========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 15:07:32 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: Failed Experiments That piece by Timmons was pretty bad, eh ? I'd say that it failed at some thing , and should nt have been published here. Mark Roberts SIS Liaison Officer Student Information & Systems Office Ph 02 385 3631 University of NSW Sydney Australia Fax 02 662 4835 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 00:02:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: G-ology First, two corrections, or, as we G1-ers are wont to say, self-criticisms: Jena's right that I conflated Chain & A Poetics of Criticism. Mea culpa. Tho she doesn't mention that her co-editor also co-edited the Technique section of O-blek 12. I would love to have somebody FULLY elucidate the differences between the various publications with their overlapping editorships. I frankly could learn a lot from that. Second correction: nobody seems to have caught my error in assigning authorship of Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana to "Eli Mandel." It was Eli Siegel (who still turned into a professional homophobe at the end of his life). WCW wrote the intro to Siegel's book. Anybody out there read it? Steve Evans' intro to the Technique section of O-blek 12 seems to me the most heroic attempt to date to articulate a terrain for G2. I think that he's right in that intro about the motivating "hatred of identity" that runs through the work, although his reading of the phenomena in O-blek is more broad and generous than that espoused in Apex's "State of the Art" manifesto. I used those two pieces with my class at Naropa, which led to some lively, albeit inconclusive discussions. Certainly nobody has ever done a more aggressive job misreading and stereotyping a community than Apex' broad swipes at G1 (& esp. LangPo):"an avant-garde dominated in its practices by a poetics espousing the priority of 'language itself' over all other relations." (p. 5) Is that not a classic instance of labelling theory taking the misnomer "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poet" just a wee bit literally? I've never once met a G1 who espoused that. Or, later on the same page, "a participatory valorization of this disintegration...." Haven't both Gayatri Spivak & Bob Perelman completely answered that in response to Fred Jameson's only-slightly-more-in-depth reading of the poem "China"? And, throughout State of the Art, an entire series of presumptions concerning the social functions of innovation, as though everyone from M. Bertrand thru G1 were an Italian futurist celebrating the potentiality of the submachine gun. Talk about "phobic characterization"!! I think what makes the Apex group stand out so much, especially at a distance (where, for example, it's easier to forget [or ignore] that Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet and Lew Daly, the editors whom I've actually met, are all lovely, charming, intelligent people, as full of complexity and caution as one might want), is precisely the directness of their address, which shoots right through even the "post"iness of its convoluted syntax. While Steve wants me to "say it ain't so,"the Apexers say openly that "a new understanding of our task as iconoclasts and not innovators will emerge." If I ignore for a moment how I feel at the lack of accuracy and generosity in their description of my cohorts in G1, that's still an interesting and difficult claim to make and I want to know more. What distinguishes them as a group phenomenon is their ambition--it's the most "out there" manifesto we've had in ages--even if their "ambition is to have no ambition" (as I think the British punk band The Gang of Four once put it, back in the swampy G1 days of 1982). Besides, Steve, Chick Gandil, who organized the Black Sox throw of the 1919 series (he was the first baseman), and thus gave rise to the very phrase you use, used to live on my very block here in Berkeley. He worked with my grandfather. That's at least as cosmic as discovering that I'm the reincarnation of one of Jackson Mac Low's past lives. (Or that Jack Spicer and my father died on the very same day in 1965.) >But on to specifics. (This is Steve "talking") Marjorie Perloff's remarks >about the shifting tenor of political commitments >among progressives in the U.S. make sense, but let's >not forget that the "burning political concerns" of >*In the American Tree* were/are by no means self-evident: >to accept Bruce Andrews's "In Funnel" or David Melnick's >*Pcoet* as doing political work, one has to have a >sense of the political rather more elastic than most >people on the left had in the 70s or for that matter >have today. At the point that David wrote Pcoet, he was either about to (or just had) abandoned his idea of ever finishing his dissertation (the one chapter he wrote appeared in the Maps special issue on Zukofsky), and came out of the closet to his students at Berkeley with a vengence, platform shoes and glitter in his beard. There was absolutely no way that any one confronting either him or that text in those days could not see the text's relation not just to the history of modernism but also to what was then known as "gender fuck" politics. The argument for Bruce's work is not dissimilar. Tho his idea of gender fuck is a little different. Besides, one of the major thrusts of one strain of G1 was to counter the various modes of vulgar left critical/aesthetic practice. Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck, Steve Benson, myself and Kathleen Fraser were all once in the same marxist study group, and we had some TERRIFIC arguments. In every sense of that word. And every single one of the G1s who were politically active (not just through our poetry) dealt with these issues repeatedly. >What I don't understand is why this hard-won utopian >intelligence (or say: set of reading practices) is >not brought to bear on the *New Coast.* I disagree that this is what's goin' on. Here the claim in Apex about "iconoclasts and not innovators" rings much truer to my ear. What I want to know is what the social content of that might be. If you can >read Rae Armantrout as "positioned critique" can't >you do the same for Robert Kocik? Yes, absolutely. I'm interested in examining the nature of each position. I'm not especially making the argument for my g-g-g-generation. > >I suppose that at some point, Ron, names will have >to be mentioned to go along with generalizations Oh, I still do believe in Lenin's idea that the move toward "abstraction" is toward the truer layer of the concrete. I'm honestly not sure what's at >stake for you in such remarks. I thought (still do) that if I prod a little, I'd get some interesting feedback from poet(s) in G2 (maybe even G3) who would further articulate the landscape, so that the "prospective" (i.e. inchoate) nature posed by O-b 12 might give greater rise to a new shared vision of a broader terrain. Frankly, I'd like to see less reactive criticism and more manifestos a la Apex (and from a broad range of positions). I find it interesting (very ambiguous word here, and deliberately so) that the most detailed response has come from somebody who positions himself as a critic and not as a poet, as such. >On the question of "average ages" of *NC* and *NAP,* it >seems clear to me that biological age doesn't equal "age" >in terms of the poetic field. Huh? Actually, the question of age is a complex one all on its own. One of the real values of The Art of Practice is its inclusion of a number of poets generationally part of G1 who did not begin publishing until later than most of those in Tree. (I'm reminded, say, how late both Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner were to publish regularly. When Jackson was my age, 48, he had exactly 6 books in print.) But I do think that there's a generational dynamic (different for each G) that focuses when poets are under still well under 35, and that to wait longer as a generation to begin to stake out a space is itself a notable step, so that the hesitancy implicit there must itself be looked at as part of the process (Think of Olson's age in comparison to Creeley, Blackburn et al, or of Burroughs to Ginsberg & Kerouac, or of Williams to the Objectivists.) > >To clarify one general point in closing: I am not under >the impression that a collective re-definition of what >poetry is and does has as yet been articulated by G2 Yep, except for Pam, Lew, Kristin & Alan have at least made one stab. Given the >way literary fields work in capitalist social formations, >the failure to achieve such a collective redefinition >will lead to a lot of interesting poetry disappearing Absolutely! Several G1ers have noted in recent years how much the O-b 12 formation of G2 reminds them of the younger writers who found themselves active around certain modes of the NAP in the mid- to late-60s. David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Harold Dull, d alexander, Lowell Levant, Ed Van Aelstyn, John Gorham, Gail Dusenbery, Stan Persky, Seymour Faust, George Stanley, William Anderson, Wilbur Wood, etc etc etc. But failing to distinguish their terms from NAP1, NAP2 proved unable, unwilling to set up the institutions that might have insured their own communities' perpetuation into the future. I am amazed and appalled that neither the Messerli nor the Hoover anthologies include the work of Lew Welch. In the 1960s, he would have come into almost any listing of the 24 or so most influential NAPpers. Such is history. You have to write it yourself. "Bang. Snap. Crack. They never knew what hit them..." