Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Steve Evans
Subject: Motives & Devices
Ron Silliman’s recent posting on "motivation" raised some difficult questions
about the current state of inter-generational relations within one sub-domain of
oppositional poetry. I want to dwell on a few of the claims Ron made in his
posting, claims that struck me as problematic and provocative in equal
proportions. If possible, I’d like to rob of their "obviousness" certain
assumptions that seem to have hardened along the seam where two generations,
one established and one emerging, meet. Though I doubt the following remarks
can achieve that goal, perhaps other people can find a way to move us towards
it?
Ron makes three claims in the first five graphs of his posting, each of which
pertains to the intersection of motivation/device/generation. I don’t have a
"copy" function available to me, so I will reproduce these claims schematically
before noting what seems problematic about them to me.
Claim 1: "what separates most of the writers in In the American Tree, for
example, from poets now ages 25-30 doing superficially similar things on a
page, is precisely…motivation."
For the sake of economy, in the following I’m going to use the shorthand G1 to
indicate "writers in In the American Tree," and G2 for "writers now ages 25-
30" (some of whom appear in o-blek 12: Writing from the New Coast).
Ron identifies the "motivation" of G1 as "explicitly social…even where (as
often enough was the case) the definition of social reason would have been
hard to get at beyond ‘general sense of dissatisfaction w/ the present condition
of things.’" This segues into
Claim 2: the "return to the lyric" in o-blek 12 "represents precisely the draining
of the ‘social’ from" the concerns of G2. Which in turn leads to
Claim 3: this "draining of the ‘social’" explains "why, with [one exception],
there are no literary devices in [the New Coast] that you cannot already find in
The New American Poetry, In the American Tree or The Art of Practice."