Silliman's Blog

The closure of the upstate NY bookstore at Wolf Road (in a suburb of Albany called Colonie) is not really as disastrous as it might seem. What happened is that Borders put in an enormous bookstore at Crossgates Mall (about two miles away) which has much better parking, and is probably three times bigger than the Wolf Road location. So in a sense they simply moved to a better location, and expanded their size by three. I go in there all the time (the Crossgates store) and it's always packed, and it usually takes ten minutes to get through the purchase line since there are always about ten people in front of you.

It's fun. The Wolf Road location wasn't too bad, but it had difficult access from the south. You had to turn in to the left , and get across two lanes within about 100 ft. It was doable, but then the store was very quiet, and not as big as the B & N across the street. When the Crossgates Borders opened, I forgot about the two other stores since now my wife can shop for clothes for the kids, and we can also get baseball gloves and stuff, and I can pick up some magazines and math books in the huge Borders, and we don't have to get in and out of the car (difficult with four kids).

As for the mysterious claim of Kent Johnson's that Kenneth Koch wrote O'Hara's True Account of Talking to the Sun poem -- I think he has a point that the poem is a little better than a lot of his work, but it is clearly his work. The tone is very much unlike Koch's, however, but it has a Disney-esque feeling to it. O'Hara rarely personifies or allows anything to speak in opposition to himself, and this version in which the sun gets to talk, is really fun. But I think it's just a nice highlight of O'Hara's writing. It definitely could never have been written by Koch. There is a breathless quality to O'HAra. Koch never lost his sang-froid. O'Hara always did.

I think some people pay attention to tone, and can FEEL the tone of a work.

Other people -- esp. critics who couldn't write a poem to save their lives -- seem to pay attention to the idea of a work, and can't really FEEL the TONE. This seems to be what happened to Andrew Epstein as he took the new fake purportedly by O'Hara as one of O'Hara's based on its close relationship to the poem The Day Lady Died.

But the tone is entirely different, and the structure is not nearly as tight.

It's like the difference between a Lada (Russian car that is notorious for falling apart as you drive down the road in Finland) versus a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.

O'Hara's poems are beautifully put together. He doesn't openly use beginning, middle, and end as a unitary device (as, say, Billy Collins does), but he instead uses miraculous assonance, alliteration, and tonal constituents (rarely rhyme, but he somestimes uses lovely off-rhymes internally and in very subtle ways), as well as emotional crescendoes.

Whoever wrote the fake that Epstein put into his book only got some of the more salient features of an O'Hara poem, and even those he or she often got wrong. Anyone with an ear can instantly feel how different it is.

At any rate, anyone who wants to see the fake poem I'm talking about can come to my blog. You've linked to it, too, a couple of days ago. It's too long to put into this already very long comment.

I think this is a fascinating way to reread O'Hara's work and to see how beautiful it is. Only Corso was able to touch and even outdistance O'Hara in using beautiful areas of tonal devices that go around the dead end of the end rhyme to completely resurrect tone as a method of creating unity in a poem. Paul Blackburn was also very good in this area.

Whoever wrote the fake FOH had no idea, and has a tin ear, to my mind, but a very funny mind. It's worth reading and laughing about, and I thank whoever wrote it for all the fun I've had in comparing it to actual poems by O'Hara.
 

Ron,

"Controlling Interests" is, one continues to note, the primary m.o. around here. Surely there'd be, otherwise, a link provided to my response (of last Friday) to your lead-off article, Bernstein's Boston Review piece on the Filreis book. Here: http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2008/07/church-of-poisond-mind.html

John Latta
 

You know, John, some folks send me thank you notes when I put links to their blogs, as I did yours -- 2 of the first 10 no less. You're the only person ever to suggest I was deliberately ignoring you. How bizarre!
 

