I seem to have amused Matt Lafferty. In the comments stream to my reading of Rob Read’s work, he quotes my line

But then I realized that I was liking these poems, against all my better judgment & deep instincts

commenting, “now that's a poetics.”

It made me think of the large role that expectation plays in reading. My dislike of spam predisposes me to think little of the intelligence of the marketing bottom-crawlers who dream up the crap & therefore to pay perhaps not as much heed as I might to their uses of language, and what that might reveal to us both about language itself, infinitely malleable thing that it is, & the lurid reality that lies just under their promise that, say, size really does matter, obsolete revisions of popular software programs are available cheap, and that the widow of some Nigerian potentate needs to stash their millions in my account.

So to see somebody who can actually read the stuff did, in fact, surprise me. And his ability to turn it to his own purposes, sharp, aesthetically pleasing, witty, definitely impressed me. Precisely because I know that his creative response goes against the grain of my own when confronted with the daily onslaught of the same sorts of messages. Rob Read shows me a more creative way forward. I was surprised by my reaction, and said so.

Surprise has been a recurring theme in my responses to certain works of literature, often very important ones, throughout my life. It’s a register, no doubt, of the degree to which I do take some things for granted that I should not, but it’s also I think just a process of ongoing recognition, as one of the things literature itself does is to perpetually broaden its scope, responding to the changing nature of the society in which it occurs by taking in new elements, facets, features &, as Ez put it, making it new.

Some of the writing I can think of that struck me as “beyond the pale” when I first saw it, or heard of it second hand, that later proved itself to me to be completely valuable would include Richard Brautigan’s novel Trout Fishing in America, Clark Coolidge’s early poetry, especially the books Ing & Space, and the early novels of appropriated materials by Kathy Acker. More recently, something like Mark Peters’ Men and some of Kenny Goldsmith’s “uncreative” writing projects have struck me in a somewhat similar way, but not nearly so much so, partly because I’ve come to recognize this process of surprise in myself and so have developed a second not-quite-instantaneous response of not dismissing the new outright, but giving it a more of a chance to persuade me as to its vision.

My take on Brautigan, whom I knew just well enough to be struck at his deep shyness, was that he was a guy taking the palette of Jack Spicer & using it to write these sweet, half-funny, half-sad lyric poems, a project that struck me as derivative & minor. When I first heard him read from Trout Fishing in America, at a long gone bookstore on the edge of North Beach, I heard it not as fiction but as prose poetry. Here at least was an attempt to do something different, and interesting enough, with a form that, at that point, I really knew mostly from the dreadful predictability of Robert Bly & Russell Edson. It did not even occur to me than anyone would take it as a novel. So when I started to see copies of the book, first published by Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation, definitely a small press, in the hands of people I didn’t already know, I could tell that Brautigan was starting to have some kind of crossover success I didn’t quite get. Then, in 1970, I moved briefly to Buffalo right at about the time that the Delacorte mass market paperback was issued & I could not get on a bus there that summer without seeing somebody reading the book. I had completely misjudged Trout Fishing because I’d allowed my preconceptions to set my reaction.

My reaction when I first saw Clark Coolidge’s abstract word works in Ing, published by Angel Hair in 1968, was not so terribly different from Robert Sward’s famous dismissal of the 1970 volume Space as “psychedelic word salad,” an instance of avant-gardism for its own sake. It wasn’t until Barrett Watten sat down with me one day and went through a few texts, consciously showing me the humor (which, as it turns out, has roots in the influence of Phil Whalen & Jonathan Williams on Coolidge, two poets one might not automatically think of when first confronting those clusters of disjointed phrases), that I had the “aha” experience that suddenly transformed my reading from resistant incomprehension to suddenly seeing foreground, background, all sorts of shape & shading that had been, in fact, there all along.

This transformation, from complete resistance to being able to see into the work at hand, is I think one of the major symptoms of how our own reading & experience changes us. When I was teaching a graduate seminar at San Francisco State in the fall of 1981, one of the tasks I set for all of my students was to keep a journal of their reading, and of the poetry events they attended during the course of any given week (I’d set a target of attending two off-campus readings per week). One student, who shall remain nameless here because she’s gone on to publish some very good books, wrote of how she found the writing of Rae Armantrout, whose book Extremities was the class’ first required reading, incomprehensible. In the following week, we’d had an experience in class, reading Bruce Andrews’ Sonnets: Momento Mori, aloud only to discover that some students – all grad level folks, half of whom are now publishing poets – had trouble even telling when the poems began & ended even with a table of contents. This student really struggled with that. The following weeks, reading books by Bob Grenier & Hannah Weiner, were no less relief. But then when she got to Steve Benson’s Blind Spots, the work suddenly seemed sensual, coherent, cogent in ways that she had not anticipated. She went back to the earlier books on the reading list – I’d assigned 16 books for this course – and now discovered that they also really made sense, as of course they do. There was one funny passage in her journal, in which she worried that what I was doing as a teacher might be brainwashing students, but from that point forward she was no longer the silent presence in class that she had been for the first few weeks.

Some eight years before that, Kathy Acker had been, from my perspective, just one of the faces on the San Francisco poetry scene that one remembered because she was, literally, the first woman with a freshly shaved head I’d ever seen. Once each month, she would hand me these self-printed chapters from her ongoing work in progress, a novel entitled The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, this last phrase which she was then using as a pen-name. In 1973, I was still reluctant – some six years after having made almost the same mistake with Trout Fishing – to imagine the novel as anything other than the corporate plaything of trade presses. Acker’s attempt to build a genre that was, it seemed, equal parts plagiarism & pornography, yielding from that mix autobiography, struck me as very weird indeed. Publishing chapters monthly, handing them out to friends, struck me as deeply romantic, going right back to Dickens as a model for the form, yet also extraordinarily brave. By the time, Acker began her next project, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac! Imagining, I was persuaded of the importance of her work for writing, tho I still discounted the idea of going after the novel as a project in itself. The courage of Acker’s actions was an important impetus to me, especially during the writing of Ketjak & the other poems of The Age of Huts, in some ways more than her writing.

In each case, my resistant reaction to a work that fit outside my received view of what literature might or could be proved instructive. It wasn’t that I was inherently opposed to the new – I had no such similar response to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, or Bob Grenier, for example, when I discovered them – but rather that my idea of what the new might be seems to have a lot of ought built into it. When something outside of my experience fits into my notion (it’s too impressionistic & intuitive to call an idea) of how a given genre ought to develop, then I have no difficulty.

Nor do I have a hard time segregating out what I think of as less than great work done among the various avant-(and post-avant)gardes. No amount of theoretical framing is going to render the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly or texts of Richard Kostelanetz interesting. John Cage’s work with words is a kind of literary tourism at best, well intentioned buy painfully sentimental. Cage’s work with sound, however, suffers from none of those faults.

But when something – like Rob Read’s spam poems – manages both to be new and to point to ways in which my own take on writing is not, a priori, entirely accurate, that I need to go back & revise some thinking somewhere along the line, then I know from experience I can be less than a good reader. And over time I’ve learned to gauge my response & recognize this reaction when I’m having it. And learn from it.

So the answer is, yes, Matt, that is a poetics.