Silliman's Blog

Ron,

I haven't thought through this much, but you could add Joel Lipman to your list of vispoets who were hired by a university for their writing. Visual poets tend to be quite unacademic, of course, which reduces their chances of entrance essentially to nil. I could be an academic, I suppose, but consciously chose not to be. (Couldn't stand grading papers, a kind of drudgery worse than a forgotten life.)

I'm amazed at how many visual artists are obviously visual poets, though not of the tradition, not in the milieu. And, yes, self-identification as an artist helps the bottom line--actually, it creates a bottom line. Another obvious and famous artist to add to your list of well paid visual poets is Gary Indiana, almost all of whose work is verbo-visual.

My little intro to Peter's book was originally the briefest of blog postings. I allowed Peter to repost it, though it is certainly too insubstantial for the book. I'll be finishing an appreciation of the book for Jacket fairly soon, almost as a kind of penance to the works. Once I saw the book, my "sin" was clear. (Clarification: my assessment here.)

The reason for the total exclusion of visual poetry is clear. People don't see it as poetry. People, often, don't see it as visual art. It lives in the margins, which are those parts of the book where cookie crumbs fall to be forgotten.

But a visual poet should not care about this too much. The work is the thing. Recognition can come, or not, when it will. Our job is to create. To find an audience, too, but our first job is to create.

Thanks for this appreciation of a great visual poet, one of the richest minds we have going at the moment.

Geof
 

We should also add media poetry into the mix; at least there's Eduardo Kac's new anthology published by Intellect in Chicago and Bristol.
 

I'm glad you are looking at PC, Ron,
and saying he is

concerned instead with the moment things pass into unintelligibility, the instant of rupture

is fine, but there's a lot of associations in Peter's work. He often has a memorializing quality, and a monumental one. His images are always enclosed or womb-like bringing on flavors of gnosticism.
He has a very specific color pallette which has changed over the years. If there is a rupture at work in these, and there is a moment, I would say that the last 2500 yrs are that "moment" or some such, not getting too specific.

I'm really glad you are pointing at
Peter! His work has given us a lot of pleasure for a long time!

Lanny
 

Dear Ron Silliman,

Indeed, indeed: as you plainly say, you do speak from a huge "mountaintop" from which it pains you to embrace even REASONABLE arguments without wierd jibes to go along with crow-swallowing.

Speaking of wierd jibes:

- What is a neophobe?
- What is a knicker?

Several commenters have asked you to define terms--especially when they are attacks. Are you going to be discursive and at least convey your meaning? Do you really care that people understand your usage, Ron, or are you just using words imprecisely to start trouble.

How about defining those epithets. Or: are these your versions of mild high poetry hate-speech?

Ron, why does the Academy of American Poets and any other of those RIDICULOUS bastions of seeming power have to have a wing or faction for every kind of poetry in the world, including the "visual" poetry that you talk about here?

QUESTION: I wonder...given your pronounced biases, are you fair and generous in your own institution-building?

ANSWER: Heck no.

Exhibit 1: You sure weren't open to considering countervailing approaches in IN THE AMERICAN TREE or any or the other anthology projects that you are or were involved in and that claimed to be national projects. And, really, why should you? I like them well enough. So why, darn it, cry sour grapes when other institution-builders leave aesthetics out that they do not like.

Exhibit 2: You won't consider younger language poets part of your closely guarded tradition regardless of their influence or generation. In a previous thread that I read, you were so darn cavalier in demanding that a commentor read a book that hasn't even come out yet just to understand what you mean.

Exhibit 3: Why on your mountaintop do you only reserve terms like "generative" for work that you like or consider transgressive? It's still VISUAL, Ron, if it's on a page and GENERATIVE even if the aesthetic displeases you. Why are these terms only ideological in your own way?

QUESTION: Darn it, Ron: Why do you like calling people names so much and labeling? That's really tacky!

ANSWER: Because, in truth, you are the one acting like a 'neophobe' with your name-calling and labeling. And if you're not a neophobe then darn-well say what you mean by the term!

