Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

less literate is implied by that "more", I would rather know who is doing the
talking here? Or, to put it another way, who’s the ventriloquist in this instance?
A not uncommon kind of contradiction that appears in negative reviews is
exhibited in Ms Stafford’s aside (to whom, exactly?) "a little Saussurian
reference for the cognoscenti?". It’s hard to take seriously the notion that such a
statement is directed to "the less enlightened reader". If it is, how do they,
outside of, say, an academic environment, understand "Saussurian"? This aside
is also, I’m afraid, directed at a "cognoscenti", and a clear distinction is
therefore implied, like it or not, between the author’s ‘cognoscenti’ and the
poet’s ‘cognoscenti’ - ours and theirs, us and them. But if she is, say, talking to
me (and, after all, I too am a ‘reader’), then I would say that she is not at all up
with the play, either with Saussure (who dealt with spoken, not written
language), or with Heidegger who said "It is in language that things first come
into being and are" (Introduction to Metaphysics), or with Charles Olson’s
reliance on the work of Jane Ellen Harrison for his assertion that myth (the
stories that cultures, oral and literate, tell themselves about themselves) comes
first from the mouth. I introduce these other writers here, not to show off my
naturally immense erudition, but to signal that we all have such reading lists
behind and operative within what we say. For all of us they are different of
course, but we all have these alliances, allegiances and engagements to one
degree or another. They are not the same kind of thing as ‘credentials’. If our
‘reading lists’ are too different, and I am suggesting that this is likely to be the
case as between Ms Stafford and the poets she reviews, then little wonder that
the reviewer finds it hard to connect with the work.
However, it is the outright refusals that I find the most interesting aspect of Ms
Stafford’s review. First, the refusal to be (indeed the specific injunction not to
be) literal – "Don’t be literal". If the literal is the first thing to be denied of
unfamiliar writing, then it’s understandable that a reader might find a grasp of
its metaphorical content hard to come by. If, as Ms Stafford maintains, "a
metaphor should expand meaning" (tho I don’t accept this formulation myself)
then it’s possible that the literal is one of the places from which metaphor can
"expand". It is, in any case, a perfectly reasonable place to begin. That it should
be precluded, requires more explanation than a list of other options, especially
when, for instance, my own teaching experience suggests that it is wise counsel
to keep the options open until they falter – in any given instance.
A further type of refusal is performed in the review when, in discussing
Leggott, the reviewer writes that a particular passage "would be fine if I knew
what the last two words meant". Those two words are "HYDROPHILE