Silliman's Blog

How do I decide what’s right for me?

As quickly as possible, with as little thought into the decision as I can humanly muster. It’s better, for me at least, to feel it rather than to think it. One of the major reasons that I work in notebooks the way I do is that the process of using ink & pen in a bound volume minimizes the opportunities to scroll around & contemplate larger structures. From my perspective, the most important moment in a prose poem is that which occurs between the period of one sentence & the capital letter than initiates the next. No two blank spaces are alike & there are moments when I think of the sentences primarily as a way of setting those spaces up & as if it were the spaces that were the true strokes of the painting. I can, when I am really in the zone, when I’m writing & sometimes when I’m in a reading as well, literally hear those spaces just as I do the softer ones between words, let alone the half-hidden ones you can find within words if you just listen closely. Silence is so much a part of noise yet we so seldom give it heed.

I am very much a sound driven writer. Ketjak, my first really serious work, was above all else an argument with Gertrude Stein over the sweetness of her tones. I wanted to pump her texts full of insulin, bring down the ding-dong quality, secularize those consonants, deflate the vowels. And it’s not because I don’t love her writing.

Sound is very much a liquid. We’re immersed in it, bathed in its waves. Even if you’re in an anechoic chamber – and I’ve been in a few of them lately – it’s never silent. One’s body hums right along, synapses chime, the clatter of bloodflow is as loud as the subway. Yet that is the closest I will ever get to “pure” silence. I’ve approached it only once in the real world, so-called, on a cold February morning in 1978 near Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. It’s like trying to see the night sky without the light pollution of cities – you have to go a long way to do it.

So if I say I go with the flow in deciding what’s right for me, I’m not being facetious exactly. Rather the only way to get to those spaces I’m after, literally the blank spaces, is to move very quickly. When I sit down with a notebook if I start to slow down, I know it’s over, the sitting is done. It was Steve Benson who first made me conscious of the sitting as a unit of writing, possibly he got that from Zoketsu Norman Fischer. Articulating that space is really what Paradise is all “about.” One sitting, one paragraph. That’s even the meaning of its title.

When I work with larger structures, what they really are, at least when they work, are territories in which I can get to these spaces, these moments. I bring in larger thematic elements as much because they’re pleasurable & because I’m an obsessive thinker, my wife complains that I’m never “off.” It’s almost as if I build a playground and I can spend an enormous amount of time thinking through possible forms before I begin writing. But I know very quickly whether or not it’s working. And if it’s not, I can discard it.

But if one’s life is one writing – and I really think it is – then the evolution, articulation of that writing has to be capable of incorporating change, growth, even contradiction. Not every form can do that. Living one’s life by 30-line poems perfectly designed for writing contests isn’t a way of approaching that unless one operates by a very specific discipline.

I’m right now in the earliest stages of Universe. I have a dozen or so pages of Revelator, a hundred or so other sentences on my Palm Pilot that eventually will be deployed in another work, a couple of short pieces that are part of a third one – these latter two have no names as yet, it’s too early, I’m not even sure what the form is for one of them. Originally I’d contemplated Revelator as part of a quartet – one way of approaching Universe might be to think of it as 90 such quartets – and yet I’ve begun to realize that there are other possibilities of relation that might be articulated across a 360-part structure envisioned as a single turn, and I’m beginning to wonder how Revelator might be able to bring those potentialities up to the fore. Yet when I’m writing in my notebook, all I’m ever writing is this word, that word, this.

It’s another question from Mark Tursi!

So, how do you decide what’s right for you? And, I don’t mean to be glib – I’m thinking about what Jack Spicer says about not getting in the way of the poem and the poem as dictation, and how this connects to what you think about the origin of a poem. He says this in a variety of ways:

“That essentially you are something which is being transmitted into, and the more that you clear your mind away from yourself, and the more also that you do some censoring—because there will be all sorts of things coming from your mind, from the depths of your mind, from things that you want, which will foul up the poem” (7).

“I do think that if you keep your ideas closed and your mind open, you have a better chance by and large (i.e. of creating a good poem)” (18).

“The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us – not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is – but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem” (61).¹

Basically, it seems to me, Spicer suggests ‘getting out of the way’ of the poem so the ‘Outside’ (whatever that may be) can dictate the poem to you (or through you). And, the last quotation I use here involving Duncan seems particularly close to your work. Does Spicer’s idea (via Duncan) about letting the writing explore its own path conflict with your ideas about the origins and process of a poem, or is it consistent in some ways? And, I’d like to try and connect it to my original question about “what is right for you.” That is, how is “what seems right” as a way of proceeding linked to where the poem comes from?

And, finally, I see a link between these ideas emerging from Spicer and something you said in a previous interview: “I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I’m not interested in ‘making things up.’”² That is, if the poem isn’t made up, where is it coming from?

At first blush, these strike me as being two separate questions, perhaps more, that swirl like a rather ethereal Venn diagram around a particular territory. The territory includes – but is probably not limited to – the relationship of any given poem to poetry. But if that is the horizontal axis of this question, the vertical is the relationship of the poem (or of poetry) to the person who is the poet. You don’t mention it, but of course there are ancillary issues about these relationships to and among readers, listeners, anyone who has a relationship to the poem but who did not him or herself write the damn thing.

But let’s just stick with what we’ve got in front of us. The word poet comes of course from the Greek word for “to make,” but there is a radical difference between making and “making things up.” What I’m NOT interested in is a fictive realm, one that posits all of the writer’s creativity along some referential dimension & which treats all of the other five functions of language (addressor/addressee, contact/code, signifier) as though they were transparent or unimportant. A literature that does not understand the implications of that kind of anesthesia is of no interest to me.

I would agree with Duncan – I do agree with him – that there is “really no single poem.” I usually state this as “I’m interested in poetry much more than I am in poems.” Now there obviously are great poets, really great poets, who work exclusively (or almost so) in the short poem form, so just as obviously there is something there that is, in their work, what we could call a “poem.” Robert Creeley & Rae Armantrout are the two examples that come most immediately to mind, or maybe Graham Foust. I see that sort of writing as highlighting specific aspects of a much larger process and that light – think of the prison tower’s klieg light as a visual analog – is what I see the individual poem as. This is very different – antithetical – from the sort of writing that just assumes that there are (or might be) boundaries and that one can fill a space with so much language & call it a poem.

