An email from Juliana Spahr:

 

Ron,

 

I know I'm late on the BLOG reading, but can I take issue with this:

 

she characterized the creation of Chain as an act against articulation:

 

we started chain b/c there were too many arguments

 

Saying that there were too many arguments is not the same as being against articulation. I am so not against articulation. I may not be a good literary critic, but I do what they all do all day long: examine what sorts of things get articulated in works. I'm not even against arguments. What I meant by too many arguments, perhaps not the best language on my part but I think my meaning is evident with a friendly reading (I talk in the last paragraph about some of the arguments that Chain has made, tries to continue making), is that the arguments that were being made felt too small to us. It felt as if they didn't have room for us or some of the other poets we wanted to be associated with. Chain wasn't founded out of the fence-sitting desire that Fence mentions in their first issue. It doesn't desire representation of the width of contemporary poetry. It was founded in a desire to think beyond [reformat? rethink?] the way many poetry magazines include friends rather than poems. I've got nothing against the friend journal, it was just that I/we needed larger vision at the time. Needed to see more work, different work, different forms, work from places we had never been--and think about the connections between them.

 

That said, I totally agree when you say this:

 

To return to an old lesson from Jean-Paul Sartre: your choice is between the series – absolute atomization – and the group. Though that latter term has multiple meanings.

 

And I agree with your analysis of how the media encounters poetry. Yet what I think is that the group needs to be larger than that group of friends to which journals often limit themselves. And that these groups need to seek affiliations with other groups. I think where we disagree is not on this argument issue... I see you as arguing that we need to call out the names of the gang or someone else will. Is that right? I'm not sure I'm against this project but it feels of less importance to me than explorations of how the gangs are connected (I guess I see the gang called out through social engagements--parties, who shows up to whose readings, etc.). I want to work not just on/with my own gang, but I want to think about what I can learn from the next gang.

 

I think it is crucial that we all not be scared of the diversity of contemporary poetries. I think it is a great sign of health. I love it. I like to think, and I think it might be true even, that right now, when I am alive, right now there are more poetries or I have the possibility of reading more poetries than humans at any other time. What a huge weird world of poetries! I can't read it all. I admit it. But what a great thing.

 

Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?, things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers, but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and Nation language/Caribbean poets and pidgin/Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets and etc. all have these arguments against standard English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.