For all your publications, speeches, influence, you can't help being a kind of bully--the bully that refuses to define your seemingly mean epithets; the bully who laments when he's called out or criticized but who dishes it out demonically; the bully who uses terms like neophobe when, for the love of God, true hate and discrimination exists in this world and the petty poetry squabbles that you engender can't hold a torch to truly substantive abuse and injustice.

So: Here you are on your self-described mountaintop hurling labels and your own special epithets on people whose work you've never read substantively and who you have never even met just because you disagree with their aesthetic--with their way of writing poems--and with their institution-building behavior which you too have done your share of (hypocrites all) at a time when the pain of partisanship is actually harming us all on material levels.

Would it be beneath you to start actually discoursing with these people--this School of Quietitude--that you obviously hate so much?

But, alas, I suspect that part of your aim is simply to start trouble to boast readership of your site and champion your own ego-project.

That's why, each week, when you publish a particularly snide or snarky post, you then almost holler for joy by openly noting that the particularly snarky post got your site the most hits ever!

...guess you aren't really interested in dialogue. Just bombast and epithet-hurling and trouble-making to get hot numbers for your site.

If this isn't the case, then stop this darn complaining and start talking to the people who you claim to be so against so real substantive change can happen.

DO YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT MAKING THIS CHANGE!? THEN:

1) GO TO THE SOURCE.

2) CREATE A CONFERENCE OF DIVERGENT APPROACHES AND HAVE IT OUT.

3) SEE THE WORLD FROM THE OTHER'S EYES AS WELL AS YOUR OWN.

4) STOP ACTING LIKE YOU'VE BEEN ABUSED WHEN YOU'VE BEEN SO DARN CELEBRATED.

5) GET OFF THAT MOUNTAINTOP SOMETIMES!

And no: I'm not a fan of "Charlie Simic" as you infantilistically call him.

Maybe you'll listen to what I'm saying here.

Sincerely yours,

John de Lavallade
Laurel, MD
 

I havent seen Cicciarello's work, except for the example of it you present here.

This example strikes me as intriguing, though straightforward, visual (or plastic) art, which may in fact be a photograph of a construct, though he might have made it with Photoshop@ or another software program. It does not ask to be taken as a text, but as a commentary upon the disintegration or dissolution of text, or as the confusion of or frustration of a previously viable text. It may in fact have a textual "content" (which could be teased out with time and effort) but it resists our tendency to engage it at the level of comprehension.

There's this teasing, half-cute "look of the runaway in his eye". Does work of this kind suggest a fear of or a lack of interest in the potentials of text? More likely, it attempts to represent a dream-state in which language, or its distributed symbols (letters), floats in the unconscious, just at the edge of intelligibility. Without the dimension of sound, however, we have to imagine what that other part of the imagined process would be like (in the artists's mind). I often have the sense, looking at Renaissance art painted on church ceilings, in which cherubs and angels float about in the empyrean, that those painters were really just grooving on what weightlessness, or objects floating free of gravity, might feel or look like. Those fat little angels with wings may have been religious icons, but the visual and imaginative point wasn't religiious at all.

Grenier's scraws aren't about the disintegration of language, but the difficult building up of meaning, one letter at a time. That struggle, which is preserved in the original holograph, asks to be taken as the literal fact (evidence) of its creation, so that there is "literally" no distinction between form and content. The "shapes" are "the poem." The danger, however, in Grenier's work, is that the formulaic approach has only a single visual methodology, repeated over and over again. Grenier takes this to be a respect for limitation of the individual condition, employing the commonest materials, requiring the least elaborate approach to the material text. I have suggested to him that three-dimensional hologrammatical projections might be an interesting elaboration of his colored lines, since his colors occasionally suggest three-dimensionality.

Saroyan's "I tend to draw words" is the controlling pointer, the clearest and most direct expression of the potentials of confronting the text in an original way EVERY TIME you think to make something, never accepting any traditional assumption about that process. This goes right back to Duchamp and the abandonment of traditional painting in favor of the discovery of conceptual meaning in things. But Grenier's work isn't a collection of "things". It's writing.

