new poetry and poetics edited by brian kim stefans - Arras.net

whom are around your age – claiming that there is little value in investigating
these poetics?
MC: Ted Hughes as point of extremity–now there’s a depressing thought! It’s difficult
for me to answer the first part of your question Brian (my answers would
be as follows: I’m not sure; possibly; I don’t really know), as I don’t really know
what’s being said, or by whom, & it does seem to be the case that such discussion
could only have its potential uses after the fact of writing, & even then this
seems doubtful (&, at whatever stage, its hardly an exciting idea–that of a bunch
of writers or explainers sitting around discussing English poetry & where it
should go from here–makes me think of Peter Schjeldahl’s little piece on poetry
in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E_: “poet clannishness distresses me: people just throwing
away their one and only significant advantage in rites of terminal pettiness
and boredom”). One of the things I value about being here is the ease with which
one can absent oneself from discussions of this type (I guess this is the “emptiness”
we’ve been mentioning)..
I understand the need for certain younger writers in the US to put some Oedipal
distance between themselves and language writing by rejecting more polymorphously
referential works–& if they want to do so by hiding behind something
Olson or Duncan said once, or by writing a paler, less “ironic” version of later
Ashbery, then that’s fine. I just can’t help thinking that it’s sad to get so far &
then turn back (what’s that phrase of Coolidge’s from his Journals–”as if fear of
the unknown were the mother of discourse”?). Also, I don’t see any clear boundaries
anywhere, or that there’s a point where language writing begins or ends (did
Coolidge ever “become” a language writer? did Ray DiPalma? Ted Greenwald?).
How do you throw out language writing but keep hold of Tender Buttons, LZ’s
Catullus, John Wieners’s Behind the State Capitol, Arlene Zekowski, Stanley
Berne, much of the post-Tennis Court Oath exploration of the sixties, &&&?
(I’ve heard rumours of an unpublished book- length poem by Dick Gallup which
reads “like Andrews”.) & given that, as Wittgenstein put it, it’s impossible to
write anything more like ourselves than ourselves, it seems crazy to give up on
this notion of “research” or whatever one chooses to call it–the world _is_ complete,
& it doesn’t need other, smaller images of itself inside it. Hence poetry’s
great freedom (a responsibility, too) to go off & do other things.
I’m not familiar with the Talisman anthology you mention...I suppose that, if
one has never read Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, or any of Leslie Scalapino’s works, or
Steve Benson’s, or Hannah Weiner’s, or ____________’s (insert preference here),
one could make a case for language writing as being purely formal–well, no, actually,
I can’t see how one could do this at all. & I fail to see how any linguistic
occasion can be “purely formal”–how exactly does one strip language of its social
dimension? The implied opposition of “formal” & “social” seems wilfully naive