My own bias is of course for those writings, from Melville or maybe even The Prelude to the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, that take on all six of the functions of language, and which do so on a scale that suggests a major life commitment. Yet I would still list Armantrout, Creeley & Foust among my dozen or so most favorite poets, even as I read them as specific instances in which something like The Cantos or “A” is the norm.

To return for a moment to Spicer’s terminology, which is one way among many to discuss these kinds of issues, the poet is a “counterpunching radio” principally to the degree that he or she is capable of counterpunching. The writer has to be open to anything coming into the poem – which is one reason I suspect that all of my poems, even those with the most predetermined exoskeletal structures, have always surprised me, taken me to places I had not anticipated when I began the writing (why, for example, the first poem in Universe insisted on being called Revelator, rather than Witness as I had planned). Call it negative capability or listening for the Martians, whatever. Nothing will cause the poem to go dead faster than setting out to write “about” X, something that gets proven over & over.

What I look for in the poem, any poem, mine or others, is that engagement with all of what Jakobson calls the six functions of language, not just sound (which lies on the contact/code axis) nor story (the life of the signified). Think of how in his very best work (Language, Book of Magazine Verse) individual lines in the poetry of Jack Spicer function almost as a kind of shrapnel, not as parts of discourse or argument. Thus, for example, “They will never know what hit them,” a sentence that takes up the latter half of the third line of “Smoke signals / Like in the Eskimo Village” in the Thing Language section of Language – which, as we are told point blank is “a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy” – returns at the very end of “Transformations II” in Transformations : “The Trojans / Having no idea of true or false syntax and having no recorded language / Never knew what hit them.” What then is the content, let alone the origin, of such a phrase? The capriciousness of fate? The horror of history? Where is, in such a target rich environment, the Outside?

Tomorrow I’ll address that initial question: how do I decide what’s right for me?

¹ All these quotations are taken from The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi. The lectures were presented over several months in 1965.

² Gregory, Sinda. “A 1982 Interview with Ron Silliman.” Modern American Poetry.

My first thought when reading K. Silem Mohammad’s “A Language Poetry Dossier” was that Kasey had, a la some Mark Peters’ projects, run the phrase “language poetry” through Googlism & used that as the basis for constructing the later sections of his piece. But when I attempted to replicate the experiment, or what I thought was the experiment, the results of which follow this preface, it instantly became clear to me that Kasey’s piece is far deeper, more methodical, funnier & more sinister than that program can achieve. Yet doesn’t that first sentence in this list show up verbatim in Kasey’s text? (It is taken in its entirety from Eleana Kim’s “Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Making of a Movement” in Gary Sullivan’s ezine, Read Me) Doesn’t the second? Doesn’t the third? That fourth item is of greater interest to me if I think of “q” as “Q,” the recurring character on Star Trek modeled after Milton’s Satan.

Ultimately, my itchiness over all this really has to do with my own discomfort at statements of agency ascribed to any abstraction or group noun. I cringe when W tells us what terrorists or “evil doers” or even “old Europe” are thinking & I cringe at any other assertion that “Group noun is X,” regardless of what Group noun or X might be. In the truest sense, every single sentence in Kasey’s text is wrong. Simply & completely wrong. Yet a number of them are, in the same moment, in some sense, often qualified or partial, also true – that is what is so creepy.

Then I realized that what Kasey had done wasn’t Googlism, but Google itself, searching the phrase “Language poetry is.” That yields some 524 hits, notably better than Googlism’s 51, and closer to the number of sentences that actually occur in Kasey’s work. And isn’t Google what Mark Peters did also, now that I think of it?

Then I thought to myself – why is Kasey focusing on a phrase that is over a quarter of a century old? What is this obsession with those of us “of a certain age?” So I try it with “New Brutalism is” & it’s true, I get only 32 hits, two of which also come from Kasey’s site, but none better than another ascribed to, of all people, Rob Lowe: New Brutalism is like chewing aluminum foil.

Which brings me back to my old feeling that anti-group behavior has never served any younger poet well. It’s not simply that this retro-rugged individualism is a part of the (literal) anti-commun(ism) that accompanied the rejection of the left after the 1970s (tho that’s a side of it also). You just can’t discuss what you can’t name, regardless of how much you may brutalize a concept like langpo in the process. And if you can’t talk about it, does it even exist?

Googlism: language poetry

language poetry is constructed as a niche market

language poetry is seen as political act in the deepest sense

language poetry is futile without publicity

language poetry is q

language poetry is about going beyond the boundaries “traditional / conventional" language usage places on notions of meaning

language poetry is a movement of convincing authority in contemporary poetics

language poetry is concerned

language poetry is its meticulous

language poetry is one in which there is a number of established poets operating in diverse ways

language poetry is held out to be one of the poetic modes of the present moment

language poetry is indicated in the only epigraph in the book

language poetry is also often seen as elitist because it never dealt adequately with issues of race

language poetry is all about the sound of the words together

language poetry is a cryptic and highly theoretical literary form grounded in philosophical discourse

language poetry is to meet some actual examples of it

language poetry is relatively recent

language poetry is academy

language poetry is not "literature

language poetry is vibrant

language poetry is highly structured

language poetry is said to be at the intersection of literature and graphic design

language poetry is in its heyday

language poetry is highly personal

language poetry is his attentiveness to the texts

language poetry is wordplay

language poetry is iambic pentameter

language poetry is

language poetry is something of an artistic dead end

language poetry is also provided

language poetry is a way of expression open to anyone who chooses to use it

language poetry is twenty years

language poetry is heir to

language poetry is essentially no different from any other formal poetry

language poetry is in for one helluva ride

language poetry is its sophistication

language poetry is written in iambic pentameters

language poetry is correlative to no object

language poetry is undoubtedly the most self

language poetry is shit or that it is the shit – and no doubt that will be educational and maybe even fun sometimes