Whereas Cicciarello's work is (still) (about) painting: Space, color, voids and solids, line and mass, clarity and blur, motion and immobility.

On a purely interpretive level, Cicciarello's work could be a commentary on the breakdown, or break-up, of the textual frame, or of its constituent parts. But that's a deduction, not really "IN" the work.

Typographers, whose sensitivity to the physical and visual fact of letter formation and "flow" derives from a minute familiarity with the historical development of letter shapes and the technics of printing, have been addressing these issues for hundreds of years, albeit at the level of the presumption of the traditional function of text--the transmission of information, knowledge and feeling. Contemporary letterpress books may be seen as an attempt to preserve the physical experience of the materiality of text against the advance of technological convenience. Cicciarello's work in this context could be seen as an attempt to restore the symbolic importance of letters to the visual space created from/through painting (a la Blake).
 

I do wonder a bit at your acceptance of the significance of mainstream prizes, Ron, and your idea that institutions like Berkeley and the Ivy League are where it's at. Yes, experimental poets deserve good jobs and recognition, but does it have to come via the institutions they otherwise are in some tension with? And if they aren't in tension with them, then where are they?
 

Oh, by the way, there's an article about Saroyan on, yes, the Poetry Foundation website.
 

I totally agree with John de Lavallade. I mean, you could have simply posted your great observations about vispoets without namecalling yet again to create silly controversy and boost readership to your website (the brag about it). It was I many comments ago who said that you need to interphase with the establishment that you deplore. Otherwise, your complaints sound false and attention-getting, rather than truly change-making. Good comments on visual poetry, tho. But, I wish you'd explain what makes the distinction in a clearer fashion. You can't harp on people for being sloppy writers and thinkers when you yourself aren't clear. That's why this whole thing about saying what you mean about terms is really important. I thought, Ron, that your suggestion to me in an earlier comment that I read a book that hasn't even come out yet in order to get an indication of what you mean by a term and a pattern of thought was pretty snide. Why do you treat readers who come to your site like that? Frankly, it's unnecessary, especially since some of us aren't so deeply knowledgeable as you and genuinely want to know the deal.

Jason Hyun
 

Jason -- what do you mean by "interphase with the establishment?" Curious as to specifically what actions that would entail.
 

the meaning of neophobe is kind of obvious though, isn't it, when broken down into it's greek components? neo (new) phobos (fear, as in phobia).

if you were to look it up, you'd find that neophobe and neophobia are in many dictionaries, and date from the 19th century.

the wikipedia article here may also be helpful.

which is to say, when in doubt, google can usually help. :)
 

Who hasn't heard of knickers? These days it's a British term for women's underwear. But it's short for knickerbockers, which comes from Diedrich Knickerbocker, the pseudonym used by Washington Irving for A History of New York (1809). It came to refer to descendants of the original Dutch settlers of NYC (back when it was NA, of course) and then to New Yorkers in general. (Hence the basketball team.) I don't know how the word ended up "across the pond", but there it is nonetheless, probably to stay.
 

Simple question to "john" above:

Do you think any "Quietist" critic would either know or care about ANY poet who chose to explore composition at the level of the visual?

That's the difference between Ron and them. He reads the Quietists, and he knows all about their agenda. They don't know squat about his, and they aren't interested in learning. As far as they're concerned, his position doesn't exist.

I wouldn't mind if, from time to time, he did review conservative books and tell us why they aren't good, or why they are on their own terms. That, at least, would be "fairness." And, if he succeeded in making points against them, his position would be that much stronger. And stronger (or truer) does seem to be what it's about.
 

One might also inspect OED definition #2 of ‘criticism’: “The act of estimating the qualities and character of literary and artistic work.”

But frequently interjecting accusations of ‘hate speech,’ using numbers and bullets, and attempting to moralize on behalf of the institutional establishment is always an indication of education money well spent.

“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”

“The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas.”

“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”

“Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.”

