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Apropos of the Previous Post
Walter Russell Mead touches on the same concerns: In literature, critics and theoreticians erect increasingly complex structures of interpretation and reflection – while the general audience for good literature diminishes from year to year. We are moving towards a society in which a tiny but very well credentialed minority obsessively produces arcane and self referential (but carefully peer reviewed) theory about texts that nobody reads.Read More
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The Poe(li)tics of Reality
Robert P. Baird at 3 Quarks Daily draws a fascinating parallel between the motivations and methods of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and those of the Language poets. He compares Assange’s hatred of secrecy—which he (Assange) views as the essential strategy all authoritarian governments use to maintain their power—with the Language poets’ hatred of “the rules for the ‘clear’ and ‘orderly’ functioning of language” (Charles Bernstein), which they see as similarly essential to maintaining “the capitalist project.” Certainly the paranoia-tinged views of Assange do mirror Langpo’s paranoid fear of “official verse culture” (Bernstein), a.k.a. “the School of Quietude” (Ron Silliman).Read More
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A World of Things
Bill Knott asks some important (to the extent that poetry is important) questions here and here. His focus is Objectivism (the Zukofsky/Williams/Reznikoff/Oppen Objectivism, not the hilariously stupid “philosophy” cooked up by that maven of selfishness, Ayn Rand), one of the root assumptions of which is the notion that content doesn’t matter. In fact, Objectivist poetry exalted a world of things, a world without meaning—except for the significance imposed upon it by the poet.Read More