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 10:01:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: G-ology In-Reply-To: <199411010036.TAA18462@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some items to consider in the current "generation" debate (and let me say that the remarks I'm about to make are not directed at any one particular respondent. 1) It is a standard hegemonic (not to mention racist and imperialist) move to take one piece of writing by some particular "group" (as it is defined from outside) as the example of what is wrong with that "group" as a whole, and then dismissing that "group" on the basis of that one piece of writing. It is even hegemonic, racist, and imperialist to refer to them as a "group." What does all this have to do with many of the reactions to the introductory essay in Apex of the M? 2) "Make it new" was hardly a dictum put forth by someone interested in social liberation. Indeed, "make it new" is at least as effective as a capitalist slogan as it is as a call to radical change. And whatever the social effectiveness of the proponents of "make it new" in poetry (I think it's unclear, but worth discussing) their success has been undeniable in terms of their marketing of that concept and their promotion of poetry that fits the concept. 3) Indeed, it seems true to me that all writers have a complex relation to past and present, making what is "new" by borrowing, changing, demolishing the past. 4) To see the "lyric" as somehow a force of social conservatism is simply HISTORICALLY UNVERIFIABLE. The lyric form, like the use of parataxis, collage, sonnets, whatever, is a possibility that can be made use of, or discarded, in a variety of historical situations. 5) I don't think it's at all clear whether younger writers are "returning to the lyric." But if writers are using lyric forms, the question to ask is NOT "what's wrong with those writers?" but rather "what is it about the contemporary social environment that makes the lyric seem useful to some writers" or "what is it about the lyric that makes it seem useful to some writers in this social environment." 6) One of the things I'm struck by in my conversations with writers of my own age is their GENEROSITY in responding to the work of previous generations of writers. I'm beginning to wonder whether more established writers can respond with the same level of generosity. What does it mean that it would be taken as a sign of WEAKNESS to actually believe that writers in the past did some interesting things? 7) In fact, my objection to Lew Daly's introduction to Apex of the M is not primarily on the level of poetics (though I find the statement of poetics there fundamentally misguided) but that it repeats the same Oedipal MALE model of thinking your poetry has value only if you can "overthrow the enemy." My problem with his introduction is not that it departs from the avant garde manifestos of writers like Breton, Olson, on down to Silliman, etc., but that IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE THOSE MANIFESTOS. 8) But the idea that Lew's work, however interesting or not, is a statement of MY poetics, or that of Steve Evans or Jena Osman or whoever, simply escapes me completely. And that would be true even if I thought everything Lew did was great. 9) To what extent does the discourse of the avant garde remain fundamentally linear, imperialist, etc on the subject of form, the social, etc? Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 10:21:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: G-ology In-Reply-To: <199411011502.KAA29012@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some additional comments on my previous missive: 1) What role does GENEROSITY of response to other poets play in who is considered "important", etc. Is attacking the writing of the past the same as a claim to "seriousness"? 2) I WANT TO SEE LESS MANIFESTOS 3) Notice that hegemonic "grouping" practices can be used by everybody against everybody, and they always suck. 4) Charles Borkhus: "You originals/are the biggest dupes" Whether one believes that or not, to what extent is the concept of originality on the level of form a problem rather than a given good? 5) If a revolution were to occur, what makes poets so sure that we would be part of it, rather than what was being fought against? 6) Isn't it possible that everything we know is still wrong? Or at least not more right than previous generations of writers have been? 7) Jefferson Hansen: "I don't know what I think. Hence I am crudely ecletic." Does that make him a WEAK poet? What if it did? 8) Will somebody please say that discussing poetry doesn't have to be the same as a battleground? (excuse me now, I have to go put on my armor) Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 11:51:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt For those of you who are interested, what follows is the preface and footnotes to an essay I have written on the "apex of the M" preface. I present the essay in its abridged form here in part to spare you too much text and for the simple reason that I have it "out" to an editor in hope of publication. My response the the "M" centers upon a notion of "act" is which I feel undermined by the eschatological. The "footnotes" which folow actually contain their own argument and flesh out more fully what I mean by "act." Toward the end of the body of the essay, which is aphoristic in its construction, I quote a critical line offered by Ron Silliman in the "Chinese Notebook" 20.) Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all..... & 25.) How can I show the intentions of this work and poetry are identical? Here I ain't talkin' 'bout my ge...ge..genuflection. I would be happy to send the body of the paper to anyone who'd like it. Patrick Phillips "Only Be Sure to Spare the Poet's House." Put it all to the torch! And the king named one by one the towers, the gates, the temples this marvel of the world; then brightened, as the thought leaped into words: "Only be sure to spare the Poet's House." Akhmatova: from Alexander at Thebes Leningrad, October 1961 What follows is in part a response to a recent editorial preface published in the first issue of "apex of the M." My initial response upon reading the preface was something of a fever, a visceral anger over the tactics chosen by the editors. Among other things the preface urges a re-figuring of poetry toward a "millennial" poetry; a proffering of the "eschatological" and the acknowledgment of the "sacred" as an orientation in this "iconoclastic" re-figuration. On further reflection, it became clear that the gnostic territory marked out by the editors is an extreme violation of the very things they advocate. I wrote this response to allude to another radicality which turns the editor's contentions inside out, a radicality which alters the grounds toward which such theological terms attempt to surface. The poet's house in the above epigraph is a protectorate it suffers an enjoined sovereignty. By torching Thebes, yet sparing Pindar's house, Alexander makes of the poet's house a protectorate within an eviscerated political and ideological history a situation which speaks poignantly about Akhmatova's condition in Soviet Russia in the early 1960's.1 This protectorate is a historically ramified condominium; condominial in that it becomes the locus of its own negation, an index of a history apart spared only as a remnant. The tyranny of Alexander's rule is not mitigated by his benevolence to the poets (and priests) of Thebes. By being spared the torch, the poet's house is brought into the state, and made a colony of its ideological adventurism. In a similar fashion, the editor's preface to "apex of the M" makes of the poet's house a protectorate through its reference to Dante's benevolent Monarchy.2 The concept of the monarchy arriving at the new Millennium folds this protectorate around our action/writing. The proposal of a millennial poetry guts the act of its own potential; the cultural and historical magnetism of the Millennium is powerful enough to push historical perspective into a future which is beyond its own significance. It is a warped projection which hurls the act into a future of its own making. This warp enables a projection of "consciousness' which for many reasons is an aberration of any sense of the continuity of work. The thought of this projection and its working through is in fact suspended by this hurl into the future; this "thought" is propelled by its own idea and is a self-serving futuring and is not arrived at through historical immanence. In other words this gnostic sparing is an evacuation of history through a constant futuring; an eschatological desire which distances desire and history from the moment of act. This maneuver proves quite similar to Alexander's sparing, but in "M" the house is "spared" instead through the sacred as a sacrifice to the Other. In material history, the poet's house cannot be spared by either monarchy; both monarchies only gaze from a distance at the poet's house; they reach only to the threshold of its potential. As though in the flames engulfing Thebes, the thousand lights flickering off the M into the heavens3 illuminate the poet's house as only an iconographic way-station, postponing history until the fulfillment by an other. This other never being accomplished refutes action.4 History in the case of any imperialist tyranny is absorbed by that tyranny the ash surrounding the poet's house. History in the case of "M" becomes a transfixion, dependent upon the course of postponed desire. The M's subjects stand transfixed by the flicker, the meta-physic of the gnostic fire, a fire as tyrannous in its claim on poets as were Alexander's. We begin to see a relationship of the word to history. The force of work in world is equal to its moment of act as reflected in the word. This is the word's duration and consequence. Through this examination we also begin to notice that the image