Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Juliana Spahr
Subject: Re: G2
As to the Evans-Silliman exchange:
I appreciated both posts. But Steve’s I found especially useful for clarifying a
lot of the problems that I had with Silliman’s original post. What I find most
frightening about Silliman’s arguments is his reduction of everything in Buffalo
or even elsewhere in the nation to a sort of spiritualism (it is the only grouping
that he acknowledges as really having any seriousness) that finally isn’t
representative of the larger picture.
For starters, as Jena made clear, neither of the editors of Chain are on the board
of Apex of the M. Chain in fact is a journal that in many ways pursues an
opposite agenda as that of Apex–it is anti-editorial, anti-grouping. The use of
the device of the chain letter in the first volume was explicitly intended to
expand community definitions beyond editorial privilege (Jena Osman and I
wrote about the success and failure of this project in our "Editors’ Notes").
Also neither of the editors of the Technique volume are on the board of Apex
of the M.
But while this is probably just a confusion on Silliman’s part, it also seems in
some ways indicative of his blindness to anything going on in what seems to be
called G2 poetry beyond spirit. Beginning the Technique volume with the Spirit
section was something that went counter to my editorial wishes and knowledge
(I wanted to open with the broader "word and world" section), but also I think
should not be read as "aggressive." Peter argues that when he sent this volume
off to the printers with the spirit section first, it was to try to offer some
connection with the Presentation volume–both begin with Abbot and end
Ziolkowski. I am willing to chalk it up to alphabetical accident.
But also I don’t think that any more than the twenty-one poets in the spirit
section have much to do with spirit (and come on, even of these twenty-one,
beyond a statement of an idea of poetics as being transformative, it is hard to
see these poets as a unified group–Miekal And, Lisa Jarnot are hardly
spiritualist poets that would meet the rigors of definition proposed in Apex–this
confusion or expansion of the categories in this collection was an editorial
intention).
Finally, to see the anthology as spiritualist is to do a great and serious
disservice to around one hundred other poets. Just as to say that the anthology