language poetry is diverse

language poetry is always the one you can feel more intensively

language poetry is tae hae its first owersettin intae chinese

language poetry is autobiographical at its fundament

language poetry is no harder to "get" than cubism; the other weird thing is that it's lasted as long as it has without the support of

language poetry is in 839

language poetry is normally recited

language poetry is influenced by theory

language poetry is ordered by production rather than reproduction

language poetry is much more philosophically

language poetry is here evoked

language poetry is often

An idyllic tale of a young man’s search for himself & the need for peasant-led communist revolution is so not 2004, particularly out in aptly named King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, that I wanted to check the year feature on my watch by the time I left Motorcycle Diaries. It’s a sweet little road movie, visually breath-taking, a kinder, gentler Easy Rider, albeit one that sees the harshness of the lives of the people whose land the protagonists ride (or, more often, push) their ancient Norton 500 through . . . at least until they sell it for scrap & take to traveling by foot, by thumb & by raft.

Maybe it’s because Walter Salles’ previous motion picture, Central Station, was a minor cross-over hit, or because Gael García Bernal starred in Y Tu Mama Tambien, much more than a minor crossover success, as well as Amores Perros, or perhaps it’s because Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Motorcycle Diaries’ protagonist, evolved “in real life” from the wide-eyed asthmatic med student of this film into “Che,” itinerant revolutionary & ultimate t-shirt icon, but somebody has an idea that this movie is going to do fairly well here north of the border. Maybe.

Films like this – and this is a good one, well executed – operate through the elaboration & extension of genre clichés that everyone in the audience always already knows – there are some scenes in the tougher physical climes of the Andes in which one swears that one is watching Frodo & Sam on one more climb, one more trek through the snow, the motorcycle itself turning into an ever heavier ring. At other moments in the film, tho, the ring’s role is played by $15 in U.S. currency Che has been given by his rich girlfriend on the off chance that this 8,000 mile trek through South America should lead them to the United States & the possibility of fashionable swimwear.

Rodrigo de la Serna’s Alberto is more Falstaff than Sam to Che’s Frodo, however, which creates something of an odd arc for the narrative as the quest for booty turns, once our lads have gotten into Peru & especially once they’ve arrived to do a three-week internship at a leper colony high in the Amazon, into a quest for social justice. Salles uses the region’s stunning beauty to soften what are really agitprop appearances of coal miners & communists & campesinos thrown off their land in the name of “progress.” This Frodo, it is worth noting, gives the ring – or at least the $15 – to the communists.

The film’s third act, the internship at the leper colony – real Hansen’s patients appear to have been used as actors here – is itself a set piece, complete with a nun in the role of Nurse Ratchet (or maybe Nurse Ratchet-lite – her worst punishment is to withhold meals to those who fail to attend mass). The patients are kept on one side of the river, literally, while the doctors & staff live on the other – the Amazon is no mere stream. The film’s climax comes on Che’s 24^th birthday, which he celebrates by giving a political speech in the form of a toast to the doctors & staff (and it is to Salles’ credit that he makes it quite clear by the reaction shots of the colony’s staff that only Alberto has any clue what Che is actually saying), followed by a swim across the river to the colony itself, a lengthy & treacherous venture made no easier by Guevara’s asthmatic wheezing.

Perhaps the very best part of this movie – beyond the dramatic uses of scenery – are the little touches that Salles & García Bernal give to Che. When a leading expert in leprosy – Guevara’s prospective specialization in med school – hands him a book manuscript to read, Che tells his benefactor that it’s cliché ridden & badly done. This bluntness is both a virtue & a curse.

Guevara’s sense of propriety & lack of ease with himself (he's in denial over the severity of his ashtma attacks, he can’t dance, he can’t get his rich girlfriend to go beyond the simplest backseat fondling in the family car & he certainly won't lie just to be polite) just barely covers a rigid side – one that Alberto likes to tease & prod – that the audience knows will combine later with his idealism & anger in ways that are at once “liberating” & more than a little toxic. Are we intended to catch the irony when Che tells the doctor to “stick to what you know best?” The film doesn’t answer that, exactly, but Salles wants us to know that this question didn’t go unasked.

Okay, so where Goest Cole Swensen, exactly? Her book of that title itself presents a text in three sections, the first & last of which form short brackets (Of White and On White, respectively) around a longer sequence entitled A History of the Incandescent. At one level is this a long or serial poem, at another an exceptionally well thought out sequence of independent works. There is a sequence in Of White – “Five Landscapes” – that has an exact parallel in On White. Likewise balanced is a work entitled “The Future of Sculpture” in Of White, largely taken from the words of Cy Twombly, and a work entitled “The Future of White” in On White, likewise derived from Twombly.

The middle & longest section of this book is a sequence of 20 poems, virtually all of which have to do with first things. “The Invention of . . .” appears in eight of the titles. Other titles include “The First Lightbulb, “ “The History of Artificial Ice,” “The Origin of Ombres Chinoises,” “Things to Do with Naptha,” “The Lives of Saltpeter,” etc. A second way to look at this sequence is to focus on what precisely is being invented, discovered, evolved, or whatever: in addition to those already mentioned, we find streetlights, the hydrometer, the mirror, the weathervane, automata, Bologna Stone, etched, engraved & incised glass, the pencil and natural gas. How does one suggest ethereal? Evanescent? There is, in fact, a version of this book to be written within the framework of a history of the sublime – the sort of thing someone like Rob Wilson might write. And that is, I suspect, not too far from what Swensen herself is pursuing here – this is the kind of writing one might characterize as abstract not in the lazy sense of that word, but in the literal, almost philosophical sense that conveys out-of-traction, suggesting in the same moment a hue beyond color & a gravity that understands weightlessness not as a condition so much as a gateway & what fascinates me most about what Swensen is writing here is not this focus nearly so much as the rigor & intensity of her pursuit, which can only be described as marvelous.