of the M disrupts history, it creates a film on history which is gesturally opaque a shadow of the world. The "apex of the M," in spite of its attempts to be iconoclastic, reapplies the icon in a most graphic and violent form of usurpation, intended as liberatory, yet functioning as a rhetorical device which perhaps unbeknownst to the editors is bent on debilitating human actuality. We begin to see that far from being iconoclastic the editor's spell cast at the apex of the Millennium makes of history a fetish. The result of the distance of act from word in the eschatological breach is that history and the future is idolized, thematized, made aspect of rhetoric and form. In essence the effect of the preface to the "apex of the M" is an "iconoclastic fetishism."5 Within act as a process of work the poet's house is and can only be continuously engulfed in material history by constantly enacting the overthrow of any agency. This is achieved only at the moment of the letter as it is engulfed in history apart from any agency. Indeed this struggle against agency is the interminable contradiction of language, its constant overthrow of its own mediacy. This continuum is itself history; history apart from rhetoric, from style, from form in activity. This essay is a brief examination of the poetic act as act in history and is prompted by the responsibility of this act a responsibility and a history dodged by any agency, any Monarchy, be it "Alexander's," or "God's." 1 At a recent reading given by Michael Palmer he mentioned to the audience that Akhmatova's house is a national museum, but that it is unmarked and its location is known to but a few it is a "secret house." 2 In Dante's cosmology, the "M" falling out of the heavens in a procession of letters (D-I-L-I-G-I-T-E I-U-S-T-I-T-I-A-M...Q-U-I I-U-T-I-C-A-T-I-S T-E-R-R-A-M ) orients the reader to view the M as if with a partition between one's eyes. In one eye the M is a promotion of the benevolent monarchy - God's justice - to be established on earth; in the other eye, as some critics would have it, the M, in its transformation to a fleur-de-lis, is a critique of the imperialist ventures of the French Monarchy and of Florentine political schisms France had its hand in the ouster of the Ghibbelenes in Florence and both France and Florence used the fleur-de-lis as political symbols. This politically partitioned view of the M points to a secular monarchy and to Dante's critique of a Prince's justice. The partition of the M is instructive.The moment of the M, of letters, for Dante is partitioned secular and sacred the moment of act and potential.. The schism of act and potential points directly to the schism of secular and sacred, but through the transparency of angels: 'The Angelic intellect is always in a state of pure act that is, its powers never lapse into mere potentiality, but are at every moment actualized. At the other extreme of creation, and therefore in the lowest place is pure matter, the prima materia which is pure potentiality the possibility of becoming realized in some individual form. Midway between the two stand man, a union of both. Part of our powers goes forth intermittently in act or actuality; but part lies inactive as mere potentiality, waiting to be called into play. And in man this union of act and potentiality, Beatrice declares, will never be dissolved. This is sometimes understood as the union of body and soul, which even death can dissolve only for a time; but it seems rather to imply that man even in the world to come will never attain to the pure act of the Angelic intellect some part of his being will remain for ever in potentia.' from In Patria, an Exposition of Dante's Paradiso, Rev. John S. Carroll, M.A., D.D. , Kennikat Press Port Washington, NY/London, 1971, first published in 1911. p. 454. When seen through the agency of the Angelic intellect, material act is "for ever in potentia." This in potentia is the measure of our act, from without. This external measure results in a violence an excised history very similar to that suffered at the words of Alexander. In a subtle, yet profound shift, if read dialectically, the future does not bestow grace upon act, act is its own futuring.B With the recognition of the trans-temporality of act, there is a clearer understanding of how the poet's house is perpetually engulfed in history; never does it propose a future, it actualizes history as it's own future. To flesh this out further, this notion of act can be likened to the idea of negotiation put forth by Homi Bhaba in location of culture, (Rutledge, '94). In the first chapter, "The Commitment to Theory," Bhaba refutes the possibility of a transparent agent, or of any third person examination of ideology. He puts forth Mill's "On Liberty" as a clear example of a third person , or transparent agency of political ideology that first marks out difference (polarization) and then reconciles these differences through a careful, (and inherently violent) rationale. (For Bhaba, Mill's transparent agency is a rhetorical/textual manifestation of the political subject through negation.) Opting instead for a textual, or iterate negotiation, Bhaba attempts to position the text in a constant process of emergence from within an ideological translation. "When I talk of 'negotiation' rather than 'negation,' it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic, without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History....By negotiation I attempt to draw attention to the structure of 'iteration' which informs political movements that attempt to articulate antagonistic and oppositional elements without the rationality of sublation or transcendence. (pp. 25, 26) What does this have to do with a benevolent monarchy? First, gnosticism is the pre-eminent trans parent agency. For the gnostic, only God is capable of reconciling act and potential. Any acceptance of that agency is a subordination to that agency - a further removal from act's capacity; any acceptance of a transparent agency, any Monarchy, is an acceptance of a negative, transcendental history. Second, the iteration of a gnostic history is the proposition of an Other to which we ascend, of a constant and everlasting potential which is always undoing the act. The extension of this is that through transcendence, history is subordinate to gnostic iteration. B Any attempt to reconcile act with potential must encounter history at its moment and this encounter is impossible through any transparent agency (or angel). In part of the Arcades Project, Benjamin counters very clearly the agency of angels and proposes a material history in constant actualization. The fore- and after-history of historical evidence is made manifest in it by a dialectical presentation. Further: every historical state of affairs presented dialectically polarizes and becomes a force field in which the conflict between fore- and after history plays itself out. It becomes that field as it is penetrated by actuality. And thus historical evidence always polarizes into fore- and after-history in a new way, never in the same way. And it does so go beyond itself, within actuality per se....(N7a,1) and in another place: in allegory the facies hippocratica of history lies before the viewer's eyes like a frozen, primordial landscape...(N2,7) from N: "Re The Theory of Knowledge,Theory of Progress," Act is its own limit and the limit of history. Any agency (any "M") is allegorical and denies this limit and instead presents a mythic history an "antediluvian fossil." As an historical and cultural cross-reference, parts of the argument put forth by the editors of "apex of the M" are in no way new, or specific even to poetries of the west. A Japanese literary critic Yashimoto Takaaki used a similar argument against self conscious, language-centered writing in Japan in the late 1970's. Yashimoto, reacting to the influence of (French) post-modern thinkers on Japanese poetry in the '60's, argued that "to single out [contemporary] poet's individual characteristics from the ground of their sensibility and the solipsism of their thought has become meaningless." [See the introduction to An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Leith Morton Ed (1993) and Trans and Yashimoto Takaaki, Zomho Sengoshiron (Tokyo: Yamata Shobo, 1983) (The above quote is borrowed from Morton's anthology, page xxiii.)]. 3 These thousand lights have been said to be the transcendence of writing itself; the individual letters actually writing the world onto the face of divine justice - the joined matter and spirit, act and potential in the Jovian sphere. See chapter two of Jermey Tambling's Dante and Differance, Cambridge, 1988. