I can&#8217;t say what will come next exactly, tho I don&#8217;t think flash poetry is it, precisely (tho it might be for <span class=SpellE>concretists</span> &amp; visual poets). In fact, I think we&#8217;re about to see several different &amp; somewhat contradictory trends occur simultaneously. One is that blogging has gone from being a new medium to an old one in just five or six years, tho to date nothing has shown up yet that suggests to me anything better. I tend to agree with my son who argues that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>social networking sites all suck. </i>But that might not be true three to five years from now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I also think we&#8217;re seeing something of a backlash to online content, as such. One history department has already banned the use of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Wikipedia </i>as a citable source for papers &amp; there are certain to be others. Similarly, we&#8217;re already familiar with the model of the brilliant grad school poet-blogger who suddenly goes silent (or at least dampens down the activity markedly) the instant he or she gets a tenure track job, suggesting that there is a conflict (real or imagined) between community &amp; career. As least such poets are being clear as to which value they&#8217;re going to pursue. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Similarly, I think there&#8217;s going to be &#8211; already is, I suspect &#8211; some clashing over whether it&#8217;s possible to do serious critical writing in this form. One of the most interesting things about last December&#8217;s MLA convention in Philadelphia was listening to one fifteen-minute paper after another &amp; realizing that two-thirds had less in the way of ideas than the average blog note. And this was, by all standards, an excellent MLA convention. Try writing 200 MLA presentations in one year, tho, and your whole idea of what constitutes a critical piece of thinking is going to change. In this sense, the real promise of blogging is the one that it holds for changing what constitutes critical thought, literally marginalizing the academy as a site for such about poetry, returning critical writing instead to the poets themselves, most of whom do not teach, or do so only under the most abject of adjunct circumstances. Perhaps marginalizing is too strong a term &#8211; there are, after all, good people in the academy who do serious work &#8211; but at least &#8220;de-authorizing,&#8221; de-legitimating academic critical writing as such, forcing it to compete on an equal basis with the &#8220;deep gossip&#8221; of poets writing about their own work &amp; that of others. Nothing could be healthier than that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But mostly I want to say what I&#8217;ve said before when I&#8217;ve come across these little milestones in the history of this blog, which is thank you for stopping by, whether you agree with anything I write or not, or simply love to watch a train wreck in slow motion. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Just what I needed.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Yesterday, my primary system picked up a virus. I keep copies of all the important &#8211; and complete &#8211; stuff elsewhere. However, I lost three days of blog notes I&#8217;d prepared for this week, plus some work-in-progress for a future volume of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Grand Piano. </i>Sigh. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, January 01, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I&#8217;ve had for two years now:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Blog better, blog less. <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space &amp; silence. <span class=GramE>And maybe yours too.</span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is, to my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, October 09, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="280" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/zVMdpkv74P733wZvBMOGpmseWoAZUBXJQBNKp7WM4yOjfW9ebKZ5kmB7uPpf6XqS7RYYaWUfzBhSVjUXFZqSqkM0m3VObXkk%3Ds0-d" width="360">f<br>
</span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Eleanor Anne Porden (1797-1825)</span></i><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Silliman&#8217;s Blurb<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This past week has not been an easy one &#8211; I&#8217;m paying the piper, so to speak, for having taken some time off this summer &amp; find myself in the midst of multiple major reports, all with deadlines, all more or less simultaneously. On top of which my sons are both starting high school, but at different schools in different counties (long story) &#8211; not even adjoining counties at that &#8211; and the gauntlet of orientations, open houses &amp; curriculum nights has gobbled up what little other time I&#8217;ve got. Then Anne Boyer &amp; Ian Keenan were kind enough to steer me in the direction of <a href="http://secretmint.blogspot.com/2006/10/gender-of-seriously.html"><span style='color:black'>Elizabeth Treadwell&#8217;s blog</span></a>, which has a note about my blurb for <a href="http://www.apogeepress.com/books_verso.html"><span style='color:black'>Pattie McCarthy&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Verso</i></span></a><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>that<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>interprets