Let me give an example. Here is the first poem from the series entitled “Others,” which appears in the opening section Of White:

You walk into a house

in which several people are sitting in the dark

around a dinner table, eating, drinking, laughing.

This simple text has, a careful reader will recognize instantly, a history & a context as well as several decision points, not one of which occurs casually or out of habit. The use of the second person invokes an entire tradition of “dream writing” that would include everyone from Kafka, the Russian absurdists, Max Jacob, Lydia Davis among more recent Americans & the work of Russell Edson. Swensen’s work stands up well – better than “well,” actually – alongside these other works. This is due largely, I think, to two decisions that occur in the final line – the first to omit the “and” from the list of actions, the second to include the period to a work in which it might not otherwise appear necessary.

Omitting the “and” destabilizes the list’s sense of completeness. It also gives the third line a sense of claustrophobia (through condensation, the ur-device of poetry) it could not otherwise have. The claustrophobia is reinforced through the presence of the period, which closes the image posed by this single sentence. Together, the two give this text a menacing air that is not visible at all through Swensen’s selection of words – unless we consider the second person itself to be “menacing” (a real possibility) – something I don’t think I’ve ever seen demonstrated so clearly before in a poem.

This degree of engaging the reader’s expectation only to undercut it is characteristic for this book. Similarly, for example, the sentence that wends river-like through the lines of the first stanza of “The Lives of Saltpeter” – “Glass made its first appearance / on the shores outside of Belus / when sailors placed blocks of saltpeter under cooking pots / causing the sand to fuse along the entire edge of the sea / ran another sea that refused to move”– sounds as if it was set up to articulate that fissure of syntax that occurs just prior to the last line until (and only until) the eye crosses over the stanza break to the first words of the second strophe –

has been proved false.

– again inserting an exceptionally forceful piece of punctuation. The reader whose attention flags during these shifts will lose his or her way quickly in these poems.

Another review that needs to be written of this book is one that contrasts the seeming openness of so many of its “transparent” subjects & the closing – indeed, constricting – forms that Swensen gives to these pieces. Even the idea of a central sequence bounded on either side by parallel brackets, prelude & coda, sets this book up very much against the apparent open-endedness of the American long poem.

Swensen is completely conscious of these stresses in her work. In addition to its title, with all of its layers, the book takes for its cover image a photograph of Running Fence, the site work constructed by Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude throughout Marin & Sonoma counties in Northern California in 1976, 18 feet high by 24½ miles long. To a poet’s eye, this endless “sheet on a clothesline” is nothing other than the line – including of course the line of the poem – made palpable & manifest. But to enter into it meant nothing less than taking a ride in the country, something a bit alien to lots of art lovers in that disco-defined decade. In some sense, the book behind this cover does something very similar, but reversing these exact dimensions – where Christo’s fence made closed form infinitely indeterminate (it ended only when it went, literally, into the ocean), Swensen wants to show us how the form of the poem seems able to close off the infinite power of light itself. The result is a book that is an immensely powerful experience.

A copy of The House that Hijack Built, by Adeena Karasick, is going Harry Thorne of Long Island City, who was the 200,000^th visitor to this site. House has the unique distinction of being the one book that I appear to have acquired three times.

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Some people have asked, so I ought to note that the rest of the 40-odd duplicate books that turned up when I put together my new bookcase will eventually find their way to the library at Kelly’s Writers House.

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The box from SPD arrived and I was right – there were two new duplicates in that shipment. In one instance, tho, I profess blamelessness. I received the book from the publisher directly earlier this week, then the second copy arrived in the very battered box that SPD used. Happily, ‘twas the box that was battered & not the books inside.

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One of the things you learn – or should – when you’re scrolling among the various blogs out there is that if you’re going to post a comment, especially if you have multiple blogs open on your screen & have the impulse to post a comment to more than one, you ought to slow down & try not to overdo the multitasking thing. Otherwise you might post the comment to the wrong blog & sound even less coherent than you really are. Somebody out there has a really weird note of mine that would seem much more sensible if it was only attached to Tony Tost’s blog.

It is often the case that the baseball playoffs are more exciting to watch than the World Series to which they lead. And it may turn out to be the case again this year. But anyone who is a fan of baseball will have to admit that the past week has been one of those transcendent moments when what is humanly possible in sport is on display so clearly that even the most casual observer would take notice. Since we’re rooting for everyone & everything from Massachusetts for the next several weeks anyway, we’re quite pleased.

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Gwen Knapp of the San Francisco Chronicle should win some kind of award for most extravagant mixed metaphor in attempting to describe the Sox-Yankee series:

They were tamed by pitchers who, in an era when arms are more delicate than orchids, worked like Iditarod dogs.

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Plus I like how they snuck in a plug for one of my books in this wallpaper display.

Mark Tursi is working on a dissertation & sent me a question, which follows. He warns that, if I post my response to this blog, any commentary thereon in the Squawkbox tool might also become part of his process:

In The Chinese Notebook, which was just recently re-released online by UBU Editions (2004), you suggest, “Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all.” I find this a particularly interesting proposition in lieu of the various forms throughout all of The Age of Huts: Sunset Debris which is all questions; 2197 which is largely verse form with a few sections of prose; and, finally, The Chinese Notebooks which is enumerated prose paragraphs. There has, of course, been a lot of critical writing that argues that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry is largely concerned with process rather than product, and you yourself suggest in the Afterword to the 2002 edition of In the American Tree that writing is “a means of thinking, an active process” and “shared thinking.” But, I wonder, to what extent your writing is concerned more with activity rather than process (or form or product), as you seem to suggest? That is, I think there is a slight nuance in meaning here that is rather revealing. On the one hand, your work seems to a reveal an obsession with form (e.g. The Age of Huts and The Alphabet), but on the other, you seem more concerned with writing as an act (activity), first and foremost (esp. your blog and The Alphabet perhaps!?), rather than as a form existing outside of the act itself or even the process (procedure), except how it actual comes to exist as an intentional and self-reflexive act. And, if the ‘intention’ and ‘the poetry’ are identical which you suggest a few lines later in The Chinese Notebook, isn’t the act and the form one in the same? And, back to your suggestion and following question: “Would this definition satisfy Duncan?” I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more on these distinctions (or lack of) between act and process, act and form?