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 11:12:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Juliana Spahr Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: Re: G2 As to the Evans-Silliman exchange: I appreciated both posts. But Steve's I found especially useful for clarifying a lot of the problems that I had with Silliman's original post. What I find most frightening about Silliman's arguments is his reduction of everything in Buffalo or even elsewhere in the nation to a sort of spiritualism (it is the only grouping that he acknowledges as really having any seriousness) that finally isn't representative of the larger picture. For starters, as Jena made clear, neither of the editors of Chain are on the board of Apex of the M. Chain in fact is a journal that in many ways pursues an opposite agenda as that of Apex-- it is anti-editorial, anti-grouping. The use of the device of the chain letter in the first volume was explicitly intended to expand community definitions beyond editorial privilege (Jena and I wrote about the success and failure of this project in our "Editors' Notes"). Also neither of the editors of the Technique volume are on the board of Apex of the M. But while this is probably just a confusion on Silliman's part, it also seems in some ways indicative of his blindness to anything going on in what seems to be called G2 poetry beyond spirit. Beginning the Technique volume with the Spirit section was something that went counter to my editorial wishes and knowledge (I wanted to open with the broader "word and world" section), but also I think should not be read as "aggressive." Peter argues that when he sent this volume off to the printers with the spirit section first, it was to try to offer some connection with the Presentation volume-- both begin with Abbot and end Ziolkowsky. I am willing to chalk it up to alphabetical accident. But also I don't think that any more than the twenty-one poets in the spirit section have much to do with spirit (and come on, even of these twenty-one, beyond a statement of an idea of poetics as being transformative, it is hard to see these poets as a unified group-- Miekal And, Lisa Jarnot are hardly spiritualist poets that would meet the rigors of definition proposed in Apex-- this confusion or expansion of the categories in this collection was an editorial intention). Finally, to see the anthology as spiritualist is to do a great and serious disservice to around one hundred other poets. Just as to say that the anthology indulges in "increasingly modest forms" is to do a great disservice to a whole slew of writers (who are these people, Ron? who is "returning to the lyric? what are their numbers in this volume? who is draining the social? what is the social and why is the lyric not social?-- these are all innocent questions on my part, I need more specifics to actually begin to discuss this topic which is one that seems very urgent to me). It is, to just list some names at random, unfair to Lee Ann Brown's and Karen Kelley's attention to sexuality, unfair to Kevin Magee's mix of formalism, class struggle, and history, unfair to Myung Mi Kim's attention to relation, unfair to Susan Gevirtz's complicated feminism and attention to subjectivity, unfair to C.S. Giscombe's attention to identity. It is also I think unfair to the overt political intention in the anthology to include as many women as men (something that other anthologies of alternative poetry don't even come close to attempting and something that never seems to get mentioned in any complaint about this collection). Further, I am no longer sure any more, although I would have been a year ago, that a return to the lyric is a draining of the social. For starters, it is difficult to separate the social from any form. Susan Stewart's recent work on the lyric has done a lot of change the way I think of this form. Also, I don't see the anthology has having a "reluctance to acknowledge or own its own position." It seems rather that there is a complication in the anthology of what it means to have a position (an identity, a school, a gender). Steve Evans's introductory piece is good on this. If there is anything that sits owl-like overlooking a younger generation it isn't language poetry anymore than it is the New York school-- it is rather attempts at categorization, at bunker mentality. Much of the work of what might be called G2 reacts against this and in very interesting and innovative ways (Apex is an obvious exception to this in their editorial return to a concept of poetic discourse as war). Perhaps the reason such a collection seems such a strange beast to Silliman is that it is so different than the rigorous, mathematical model of ITAT. It is a collection of younger poets-- all of whose writing will change dramatically in the next years. I prefer to think of the anthology as more of a phonebook than even an anthology (these complaints about the authority of this anthology that are happening in Joel's post and in the discussion of anthologies at the beginning of the year are very alien to me-- what authority? the whole thing was thrown together and knows it). The numbers will change, people will move, but it is an attempt at a demographic for the year. It claims no completeness. It doesn't tell you not to read the books of the authors included. At best, it is a reference tool. At its worst, it is difficult to read because it includes so many writers. All of this has put me in the uncomfortable position of defending something that I have worked on. But while I acknowledge a lot of omissions and other problems with the anthology, I also believe that a lot of the work in it is important. I stand behind this work by other people because it has meant something to me. I don't find this work a repetition of language poetry nor does it seem to me upsetting that there are "no literary devices in that collection that you cannot already find in The New American Poetry, In the American Tree, or The Art of Practice" anymore than it upsets me that there are no devices in these anthologies that one cannot find in as inclusive a project as America: A Prophecy or maybe even the Norton. It is emphasis and idea and use of device here that is important. Not device itself. I hope this makes sense. I would enjoy complaints and clarifications. Juliana Spahr P.S. Please excuse erratic returns, they are not poetic attempts but rather just attempts to stop the line being cut in two. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 12:43:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Benjamin H. Henry" Subject: Little Magazine Call For Work X-To: nd5754@albnyvms.bitnet, jej84@albnyvms.bitnet, mijoyce@vaxsar.vassar.edu, bernstei@ubvms.bitnet, 3smc22@qucdn.queensu.ca, v231sey9@ubvms.bitnet, v080l3np@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu, keepc@qucdn.queensu.ca, v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu, au462@roo.INS.CWRU.EDU, ls0796@albnyvms.bitnet, digaman@well.sf.ca.us, varmint@well.sf.ca.us, caroway@aol.com, st000910@brownvm.brown.edu, cab7599@is.nyu.edu, db0965@albnyvms.bitnet, bsmjj@cunyvm.bitnet, belile@delphi.com, pac2j@virginia.edu, edene@alpha.hanover.edu, gquasha@aol.com, v369t4kj@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, benoit_sta@lsi.supelec.fr, Chris Funkhouser , greg@rasna.com, kelly@levy.bard.edu, jtm19@albnyvms.bitnet, manowak@alex.stkate.edu, wand@nyu.com, gsaedit@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet, kroker@vax2.concordia.ca, garber@albnyvms.bitnet, magnetic@netcom.com, rasulaj@qucdn.queensu.ca, hrl@well.com, hoffmap@snyplava.BITNET, saturn@hearn.bitnet, tnc@gitvm1.bitnet November 1994 Issue 21 of _The Little Magazine_ will be distributed as a cd-rom, and we are looking for work which maximizes the potential of this medium. We encourage contributors to conceive of their submissions as multi-media "texts" which can incorporate graphics, audio and hypertext (as a partial listing of the possibilities). "Straight" texts will also be considered, especially those concerned with issues relating to electronic medium (the attitude need not be positive). We will produce the journal using a Microsoft Windows system and Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook, and accept submissions on disk (MacIntosh format possible but not preferred), or via e-mail, ftp, or DAT. Paper as a last resort! Graphics work is preferred in a digitized format, though, if required, we can digitize work for you. Our conceptual / diagrammatic deadline is January 31, and technical / final deadline is April 1. Please contact us as soon as possible if you have work to contribute. _The Little Magazine_ Department of English SUNY-Albany Albany, NY 12222 518-442-4398 bh4781@csc.albany.edu Look forward to hearing from you, Thanks! The Editors ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 13:21:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: calling G1G2...this is mission control In-Reply-To: <199411010808.DAA81531@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Ron Silliman" at Nov 1, 94 00:02:10 am > At the point that David wrote Pcoet, he was either about to (or just > had) abandoned his idea of ever finishing his dissertation (the one > chapter he wrote appeared in the Maps special issue on Zukofsky), and > came out of the closet to his students at Berkeley with a vengence, > platform shoes and glitter in his beard. There was absolutely no way > that any one confronting either him or that text in those days could not > see the text's relation not just to the history of modernism but also to > what was then known as "gender fuck" politics. As someone struggling with my own dissertation on the Objectivists, i found this image of a newly freed Melnick in platform shoes, an image apparently hovering just behind the text, delightful. Problem is, i'd read the poem before & never been visited by this apparition. And maybe i'm only advertising my own lack of in/sight but i defy anyone to conjure it from those pages in INTAT alone. The point is that in its absence, i'm not sure how clear the whole "gender fuck" issue is (wasn't clear at all to me). The larger point, as i see it, is that many of these sorts of discussions, of poetry and "the social," posit a larger (reading) context for the poetry that is simply an illusion (despite the fierce energy and intrinsic interestingness of some of the discussion). Where i live i am defined against almost everyone i know by the fact that the latest ish of Talisman or Sulfur might be found lying around my apt. That puts me in a pretty small group--yet i'm pretty far out of the loop when it comes to the current G1/G2 debate--much of which, it strikes me from the outside, will turn on precisely those Melnickean personal filigrees to which Ron alludes--and these are supposed to verify the political dimension of the work? And on this point, i have to say, despite my longstanding sympathy w/ the LangPo effort, that if people have insisted on objecting to what they see as that group's exclusionary emphasis on the centrality of language (which is key to the claim for social efficacy of poetry), it is only because the original writings are full of such assertions of linguistic centrality. It may be true, as Silliman indicates, that no one actually believed it, but the extremism of assertion was itself part of the way the "group" worked and undoubtedly a crucial factor in its "success" (w/in an extremely limited field). The question remains: what is the larger social efficacy of the sorts of "resistances" LangPos have advocated? How exactly does the social enter the poem and the poem the social? How do discussion like these keep from remaining hopelessly INTERNECINE?? steve shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 12:31:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: Failed Experiments In-Reply-To: <01HIXW0LU0QA8YEVHW@asu.edu> On Mon, 31 Oct 1994, George Bowering wrote: > That piece by Timmons was pretty bad, eh? I'd say that it failed at > something, and shouldnt have been published here. > Which, within the context of the "discussion," is another way of saying that it was a successful experiment--though the criteria for success must be garnered through an ironic reading. