>>>  Where would Thomas peg himself today?  I don't think you can
>>transpose people of out their time can you?
>>>
>Well no that goes w/o saying. But light can be shed from imagining the
>literally impossible.  It was merely an invitation to play.
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>Would add here that by introducing a handful of names who can't (or
>perhaps can't) be assigned either to the mainstream or the exploratory
>camp, one  doesn't erase the reality of those camps. If there were a field
>of bulls and a field of sheep, and a bunch of genetically altered shulls
>or beeps were running up and down the lane, would the twin fields vanish?
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>Au fond, no poet wants to be known as an M or an E, s/he wants to be known
>by the name s/he puts on the spine of the books s/he publishes. It isnt
>possible, I think, in e-mail brevity, to account for the integument of
>connection among poets as various as (I cite from the USA since these
>poets I know best) Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, and Lyn Hejinian. But it
>nonetheless makes a sometimes useful sense to place them in the E camp,
>and w/in that category, in the L=A=N row of tents. Take my word for it--
>there are reams of supporting articles.
>
>The case of Michael Palmer is noteworthy. Some years since, in an article
>in the _Georgia Review_ , seven L=A=N poets took exception to Palmer's
>occasional denials that he was of their number, and pointed out that he
>had work in all the anthologies that represented their movement (I forget
>whether they mentioned that one of MP's publishers advertised his book as
>being by "THE leading Language poet" (my emphasis).
>
>MP, to the best of my k-edge, did not deign to reply. But subsequently, in
>the French translation of his book _Sun_ , Richard Sieburth, the
>translator,. writes "Michael Palmer n'a jamais fait partie du groupe des
>'language poets'  (Andrews, Bernstein, Perelman, Silliman, Watten, etc.) "
>Presumably MP read this over and gave at least a tacit approval prior to
>its being published.
>
>How Sieburth continues sheds light on the individual caught in these
>category wars : "La po\etique de Palmer, essentiellement idiosyncratique,
>ne s'est jamais présentée comme l'illustration d'une 'école' ou d'un
>'mouvement' littéraire
> Elle a toujours été trop modeste, trop discr\ete, et surtout trop
>sceptique pour se prétendre 'révolutionnaire.'"
>
>One who knows the poet can almost hear his voice speaking those words, and
>likely he did, or something like, in order for Sieburth to write them. To
>my mind, MP (like his associate Clark Coolidge) is more an ur-L=A=N poet,
>than one at the heart of that mouvement.But when we return to the
>advertisment declaring MP not only at the heart, but at the head, of the
>Languagers, we may encounter a cognitive dissonance that's dizzying. Is MP
>a present-day Vicar of Bray, trimming constantly to maintain equilibrium?
>Maybe, but these years place the Vicar of Bray in another light. The self,
>now porous, shifting, compound of illusory and constant qualities,
>requires of its heroes something less steadfast than 'hearts of oak.'
>Palmer (his British name the Italian Palmereri or -ini just a generation
>before) has become one of these.
>
>So this man, too modest in his poetics to be a revolutionary,  is often
>indistiguinshable (or why the insistence otherwise?) from the large group
>known as the L=A=N poets. This double life, as individual and as group
>member, is often not to be avoided as matters now constitute themselves.
>
>I have gone on too long, but I could offer better arguments for Peter
>Reading being M, rather than E---as well, of course, as being the supreme
>individualist we would like him to be when we are thinking as supreme
>individualists
>
>David.
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>book _Sun_ ,





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