Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Tom Mandel
Subject: notes on professions, academic etc.
It has taken me a couple of hours to read (at least partly) the extraordinary
number of contributions to this list which have arrived in cyberlitterland over
the last couple of days. My survival, i.e. time enough to pay the bills and make
money enough to do so, depends on you cutting it out.
1. For 5 years during WWII neither the English nor any other allied power laid
an intentional single bomb across the railroad tracks that led how many
thousands of jews gypsies gay people per day? to doom. Does this make them
thugs?
2. I was a grad student for 6 years, have taught in 3 universities, have worked
for large corporations, as well as quasi-gov’tal organizations, and have written
and lived poetry off and on all my life. Without question, and by metaphorical
orders of magnitude, the most serializing, cutthroat, thoughtless and nonoppositional
(i.e. slavish) environment I ever lived in was the academy.
Lagging far behind is the world of poetry, although as poets move into the
academy some of them unveil an extraordinary capacity to take on that local
color (and others, on the other hand, retain the exceptional generosity of nature
and act that will make you know whom I mean not to be commenting on).
There is a strong sense of comradeship among poets somehow, at least I have
always noted it, which mediates if not moderates the lust for… any response
honor position the opportunity to make a living by your wit of words, whatever.
This comradeship I think it is which allows a poet like Henry Taylor to write so
meaningly about Jackson Mac Low, and which allows me to enjoy getting to
know HT despite the zero in common of our work. Much more open, all the
same, much more egalitarian, much more permissive of range has been the
world of commerce. I remember how shocking, and somehow wrong, I found
that fact.
3. The above is what James Sherry might call a "theory based on memory… not
analysis" (that’s a paraphrase rather than a quote, but close I think). All theories
are of memory (a term which we need not trivialize) and on the other hand,
analysis (despite the brilliant series of posts by James which had me gasping
with pleasure to keep up with) is a meaningless term, an honorific in any case,
and a metaphor (understand by dividing : divide and conquer, really) of little
application. Recursive systems (i.e. memory-based and developmental in