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 14:52:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt I must apologize for the hastily strung preface to my excerpt. The garbled sentence should read: Just how does one act when the church is on fire? I should also add that I find myself, by vice or virtue - not by age, outside G2, though most of my friends are card carrying. My poetry is god damned lyrical though, so according to prophecy, I should be getting my card in the mail any day now. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 13:07:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: calling G1G2...this is mission control In-Reply-To: <01HIYP465EDU8YF26H@asu.edu> Steven Shoemaker's question is an important one: How does the social enter the poem; how does the poem enter the social? Such questions seem highly valuable in ascertaining not only relationships between aesthetics and the larger social world, but the place of the arts (and artists) in that world. I'm very interested in hearing what other people's ideas are about such notions of influence between the social and the personal, particularly as they relate to aesthetic production and their place/influence/relationship to history and context. I've been exploring Marxist, particularly Gramscian, views of how the social and the aesthetic interact but I have the sense that they, while useful, remain vague and ill-defined. The notion of "use" that was raised seems pertinent, but I'll have to reread (always) those entries to see if they can be inserted into Steven's question. I am always reminded of Emerson in "Art" where he finds the distinction between the useful and the fine arts limiting and stifling--perhaps the answer (were there ever any one) would lie in that direction. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 16:28:28 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: calling G1G2...this is mission control Isn't "the poem", lock schlock and barrel, constituted by a writer who has continuing relations with the body politic, like it or not -- thrown-ness as in Jim Morrison (rr or r] & Charles Bernstein have liked to say -- following Heideggr, I guess. Oh yes aesthetics happens somewhere else then where, old bean, huh? Aesthetics is a blind for social and money interests mainly. Confucius never found anyone who was disinterested -- & that makes questions for a whole tradition of separations and purifications in the name of art (i.e. Milord's fetishized pictures and objets d'art, later property of boards of trustees of museums, or MS of Vergil, as sandwiched in plastic sheeting in Vatican to be literary. Poet's letters, Palgrave and subsequent anthologies in the college market]. Jean Calais's translations of Villon are all in vain....Everyone wants to be a big artist these days. There must be more in poetry than anyone has thought. Could it be that there is a real power in it/always ideologists want to bring it under their control, as instrument. Like music, it keeps on escaping ideological control clutches, saying more than it means to, or less. Let's hope there is a real poet among the new writers, or even two. Surely "G1" or any G at all including G-6 (dead poets of circa Mallarme's time will welcome them, by opening new readings to us, readings we had missed, but which may be what we have always really longed for. Belonging to no G in the U.S. (wrong age) but listening as a reader/user to several U.S. G's with pleasure, excitement, appropriative glee, there is no reason to choose among generations, only to pick out the plums. This you learn in "art history", who says there's progress between generations, so that noone can consider themselves righteous who can make use of "early" artworks? Does the saying of a poem work like a charm as entry to a space of thoughts and language issues and issues of living and the politics of living or not? Noone can quite tell what will prove to be useful and sometimes it happens that a misprint retained does the trick. L= was marvellous because it accepted that conscious control of the way words got into the poem could be consonant with disorders that seemed to be the preserve of chance procedures or of lyrical speaking with tongues. It did not only "displace" "personal poetries" (Downtown poetries various, variously remaining in some degree acceptable or with affinities) but also the hopes for the upsurge of deep image to recreate the body and the body's politics. I look to see with interest which models from the recent G's various will reappear as the mashed potatoes for the younger poets. I could see aspects of beat poetry being valuable as well as the "spiritual" poetries of say Robt Kelly or George Quasha.... If I see the arts as a zone for freedoms, someone will now surely tell me my responsibilities. __ That sounds like a job for Ron Silliman. __ I'm impressed with Tom Mandel's comments on "use" and I hope this will be seen as pushing in something of that direction as well as a rejoinder to the Shoemaker questions. This medium is great for filling in times like sitting in office waiting for next lot of exam papers to come in. Hello. American poets, it's half-past four on an early summer afternoon, --- here is your wake up call. "The difference is spreading." Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 16:32:02 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: experiwhat? Not Mandel only, but Patrick Phillips on use, and impoverished uses of this facility, ending "Form is rampant". There's politics! Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 00:37:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt Although I've been presumptuous enough already, I left off two important notes in the excerpt: 4 My progression to a notion of poethics can't help but take up, through parallel, Levinas' notion of Heideggers' Ontology. In Otherwise Than Being (pg. 103) Levinas charges Heidegger with doing to Being what the M'sters have done with any notion of making, or of poetry. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues the State and in the nonviolence of totality, without securing itself against the violence from which is nonviolence lives and which appears in the tyranny of the state. Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity....A philosophy of power, ontology is, as philosophy which does not call into question the same, a philosophy of injustice. Even though it opposes the technological passion issued forth from the forgetting of Being hidden by existents, Heideggerian ontology which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation of Being in general, remains under the obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny. Tyranny is not the pure and simple extension of technology to reified men. Its origin lies back in the pagan "mood," in the enrootedness in the earth, in the adoration that enslaved men can devote to their masters. 5 In Iconology (Chicago, '86) W.J.T. Mitchell plots out some of the rhetorical image-making used by Marx and his contemporaries in an effort to get to an understanding of "The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm." From the chapter so titled he examines empiricist and idealist models of history to illuminate Marx's critique of fetishism and "its dialectical counterpart, the phenomenon of iconoclasm." Although his argument in no way resembles my own, I feel there is an pertinent quote from the passage called "the Dialectics of Iconoclasm:" Iconoclasm has a history at least as old as idolatry. Although it always tends to appear as a relatively recent, revolutionary breakthrough, overturning some previous established cult of image-worship (the Protestant Reformation breaking with Roman Catholicism, the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire opposing the patriarch, the Israelites escaping Egypt), it regularly presents itself as the most ancient form of religion a return to primitive Christianity, or to the religion of the first human creatures, before a "fall" which is always understood as a fall into idolatry. Indeed, one might argue that iconoclasm is simply the obverse of idolatry turned outward toward the image of a rival, threatening tribe. The iconoclast prefers to think that he worships no image of any sort, but when pressed, he is generally content with the rather different claim that his images are purer or truer than those of mere idolaters. (page 198) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 