Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Ron Silliman
Subject: Re: wild blue yonder
I really appreciate Jeff Hansen’s argument for exploration between formal (in
the strictest sense) boundaries rather than, say, beyond them, even if I don’t
know (understand?) whether or not that sentiment might be shared by others. It
raises a lot of interesting questions for reading and interpretation and seems to
me a terrific road into a lot of work. I had not meant my comments to be strictly
taken as referring to an "emerging" generation (one that stretches out from
people who are my own age, more or less, a la Selby and Basinski, to people in
their early 20s), but I often hope to see my posts here as a prod to comment,
and here Jeff takes that phrase in very useful direction.
Here is a for instance: Peter Gizzi is a superb and subtle craftsperson, so much
so that his use of Spicer and the serial poem turn into a demonstration of the
Esthetic as such, a result that strikes me as antithetical to Spicer’s almost
Celine-esque anti-aesthetic tendencies. Gizzi’s Spicer seems closer to
Bonnefoy than Celine or even Prevert. Clearly Gizzi is extending the mode of
the serial poem in a direction unanticipated by Spicer, creating in some sense a
different Spicer than the one I have read (where in fact I often find a horror of
the aesthetic). Is this the same or different from the way in which (to pick a
pseudoparallel) John Taggart and Ronald Johnson might be said to have read a
different Zukofsky than the one read by Bernstein and Andrews?
I agree with Hansen that the idea of extending "innovation" to predictable
logical conclusions ("typing" as someone once said of Kerouac’s form) is of
little interest, especially 80 years after zaum first demonstrated a range of
possibility there. Similarly, all sound poetry "says the same thing" and it says it
over and over.
Where formal innovation typically occurs (I’m making a wildly broad
generalization here) is when the society underlying a given mode of verse
production changes so that new writers (younger or otherwise–Olson was a late
bloomer and WCW wrote Spring & All in his late 30s) bring in newly
recognized territories and modes of the social into their work as form. I don’t
want to reduce this to some crude variation of base/superstructure economic
determinism, but there is a constant and dynamic tension. Next to Snoop Doggy
Dog, exactly how white does the French-inflected lyric poem sound? Next to
Chuck D?