-Walter Benjamin
 

Lucan was killed over poetic jealousy
and got to recite a line of poetry as he died..

keep poetry irrational!
fugue everyhon on all sides
we all one we all lost
we're all earelevant
and that's beside the point

witch ~ is
 

My name is Jason Hyun, by the way. And if you want to get in touch with me you can email me at jason.hyun@gmail.com

At the end of my comments I list some concrete strategies that Ron or others may take to begin to make substantive change in the institutional problems of poetry prizes and publishing that divide all of us in some ways. It is impossible to be “fair” when artistic discernment demands that we be selective and when the way that poets write poems is so radically different from one another.

However, Ron does have a great point that the most national prizes, contests, and institutional bodies can indeed be more inclusive.

Yet, Ron’s approach to making substantive change is deeply troubling and, as I try to argue here, his approach serves to do the opposite: it perpetuates the problems that he critics.

On treating others as you wish to be treated, regardless of ideological or methodological disagreement

Think of it this way: Most people would tune out (or would discount) anyone who calls us names repeatedly--names that do not encompass out own definitions; most people would discount anyone who uses pejorative terms to characterize us--even seemingly made up pejoratives like 'neophobe' which still has the force of a pejorative and that is exactly what Ron seems to intend; most people who discount anyone who seems, as the sum of all these tactics, to be more harassing and obsessive than focused on patient, reasonable critique that does not include passive aggressiveness or the kind of sarcasm and seeming bitterness that forestalls someone actually being able to hear and take in the force of the criticism.

Before I speak further and offer those concrete strategies, I'd like to directly address Annandale and Curtis' concerns from this thread and also speak to the interpretative fallacies in Ron’s approach. Take in mind that I agree with some of his criticism of the exclusions in poetry prizes and institutions. However, it is critical to note that websites and blogs are institutions too with their own power and influence.

Responding to Annandale

Annandale: By 'interphase with the establishment' I mean actually talk and attempt to openly and directly engage with the institutions and prize making agencies that Ron abhors. See my specific interphasing (yet also critical) strategies below.

Responding to Curtis

Curtis: Ron's approach to writing poems and prose is different than the poets and poems that he openly abhors. But Ron isn't substantively different in his tactics. Both sides often do the same arguably infantile thing: they call names and exclude; they build cliques and favor. Worse still: These days, as experimentalists gain institutional power from prizes, university posts, money, power to judge contests, seats on the Academy's Chancellor's panel, websites, blogs, conference talks, and poetry readings, it is sometimes (though not always) Ron who looks like he's doing the most namecalling, neophobing, accusing, and mislabeling.

And there are PLENTY of times when Ron doesn't read, doesn’t appear to have read, or hasn't even read or even could not have read (because the book hasn't come out yet as a commenter incisively pointed out several threads ago) the books he attacks through contests or directly. I suspect that he simply sees the name of the poet, the publisher and he mislabels and hates on the work without even engaging in it. Sometimes (though not always) in the past, Ron does not address the most substantive of his errors or he attempts a correction yet the correction includes put-downs. For example: Ron did point out the rightness of my and others’ observation of the polyvalent power that experimentalist now hold. But he also—oddly—called people names like ‘knickers’…such an infantile thing to do.

And he also accused others of being apologists for Simic, which was a categorical misreading of our comments in a previous thread. So even his corrections are made with extreme bitterness, namecalling, and passive aggressiveness and these dynamics serve to undue the correction that he at first appears to make. That he cannot seem to understand the reasonableness of my observations here deeply problematic.

Now look: All of our tastes and approaches are different than someone else's.

Does the difference of Ron's approach make him BAD or ABUSIVE? Heck no!

Does the difference of Louise Gluck's approach--however opposed one is to her way of writing poems--make her bad or abusive or nasty? Heck no! (Ron performed a “take down” on Louise’s poems recently; hence, my use of her as an example.)

From what I've heard firsthand by people who she's mentored and taught, Louise is actually a pretty caring, detailed-oriented, and generous reader of poems and a teacher who doesn't only interact with people in a way that favors her own way of doing things.