08:16:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: experiwhat? This is a bit of a long post, which is, I know, against the rules, and, worse, rude. I apologize in advance, but having initiated this discussion, there's a lot I need to say at this point. The multitude of repsonses have been extremely interesting in their diversity and inventiveness, but none has yet convinced me that the phrase "experimental poetry" is either meaningful (apart from idiosyncratic imaginations of it : private languages) or particularly useful. On the contrary, after everyone has said their piece, it seems more confused and confusing than ever. For me, the most attractive defense so far has been Robert Kelly's, which he achieves by returning experiment and its science to their mysterious alchemical sources, and the notion of proceeding not knowing what the outcome will be. Even then, though, the idea that only some poetry is initiated not knowing its outcome seems based on the very same violent taxonomy I was trying to shed some light on in the first place. If we take this secondary definition of experiment as the operative one in relation to poetry, the unspoken implication is that there is something we can call non-experimental poetry. What exactly would that poetry be? Poetry that knows what its outcome will be before it starts? What does "outcome" mean here? What the poem ultimately "says"? How the poem ultimately "works"? Frankly I don't think I know of any poetry like that, even the poetry I am least interested in. Even the most predictably conventional, it seems to me, can, and frequently does, contain surprises, the unexpected. To know the outcome before you write is to produce manuals, not poems. Even someone like Timothy Steele, I'd argue, doesn't know what results his rhymes will produce before he writes them. Perhaps the key is the word "conventional". Or, dare I say it, "predictable", thus returning us to the world of experimentalism. (But if a poem is predictable, can't this be part of an experiment? Experimenting to see if certain conventions will produce consistently predictable results?) Let's say there is a complex structure of conventions the poet has at her disposal, conventions that extend from phonetics to syntax to semantics to form (something like the grammetrical model Donald Wesling works out in *The Chances of Rhyme* and *The New Poetries*). In one sense, a poem embodies a structure of choices (conscious or unconscious, controlled or random) that array language in complex relation to those conventions. Certain patterns of convention dominate at any given moment the cultural sense of what constitutes a contemporary poem. We recognize Shakespeare's sonnets as poems, even great poems, at the same time we know they are not contemporary poems. Compare them with Bernadette Mayers' or Jack Clarke's sonnets. Their sonnets are absolutely contemporary in every way, even though, or maybe especially because, they work with a 600 year old form. I don't know how Bernadette would refer to her work, but I think Jack would blanche at the word experimental. You could say Los doesn't experiment, Los creates. Is this a meaningful distinction? My sense is that every phoneme, every stress, every rhyme, every reference in Jack's sonnets work within and against the array of conventions to mark out a moment of awareness of the particularity of the astonishing complexity of relation between language, thought, myth, history, sound, silence, rhythm, self, other, social, personal, elsewhere, here, time, and eternity. What Girogio Agamben calls "whatever being" in *The Coming Community*. This is not something I would think of as experimental. Let me go back to the question of the relation to convention as a way of distinguishing between poetries. Let's assume that at certain times certain conventions dominate writing to the point that they no longer even seem to be conventions, they are simply seen as constituting (good) writing. And as a result, meaning itself becomes predictable and conventional. Moreover, the conventions can be seen as upholding certain conventional and oppresive forms of life. One alternative for a poet in those circumstances is to try to subvert the forms of life by subverting the dominant conventions in her work. Is this something people mean by "experimental"? And if so, is it more important under these conditions to not know what you're doing (what your desired outcome is) or to know? Or is it possible in some sense to both know and not know at the same time? Say, to know generally, but not to know specifically. What does it mean to not know in this context? Let me return for a moment to the idea of a situation in which a specific form of literay convention has become authoritarian and can be seen as upholding certain oppressive forms of life. In this situation, is it possible to address, even subvert, those oppressive forms of life from within a writing based on those dominant conventions? I think this is the kind of writing Keith Tuma referred to a few months ago during the great anthology debate, i.e. the writing of someone like Thom Gunn, or, say, Louis Zukofsky when he's writing sestinas. If we acknowledge that it is possible, that means that the link bewteen the forms of literary conventions and the forms of life is metaphorical, not actual, and that some other issue is at stake here in the writing. Let's call it "meaning", where we understand that in a broad sense of the overall signifying power of the poem, the numinous "cloud" of significance generated by the totality of the poem's phonic, visual, semantic, and temporal structures. In this model, the relation to convention, while meangingful, does not determine meaning. If we understand "experimental" poetry to be poetry which resists in some way(s) the dominant conventions by "not knowing" what it's doing, what its outcome is, it could in any case still be upholding the very oppressive forms of life it seems to be subverting, or trying to subvert. That is, it could banal, predictable, pretentious, self-indulgent, tedious--even authoritarian (and, as Joel Kuszai pointed out, sometimes is). What, then, is the use of this distinction? Rather than clarifying the issues facing writers today, it obscures those issues by creating a dualistc taxonomy which implicitly attaches value to sheer formal exuberance or lack of control or even ignorance. I know there's a whole other dimension to this question that has to do with practical considerations of identity, recognition, publication, government money, etc. A number of people made interesting observations about these issues and the question of lables. These are important questions, but they're not questions of principle. They should not be confused with principles, nor allowed to confuse them. Adios, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca PS Peter Quartermain tells me Gertrude Stein denied she ever wrote an experiemntal work. How should we understand that? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 08:50:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <199411021320.IAA03923@eerie.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Michael Boughn" at Nov 2, 94 08:16:45 am Mike, In the airport recently I observed a man wearing a tee shirt upon which was written, in huge block letters: WHY? BECAUSE I SAY SO. This to me sums up this question re: the issue of "experimental" (allowing that we are not talking any more, which would yield no results, postulating a hypothesis and then trying to prove it.) What I mean to say is that if you take Timothy Steele or people secure in the academy more importantly, where these people come from, that they are invested with some authority and the line really falls where they have the confidence (vs permission, in Duncan's sense) of being able to "say so." I mean when I saw the t shirt I thought who is his audience, his children, his significant other, airport personnel. But in the end it didn't matter to whom it was addressed (maybe it was only to me!) there was no doubt from the look in his eyes, whether he was going to be "experimental" or "conventional" that his audience would have to yield. That's the point I'm thinking as I do my own scribbling somewhere out of his way. Loss Loss Glazier lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 05:57:05 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Flaming X-cc: rsillima@vanstar.com I've found virtually every response to my last post really valuable and useful. Especially Juliana's. But I don't want this to be reduced to a "generational debate" since I don't see "winners" or "losers" but rather think I (personally) have a lot to gain from getting the sorts of insights that seem right now to be just popping out the various posts. Roadmaps to the writing are especially valuable. Besides, if this is going to be Oedipal, I know which role that puts me in, thank you... Some thoughts here on a few of Mark Wallace's comments. > >1) It is a standard hegemonic (not to mention racist and imperialist) >move to take one piece of writing by some particular "group" (as it is >defined from outside) as the example of what is wrong with that "group" >as a whole, and then dismissing that "group" on the basis of that one >piece of writing. Yo, Mark. I'm not saying there's anything "wrong" with the Apex cluster and am trying to read them, not dismiss them. One of many valuable lessons I learned from Jerry Rothenberg about 25 years ago was that it's very hard for any writer to read the work of people 20 years or more younger than him or herself. Writers of the NAP generation tended to cluster w/ regards to my own G1 into the following patterns: 1) Couldn't read it, didn't try 2) Wasn't what they expected, so dismissed it outright, sometimes w/ great hostility 3) Tried to