what I had written in ways I&#8217;d never imagined possible &#8211; my first thought, on reading Treadwell&#8217;s angry &amp; dismissive comments, was that it was strange indeed for anyone to be reading another person&#8217;s blurb as being a statement about herself. I still think that may be a primary dynamic here, but at the same time there is another level on which I can see Treadwell&#8217;s argument as being completely reasonable. And some of what she writes points to important fissures in writing at the present moment. <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'>Obviously, I brought this on myself. In writing a blurb sufficiently modular for Apogee publisher Alice Jones to edit it down to what she &amp; Pattie wanted to use, I&#8217;d left myself open to one on the inherent dangers of any critical endeavor, even as simple as a blurb &#8211; I&#8217;d written something that could be taken out of context where its meaning comes across fairly differently (to my eye &amp; ear, at least) than it does if one runs just the final four sentences. Here is the actual blurb as it appears on the cover of the book. I&#8217;ve italicized the portion that Treadwell quotes.<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'>What if Frank O'Hara had been, literally, a court jester? Or, at the very least, tutor of the King's children? Those are questions that linger in the imagination as one reads Pattie McCarthy's <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Verso</i>. McCarthy strikes a new tone in &amp; for her poetry. At the same time, however, all of the concerns &#8212; with history, naming, gender, etymology &amp; referentiality &#8212; that have always animated her work rage on unabated&#8230; She makes the membrane between the visible and <span class=GramE>its</span> opposite her focal point&#8230; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pattie McCarthy has been one of our most intellectually ambitious poets&#8212; a tradition she shares with Rachel Blau DuPlessis &amp; with H.D. <span class=GramE>And indeed with the likes of Pound &amp; Olson.</span> We can still count the number of women who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands. So it is worth noting &amp; celebrating this addition to that roster.<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'>Any strategic hyperbole in the comparisons of the final four sentences comes across as simply unjustified blanket assertions absent the earlier text. With the full statement, tho, I might be wrong, but I&#8217;m not without my reasons. <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 objectionable points, as I understand Treadwell&#8217;s remarks, as well as those made in its comments stream and in subsequent blog notes by <a href="http://limetree.ksilem.com/archives/2006_10.html#000858"><span style='color:black'>Kasey Mohammad</span></a>, <a href="http://www.shannacompton.com/2006/10/on-strategic-overstatement-as-modus.html"><span style='color:black'>Shanna Compton</span></a>, <a href="http://www.odalisqued.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Anne  Boyer</span></a> &amp; <a href="http://looktouch.blogspot.com/2006/10/trees-and-forest.html"><span style='color:black'>Jessica Smith</span></a>, in the comments streams thereto (see, for example, Jonathan Mayhew&#8217;s comments in Kasey&#8217;s blog, as well as those made to more than one blog by Ian Keenan &amp; in Treadwell&#8217;s stream by Jim Behrle) as well as to the <span class=SpellE>pussipo</span> listserv, are functionally three: the use of superlatives, as such; a comparison with other writers, especially male other writers; and my &#8220;fingers of our hands&#8221; remark, which can be interpreted apparently as meaning<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>that there would be as few as 10 such writers (tho that is not how I read the plural <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>our</i>). Beyond these surface issues, there is a question of a tradition that would include high modernists like Pound &amp; H.D. with one of the early coiners of the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>postmodern </i>in Olson with a contemporary feminist poet like DuPlessis. And, if I read Jessica Smith&#8217;s blog &#8211; and several emails I&#8217;ve received from other people &#8211; a general irritation that &#8220;the language poets&#8221; and/or possibly just myself have far too much &#8220;power&#8221; on the poetry scene today. <span class=GramE>Lets</span> take a look at each of these. <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 use of strategic superlatives &#8211; Shanna Compton &amp; Jonathan Mayhew are largely correct in their assessments of this &#8211; is one of the inherent risks of <span class=SpellE>blurbing</span>. One important reality &#8211; and part of what motivates Treadwell&#8217;s initial reaction, I think &#8211; is that there are, in fact, more good writers today than ever before. When you go from a few hundred publishing poets, the situation in this country a half century ago when the New Americans first came onto  the scene, to the more than ten thousand who are now publishing, not just writing, there is going to be a major dispersal of the landscape.