Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

8) But the idea that Lew’s work, however interesting or not, is a state-
> ment of MY poetics, or that of Steve Evans or Jena Osman or whoever,
Nobody ever said it was. Or Jena’s or Juliana’s or Joel’s or most anybody else
in O-blek 12 except for the very particular few who actively commit
themselves to some version of its argument. So people like Will Alexander and
Elizabeth Robinson stand in an interesting relation to it, not a part of that
declaration but obviously very sympathetic to its conception of a spiritual
poetics. Not clear at all how they would stand w/ regards to State of the Art’s
rather bellicose stance toward the past.
I have found people in O-blek 12 who themselves felt that putting the spirit
section first in Technique "yolked" them into its general thrust and felt very
much ripped off by that, precisely because they did not buy into the underlying
argument and felt that putting it first created a sense of that. I’ve heard that
from at least 5 contributors.
The value of State of the Art is that it makes explicit what O-blek 12’s editing
structure seems to imply. Very hard to read it as an accident of the alphabet.