Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Marjorie Perloff
Subject: Joris’s Celan and Corn on L poetry
I’m so glad, Jonathan, that you mentioned Pierre Joris’s new translation of
Celan [Breathturn]. It is STUNNING. Pierre’s command of German, French,
English is incomparable and he’s a poet who really has a feel for Celan. This is,
for me, a major poetry event.
But I must confess to being very discouraged by the Alfred Corn conversation
that’s been going on on this net for the last few days. This Poetics Discussion
Group was, after all, founded at Buffalo by, yes, Language poets and although I
myself feel the term language poetry has outlived its usefulness (like any
school), and although it’s true that the so-called L poets are often very different
from one another (and obviously some are much better than others–again, as in
any movement), the fact remains that L poetry has made an enormous
difference in the poetics of the 80s and 90s and that, on the other hand, poets
like Alfred Corn and J. D. McClatchy and any of their poet friends at Yale
Review and similar places have vigorously opposed it or, at best, ignored it.
Corn is being just a little bit disingenuous: he and his friends win all the prizes
(Guggenheims, MacArthurs etc), are reviewed in the NYT Book Review
(unlike Clark Coolidge or Lyn Hejinian or Charles Bernstein) and are very
successful. … When the big and exciting conference on Visual Poetics was
held by the dept of Spanish-Portugese last spring (starring the deCampos
brothers and including, among many others, Steve McCaffery, Johanna
Drucker, and Charles Bernstein), not one faculty member of the Yale English
dept. showed up.
So why are so many people on this net like Keith Tuma suddenly so pleased
and grateful that–gee!–Alfred Corn is actually willing to participate in
discussion with members about Language poetry! And why is Maria saying
that she never writes about language poetry anyway. Maria, that’s just not true.
You do write about language poetry (as in Stein, Duncan, other precursors,
yes?) in the larger sense of the term, and respecting the rights of others can turn
into capitulation, no? .
Alfred says of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life that being autobiographical, it does have
representational elements. Well of course. Many of us have said this in print.
The old chestnut that "language poetry" doesn’t "say" anything has finally been