I have a couple of different, possibly conflicting reactions as I read this – indeed, that latter sense has delayed me from responding to it for quite some time – but the strongest & most immediate one is a distrust in the way that the term “form” is being applied here, which I read as “exoskeletal pattern.” The description of 2197 is the give-away here, precisely because it is so inexact. The work consists of 13 poems, all constructed from the collision of 169 different sentences with one another – the title refers to the number of sentences in the work as a whole. When sentences “collide,” the grammatical structure of one is used to house the “content” words of the other. 2197 thus comes closest to the conception of form you pose, yet it is the one that is – to my reading of your question – the work in The Age of Huts that is least recognized as such.

Yet how much of that poem is that reiterative structure – which is not without its problems – and how much of the work’s “true” form is my own experience of working on it in notebooks – one of which contained nothing but the numerical plan of which sentence was to serve as the syntactic domain here, which as the source for signifiers? How much is involved in writing it specifically in coffee houses, especially the Meat Market, an establishment that exists (or used to exist) in an old butcher shop on 24^th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, where at least 80 percent of the text was crafted? How much of its form, for me, also is involved with living in a collective household on California Street in San Francisco, and with my various roommates there, a particularly intense & close household? I began the poem while working on the other sections of The Age of Huts – the first of which is Ketjak, published separately from the Roof Press edition – but did not complete it until I was well into the writing of Tjanting, another work that required rigorous planning and a careful structure laying out which sentence went where (and which also, taking directly from 2197, almost always involved revision as essential to the reiterative process).

You can get a better sense of how 2197 is put together if you follow a single term throughout the work, for example “lion.” Thus in the first poem, “I am Marion Delgado,” we find two consecutive sentences with it:

Lion I’d bites.

A specific lion, mane, bites for the peach-headed.

In “I Meet Osip Brik,” we find

The lion is full of grapes.

In “Rhizome,” lion & grapes again appear, but a different sequence:

Lion made the grapes

of my peach-headed man.

In “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap,” we come across the combination again:

Anything lion do is made for many grapes.

And so on. My idea in writing this was that it should work on several levels. Whether or not it does, I guess, will depend both on what different readers experience coming across these individual sentences in very dissimilar (or what I hoped were dissimilar) contexts and on how well I may have executed my initial impulse(s).

My own sense is that form in the poem is all of these things – that one cannot dissociate exoskeletal structure (the “patterns of deployment” in 2197 are an alternating sequence of three different formats – a “one sentence / one line” mode with heavily indented lines that I took directly from work Barrett Watten was doing at the time, a prose poem paragraph, and a “stepped line” derived partly from the late work of William Carlos Williams & partly from Mayakovsky) from the actual processes of writing. Attempts to do so always strike me as artificial distinctions, which can be tactically useful, but quickly become sterile if carried out toward “logical conclusions.”

Another way to examine the same question would be to ask what the formal relationship of my titles to the textual bodies beneath them might be. 2197 is really where I think I worked out my sense of the modularity of that process. Each title in the sequence is exemplary (at least in my imagination) of a certain genre of title. Thus “I am Marion Delgado” is at one level a typical “autobiographical title,” and yet I am obviously not Marion Delgado, nor does the sentence mean precisely what it suggests. It was the “code” phrase used by Mark Rudd as he got up to the podium to speak to signal to the other members of what became the Weather Underground that it was time to bolt the SDS convention in 1969. Marion Delgado was, in 1968, a three-year-old toddler in the Fresno area who inadvertently left a tricycle on some railroad tracks and derailed a shipment of war material bound for Vietnam. Similarly, “I Meet Osip Brik” – a more active variant of the autobiographical title – suggests a history that I do not have (I am not, for example, Mayakovsky & while I have stood outside Brik’s apartment in what was then Leningrad, I never met the man who died some 18 months before I was born). “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap” is a scenic title derived from the history of painting – I think of it as being particularly Ashbery-esque. Alternately, “Invasion of the Stalinoids” has a sci-fi feel to it, although “Stalinoids” is a term derived very much from the left in-fighting of the far left in the 1970s. “Turk Street News” was the name a porn theater where I once watched Kathy Acker on the big screen having sex with several men, one of whom was flogging her with a head of iceberg lettuce. So there seems always to be two things going on in these titles, for me at least, one of them being a relationship to title-ness, the other something that is far more personal & probably inscrutable to the reader. Neither, it is worth noting, has much to do with the mathematically determined sentences that appear as the “named body” beneath each title. Titles for me are very much about that arbitrary element that occurs in naming – what would become of a child if you named him Orlando or Arkadii instead of Jesse or Colin?

I recently had a fellow overseas who got very angry at me over just such a relationship between the title of one of the sections of VOG in The Alphabet and its textual body. He wanted there to be a clear referential frame between body & title where I want to explore as many angles in & around that relationship as is humanly conceivable. And he’d allowed the parsimony principle to convince himself that the body of the text had a single, nameable content, something that is virtually never the case with my work.

So where does form end & process begin, or form end & either “the world” or “content” begin? I’m not convinced that such boundaries are real, tho we can from time to time foreground elements that seem to suggest otherwise. In ”Revelator,” the first section of Universe – the work that comes after The Alphabet – I’m working with a five-word line as a constant & the physical size of a notebook as boundaries to the text. Yet if you were ask me what the formal engine of the text is, my instinct would be to point to the role of sound, rhythm and the levels of phrasal concentration that a line of that size literally dictates. Bob Perelman prefers a six-word line, and has said that he does so precisely because it doesn’t call for such concentration, which he sees as getting away from the looseness of speech & coming across as excessively literary. I don’t think that either one of us is “right” in which way to proceed, but we do at least understand the implications of making specific formal choices, so that I might do what’s right for me, Bob what is right for him.

