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Further Adventures of Captain Ron
I have to thank Ron Silliman for his latest blog post, which for the first time has illuminated the chief reasons why his views on poetry get my hackles up. But let me start with what he gets right.Read More
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A Comment on “Rupture”
I just posted the below “prose poem” (or whatever) in response to Linh Dinh’s poem Rupture, for what it (my piece, I mean)’s worth…. THE INTRODUCTION The “I” in the next poem is not me. It is a rhetorical device, a psychological-being-state marker designed to make you feel comfortable as the poem progresses. Of course, the poem does not progress: “progress” is a rhetorical term designed to make you feel comfortable with the sense of alienation the next poem means to produce.Read More
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Reginald Shepherd and the Surrealist Project
Over the past two weeks Reginald Shepherd has put up a provocative four-part series of posts on the subject of “Avant-Garde and Modern.” I won’t summarize his argument, since each part is available here—part one, part two, part three, part four— and the whole series deserves a careful reading. However, there is a key element of Reginald’s premise that I need to dispute. He comes by honestly, because the touchstone for his posts is the work of a German art theorist named Peter Bürger.Read More
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A Mysterious Deference
This from a recent BookForum column by Paris Review managing editor Radhika Jones on one of the leading lights of UbuWeb, the so-called avant-garde archive: [Kenneth Goldsmith’s] position on writing is as follows: Modernism and postmodernism are over, and the literary arts have entered a new technology-driven paradigm. Originality is out the window. “Writers don’t need to write anything more,” he says.Read More
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On Poetic Values
Over on the Harriet blog, Kenneth Goldsmith posted an account of a keynote address by Marjorie Perloff at the recent Conceptual Poetry Conference in Tucson. It’s well worth reading, although it offers up a point of view I disagree with. Here is the response I posted a short while ago: I’m an admirer of Ms. Perloff and am a little reluctant to criticize her based on Kenneth’s summary, but if his characterization is accurate, I have to take issue with her logic.Read More
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Little Somethings
A little something worth remembering, from someone named Perie Longo … “The Inuit root word anerca means both to breathe and to make poetry.” … and a little something worth forgetting from Charles Bernstein.Read More
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A Valuable “Post-” Post
Over at his blog on Harriet, Reginald Shepherd offers a characteristically insightful post about “post-” poets (post-modern, post-avant, etc.). Here’s an excerpt: Post-avant writers tend to eschew the standard and standardized autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote which predominates in what’s called (usually pejoratively) “mainstream” poetry. Indeed, they frequently problematize and question the notions of self and of personal experience. But they don’t just discard the self as an ideological illusion. As well, they tend to avoid or at least seriously complicate narrative of any variety. They incorporate fracture and disjunction without enthroning it as a ruling principle.Read More
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Poetic-Critical Complex Langpo Advocates Rationing Pierian Springwater
From a 2/6/08 blog post by Ron Silliman: “I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More
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News Flash: Langpo Relents (Or Does He?)
Ron Silliman’s latest post, a praise-song to Geoffrey Young’s The Riot Act, begins—as do so many of Silliman’s posts—with a sneer. “In one sense, Geoffrey Young is the poet Billy Collins & Ted Kooser both would like to be, writing self-contained works that are narrative marvels and accessible to just about any reader of English.” This fatuous statement is followed by this lucid introduction to one of Young’s poems. “Dig:”, he instructs us from under his cocked beret, the epitome of avant-schmavant cool. Now, I don’t want to sneer at Geoffrey Young.Read More