Seth Abramson has bravely taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Ron Silliman re: defining “School of Quietude,” though his lawyerly training has produced a rhetorical mishmash, I think, in this second of his two-part response. I bring this up because I’d hate for the folderol in Part Two to distract from the brilliant essay with which he ends Part I (click here and scroll down until you find the title “On Rhetoric, Hybrid Poetics, and the Intersection of Immanent and Transcendent Meaning”). For me, the meat and potatoes are in this essay and all the rest is parsley, radish rosettes, deep-fried stems of green onion. While reading what Seth self-deprecatingly calls “the nub of an essay,” I believe I caught a glimpse of something–call it “the fitful tracing of a portal” through which we might exit the dinning cocktail party of American poetic tribalism into a genuinely open space: a world outside. Now wouldn’t that be something….
If I'd quarrel with anything (oh, there are small things, I imagine; trivialities…), it would be his use of "immanent" to describe a quality of language that is historically acquired, not "inherent" (my dictionary defines "immanent" as "existing or operating within; inherent"). In a way, the immanence he describes is little more than multiplicity of
I agree, Joseph.<br /><br />Abramson's critique is potentially devastating. But, to be fair to both sides, and a little more realistic, I think Silliman would make mincemeat of Abramson's youthful characterizations of poetry movements and (as you've indicated )the legalese style in which it's written.<br /><br />I don't disagree with a single point Abramson's made, though.