David Giannini responds to my blog on his book, Other Lines:

Dear Ron Silliman:

Thank you for reviewing Others' Lines. These days, one is grateful for almost any notice!

You have certain agenda items of your own throughout most of the review, and I needn't agree with you. You do end the review with a tidy handshake and nod – much appreciated! You mentioned nothing about the Note (at the beginning of O.L.) indicating my overall intent and attempted honoring of a diversity of poets coming from many "campsites" and how they become, one line with another, intimately linked. There is no "game" involved, the whole process was quite organic for me. There is also the matter of the simple gap-narrative one may discern throughout O.L., one reason why I felt it was necessary to place three triads to a page in most cases, a matter of 'fluidity'. My hope is that the process in O.L. will be built upon by others.

I want to provide you, here, with another poet's response, one who is also a university professor and a Buddhist. I copy a portion of his response verbatim:

It is wonderful to see Your (for you've done something no other has here!) Lines as a book now – and fitting that Ganick bring it out.

 You 'call into question' so many assumptions about poet and poem in a delightful way, show how a poem, any poem, is made out of poems, renew the idea of, well, I'd say sangha for want of something better.

 There's so much pontification these days about 'authorship' and 'intellectual property' – all of it nonsense and all of it because people want to hold onto something unreal. They want, figuratively if not literally, their royalties. To be royal. And all worked up because they're not, because no one is. And you've made something here that transcends it all, shows us something lovely 'on the other side.'

Quite a felt response, I'd say, one quite different from most of the seven responders to your review, people who are judging and even attacking the integrity and veracity of approach in Others' Lines WITHOUT HAVING READ THE BOOK ITSELF! At first I thought to stick the prongs of my pitchfork of contempt into the mess of them, but why bother? Their own words betray them. Nor is this a matter of 'sour grapes' on my part – I respond to what is obviously and innately various ego-stances of uninformed pronouncements. I am, then, grateful for Edward Baker's response, and for "nate the writer", his openness.

Thank you, again, Ron Silliman.

David Giannini

P.S. If you think, for some reason, that this letter might hold interest if placed within your blog site, go right ahead!