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Blurbs are endorsements &#8211; unlike at least a couple of the New Americans, I won&#8217;t blurb a book I don&#8217;t like (just as, in my blog, I very rarely bother to write about a book I don&#8217;t like) &#8211; and superlatives are a foregrounding device. <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'>Given that I could write &#8220;this is a terrific book&#8221; about at least 100 books in any given year, I use comparisons as a means of giving a better sense of shape to my experience of this landscape. Literature is not without its history &amp; a little reading allows any reader to begin mapping out what matters to them &#8211; it is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the </i>primary device for making sense of the cornucopia of data points that 4,000+ books per year constitutes. As the alternate modes offered by Jack Spicer in his application for the Magic Workshop nearly 50 years ago underscores, there&#8217;s no one right way to see things, no <span class=SpellE>Mercator</span> projection that will always identify Gertrude Stein as having a value of X, <span class=SpellE>e.e</span>. <span class=SpellE>cummings</span> a value of Y. I know a number of mostly younger poets who chafe at being so pigeon-holed, but that is an act of denial I <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>always</i> reject. A work that stands truly outside of any plausible mapping of the landscape, not just of the present but going back at least to the start of the 19<sup>th</sup> <span class=GramE>century,</span>  can only be described in a few ways. One is the category of &#8220;things that don&#8217;t fit&#8221; or at least don&#8217;t fit <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>yet. </i>Another is works ignorant of history. A third is works with a lack of self-knowledge. Some really good writing can fall into these interstices &#8211; consider <a href="http://www.mainepoetry.com/bern.html"><span style='color:black'>Bern Porter</span></a> as an example &#8211; but the one sad certainty is that all these categories are paths to neglect. <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 second plausible objection to my use of comparisons here is that I <span class=SpellE>overhyped</span> Pattie McCarthy&#8217;s work, placing it alongside canonical poets like Pound, Olson, <span class=GramE>H.D</span>. &amp; DuPlessis. This is where I think Treadwell&#8217;s quoting out of context distorts what I actually wrote. All four poets &#8211; regardless of how much one does (or doesn&#8217;t) think of them &#8211; were involved in larger literary projects that usually gets described as the composition of the &#8220;contemporary epic,&#8221; or &#8220;long poems containing history&#8221; (tho one can make a case that <span class=SpellE>H.D.&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Trilogy</i> at least is concerned more with mythology). <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Verso, </i>like McCarthy&#8217;s earlier <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.apogeepress.com/authors_mccarthy.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>bk</span></span><span style='color:black'> of (h<span class=GramE>)<span class=SpellE>rs</span></span></span></a>, </i>strikes me very much as preparation for a project on the scale of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts.</i> This doesn&#8217;t mean that such is the only path a serious poet can take &#8211; I would number Emily Dickinson, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout &amp; Robert Creeley as four of my favorite poets of all time, not one of whom used that approach. Nor does my statement even mean that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Verso </i>itself is such a work &#8211; as a project in its own right, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>Verso&#8217;s</i> scale is closer to that of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mauberly </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Waste Land </i>or &#8220;Poem Beginning &#8216;The<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>.</i>&#8217;&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>But it is hard &#8211; for me impossible &#8211; to read McCarthy&#8217;s work and not be taken with the sense of intellectual horizon that is everywhere implicit in her poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is, at some point, a good piece that needs to be written on what actually constitutes a longpoem. From my  perspective, there are questions of the scale of the text, time of composition (a different scale altogether) &amp; scope of the project &amp; its internal structures that all come into play. It is perfectly possible to write large books that are not so much long poems as they are fast ones &#8211; which is how I read Anne Waldman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Iovis </i>or John Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Flow Chart </i>or some of A.R. Ammons&#8217; work &#8211; just as there are works that seem long in the literal sense of the number of pages, but which are deliberately narrow, a type of poem that Ted Enslin &amp; Frank <span class=SpellE>Samperi</span> have elaborated &amp; explored. These poems are long in much the same way that a block of clay can always be rolled into an ever thinner string thereof. There are also booklength poems that use different scales altogether, such as verse novels, Jack Spicer&#8217;s serial poems, Ted Berrigan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets, </i>most of Leslie Scalapino&#8217;s work<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>.