be generous, but didn't really get it (this was/is almost a majoritarian reaction) 4) Read it with interest, insight and made valuable responses to it W/ regards to G2, G3...Gn, I'd like personally to aim for #4. And would appreciate any help I can get. It is even hegemonic, racist, and imperialist to refer >to them as a "group." What is the point of writing a collective "state of the art" if people don't take it seriously as collective action? I'm not the one grouping them together. I will admit that use a governmental/institutional frame such as a "state of the art" address does put one into some heavy metaphoric territory. They're the ones who announced that they were the government, no? Let's avoid flame wars of hyperbole and character assassination if possible. It makes it harder to read the work. >2) "Make it new" was hardly a dictum put forth by someone interested >in social liberation. Indeed, "make it new" is at least as effective as a >capitalist slogan as it is as a call to radical change. And whatever the >social effectiveness of the proponents of "make it new" in poetry (I >think it's unclear, but worth discussing) their success has been >undeniable in terms of their marketing of that concept and their >promotion of poetry that fits the concept. > Actually, Pound was interested in social liberation. But he had a profoundly fucked up idea of what that might mean. The other point about making it new and the promotion of a poetry that fits the concept is one that the New Formalists have already made. Interesting to see it here. >4) To see the "lyric" as somehow a force of social conservatism is >simply HISTORICALLY UNVERIFIABLE. The lyric form, like the use of >parataxis, collage, sonnets, whatever, is a possibility that can be made use of, or discarded, in a variety of historical situations. I think that a social examination of the lyric is a great project to think about working on. I've even contemplated the idea of a booklength study. Especially since the definition of lyric changes I think (part. in the late 19th century) as its differentiation from dramatic & narrative modes dissolves in poetry due to the arrival of other more powerful dramatic/narrative media, the novel, cinema, etc. Pound's tripartate logopoeia, phanopoeia, melopoeia are an attempt I think to rescue that earlier distinction, essentially dividing lyric into all three houses of the poem. But the underlying question becomes, what is the social meaning of the lyric? In O-blek 12, as I read it, it seems a return to the personal and local, which in turn can mean a lot of things. I'd like to figure out just what those are. In general, I think that all forms are amoral and can be used from any poltical/social position depending on the context. >5) I don't think it's at all clear whether younger writers are >"returning to the lyric." But if writers are using lyric forms, the >question to ask is NOT "what's wrong with those writers?" but rather >"what is it about the contemporary social environment that makes the >lyric seem useful to some writers" or "what is it about the lyric that >makes it seem useful to some writers in this social environment." > EXACTLY!! >7) In fact, my objection to Lew Daly's introduction to Apex of the M is... that it repeats the same Oedipal MALE model of thinking your poetry has value only if you can "overthrow the enemy." My problem with his introduction is ... that IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE THOSE MANIFESTOS. > It wasn't Lew who signed it. According to Alan & Kristin, they all worked on it together, to the point that even some sentences were collaboratively written. >8) But the idea that Lew's work, however interesting or not, is a >statement of MY poetics, or that of Steve Evans or Jena Osman or whoever, Nobody ever said it was. Or Jena's or Juliana's or Joel's or most anybody else in O-blek 12 except for the very particular few who actively commit themselves to some version of its argument. So people like Will Alexander and Elizabeth Robinson stand in an interesting relation to it, not a part of that declaration but obviously very sympathetic to its conception of a spiritual poetics. Not clear at all how they would stand w/ regards to State of the Arts rather bellicose stance toward the past. I have found people in O 12 who themselves felt that putting the spirit section first in Technique "yolked" them into its general thrust and felt very much ripped off by that, precisely because they did not buy into the underlying argument and felt that putting it first created a sense of that. I've heard that from at least 5 contributors. The value of State of the Art is that it makes explicit what O 12's editing structure seems to imply. Very hard to read it as an accident of the alphabet. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 05:59:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt That Mitchell quote is illuminating. Though I'm amazed that in 1986 he still uses "he" as a gender neutral third person!! > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 10:32:42 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: Little Magazine Call For Work folks-- good ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 11:19:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411021358.IAA10207@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> I thought it was clear from my opening comment that my remarks were not directed at "attacking" the comments made by any one particular post. It's interesting that my attempt to avoid doing so can be taken that way. Some further responses, this time in particular to what Ron has said. 1) I think I was suggesting, at least partly, that the reductive grouping of various poets BEGINS in the introduction to the Apex of the M. By turning "Language Poetry" into some one particular thing, they unfortunately invite the kind of attacks that turn THEM into one particular thing (altho I find it unfortunate that that is what had to happen) 2) I think it may be a stretch to say that Pound was ever interested in liberation, altho he may have been interested in revolution. I really do wish that history bore out the conclusion that revolution and liberation were the same thing, but I'm afraid it doesn't. And to say such a thing is not to say that revolution is bankrupt, by any means. But reductive thinking about what revolution entails (and again, this is not to say that anyone has done this recently) is NOT going to help revolution be successful. 3) The idea that poets respond to the past as much as remake the present does not imply a return to radical formalism any more than noting that the avant garde has traditionally been racist and sexist is a conservative insight. 4) The idea I want to put forward is that we need to rethink the relation of the avant garde to the history of social liberation. And I think it's not at all clear that avant gardists have always been as socially revolutionary as they would like to claim. I think it's not at all clear that new forms equal greater freedom, altho I do think that poets can make use of form to respond to changing cultural dynamics. The unexamined conviction that the avant garde is by definition involved with social liberation has to be examined, and to say so is not conservative. 5) It may be that there was some group editorial input on the Apex of the M introductory essay. But the tone and style is undoubtedly Lew Daly's, as will be clear if one reads his essay in A Poetics of Criticism. 6) In fact, it is quite possible that a "poetic revolution" among younger poets may find certain ideas in so-called "Language Poetry" to be reactionary, heavily male-oriented, and wedded to a concept of "make it new" that itself is conditioned by a certain blindness to the historical/social/cultural of its own discourse. But I myself would reject such a revolution, since I think the poetics of writers like Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten and others is more complex than that. But the argument I'm suggesting here is going to be made, and the people who make it will not necessarily be conservative. 7) I don't see how any of these comments can be considered a "flaming" attack on anyone's personality, altho I'm tempted to resent the aspersions that what I've said is "flaming"--and I wonder about the heterosexist implications of a word like "flaming" anyway. 