In the past month or so, I’ve posted just under 10,000 words on the topic of Robert Duncan & The H.D. Book on this blog, enough so that poor David Nemeth complained that he was tiring of them. Fair enough.
But of those 10,000 words, Kent Johnson posted the following single quote to the New Poetics list:
"At the same time, Robert (Duncan) did not get the degree to which the New Sentence, if I may indulge in caps, figures precisely the role of the Other, the non-rational, the dark side (which is not without its many colors). The blank space between punctuation & the next capital is the X-file of language & we have just begun to scratch at its surface...For a young poet today, replicating those scratches is not necessarily a step in the right direction. Time to look inside!"
With the simple comment that he was “Curious what others might think of it.” Connoisseurs of Johnson’s role as a gadfly to numerous listservs over the years will recognize the oh-so-innocent-nature of that remark as one of his primary literary devices.
Now 85 words out of 10,000 can be viewed in a variety of different ways. Yes it was out of context, but most anyone could have found their way here and gotten about as much context as a human could stand. Instead, what ensued was a series of more than two dozen responses, only a few of which seem to have been informed by a look at the blog.
“Po-mo gibberish?” asks new formalist Paul Lake, suggesting that he’s never read any of the work I’ve published that suggests – ironically in some agreement with him – that much po-mo theory is not serious intellectual work and that the neo-modernist line suggested by Habermas – the need to return to the problems at the root of modernism and re/solve them sans totalitarian diversions – is in fact the very process that confronts any serious thinker today.
At the far end of the commentary scale from Lake’s two-word rhetorical question – at least superficially – is John Latta’s attempt to deconstruct the quotation in the manner of Roland Barthes S/Z. Unlike Barthes, who uses segmentation into lexemes as a strategic device that allows him to bring in a vast range of secondary material, Latta’s comments range no further than the bullet point immediately prior to the two cited by Johnson. Most of what Latta has to say suggests that I use figures of speech that are, in one way or another, pompous. (I would prefer the characterization precise, but, hey, that’s just me.)
In between these two poles, most of the reactions on the New Poetics list strike me as using my paragraph rather like a Rorschach test. A lot of anxiety seems to pivot around the comma that either separates or joins “the Other, the non-rational” and the admonition to “look inside” the blank space that occurs between sentences. How indeed might one investigate that latter terrain? My favorite remark in the exchange was an accusation that the allusion to the “X-files” was obscure.
But I don’t read comments like this – as indeed I often don’t read the commentaries that flower around some of these blog notes in the Squawkbox tool – as having much of anything to do with me, except insofar as I might be a figure of fear & loathing (not my favorite role), a category that seems more to do with my persona than my self. Not unlike Jim Behrle’s ad campaign for me last August:
There is, after all, a lot of inchoate social material that abounds around poetry, especially since it’s not reducible to a pre-packaged social category like economics. Some of it isn’t pleasant – this is after simply the next generation of the alt.fan.silliman parody that the Anti-Hegemony Project ran on the Poetics List nearly a decade ago (now reprised in Ben Friedlander’s Simulcast where it reads as quite dated). But it’s unavoidable.
Yet, if I am to be the windmill of some young Quixote’s fancy, what exactly does that make him?
