Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Keith Tuma
Subject: Re: Criteria
Dear Alfred Corn,
Probably if I had to name just two essays that might serve as a primer for
someone coming late to the game they would be the title essay in Silliman’s
The New Sentence and Bernstein’s "Artifice of Absorption" in A Poetics–
neither of these really "about" langpo so much as concerned with elements and
issues relevant to it. And there’s CB’s Content’s Dream too, Perelman’s edited
collection Writing/Talks, Steve McCaffery’s North of Intention, many of the
essays in Poetics Journal, the now-defunct Temblor, Bernstein’s collection The
Politics of Poetic Form, books by Watten, Perloff, too many others really to
mention with a lunch appointment in an hour. One partly skeptical but useful
and too little known essay is Nathaniel Tarn’s "Regarding the Issue of New
Forms" in Views From The Weaving Mountain. Then there’s near-famous
exchanges between E. Weinberger and Michael Davidson in Sulfur, one of the
journals I’d recommend, though by no means devoted to langpo, and between
Charles Altieri and Jerome McGann in Critical Inquiry, which also once
published an introductory essay by Lee Bartlett. That’s just a start though.
Don’t know if there are journals exclusively devoted to langpo–too diverse
anymore to be worth characterizing–but a few of the journals I read where
some might be found at times (and there are many I won’t name–see the SPD
catalog) are Avec, the defunct O-blek, Nate Mackey’s Hambone, O.ARS, Acts.
The Difficulties and Temblor had great runs and one should look at newer, notnecessarily
and in some cases hostile-to-langpo journals such as Apex of the M,
Five Fingers review, lingo, etc etc. Maybe somebody with more time than I
have today can offer a fuller list, or perhaps refer you to some of the lists
available on-line or elsewhere.
Yes, it’s true that langpo is one of the places where I (sometimes) find
interesting writing. But then what writing can ever really be isolated from other
writing anyway? Surely not langpo, which sometimes has a
parasitic/punning/ironic relationship to other writing. What would Mr. Silliman
do, for instance, without the first line of Pound’s Cantos?
If anything, I’m sorry to be so limited (short, brief) in the lists I’m making here,
and the one I offered yesterday.