for US poetry subculture junkies. . .
what follows is a brief response to some remarks on 2 US magazines, Chain
and Apex of the M, made by Ron Silliman at his Blog site
(http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com).
RS's commentary on the poetry scene is often an intriguing mixture of
insight, ambition and frustration. Here he uses the occasion of a new
issue of the magazine Chain to praise same as the premier journal for new
American writing today, comparable to Sulfur, Temblor et al. of earlier
decades. But in the midst of praise he can't help but make an invidious
comparison to another magazine, now defunct - Apex of the M - which
operated in the 90s for a few issues on the basis of premises and goals
completely different from those of Chain. And he frames the comparison in
terms of an old grievance - that Apex's polemical, anti-langpo stance
generated far more interest at the time than did Chain, which was, of the
two magazines, much more important, more central to the project of US
poetry (according to RS).
What is happening here is a comparison of apples and oranges, based, not on
an analysis of the principles and methods of the two journals, but on a
secondary attribute: their relative influence and notoriety. There must
be a latin name for this kind of logical fallacy: RS blames Apex for being
famous. In the process the argument gets murky. Apex comes in for a
variety of jabs: ephemeral impact, lack of generative influence, narrowness
of interest, patriarchy (based on assumptions about the listed order of
editors); while Chain is praised for its massive, democratic inclusiveness
and the quality of its editorship and contributing work. Nevertheless,
there's an undercurrent of complaint: Chain "mutes" its edge by that very
("alphabetical", un-judgemental, un-polemical) inclusiveness.
It's as though RS wants to do a couple of things: get in a few more jabs
at an old unsettling irksome thorn in the side of language poetry (some of
the "famously isolative", ie. unsociable & democratic poet-critics of
langpo connect with Apex), and simultaneously pump (albeit only by
inference) for a sharper theoretical edge to the example offered by
Chain. As though he'd like to graft Apex's polemical energy - with a new
set of principles - onto the Chain axle.
But wasn't it one of Apex's (perhaps unstated or assumed) principles, that
every poetics produces or is produced by a meta-language, a worldview - and
that worldviews CAN be controversial, counter-intuitive, even
"anti-social"? (One could say the same about langpo, I guess.) If we think
of this in terms of American literary tradition, Apex stemmed from the
idealist-transcendentalist end of the spectrum, while Chain's studiedly
democratic and inclusive approach stems more from the general influence of
pragmatism. The problem that dogs such a pragmatic approach is that the
principles it evokes are so vague as to amount to shibboleths or
non-principles (what is the difference between "democratic" editorship and
a simple inclusiveness without any particular principles at all, beyond
opportunism?). Ron may be right that Chain offers the best samples of
important "alternative" poetics in the US today - but this is Chain's
worthy goal, it was never Apex's. If RS wants Chain to inherit the
polemical panache and subsequent interest which Apex briefly generated,
then perhaps he needs to propose a set of such principles himself. But
he's been famously waiting for the next generation(s) to do that...
Henry
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