Ron,

There is, of course, utter precedence for the neglect. How many of the Grand Piano links provided here did you link to? http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2008/03/grand-piano-notes_12.html

There is a pattern of "de-selecting" (silence / erasure) whatever's likely to toss any criticcal flak at your own (and cohort's) "projects." It only becomes more apparent with the nods toward the (un-threatening) O'Hara posts. Uh, "thanks."

John Latta
 

OH

I feel sooo ne:glected.
I think I'll 'go-eat-worms'. Keep 'things' simple. And "tothepoint".

as,
I am the most "neglected" poet-artist in America.... Thank God! All 2.3 million of 'em

my newest book ( I hope) now being produced. only the weakest link in the chain than binds...I think I will send a "review copy" to
Bob Grumman or maybe his friend Geof Huth

then "we" Patriotic American Poets can "link" to their sights and (really) see what is what...

more or less... or is it
less is more?
 

John,

are you kidding? This is Ron's Blog. Are you still in the Modernist stages of the bifurcated subjective/objective field. The discourse and intertexuality that is played out on Ron's Blog is played out and controlled by Ron Silliman, not an entity of "unbiased" concentric circles. These are eccentric circles that radiate from the field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the posts are merely a reflection of that. I would think you could contribute your time to something more personal on your personal volition instead of complaining that Ron doesn't give you enough air time.

Sincerely, LM Rivera
 

--Ron does seem to provide a generous number of links to posts opposed to his positions.

--I hope everyone (including you, Ron, and the maker of the blog) finds "ronsillimanupdate" as funny an idea as I do. That's some subtle satire.

--Glad to find out about Rothenberg's blog, the "cognitive mapping and cluster bombs" link, and (since I can't possibly keep up with it at this point) the latest developments in Kent's current project.

cheers,

Andy
 

Finished Counter-Revolution last night. No question it is a classic of exhaustive research that exposes the agenda of the dawn of the post-war SoQ, the genealogy of the broken record arguments about aesthetic refinement vs. tractor art and all those ploys people use to keep people from thinking and caring about literature.

The disagreement I have with it is that in exposing so many critical statements as disingenuous it doesn’t have any use for good, relevant critical discourse. Al likes to deal with arguments that he can rout, including Robert Graves’. What was lost in America during the ‘attack on the thirties’ was a discourse rather than some grand doctrine for the equilibrium of the Baudelaire- Brecht synthesis.

Al describes the “volubly, aggressively disillusioned James T. Farrell.” For a book that is 20% footnotes (and 3% Waste Land references; maybe a correlation), this dismissive characterization is not explained. It is interesting that the larger of the two back cover blurbs for CRotW is by Alan Wald, who introduced Farrell’s Note on Literary Criticism by calling it ‘a critical turning point in the American literary left,’ ‘effective because he identified distortions that suggested a deeper malaise beneath,’ ‘powerful logic which he enlists in his onslought,’ ‘a landmark text.. that remains a beacon..’

Some of the arguments I get into when I turn on my computer are stupid arguments you can rout in five minutes, when somebody makes historical statements that they know are false to bolster their hostility to modernism and liberalism, all of which are watered down rehashes of Viereck and the idiocy documented here. But you rout them and writers can move on to important matters rather than deliberate over them, while the bureaucrats change their grammar for their next repetition. The discourse which Farrell, William Carlos Williams, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Shapiro, Dwight MacDonald et al brought forth was one of the most valuable literary elements of the thirties in America.

Most importantly, Al shows what happens when an Ivy League college makes an effort to actually promote literature, and Charles Bernstein is right that the suffocating of poetry by the ‘mediocracy’ can be better understood through reviewing this documentation.
 

I enjoyed reading the article, "The Gas Hike Poems", and especially the websites the article linked to - wow a walking revolution! Who would have thought?! But may I point you and your readers to a poem that actually deals with "gas hikes" in all seriousness? Namely, "Four Buck Gas" by Glenn Buttkus. I think it makes a good argument for my contention that poets are the true historians of any age.

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