Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Tom Mandel
Subject: Re: Consent of the governing
Ron’s response on the subject of "power", tenure, whatever, in wch he details
his own experience, seems definitive. Truly, I hope this subject will go away,
as it is boring beyond bearing.
A measure of worthwhile subject surely must be the difference which may be
made by one response or another. Why, in that case, does this list produce the
opposite when it is composed of intelligent and passionate people committed to
the baseline language art?
I had a (seeming) endless correspondence more or less onthis subject in the late
80’s or very early 90’s with Spencer Selby who at that time maintained as he
seems to wish to continue to maintain that the poetry world is nominalist; i.e.
people build magazines, booklists, reading series, etc. around names rather than
works. And that this translates into a kind of power and status which is not an
exact mathematical function of the value of the work currently streaming
(dribbling?) from that source.
So? Yes, this is true. For one thing, most judgments about current work have
little value in relation to any long-term assessment. The Cambridge Platonists
were the hottest thing going hundreds of years ago, rather in the way that
"theory" functions now. Read’em lately? For another, it’s useless to think about
poets in so immediate a manner. Your work is a lifelong arc (well, a much
more complex shape than that); its weaknesses, lapses, gaps may contribute to
strength.
Neglect, lack of official endorsement, surely these are relative; surely too they
are a just reward for the restless and radical desire to write. To imagine that
there is a locus of power relevant to writing that exists outside the authority of
that desire, which is self-permitted and demanded, is a foolish illusion. Knock
long enough at the door of the one place which you imagine it matters to be
published (i.e. Conjunctions, Sulfur) and no doubt you will be let in and learn
that the place and object associated with idea and work are strictly irrelevant.
Must it not be the case that the energy invested in imagining the opposite cd be
better invested in re-imagining one’s work? Isn’t there, for every one of us,
someone who imagines that we have more power than they? Someone I think is
powerful, another who thinks me so; someone Gary Sullivan imagines to have