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Post-Avant David v. NPR Goliath
Ron “Solo” Silliman endorses Palin’s “poetry” as part of his devastating attack on Garrison Keillor, Commander of the Public Radio Death Star responsible for destroying post-avant planets across the universe.Read More
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What Poetry Can Be
I wonder if there’s room on a post-avantist’s reading list for this. Are the sample poems SoQ? If so, what would a Silliman or a Goldsmith or a Spahr do with such an irruption of brutality in their lives? More broadly, what would Wallace Stevens or any of the other “High Modernists” have done with it? (Is Williams a “High Modernist”? If so, there’s at least one who could do it.) I don’t put these forward as rhetorical questions: I genuinely wonder if the avant-garde and their acknowledged masters haven’t narrowed rather than expanded what poetry can be.Read More
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Solipsist Jottings
There’s a curious and interesting essay by Christopher Rizzo in the new Jacket Magazine. It’s essentially an response to a rather dismissive October 2007 review by Charles Simic of Robert Creeley‘s The Collected Poems (both Volume I, 1945-1975, and Volume II, 1975-2005). Rizzo is clearly a smart person and a fan of Creeley’s poetry and poetics. My admiration for Creeley is strong, but I have to admit it wanes when I read his work from Pieces on.Read More
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You, Ron Silliman!
Another fine link you’ve led me to…. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe? To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers […] provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading. Read the whole article here. I haven’t decided yet what I think about this, but I have often wondered if many of us don’t fetishize the physical book.Read More
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Parsing the Pointless
I can’t resist pointing this blog’s readers to today’s entry on Silliman’s blog, wherein he lavish roughly 2,800 words on a book whose aim he characterizes thusly: “[I]t wants to place conceptual writing — including flarf & more than a few kinds of appropriative techniques — into a historical context that renders all that has come before obsolete & irrelevant.” In other words, the authors use history in order to render history meaningless. In true intellectualoid fashion, Silliman parses the pointlessness of this effort in a way that foregrounds not only his own poe(li)tical obsessions but his shirt size.Read More
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Guilty
Ron Silliman tops his best in his latest blog post, in which he turns the smarmy politicking at Oxford into another intellectually dishonest brief against his fantasy nemesis, the School of Quietude. It’s fun, I admit, watching Captain Ron attempting to turn his horror over the political nature of the Padel-Walcott affair to his own poe(li)tical advantage. On the other hand, it’s sad to see him turning into PoBiz’s own Ann Coulter.Read More
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Ron’s On
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Ron Silliman’s 1000-page L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E adventure The Alphabet, written over a period of 30 years, you can get a taste of it here. I’ve never heard him read in person, but person who has (Al Filreis) says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him read so well. He was on,” and I have to agree.Read More
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Poetic Cleansing
I want to recommend the experience of reading and comparing two essays, a brief one by D. A. Powell and a longish one by Ron Silliman. The two pieces have similar titles — respectively, “Unburying Amy Lowell” and “Unerasing Early Levertov“* — but they couldn’t be more different in their aims and impacts. Powell offers a genuinely appreciative reappraisal of Amy Lowell as a poet; Silliman focuses on Levertov’s career, focusing on her strong but derivative early work to explain how she ended up in what, for him, is paradigm-shifting anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry).Read More
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Against the Binary
I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.Read More
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Those Who Can’t Do…
I highly recommend a visit to Ron Silliman’s blog post today, in which you can savor his disordered thought process in all its glory. He starts off with a school-marmish sneer toward Curtis Faville for using parodize instead of the correct parody in the comments stream, while going on to note that there have been plenty of parodies of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “tho I don’t recall linking to any.” You see, in Silliman’s world, “tho” is acceptable but “parodize” is not, undoubtedly because “tho” was sanctified by his Objectivist hero George Oppen.Read More