Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Ron Silliman
Subject: G-ology
…Steve Evans’ intro to the Technique section of O-blek 12 seems to me the
most heroic attempt to date to articulate a terrain for G2. I think that he’s right
in that intro about the motivating "hatred of identity" that runs through the
work, although his reading of the phenomena in O-blek is more broad and
generous than that espoused in Apex’s "State of the Art" manifesto. I used
those two pieces with my class at Naropa, which led to some lively, albeit
inconclusive discussions. Certainly nobody has ever done a more aggressive
job misreading and stereotyping a community than Apex’ broad swipes at G1
(& esp. LangPo):"an avant-garde dominated in its practices by a poetics
espousing the priority of ‘language itself’ over all other relations." (p. 5)
Is that not a classic instance of labeling theory taking the misnomer
"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poet" just a wee bit literally? I’ve never once met a
G1 who espoused that.
Or, later on the same page, "a participatory valorization of this
disintegration…." Haven’t both Gayatri Spivak & Bob Perelman completely
answered that in response to Fred Jameson’s only-slightly-more-in-depth
reading of the poem "China"?
And, throughout "State of the Art," an entire series of presumptions concerning
the social functions of innovation, as though everyone from M. Bertrand thru
G1 were an Italian futurist celebrating the potentiality of the submachine gun.
Talk about "phobic characterization"!!
I think what makes the Apex group stand out so much, especially at a distance
(where, for example, it’s easier to forget [or ignore] that Alan Gilbert, Kristin
Prevallet and Lew Daly, the editors whom I’ve actually met, are all lovely,
charming, intelligent people, as full of complexity and caution as one might
want), is precisely the directness of their address, which shoots right through
even the "post"iness of its convoluted syntax. While Steve wants me to "say it
ain’t so," the Apexers say openly that "a new understanding of our task as
iconoclasts and not innovators will emerge." If I ignore for a moment how I
feel at the lack of accuracy and generosity in their description of my cohorts in
G1, that’s still an interesting and difficult claim to make and I want to know
more. What distinguishes them as a group phenomenon is their ambition–it’s