Ron Silliman’s latest musing on trivia dressed up as poetry uses the idea of narrative to add William Stafford to his enemies list, the so-called “School of Quietude.” Silliman attacks Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” as a “high point of American kitsch” that “uses plot to set up the arch-silliness” of the poem’s penultimate line, which according to Silliman is “a perfect instance of feigned & posed seriousness & just possibly the single most pompous line ever written.” Okay. He dislikes Stafford’s poem, as any reader is entitled to do.Read More