My comments yesterday on how to organize one’s thinking about the surfeit of good writing by younger poets when faced with absolute constraints on one’s time & attention generated a few interesting responses as well as, I’m afraid, some predictable ones as well.

To the implication that if I think there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of competent, interesting post-avant poets now writing in English, I should adjust my critical horizon upward until it fixates upon some attainable quantity of “great” writing, I think that view manages to miss – precisely! – what is different about the current poetic age.

The social role of poetry in the English speaking countries is changing & attempts to retain a sense that one might be able to encapsulate just the best-of-the-best in anthology-sized collections, for example, is only a method of pretending that this transformation isn’t happening. What it means is that the relationship of the individual poet is changing with regards to his/her audience, to the role of the book, the role of the literary journal & the function of specific poetic communities. One consequence that I can see – although it is far from complete or uniform as a social effect – is that the hardcopy literary magazine has declined dramatically in importance & value. Only part of this is due to the rise of web-enabled journals. An equally important side-effect is the rise of the chapbook – the chapbook may in fact the be the primary literary “unit” vis-à-vis poetry right now. It’s a publication that has zero chance of making it into the book chains and save for a few poetry-centric bookstores (most notably Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee), you can’t get it retail. Even City Lights & Open Books in Seattle tend to have very few chapbooks. My new 84” bookcase is filled with them.

Rebecca Loudon responded in the Squawkbox commentary tool* to my line that

" I’d love to figure out how younger poets are handling it "

What, exactly, do you mean by younger poets? Chronological age? Emotional age? Years of writing? Number of publications? Do you have no interest in how the older poets are handling it? Curious.

Which is an excellent point. By “younger” I mean anyone who hasn’t been writing & publishing books for a quarter of a century, whatever their chronological age. My experience has been that younger poets are actively attempting to make sense of the world, and especially the world of poetry, “in real time,” with all the chaos, change & indeterminacy that implies. “Older” poets have largely already figured out what their poetry is doing and have a tendency to stay focused on the world of writing as they understood it when they were younger poets. What is so remarkable about an older writer who actively manages to stay current with all that is changing in poetry – Robert Creeley is a great example of this – is that it is so very rare indeed.

I don’t think that this is an indictment necessarily of anybody who can’t keep up with Robert’s restless imagination & his ability to absorb so much of what’s new. I just think this is a natural part of the “gravity” that occurs as part of the aging process & that one has to work actively against that winnowing process that results in older writers seeming “out of touch” or “interested only in their friends & those younger poets who imitate them.” Or worse.

As aggressive as I try to be about that myself, the greatest surprise to me in starting my weblog two years ago was exactly how much even my own reading tended to focus largely on the work of my immediate peers, poets born between 1940 & 1955. One person who is getting (re)educated as a result of this blog is therefore me. And it’s been a useful process indeed.

Dan Bouchard sent me an email pointing out Steve Evans’ article in the fourth issue of The Poker, which addresses this same issue. Sort of. As is so often the case with Evans’ work, the piece considers many aspects of the phenomenon without ever taking a clear stand in behalf of one particular strategy. He achieves this by framing the discussion as a look at “four dissimilar strategies.”

He sort-of-warns against “outsourcing” our “taste” to the various prizes, which attempt to sort out “the best”  – or at least to lend that rubric to various School o’ Quietude friendship networks. He presents various “constellations” of his own gradually evolving reading list (he’s as slow a reader as I am). He thinks about the relation of writing to the world & especially to our current debased mode of political discourse. Here at least he ventures a conclusion – that Bush should be beaten. Evans then lists 232 reviews that appeared over ten months in four journals – The Boston Review. Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi & Poetry Project Newsletter – and notes which presses got the most reviews:

10 reviews: Norton

9 reviews: FSG, Graywolf, Verse

8 reviews: New Directions

7 reviews: Coffee House, Wesleyan

5 reviews: Knopf, Krupskaya

4 reviews: Flood, HarperCollins, Kelsey Street, Penguin, University of Georgia

Evans doesn’t discuss what it means, in relative terms, to have a review in Publishers Weekly vs. one in the Poetry Project Newsletter, let alone The New York Times or Poetry. Nor does he indicate which titles may have received more than one review. Thus the piece feels like an incomplete update on the sort of research that Jed Rasula did in The American Poetry Wax Museum or Hank Lazer did in Opposing Poetries.

Yet what feels most “contemporary” about Evans’ take on all this is exactly its failure to take a stand, adopt a topic sentence, draw conclusions on the wall. Thus ultimately it’s his lists of “constellations,” titles of eleven books each that he was in the midst of reading at different moments over the last 18 months, that one reads as the clearest presentation of a point of view. And here it would be interesting to see which presses his constellation represents – and possibly even to see some discussion of what it means for a book to continue to stay on the list for several consecutive months. Is that a good thing or just the opposite?

It is worth noting, I suppose, that of the 14 presses listed above, five are New York trade presses & at least three of the independents (Graywolf, Coffee House, New Directions) publish enough books annually to function as if they were trade presses. Just two are related to universities. Three of the presses – Kelsey Street, Krupskaya and Flood – might truthfully be said to be small presses. But none to my knowledge publishes chapbooks.

* Which was down for awhile yesterday & even appears to have eaten at least one comment.

While I was in California, Krishna bought a couple of 84” bookcases – one for each of us – to upgrade the four-foot high ones in our bedroom. I moved one of the latter down into the study and have spent much of the past weekend converting stacks of books on the floor into some semblance of order. Unread books of poetry takes up almost all of the new case in the bedroom, with just enough room for some of the unread critical texts that still won’t fit into the shelves in the livingroom.* It’s been nine years since we’ve added any new bookcases & I have not been on a book-buying moratorium of late.