Ron has already penetrated and been included in the establishment in many ways

Ron, it seems that you too are generous and supportive in a similar way. But NOT, it seems, to the poets who you mistakenly feel have some power. And Louise Gluck has never, ever mislabeled your work publicly, called you a name that is not one that you believe in (you’d get pretty mad, Ron, and territorial if some published a piece of writing saying that you are not a Language poet or a talk poet or whatever but actual a ‘school of neophobists’ poet…or, perhaps, being quick to be passive aggressive, you’d welcome an attack; but, it would hurt nonetheless and it hurts to be mislabel and for our attempts to define ourselves on our own terms to be ignored).

The so-called school of quietude’s power is only as far-reaching as their circle. Penetrate the circle more--and indeed you already have! Go to the source and talk to them. Here's an example (and take in mind that websites and blogs are institutions too; websites and blogs are sources of power too).

You have a terrific biography page on the Academy of American Poets website. They made an attempt to include you in the best possible way and several times in the last five years they featured you on their home page prominently. When your last books, Under Albany and Tjanting, came out, they even helped sell these books with clear links to how to buy those books which, for me, is the best compliment EVER and more than what some other poets get on the Academy site. Those links are still up today. Yet, you savage the Academy as being against you and your kind.

Ron’s interpretative fallacy

Ron: I do not know if it has ever been emphasized to you strongly enough how you perpetuate a devastating interpretative fallacy when you unleash tirades about the ‘school of quietude’.

Instead of judging work by the intentions evident in its own structuring (however much you may disagree with those intentions), you judge it by the ideology of what you want it to be.

This interpretative fallacy leads to interesting missed opportunities. For example: You don't challenge experimentalists enough. Much of the poetry that you champion has its own problems and lapses. But the quietists are the only wrongly-structured, wrongly-designed poets in the world to you. It's called outrageous biasedness, the kind that makes you unable to see good stuff in the poems you mislabel and unable to call out bad stuff in the poems that you champion.

Concrete strategies to make substantive changes in institutional problems regarding prizes and publishing

So those are some concrete alternatives to Ron’s rather ineffectual namecalling and mislabeling:

(1) Make an appointment the old fashioned way to speak with various heads of the Academy of American Poets and all the prize bodies that you have critiqued. Speak to them directly about the schools of poetry that you think have been left out of their purview. Challenge them regarding the selection of their adjudication panels.

(2) Write an essay to Alice Quinn, the head of the Poetry Society of America, and request that she publish it in the PSA’s newsletter. Talk about the abuses that you see. Write in a way that requires that you be open to feedback. Ask the why they do what they do and why they do it in the way they do it.

(3) Directly convene a conference specifically about “what divides us in poetry institutions”. Write a grant to fund it—perhaps through the Pew Foundation right in the Philly area where you live Invite hundreds of so called ‘quietists’ as well as people of your school and many others. Mandate a respectful and non-namecalling and mislabeling approach to the panels (because you won’t be able to act out with pejoratives as you do on your blog, Ron; it’s harassing at the most; mean and disrespectful at the least and you wouldn’t want people to do that to you). Have panels on specific problems—like prize adjudication panels and their selection. Invite people who you disagree with.

Begin a true process of change, Ron. Reconsider the tirades because they aren’t changing anything. They are, in fact, only stoking the flames. Do you care about true change?
 

I haven't read your essay in the Politics of Poetic Form since a couple of years after it came out in the early 90s, but I seem to remember it being the one where you suggest joining forces and interfacing with the official verse culture, using the metaphor of the Democratic Socialists working with the Democrats. That approach was apparently short-lived.
 

It is hard to read "neophobe" as a purely descriptive term. Rather, it seems inevitably derogative, and the presumptive opposite, "neophile," would be hard to read, in the context of this blog and most other venues of Avant comment, as anything other than a compliment.

This assignment of value to the new, as new, is a common feature of Avant Po (and other avant garde movements), an assumption that has never been examined carefully and honestly enough, despite its serious artistic and political ramifications.

Basically, the neophile attitude (neophilism?) of Avant Poets is a reflex of Late Capitalist/Consummerist culture. Nothing is better advertising than a claim that some product is "new and improved."