</i> McCarthy&#8217;s first two books fall into this last category for me, but do so clearly invoking the tradition toward which I think she&#8217;s working. If we look at the actual tradition, it&#8217;s fair to ask how many poets of all kinds are attempting projects that engage that scale I implicit in McCarthy&#8217;s writing &#8211; not one of the poets listed in Treadwell&#8217;s blog seems to fit that definition, tho that doesn&#8217;t mean that several of them aren&#8217;t tremendous poets. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>But they are doing different things.</i> Treadwell&#8217;s argument is akin to complaining that I haven&#8217;t included the likes of Susan Bee or Francie Shaw among a roster of great sculptors simply because they make paintings. <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 is also a history yet to be written of the longpoem and its relationship to women, one that would include, for example, <a href="http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/Works/FranEVeils.htm"><span style='color:black'>Eleanor Anne Porden</span></a> &#8211; a woman with a complicated relationship to my own family tree&#185; &#8211; as well as Frances Boldereff, Charles Olson&#8217;s mistress &amp; unacknowledged collaborator, not to mention Celia Zukofsky, Hilda Doolittle, Beverly Dahlen &amp; Rachel Blau DuPlessis. But while this history would need to look at the work of writers like Gertrude Stein or Susan Howe or a project like Diane Wakoski&#8217;s George Washington poems, it would be for the purpose of contextualizing the project within its actually existing history, not because they are doing the same thing. A history like this is nothing but comparisons. And a history that failed to be able to distinguish between Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Making of Americans </i>&amp; Doolittle&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Trilogy </i>would frankly be a failure. <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'>Superlatives &amp; comparisons both make distinctions, which, complains Treadwell, &#8220;are divisive. &#8220; But that is precisely what distinctions do. They are the fundamental device of organization: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not this, not this. </i>Not only do distinctions enable us in daily life to separate out the wolf from the dog, but the romaine from the hydrangea, which, however beautiful, is quite toxic. Any mycologist had better be able to distinguish which mushrooms are edible &amp; which lead directly to liver &amp; kidney failure &amp; ultimately death. Distinctions are not inherently pernicious &#8211; they are, in fact, the primary function of culture itself.<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'>Treadwell&#8217;s blog is itself an  attempt at distinction, at dividing. She seems clearly to want to set in a motion &#8211; or at least to proclaim critical mass &#8211; a paradigm shift in American writing. Where Bob Grenier once wrote, all in caps, &#8220;I HATE SPEECH,&#8221; Treadwell&#8217;s argument in her blog, her choice of a strident tone as well as some of her comments to the <span class=SpellE>pussipo</span> list, all suggest that functionally &#8211; not personally, I hope &#8211; Treadwell proposes to substitute my name for Grenier&#8217;s noun. <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'>Treadwell&#8217;s thesis as I read it is that women have sufficiently arrived as poets to enable them to constitute a literature without the help or examples or history of male writers. Fair enough. As I read it, this is different from the separatism of certain feminists in the early 1970s &#8211; Judy Grahn has characterized separatism as it rose up then in the lesbian community as a tool, not a program &#8211; tho its motivation may be similar. It is certainly true that with the thousands of interesting poets writing now &amp; the enormous increase in the number of female poets since the early 1950s that a poet could easily read only women poets &amp; still never find the time to read even all the good or great ones. So what Treadwell is suggesting is not at all implausible as a next stage in the evolution of writing in the  </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> As it stands today, it simply is impossible for a post-avant poet to read every other kind of poetry that has risen just out of the New American poetries of the 1950s, let alone, say, such post-dada (but never New American) tendencies as vispo or a good deal of what constitutes performance poetries. In a nation with 10,000 publishing poets, how will one choose what to read tomorrow? How will one constitute one&#8217;s tradition against such a landscape? These questions are the ones for which Treadwell appears to be proposing answers. And she&#8217;s right that they are major questions. And they lead to further, fascinating questions, at least one of which is what <span class=GramE>is the role of literary history</span>. All are worth thinking about, dreaming 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'>I will admit to <span class=GramE>a certain</span> ambivalence to being proposed as the icon of all that is old. It&#8217;s an index of how far from what I experience as &#8220;the old world,&#8221; i.e., the institutions of what Charles Bernstein still calls Official Verse Culture, the world  of