One thing that always turns up when I engage in a project of this sort is some kind of snapshot of what I’m buying, but which I haven’t gotten around yet to reading. There’s a lot of John Ashbery & Clark Coolidge in the new bedroom bookcase – about five books of each. A lot of Mark Wallace (almost all in little chapbooks), lots of Leslie Scalapino, lots of Alice Notley. In some instances, like Wallace & Scalapino, this is really an index of how prolific each writer is at this point in their careers, but with Ashbery it’s more a sign of how very long it’s taking me to get around to his books. I’ve been struggling with Flow Chart since the summer, wanting it to be the transcendent long poem that seems to be locked up somewhere inside there, but which doesn’t ever quite get through the slack surfaces that seem to predominate that text.

An even more troubling category for me is the snapshot of those books that I’m buying over & over, and still not getting around to reading – I’ve come across second copies of at least 40 different books, tho thus far no third copies. On the other hand, I haven’t gotten the carton of items I bought when I was at SPD in Berkeley yet & I know already that one or two of those are duplicates of books already here. In a number of these cases, the situation is one where I buy the book only to receive a copy from either the author or publisher later on (in at least one case, it’s very clear that one Canadian publisher sent me two review copies, complete with press release & warm personal note from somebody I’d never heard of before). But as the SPD box will also prove, sometimes I really am just buying the same book over & over.

The most shocking discovery for me was just putting all of the books I’m currently in the middle of side by side – it takes an entire shelf! All the time I was in the middle of Flow Chart, I’d forgotten that I was halfway through Chinese Whispers. Next goal: cut the number of “in progress” books by half . . . or more.

This raises for me a question I’ve posed before, but one which feels more pressing as time goes by. I’d love to figure out how younger poets are handling it (or, for that matter, avoiding handling it): the absolute number of decent-to-great post-avant poets right now is literally in the several hundreds, if not thousands, without even delving too terribly deeply into parallel or similar traditions in other languages worldwide. It’s more than any human being can possibly handle, certainly not if one has a family and/or job.

Obviously, one solution is jettison wasting any further time on those tendencies in poetry that long since turned into dead ends, even if they continue to replicate themselves all over again in ever more self-parodic modes (e.g. the Mabel Dodge Festival). Farewell to the School of Quietude!

But the world of poetry I came into back in the mid-1960s was largely one conditioned by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry & the re-emergence during those very same years of the Objectivists – and if I try to read every poet whose work could be traced back to these traditions alone, it would be an inconceivable task. Even if I try to restrict it to only those books that are excellent or better – how can I know that in advance? – there are more books than I will ever be able to read. Yet I really am interested pretty much in all of it, so the idea of how to carve out an intelligible niche, a subsegment of this wealth of writing, is one I ponder a lot.

The tendency of so many younger poets has been to be militantly anti-group formation, yet in a field of literally hundreds upon hundreds of younger poets (say, under 40), it seems very clear that this strategy serves almost none of them well at all. At the same time, this isn’t something you can fake, although the mock movement of new brutalism does a better job than most of denying their cake & having it also. The last attempt at something more rigorous or serious – the Apex of the M crowd, circa 1990 – seemed to dissolve the minute everybody groaned at its lack of good humor.

So what is to be done? Read only one’s friends? Read only “the larger” independent presses – as if they did a better job of selecting “the best” than does, say, FSG? How does one map the landscape? If ever there was a time when a Donald Allen could step forward and, with about three good ideas, completely shape the world, this is it. Just as clearly, that individual can’t be one of us geezers. It’s going to have to come from within – but the longer it takes, the more atomized & impossible the reading list(s) will become.

Finally, I can’t post a note like this without registering some kind of dismay at what I consider aggressively clueless behavior in book production. My favorite candidates for this are chapbooks with no words whatsoever on their covers – a great way to ensure that the writer inside never gets read – and oversized books that won’t fit reasonably into any ordinary bookshelf. Books that are 13 inches high or 11 by 4¼ inches aren’t reader friendly, and if they stick out, it’s in a pejorative sense. Weird bindings that injure neighboring books come next on the list – my Situationist Scrapbook, which has a sandpaper cover – think about that for a moment – sits atop a case where it mostly gathers dust since out of sight really does lead to out of mind.

* The critical books are in the livingroom not because we give an ascendancy to them, but because a poetry collection is visually chaotic, with all manner of chapbooks, oversized volumes & unique (if not downright strange) bindings. The critical texts tend all to be university or trade volumes and have that homogenous feel I ascribe to Barnes & Noble or Borders (tho, in fact, neither carries nearly enough critical texts). I have a plan to move the Harvard Business Reviews – about a decade’s worth – down to a rolling wire bookcase in the study. I don’t refer to them that often, but every once in awhile it’s important to track down something Michael Porter or Clayton Christiansen wrote. That will make room for the next generation of critical texts, so that the final volumes of the Benjamin Collected don’t need to be stacked atop the cases.

Then, every once in a while, somebody really seems to get it. Really get it. And one feels read.

This is the best review I have received in years. Thank you, Magdalena Zurawski!

Ж         Ж         Ж

Somebody this week will be this blog’s 200,000^th visitor. I can’t believe it either. If it should happen to be you, let me know – it’s even better if you can send a “print screen”  of the number on the page – and I’ll send you a prize.

Meta-Flarf?

 If you’ve always thought “I’ve never met a flarf I didn’t like,” try this.

WinningWriters.Com has a contest currently ongoing that it describes as follows:

Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest
Online Submission Deadline: April 1, 2005; no entry fee
Our 2005 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest welcomes your entry. We seek the best bad poem that has been submitted to a 'vanity contest' as a joke. Total prizes have increased to $1,609, including a top prize of $1,190. See the complete guidelines at:
http://www.winningwriters.com/contestflomp.htm

Wergle Flomp? Yes, Gary Sullivan, this is your history repeating, this time as flarf. At least the entry fee is right.

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?

I first began reading the work of Cole Swensen sometime around 1980, so that I had already formed an impression before I first met her when she turned up as a student in the graduate seminar I taught at San Francisco State in the fall of 1981. My take at the time was this was a person who was extremely adept at employing a wide range of literary styles but who might not have a deep commitment to any. Happily, I was wrong about that. What she was doing, I now think, was sort of stalking out the range of what might be possible, the first steps in a far more ambitious project than I’d originally imagined. As her books since then have demonstrated, she has a restless, extremely sharp intellect & deep formal imagination. It’s hard to imagine her teaching full-time, as she now does, in Iowa City, but her hire there is one very clear way to prove to the world that the new Iowa City is a far cry from the barren waste land that characterized the workshop from, say, 1975 until just recently.