Neophilism thus grows out of Avant Po's deep, deep ideological conservatism and its implication in the very power structures it ostensibily criticizes, or claims to criticize.
 

long ago i told a fellow visual poet that the work of peter c wd be that which would be taken to be "visual poetry" by persons like ron silliman--
it is basically an equivalent of the work of the "painter of light" for persons with higher pretensions--
 

Interesting work.

Although I appreciate the ties to Blake, among others, to my eye this looks like nothing so much as some of Cage's textual work on computerized steroids. The "32 Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham," for example. Or some of the other available examples on Ubuweb.

It's more like an extension, using the new software to take it further.

As a former professional typographer (and original type designer) myself, I appreciate Curtis' comments about the history of type, but I think far fewer typographers, post David Carson, are wedded to transparency and legibility than used to be the case. Plenty of the design journals I still read go in circles around the topic, much the way the topics on Ron's comments threads go around in circles. I've even designed a couple of typefaces, within a larger family, to be intentionally illegible. A poem set in that face (which is available from my website) would be visual poetry in the sense that it might look like a poem on the page, but hardly contain "meaning."

As a visual artist, also, I incline towards viewing this as visual art that happens to contain a typographic element—rather than poetry that happens to be presented as visual art. The direction of approach might matter. At the same time, I'm still waiting for this vispo work to synergize into a truly multi-media artwork genre. I'm doing things now with video, music, and text, too, but rather than being static "paintings" they move on DVD. I'm therefore also reminded of Laurie Anderson's use of text and icon as part of the projection level of her multi-media performance art pieces.

How do you categorize this stuff that crosses all tehcritical boundaries? The only certain thing so far is that no one really know how to judge it yet. Except maybe in terms of its impact on the viewer. I for one am not interested in puzzle-poems that I have to "figure out" as though they were sodoku: which is one of my chief critiques of much of Ron's lauded post-avant poetry. At the same time, I am interested in being presented with New Media, and imaginative new ways of conveying artistic material. Maybe if these peices moved, they'd be more interesting to me.
 

When I first saw the vispo work above, I was attracted to it/ partly because it brought to mind a large brown moth I have seen only once. I didn't recall its name (cecropia) until I was shutting down for a food and vitamin break. I am a writer whose formative years were silence-centered, and silence remains important to me; but I am stylistically multifarious and do not fit the usual conceptions of SoQ. Due to my propensity to demean myself, I am not perturbed by negative comments about me. In June of this year I wrote a book of 85 poems. One poem I entitled "Triplets (from a neutered old gay)". Its 2nd stanza reads:
in the School of Quietude
I walk newed
so as not to obtrude.
Another, entitled "Rant", uses 13 colors, 5 font sizes, a 13-times repeated 4-letter shape (scattered strategically on the page) in two forms. One form spells a single word 4 times; the other spells 6 words 9 times, with 1 of the words it spells/ being the primary word: spot.
Another poem contains a vowel chant which owes its existence to the Fox tribe chant Ron presented in the opening pages of The New Sentence.
-
I am not familiar with the various reader technologies such as RSS, but an online friend who uses a reader to read blogs/ told me several days ago that he was not able to read light texts with it because its background color is white. I, therefore, have deleted all my light texts where I was not using them for special purposes; and my page background color is now a silver gray. It works quite well with the majority of other colors.
 

As someone who produces both poetry and textual commercially sold art, I make a firm distinction between poetry and textual art. The encoding of the poem, what makes it a poem, is the words. That encoding can be presented in many forms, as text on the web, as text in a book, spoken to a large or small audience, spoken on an mp3 file, incorporated as an element in a larger picture, or (the form I most enjoy playing with) pictures embedded in the text using graphics software so that the picture is the most obvious part viewed from a distance, and the picture distengrates and is replaced by the words as you get closer, but the picture is still providing some undefined message to the brain that screws around with the perception of the words.

All of these forms change the interpretation of the poem in the individual consumer/listener/reader/viewer but every individual poem becomes a unique work in every individual person's mind regardless of the presentation anyway. The presentation is just influencing that interpretation in ways we can't possibly predict.