poetry has come that Treadwell would think to pick a blogger with no academic affiliation, someone who has never once had a book from a trade press. Why me, rather than, say, Ed Hirsch over at the Guggenheim Foundation, Dana Gioia at the NEA, Harold Bloom, Christian <span class=SpellE>Wimen</span> at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry</i> or Jonathan <span class=SpellE>Galassi</span> at FSG? In going after me, Treadwell is saying a great deal about just how <span class=GramE>much</span> those institutions actually matter. <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 is also, however grudgingly &amp; ironically, a deep compliment. And, ever since Elizabeth Treadwell posted her  blog note and the ancillary discussion began on <span class=SpellE>pussipo</span>, my blog has experienced a <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>33 percent increase</b> in the number of pages read by each visitor &#8211; a sea change, given that that figure has been stable at 1.2 pages per visit for perhaps two years. This includes two days in which more than 1,900 pages were visited. Those numbers will surely go down again as the new readers Treadwell has brought either move on or focus instead just on what has been said recently. But I have to recognize &amp; acknowledge that Elizabeth Treadwell has done more to bring people here than anyone in a long time. And for that I can only say thank you. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Porden was the first wife of  British explorer Sir John Franklin who my maternal great grandfather&#8217;s family was taught had been a direct ancestor. It has only been in the last couple of years that my cousin Richard Tansley has been able to prove conclusively that the John Franklin in the family tree in the first half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century was an illiterate fish monger, not the former Tasmanian prison master &amp; naval captain. Porden wrote several longpoems &#8211; large booklength works in the epic mode, even if they were written fairly quickly, given just how young she was when she died, just 28. It was <span class=SpellE>Porden&#8217;s</span> longpoem on arctic exploration that led her to meet </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Franklin</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in the first place. <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, September 09, 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'>Thanks to the efforts of Joseph <span class=SpellE>Mosconi</span>, the Gmail mail-abuse team &amp; several friends who actually forwarded old emails to prove I had been using the <span class=SpellE>i.d</span>., I&#8217;ve finally gotten my email address back! Now all I have to do is wade through 1200 emails . . . . <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#167;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The September issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/"><span style='color:black'>Brooklyn Rail</span></a> </i>&#8211; that name always makes me think of the bird, not the train &#8211; is online with lots of goodies well worth reading. From Charles Bernstein telling Bob Dylan to grow up to Bill Corbett reviewing the collected poems of Anne Porter, to <span class=SpellE>Ionesco</span> to <span class=SpellE>Sylvere</span> <span class=SpellE>Lotringer</span> to poetry by <span class=SpellE>Ravi</span> <span class=SpellE>Shankar</span> (the poet, not Norah Jones&#8217; daddy). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#167;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The impact of the web on poetry, as seen from <a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20359303-12332,00.html"><span style='color:black'>down under</span></a>.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#167;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>First Cody&#8217;s closed its </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Telegraph Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> store 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'>. Now <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/07/BUGD7L0GMH1.DTL"><span style='color:black'>it is becoming part</span></a> of the <a href="http://www.yohan.co.jp/english/network/index.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Yohan</span></span></a> book chain of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tokyo</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, September 03, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have had to sing this song before, alas. Somebody has captured my Gmail account, changed the password and the security question. Until I can get someone at Gmail or at Google security to rectify this situation, my email address is <span class=SpellE>rsillima</span> AT yahoo DOT com. And if you have sent me an email in the past week, please resend it to that address. If you have <i>any</i> outstanding business with me, please send me a tickler at that address, just so I don't lose an important thread.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And if you work at Google or one of its divisions - some of my readers seem to do so - please let me know if you can help with this. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thanks! <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<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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