Over at Poetics they've been talking in earnest of Language poetry,
what it is, what the avant-garde is, etc. Messages are appearing
five or six a minute, so it seems that Poetics is no longer
moderated. So I wrote Charles Bernstein a very nice note to
suggest that now might be a good time to bury old pettinesses and
to invite back those (me, Henry Gould, Gabe Gudding, Carlo
Pacelli) who had been expelled more than three years ago. I sent
that two days back; no courtesy of response yet.
I'd proposed here the other day that the erstwhile Marxist Language
poets were to the traditional U.S. poetry wing what the Democratic
Party is to the Republican Party. In other words, the Democrats
and Republicans wrangle theatrically over policy, while at bottom
they are as one in their commitment to those literary relations of
production that rest like an elephant on the material shell of the
giant tortoise of ideologically determined cultural property forms
which persist, within the bigger and evolving mode of production
that gave birth to them, to this postmodern day.
It's probably long-winded sentences like that that got me kicked off
in the first place. Maybe when I wrote Charles the other day about
smoking the peace pipe my sentences were too long and so that's
why he hasn't written back. I know that my sentences are too long.
And Gabe Gudding's posts are full of typos. But Henry Gould's
posts are as if written by Henry James, elegant and mellifluous (is
that how you spell mellifluous, Robin? I think so, but it doesn;t
matter). So maybe it's not just that my sentences are too long.
Maybe it's something else... The little Popular Frontist Stalinoids.
Grrrr.
Happy b-day to Ron Silliman (36) and Jose Carlos Mariategui (110)!
|