On the opposite end, the medium of creation, as Mr. Silliman has certainly demonstrated, can for some poets influence the words that are used in the encoding and sometimes, as in his case, the use of materials is very intentional. But when it ends up printed in a book or read aloud, I'm not seeing the different pens, the crayons, or the Chinese notebook. It's an inherently lossy algorithm. He has to tell me, with words, in the book, how it was produced, if he wants that information to be explictily absorbed, which makes the piece inherently self-referential to a higher degree than the average poem.

If there is any such thing as a poem that transcends each individual interpretation then it is the words that encode it that define what it is.

Placing the poem in a particular visual context as the only valid presentation makes it visual art. Visual poetry is a perfectly good name for that art form, but trying to shoehorn it in with the rest of poetry hurts my head.
 

James Owens (anhaga), Check out Ron’s essay from Feb 6 06 as well as the other five other essays that come up when you search “repression recovery,” an anthology that prompts Ron to reflect on the topics you raise, as well as Ron’s essays on Olson from May to June in 06, his notes on Objectivism from Nov 3 06, on Jennifer Moxley on June 20 05.. more to be found..
 

Let's go back again to first principles.

Would ANY Quietist critic "stoop" to review the work of Cicciarello? Seriously!

No, of course not.

Does Ron read the so-called Quietists? Of course. We all have been doing so for the last 50 years. The division which Ron describes is real. Does he make that division better, or worse, by taking a divisive stance towards it? Answer: That's not the question. His point is: They're wrong. We're right. Why? There's the rub.

The proof is in the pudding. If Ron wishes to go through the laborious motions of describing the failures of each and every "Quietist" writer, he could build up an impressive backlog of diatribe. I think he simply loses patience with that. On the other hand, he often praises, in a way I find troubling, work which on its face may seem experimental, but which is frequently half-baked. In other words, he cuts a lot of slack for work which is trying to be what he thinks it ought to be.

-while dismissing work which may have very nice qualities, and merit because it doesn't derive from the same agenda as his.

Ron accepts the old Modernist-Socialist concept that art is a struggle on an equal footing with social change and conflict. Without that Hegelian presupposition, much of what he does seems frustratingly divisive.

Is there a "third way" or a third stream of critical regard which could synthesize our apprehension of all poetries?

Probably not. Who would like to begin that task?
 

Thanks, Ian, for the references. I do read here often, and I've likely seen those posts before, though I don't recall off the top of my head. I'll check them out, and I won't be surprised to find them lucid and reasonable. I concede that Ron is more fair-minded and inclusive than many who write on similar topics. I certainly do not wish to associate myself with the shrill ranters who come in flinging around vague, half-assed accusations of some weird, Silliman-centered conspiracy. My target (if I have a target, is a widespread assumption in avant poetics (or Experimental Poetry or LangPo, etc.) that new is, in its own right, a virtue. I'm pretty sure that poetry or criticism that operates under that assumption, however deeply hidden, is of little use and actually does play, in disguise, to a reactionary cultural and economic model. The opposite assumption -- that old (or traditional, etc.) is a virtue in its own right -- is equally damaging and silly. I'm trying to leave them both behind.

--James Owens
 

Is there a "third way" or a third stream of critical regard which could synthesize our apprehension of all poetries?

Curtis!

This is what I do! All you have to do
is simply ignore the intention of the artist and read creatively.

All art, and ultimately all culture
is founded and continues by something called generosity.

If every single gun owner went out into the streets today and began killing people, there would effectively e nothing anyone could do. We've learned how to program people. Okay. But in Art, and in
experience in particular, there are no rules, none at all. Experience is the final canvas.

Its sort of like Burroughs said.
If I have a picture of you, do I need you anymore?

That sounds like it wants to hang up before it hits the mark.

The mark is a little thing, and the mind an open hand..

why keep the chain intact
after it passes the portal

i begin injecting it
and torturing it
and dressing it up
right away!

it feels nothing..