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Open and Closed, Part 5
Here is another handful of poems by someone firmly exiled to the so-called “School of Quietude” by Ron Silliman and others of his persuasion: the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. In the comment stream to one of my previous posts, in which I wrote that William Stafford and Ted Kooser “bring a flush of fury to Ron Silliman’s bearded cheeks.” Silliman replied, “I can’t imagine ever feeling ‘fury’ at Kooser or Stafford. That’s like getting angry at cold oatmeal.” You’ll have to decide for yourself if “cold oatmeal” describes the following poems.Read More
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Openness Contra Gated Communities
Over at “Stoning the Devil,” Adam Fieled has chosen to re-engage via comments on the poems I’ve posted by Philip Levine and Adrienne Rich. He takes me to task for not explicating the poems, but as I told him in his comment stream, “I have no intention of explicating the poems, although I may comment on them in a general way as I continue to post more examples.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 4
This continues my posting of poetry by poets on Ron Silliman’s “School of Quietude” list, which you can find in this previous post. Today’s poet is Adrienne Rich, who long ago made my personal list of poets who should get the Nobel Prize. It’s hard, I must add, to represent the scope, subtlety and power of her work, in part because she is formally adventurous, and in part because she has increasingly worked in long sequences—and it felt unfair to compare those to Mark Young’s minimalist poems, which Adam Fieled put forward as representative of strong post-avant writing.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 3
Evidently Adam Fieled took offense at my earlier addition to our ongoing discussion about so-called School of Quietude poets vs. so-called post-avant poets. I’ve tendered an apology in his comment stream, because I surely didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. As for my failures in the substance of our discussion, he’s right in calling me on the fact that I did not provide him with examples of poems from “my tradition” that I would be “willing to vouch for.” I promised him I would begin doing so, and this is the first post in that process.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 2: Another Response to Adam Fieled
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been in dialogue with Adam Fieled of his Stoning the Devil over issues of poetics, and this post is a reply to his latest foray in that dialogue. Adam has adopted a convenient format that uses numbered items to distinguish one issue from another, which I like too—and so I’ll use it here.Read More
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There there, Ron; there there….
In his blog post today, Ron Silliman offers up some wonderful insights about writing, only to go off the rails when he boards his favorite train of thought, which concerns (of course) his tribe (small, evolved, super-intelligent, “outsiders” all) vs. the imagined Other Tribe (vast, beetle-browed, witless, “insiders” all).Read More
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A Note of Thanks…
Thanks to jbahr over at WhimsyLand for entering our discussion of Ron Silliman’s by now hoary terms, Post-Avant and School of Quietude.Read More
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“Democratic” vs. “Authoritarian”
Johannes Göransson has an excellent post over at his Exoskeleton blog dealing with the whole issue of the avant-garde, the use and misuse of that term, and the question of whether the writing of Silliman & Co.Read More
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Open and Closed: A Response to Adam Fieled
Adam Fieled over at Stoning the Devil is, in my humble estimation, one of the most thoughtful post-avant partisans on the Web. When I respectfully threw down a gauntlet in his comment stream, he thoughtfully took it up in a post that’s useful in a number of ways, not least in its listing of poets in the post-avant ballpark (at least by Adam’s lights). Best of all, he presents two poems by Mark Young as examples of what he sees as characteristic and strong post-avant work.Read More
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Dissenting from My Dissent
Well, I tried to dissent from the debate, but now Seth Abramson has yet another lengthy and thought-provoking entry on his blog, to which I want to steer this blog’s readers, in part because I generally agree with his analysis. I have two dissents, though.Read More