Dissenting from “The Debate”

12 Comments

  1. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison January 5, 2009 at 5:09 am .

    Something occurred to me after my last response, ADG—namely that I am <I>always</I> open to persuasion. Maybe you could steer me to two or three Flarf poems that you consider excellent. It would be helpful to other readers of this blog too….<BR/><BR/><BR/>Cheers!<BR/>Joe

  2. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison January 4, 2009 at 10:28 pm .

    Hello, ADG—<BR/><BR/>You say "the shallow and rotting aspects of contemporary experience" are the focus of Flarf, which you also say "keys into the ‘deeper currents’" of that same experience. In-depth shallowness. That about sums it up. And if not pretending to like this stuff makes me "narrow-minded," so be it.<BR/><BR/>But whatever I think of Flarf, I fail to see how "pseudo" and "faux"

  3. Annandale Dream Gazette
    Annandale Dream Gazette January 4, 2009 at 5:34 pm .

    You sure do like to use "pseudo," "so-called" and "faux" a lot. I suppose denying something is real is one way to argue, but not a very convincing way.<BR/><BR/>If experience and theory could be disentangled, then I would probably agree with you that "experience trumps theory." But I don’t believe they can be separated. And I think your statement is simplistic and therefore pretty useless.<BR/><

  4. Meg
    Meg December 31, 2008 at 11:59 am .

    Yes. Exactly.

  5. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison December 29, 2008 at 6:15 pm .

    Angela and Greg—thanks for the kind words!

  6. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison December 29, 2008 at 6:01 pm .

    Brian—thanks for the lead to Lemon Hound! And to Timothy Morton, whose work I don’t know but look forward to looking into. Do you know <A HREF="http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm&quot; REL="nofollow">Daniel C. Dennett</A>? He’s another one who’s work I’d characterize as "complex yet persuasive."

  7. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison December 29, 2008 at 5:58 pm .

    Your question about "confessional" poets is interesting, Joel, because—in contrast to the way we have come to talk about poetry in recent years—the notion focuses on a poem’s content, not its verbal effects. The term comes from a 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s <I>Life Studies</I> by poet and critic M. L. Rosenthal, entitled "Poetry as Confession." In it he remarked that Lowell seemed to regard

  8. greg rappleye
    greg rappleye December 29, 2008 at 10:53 am .

    Brilliant!

  9. brian a j salchert
    brian a j salchert December 29, 2008 at 2:48 am .

    In a recent interview, Silliman said he is a "realist" and also that while he wouldn’t write as they do, the "Flarf Collective"<BR/>has become of interest to him;<BR/>still, "no ideas but in things"<BR/>remains central to his practice.<BR/><BR/>I am slowly reading Timothy Morton’s complex yet persuasive<BR/><I>Ecology without Nature</I><BR/>which was recommended by Dale Smith in a comment at

  10. Angela Genusa
    Angela Genusa December 28, 2008 at 11:52 pm .

    This comment has been removed by the author.

  11. jejacobson
    jejacobson December 28, 2008 at 10:39 pm .

    Hey Joe, how do the confessional poets fit into this? I read somewhere that too much of the personal experience is confessional, and the confessionals did enough of that. I might be jumbling all of this up, but is there a difference between writing about experience and being a confessional? Is it bad to be a confessional either way?<BR/><BR/>I agree with the point that you make about <I>Moby Dick

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