If you don't follow the threads on the Buffalo Poetics list, you might want
to delete this.

The debate following Bob Grumman's comments on Myung Mi Kim's inaugural
talk at SUNY Buffalo seemed to get snarled in a familiar gumbo.  It should
be remembered that BG was not criticizing her poetry, or her identity, or
her job in the academy.  He was observing that the claims made for outsider
status seemed to be contradicted somewhat by the fact that her quoted
speech parlayed a familiar critical-theoretical jargon, which is very much
part of established contemporary Eng Dept newspeak literary theory.

Why would she do that?  Is this a problem?

My guess as to why she would use that language:
1.  She doesn't want to, or doesn't know how to, "explain" her
poetry.  (this is probably the way it should be)
2.  The University needs explanations, which are a form of credential.

Is this a problem?  The outlines of a massive problematic gumbo have been
with us for a long time: the weird fusion of "radical alternative
avant-garde" art with money celebrity status and, in Grumman's term,
"acodominance".

Let me analyze or reduce Myung Mi Kim's statement of purposes to its most
basic algorithm, which, unsurprisingly, has formed the rhetorical backbone
of the Buffalo Poetics program in general.  The
argument-assertion-algorithm goes like this (as I would paraphrase it):

"There is a dominant discourse of oppressive power; this poetry
deconstructs the rhetorical resources of that power, by replacing meaning
with material, and discourse with performative non-sequiturs."

It's a basic binary negative/positive.  Dominant discourse is the
negative:  I oppose it and thereby assert my positive status as radical poet.

My problem with this algorithm is that its simplicity does not reflect much
reality.

What if we grounded aesthetic judgement in our discussions on a whole
different set of parameters?  Such as, for example, radical
egalitarianism.  What would be some of the assumptions of radical
egalitarianism in aesthetics?

1.  Humankind is a global kinship with more affinities than differences.

2.  Humankind is enmeshed in a chaotic, labyrinthine Babel of different
languages, codes, discourses.  There is no dominant  logos-discourse, only
attempts to describe things using faulty, imprecise tools.  If there is no
dominant, there can be no assertion of canonicity based on an illusory
dominant/outsider binary.

3.  Despite Babel, every human being is capable of imaginative modelling,
complex response, aesthetic experience.  These capabilities are innate,
primordial:  only their nourishment and development take different
paths.  The poem is offered FOR the primordial equal, the interlocutor, the
friend, the public; not AGAINST - unless against the abuse of language &
reality by particular usages in particular situations (this is very
different from the claim that ALL discourse is a form of dominance.  That
claim creates a vertical hierarchy:  discourse over rebellion.  I am
criticizing that convenient simplification).

4.  The poem is a hypothetical imaginative model, a free offering of
potentiality, a game.  The poem does not demand or provide an immediate
transcript of a single reality:  it's a response to, a model of,
experience, produced by and offered to equal human beings.  The poem is
both useless in a practical sense and absolutely necessary for free,
creative & humane civilization (the conundrum of art in general).  (This
model restores "horizontality" to the algorithm of aesthetic judgement.)

Henry