Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

9. Paul Hoover’s position is overwhelmingly informed by work he has done to
know, accept and make use of his own sources. Ditto Ron Silliman. These
positions are without irony, unhidden in trashy even disgraceful joking that
there is no relationship between your person and your position, as if these were
different in some principled way.
10. We all have a responsibility, a political responsibility, to make something
(dare I use the word?) positive, i.e. existent and contributory to the larger thing
which is merely the contributory nature of all that is positive. This means
pleasure in writing and a sense of the permission of form beyond theory as the
only real contact we have with the unknown, i.e. with value. As above, this is a
recursive procedure; it can be justified by nothing outside it. Without being
local (i.e. Serbian or Croatian : bonnet blanc, blanc bonnet), it is endlessly
specific. Attending to it is a discovery, uncovering, of more specificity.
11. Oh. In 8 above, you may think I’m being dismissive. Or glib, in advising
you to quit. You have families, you have to have a job. Sure, no problem. Nor
do I take the Platonic position that a slave is one by nature or essence : if not,
he’d be dead. After all, I was fired, I wasn’t offed! I prefer the Jewish position,
be kind to the slave. In the jubilee year, free all the slaves (what the heck, most
of them will enslave themselves again). (of course, that’s only one of the jewish
positions, i.e. positions in the rabbinic tradition - which is always what I mean
by the term "jewish").
12. I knew a poet once who was quite wealthy - by marriage. He lived well, by
which I mean in a bohemian manner and much like the rest of us, all young
enough (tho some older than others) not really to notice, to accumulate,
difference from where it sprung. In any case, this poet didn’t need a job. Yet, a
time came when the poet wanted to work. The poet once asked me for a job,
but I didn’t have one to offer. Some years later, the poet decided to enter grad
school, got a Phd somewhere in the humanities, and then got a teaching job and
began to live very differently from how we had all lived – in any case, we were
all living differently, having gotten older, and that was no surprise. The poet’s
poetry hardly changed at all.
13. Because of what I say in 11, that is why I have written mildly and without
wishing to give offense. It is a subject, what responsibility is taken not to
articulate a position correctly but to live a worthwhile life. Don’t you think it
idiotic to imagine that the conditions no longer inhere for that possibility?
14. There is no such thing as silent prayer. "Oh Lord, bring the arrogant
kingdom to an end, speedily and in our days." Anybody know the reference?