Referrer logs led me to George M. Wallace's Fool in the Forest, the current content of which is an interesting mix of law, California politics, and poetry. He has, perhaps, too high an opinion of Eliot's Four Quartets, but I can forgive that, considering his kind words for me. Do I need a smiley here?
One result of those kind words was a response from Ron Silliman, in which Ron wrote that he considered himself "as being far more formal than the so-called new formalists, who tend to employ pattern & call it form."
Horse-hockey.
While I was in Sweden, John Erhardt called Silliman on his absurd praise of the Grenier "poem" quoted in its entirety here:
JOE
JOE
Silliman's patronizing reply deserves to be quoted at length:
As a wry jab, it's so very close to the kinds of complaints that one once heard from some art critics towards the work of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Ad Reinhardt or even Andy Warhol's soup cans and Brillo boxes that it gave me a thrill. I have apparently proposed as "essential"—and I won't deny this—a poem so very simple that Erhardt nearly required the Heimlich maneuver.
Which allows me here to give John a good squeeze, at least metaphorically, and to say, loudly, "Yes, exactly! But, but, but…." I did indeed praise a poem that is so very simple as to call into question precisely the literary values implicit in John's rhetorical question. Now I've done this sort of thing before, and with Grenier's Sentences to boot, although usually my example tends to be a different poem,
thumpa
thumpa
thumpa
thump*
But functionally the same principle applies for both works—Grenier's "miniatures" are miniature only in the sense that Pollock's drip paintings are only paint drippings or Rothko's works, painted in fact very rapidly, might be thought of as sketches, or Cage's 4'33" is only silence.
I'll give him Reinhardt and Grenier, and, if 4'33" was typical, I'd give him Cage, too. Then ignore all three. The "form" Silliman admires has no depth and is completely mechanical, a game generated out of an abiological epistemology. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, as a whole, are interested in form only as form, as they are interested in language as an abstract system of references rather than as a way human beings form community.
In contrast, the New Formalists understand that the forms of poetry are tools human beings have found useful in creating memorable and effective speech. That, of course, offends Silliman, who earlier wrote "Like rhyme or the tub-thumping metrics of iambic pentameter, the form [the clean line] insinuates a vision of unmediated & harmonious existence that is patently a lie." But he's wrong about that, too. Simply realizing that rhyme and meter are tools for affecting the consciousness of others implies that any verbal experience is mediated, and that conflict is possible, perhaps inevitable, perhaps fruitful.
I've added Fool in the Forest to the list of culture blogs. I've found so many new blogs either about or containing poems that I've got to figure out some organization before adding them.
8:09:09 PM 
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