Bizarre-Misreading-of-the-Week Award: Mike Snider writes, and I quote: “Ron Silliman thinks that the line exists in space, not in time.” That’s not only not what I wrote, but fairly close to its opposite. The line functions in speech (i.e. in time) and in writing (where it is both temporal & spatial).

 

The interaction between the two dimensions is, of course, precisely where Derrida makes so much mischief in Of Grammatology. But to reduce the question of the line to an either/or proposition is simply to be guilty of base reductionism. Bad poetry lies on either side of that virgule. Bad theory too.

 

On the basis of this hallucinatory reading, Snider concludes that it “explains why he and I share so little in our thinking about poetry.” Well, yes, Michael, assigning meaning to language in an utterly random fashion probably does explain that.