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Legitimization Factories
Lyle Daggett has a recent post at A Burning Patience with a tantalizing excerpt from an interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes. She discusses English departments, but what she says applies to cultural support institutions like the Pew Center or the Poetry Foundation as well. Of English departments, she says, “We are working in this legitimization factory.” Think about that…. And how does legitimization come about? What are the forces that create and distributes legitimization from the “factory”? Lorna Dee puts it this way: “I’m saying look at the conditions of power.Read More
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Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
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How to Write a New Sentence
“If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.” —Adam Haslett, reviewing How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish Haslett clearly hasn’t encountered Ron Silliman and so hasn’t factored the New Sentence into his wonderful analogy.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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Recognitions
Today Jonathan Mayhew at ¡Bemsha SWING! offers a fond glance backward at 2006 as a year of stimulating comment box disputes, while John Latta brilliantly deconstructs Ron Silliman’s faux scholasticism while examining The Library of America’s edition of Poe’s Essays and Reviews. I admire both of these writers but prefer Tom Montag’s “Lines for November 17,” which captures my own mood of late. Montag, it seems to me, does what poets are supposed to do: he embraces and articulates recognitions that matter.Read More
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A Stray Thought
I was reading Kent Johnson’s post on John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti blog this morning when a stray thought zapped flylike through a small tear in the screen of my concentration. The post continues a debate between Johnson and Tony Towle over a famous poem ascribed to Frank O’Hara, but which Johnson speculates may in fact have been an imitation of O’Hara written in homage to the deceased poet by his friend Kenneth Koch.Read More
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Weary-Hearted
Among my very first blog posts here was this one regarding Howard Nemerov. I was reminded of him again by Jim Culleny’s posting of Nemerov’s weary-hearted poem “The Life Cycle of the Common Man,” over at 3 Quarks Daily. It is a fine example of what Captain Ron would call “quietude.” I happen to like it. Why? Well, at least in part because it is anti-heroic, and for almost a decade we Americans have been operating in Heroic Mode–the jingoistic, charge-up-San-Juan-Hill mentality that not infrequently leads us to elect stupid leaders who lead us into stupid wars.Read More
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Hysterical
Starry Knott Bill Knott is at his dyspeptic best in two recent posts (here and here), but the second is a good deal less funny and a good deal sadder. Recalling Jessica Smith’s post about the cruelty of many comments posted to Ron Silliman’s blog (not Silliman’s fault, I’m sure everyone agrees), Knott lists a number of nasty, cruel, arrogant and/or pointless statements from reviews of his first three books.Read More
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A World Outside
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”).Read More
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Delectable
Two delectable posts by Kent Johnson over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifuti (I recommend reading them in order, here and here).Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