Swensen’s latest book, Goest, has just been nominated for the National Book Award, and it deserves to win. Actually, this may be the least toxic shortlist of nominees that I can recall ever seeing for the NBA: in addition to Swensen, the group includes William Heyen, Shoah Train; Donald Justice, Collected Poems; Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love; Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003. The others may all be School o’ Quietude types, but none is really obnoxious and one could easily make the case that Justice & Valentine are two of the finest poets to emerge from the conservative tradition in American poetry.

Both Deborah Ager and P.J. Taylor chronicled the Mabel Dodge Poetry Festival. I don’t think either intends their commentary to be read as satire, but it’s difficult not to read them that way. At least until one stops to think about just how much manipulative malpractice is being carried out on stage by people who – in every sense of the word – never get their own feet muddy.

I’m half-ignoring Spider Man 2 on the miniature LCDs of the in-flight movie screens, wending my way back to Paoli. Alfred Molina, a wonderful actor, makes for a superb villain here – Doc Ock – but frankly I prefer him as Diego Rivera in Frida or as himself – an hysterical turn – in Coffee & Cigarettes. A week on the road in the service of poetry swirls in my head, scattering disparate observations that haven’t cohered into anything like a thesis. Some of these include the following:

·        A relatively modest audience in an out-of-the-way place like Lawrence, Kansas, can be every bit as satisfying as the largest turnout in the most major of literary centers. I can’t imagine any poet who wouldn’t (at least figuratively) kill for the audience I had for my talk in Lawrence. The attentiveness, knowledge, deep questions were fabulous. One person, Don Lee, drove all the way from Arkansas – an act that completely humbles me.*

·        I don’t think that, as a young writer, I had understood or counted on the constancy & steadfastness of an audience over the years. It is far better to have one reader over the years if that reader happens to be a David Bromige, Steve Vincent, Susan Gevirtz, Aaron Shurin, David Melnick, Kathleen Fraser, Kenneth Irby, Norma Cole, Tinker Greene or or or than it is to have a hundred hit-&-miss readers, who dig casually into the work then depart.

·        What a lot of graybeards we are!

·        Heads up, younger poets: you’re about to be ye olde poets of the next decade or thereabouts.

·        Somebody needs to fund the digitizing and web enablement of the vast archive at the San Francisco State (just as somebody needs to endow & ensure the future of the Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo, not to mention at least a dozen other literary institutions). Will the Poetry Foundation, so-called, ever step up to do something useful?

·        The most frustrating experience of my trip was learning that, when reading at the Unitarian Center in SF, I was competing with a reading that included Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson & Alan Bernheimer in the East Bay. The reading at the Unitarian Center had been planned for over a year (& been listed on the SF State Poetry Center web site almost that long), but – as happens here in Philly too – people seem to think it’s too hard to do a little advance checking…. That just flummoxes me.

·        At least it didn’t seem to have much impact on turnout, which was good for both events I did that day.

·        Using the police car as a stage (with a sort of padded lean-to attached proscenium to protect the vehicle itself) was a nice touch at the FSM rally.

·        When I first saw Kit Robinson at the FSM rally, he was talking with Howard Dean!

·        I think we are going to regret for years (decades!) the fact that Dean’s campaign was not prepared to take on the onslaught of Dick Gephardt & the Fox News Channel in & after Iowa. He would be kicking W’s butt by about a ten-point margin right now. He’s an entire generation ahead of Kerry.

·        The other first-rate speaker at the FSM rally was Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a one-time high school teacher who got her start in politics as one of the leaders of the FSM. She would make a great governor for the state of California.

·        Traveling makes it very hard to pay attention to “current events” – I caught only fragments of the VP debate & second presidential one and have yet to watch a full inning of the baseball playoffs. People who know me will understand just how improbable the latter is.

·        Doesn’t mean that I can’t root for the Red Sox this year, tho . . . .

·        People have been belly-aching about the impact of chains & Amazon on the status of independent bookstores for so long that I don’t think we get it yet just how quickly & deeply the consolidation of independent retail outlets is going to be over the next 24 or so months.

·        This is going to require a serious rethinking on the part of poetry book publishers as to what distribution actually is & means. Right now, far too many of them think of distribution as somebody else’s job –it’s not!

·        I keep imagining that the traffic in the Bay Area couldn’t get any worse – and then it does.

·        I’m nowhere near done thinking about Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. In fact, I think I’ve just sort of pointed out a lot of what will someday – like when the book is in print – seem obvious.

·        The U.S. post-avant canon is Robert’s reading list – more or less completely – more than that of any other single poet over the past fifty years.

·        At the same time, Robert 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!

·        Honoraria, especially in the academy, have been more or less stagnant now for at least 40 years, meaning that the actual payment for readings is – in constant currency – only a fraction of what it once was.

·        I’m always amazed by how academic departments fail to exploit the riches of poetry & poets in their own immediate regions (e.g., when major poets are let in, they are often – as was the case for both Ken Irby & Rae Armantrout – strung out as “adjuncts” for two or more decades.) 

·        One becomes very aware of the degree to which many English departments have as a first priority a desire not to be threatened by their creative writing teachers.

·        They get just what they deserve!

* & reminds me of how I experienced that same emotion when Louis Cabri led a carful of friends from Ottawa for a reading I did in Buffalo many moons ago.

Ron Silliman
Ruby Slippers Tour 2004

Lawrence, KS
Monday, October 4, 7:00 PM in the English Room of the Kansas Union, reading

San Francisco
Thursday, October 7, 3:30 PM, San Francisco State University, The Poetry Center (Hum 512), talk on Robert Duncan’s HD Book

San Francisco
Thursday, October 7, 7:30 PM, Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin @ Geary, reading with Judith Goldman