Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Ron Silliman
Subject: Exile on Main Street
Steve is quite right about the reiteration of recuperation from one generation to
the next. Rae Armantrout once noted that every few years she gets to show
another set of students that they did not invent the attitude captured in the
Rolling Stones’ album "Let It Bleed" (the Stones didn’t invent it either).
About 10 years ago, McDonald’s had a campaign to promote its emerging
breakfast menu (the idea of fast food breakfasts being one of the great market
expansions of the past 15 years) that used the tag line of
DAWN GOOD FOOD
which, when I first saw it, felt entirely inspired by the writing of Bob Grenier’s
Sentences (just turn the W upside down), much in the same way that display
ads in the 20th Century learned much from the use of the line break of WCW.
Look at any newspaper circa 1910 and you will see the difference.
Grenier’s distance from critical writing since founding This magazine a quarter
century ago has always seemed to me an attempt to avoid the exact kind of cooptation
that that McDonalds ad already has accomplished for him.
Obviously it would be nice to think that you and I are not implicated in the
atrocities that occur in Bosnia or Rwanda or East Timor. But we are. We are
directly and personally responsible. Each one of us.
That has always seemed to me to be the most immediate lesson of the war in
Indochina.
The problem of dropping out (or any other metaphor of purist disdain for the
establishment’s use of one’s soul) is that there is no Out. Out is simply a safe
place that In has set aside to keep Out from making too much unpleasant noise.
Ultimately, the problem of opposition is not one of how to avoid becoming a
commercial. You can’t. Trying to do so just wastes time. The question rather
seems to be one of positioning what happens when/as you do. Here the most
tragic situations have been those who apparently thought it would somehow
"solve" something. Brautigan for example.