8) I'm tempted to think that at this point in time, the lyric may be a socially revolutionary form than the manifesto. But I have no certainty on this subject. In fact, I guess I think it must be true that the manifesto is still useful, altho it feels awful tired at the moment. mark wallace ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 14:05:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411021358.IAA10207@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some last updates, etc., and then, since I may have helped confuse rather than clarify matters, I'll shut up (tho I don't really mind confusing things) In #3 of my previous message I don't mean "radical formalism" but "traditional formalism" What Tony Green says about "internicene" warfare really hits home--it's a shame that my comments potentially sparked more misunderstanding (as if we don't already have enough of that). That was not my intention for them. Perhaps my own frustrated sense that a lot of people were not reading each other with sufficient complexity led me into precisely the same error that I was suggesting they were making. On the other hand, I'm never sufficiently comfortable with my own assumptions about the "significance" of experimental poetry, and so I'm perhaps equally determined to question the assumptions of others regarding the value of that work. It's quite possible that when I do that, it can too easily be read as another call to warfare. mark wallace ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 00:33:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Kuszai Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt >From: TRIXY >To: "kuszai@ascu.buffalo.edu" >CC: >Subj: please don't forward this > >Dear Cookie, I thought I'd send you this, as otherwise you >might not see it, receiving only a few of the missives fired at >Fort Sumter since the Dresden incident. I think I'm done with >the poetics list. Stop sending me stuff. I can't bear it any >longer. Can you believe that shit? that endless chatter? the >only thing worse would be having to get drunk with those >people. but Ron, he's so funny--does he mean to be that way, >and what does he look like anyway? he is cute? I don't >understand what's up with the Apex of the M--you showed me >that essay but I didn't understand it. Trixy dont care. Trixy >have better things to do. HEY TRIXY! thanks for your response. I've been working on some other stuff so it took me a while to respond. Hope that's cool. Yeah, I promise not to send what you write to anyone else. And if you are really serious I'll stop forwarding you stuff from the poetics list. I am eager to do other things too. I think - despite the waves of chatter - that something could still be accomplished on the e-mail thing, although I have no idea as to what it would be. I mean it's not like we are going to get down to any level of praxis or meeting downtown some night to break windows or somthing...which is what I think the political leads to anyhow... Yeah, I too thought Ron was quite generous with the M'ers. I mean it is true - he's quite right - they are really trying to do something, which isn't very normal these days. I don't get the point of it. And don't worry about the editorial, you should read Lew's book--talk about incomprehensible! it is great writing, if you don't mind things being muddled by the psycho-sexual--but the editorial - the "declaration of war" as Ron seems to think it is -- the self-appointment to the "government"! -- I love that. I think Ron's pretty funny too. The problem, for my two-dollars and eighty cents, with the Apex thing is that they are trying to be political but are insisting on the spiritual -- which for me is only political when grouped into assembly for power reasons (i.e. a church) otherwise the spiritual is like, well, you know, kind of acquiescent by defualt--I mean sure, Koresh was able to bring the ATF to his front door--if that's political then let me out now--the real politics worth examining there is the refusal of the social--the manipulation of people in the name of "faith" which always slams the door on the social--here the spirital gets for me kind of sticky and icky -- like the fear of identity within the new coasteries -- hatcheries -- the fear of identity there is on identitarian grounds--the anti editorial mode is still an editorial - one of acquiescence and consent, however tacit. At least the M has some fire under their caps...and don't worry trixie, the next issue is due out soon, and word is that Prevallet wrote this one-- anybody who knows them knows that she has a mind of her own and that -- even with all the group editing in the world, I think, she is really into something different than Lew or Alan, or Pam for that matter--perhaps not hostile to them, but different enough to make the "group editorial" thing an unfortunate effacement. They will have to put their cards on the table soon enough. Poetry as Chillen of the Corn, or Jack-in-the Box will be gone of roadside ephemera soon enough. I mean the true "analysis" of our/any generation is to look at where the money comes from and how it is spent -- anyone can buy a spot on the literary register, the who's who of who cares been reading the situationists for Bernstein's class, wondering how people are going to react to it. I am afraid we'll get into a chapter & verse argument about Debord--maybe people will like him. Kind of hard to be in school and reading that stuff. Reminds me of when what's his face in Portland ore. changed all the street-signs in downtown to "Malcolm X" - it had a pretty wild effect at the time even if it was simply consumed, just as that group's efforts during the gulf war were completely co- opted by the spectacular; I mean going into restuaurants with gas-masks on trying to scare the eaters into some kind of political resistance, I mean come on, despite the disruption, I doubt anyone lost their appetite, and I'm sure there was hefty applause at the end. How yuppie (fake concerned) of them. The protest thing pretty much ended with them all "marching" around downtown portland with a police escort, I mean, led by the police escort. I remember sitting in my living room with John the night we started bombing there...we didn't have any lightbulbs that worked and no TV, just a clock radio, but that was enough. I felt competely incapacitated by the whole thing. All we could do was play music. There was only a bit of hope, word from seattle that some nut had opened fire on I-5 with some kinda automatic weapon. But that's not what the world heard. I don't know what the world heard. But the situationists. Shit. I read ten pages of that stuff then start pacing in my cage. I love it in the anthology where its written that the goal of the movement was to "complete and displace poetry." --an aspiration not too difficult to like, although I wonder what the hell it means. Situationism, as debord points out in that first part of the "Veritable Split of the S.I. public circular" book that situationism becomes as much the understanding of the enemy, who need to know it in order to fight it (through using it??) and then Trix, who then, may I ask? are we? >>The results of the poetics poll: >> >>What was it that Mean Joe Greene threw to that kid by the >>tunnel? Was it a jersey, a coca-cola T-Shirt, a flag of >>surrender? And if it was a flag of surrender, was Mean Joe >>Greene (and _all_ he represents) surrenderring to that kid, or >>what he suggesting that the kid surrender to him. Is he here a >>"warrior" or a "servant"? Is there any thing at all different >>about that ad (give or take a few years very much G1) and the >>one featuring Shaquille O'Neal intimidating all the kids on >>the court except one little one who refuses to give his drink to >>Shaq. >look, joey, trixy dont get it. Trixy say "make your point" and get >off the stage. Trixy wanna find you all alone in an >advertisement and push you up against one of those new cars >and violate you. >>"I wanted to write a poem >>that would teach you to read." >I like that! did you write that or is it from a real writer? it's a joke >Did Ron Silliman really stand on a street corner reading his >poetry to anybody who was passing by? that's what I heard/read--perhaps one of us should write to him and find out. Kind of an embarrassing thing to ask, no? >>Brathwaite reports that Mikey Smith was stoned to death in >>Kingston, Jamaica, presumably for his political activities. >>Smith was a "dub-poet" -- quite "popular" I guess, died about >>ten years ago ?? although I'm not sure. I got to Smith via >>Brathwaite but I don't know much. When the semester is >>over, and I can do what I want, I'm going to find out more >>about this. >>Before her death in 1977, Danielle Collobert had been >>involved with the "Algerian situation". >why do Trixy feel such despair! oh Trixy, my friend, please don't feel such despair.... love in all evenings, yo mama p.s. Ron is cute, but the one you really wanna meet is Steve Evans and about your age... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 12:40:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: Protest of Gulf War in Portland, Or X-To: Joel Kuszai In-Reply-To: <01HJ0QQYB7B69D4V9V@asu.edu> A marginal concern of mine, not meant to inflammatory: While they were bombing baghdad at least those of us who were "marching" expressed our rage--no matter how contained it was--against what was going on. I can't help but think no matter how "consumed" such actions were (are) that sitting at home with no light bulbs is even more determined. Sorry if this is less than relevant; it seemed important to me. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 17:28:25 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Experiwhat? It would be nice to trace a history of the phrase--"experimental poetry"--I think it was Tom Mandel writing. That history I feel sure belongs with that of modernism--and not just modernist literature--and more partic- ularly of its scientisms. "The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science" Pound in l9l3. There's a book, CRITIC AS SCIENT- IST, The modernist poetics of E.P, by one IanBell. Someone was saying Stein denied writing experimentally. although her lab. work with Prof. Wm. James clearly had a direct bearing on her ideas about and practice of fiction. The first definition offered by Zukofsky for OBJECTIVE (ism) is from Optics. Mod- ernist scientism seems to have 2 purposes (at least), the first having to do with re-positioning the artist socially, as more serious (Pound's essay, "The Serious Artist"), artistic knowledge as hardcore, etc. and the second to do with establishing the "autonomy of the modernist art object" as we would today put it. Precise description of the object, impersonality--here we have Eliot's n otorious catalyst analogy--of the writer and so on. And so the short answer to the q uestion as to why people on this list are un- comfortable with, can't see the sense of, want no more to do with, the phrase is that the context which prompted its appearance and the purposes its served have both long gone. So another way into, or out of this discussion, would be to take that discomfort as a sign of our uneasy relation with modernism .