Dear Gabriel
Weirdly, while I was interested in what you diatribed re Ron Sillman's Blog,
your blog is so much the same!! Like you're in some sort of competition!
What the hell is this all about? Are you Rhode Island's No 1 or something?
Can we come back and criticise your self-centred blog?
Fuck poets. They're the most self-centred, selfish arseholes on the
planet!!!
Rupert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabriel Gudding" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2008 4:19 AM
Subject: Re: fifteen minute poem for ron silliman
> Kasper,
>
> Sorry I missed your question.
>
> You ask what I think of Ron's blog.
>
> Well, I think it's a good example of literary violence -- and of someone
> who is very very obedient to the illusion of literature and deeply
> invested in: (a) consecration, (b) canon making, (c) pigeon-holing, (d)
> distinctions, and (e) the dream of judgment.
>
> In other words, it's a good example of fetish. Belief in literature.
>
> Too, I guess in some ways Ron's blog is a machine of capital (not fiscal
> but symbolic), whose purpose is to accrue as much cultural capital as
> possible -- to in fact monopolize, or at least corner the market on, a set
> of symbolic goods.
>
> So in short it's business as usual. Even tho Ron will say he doesn't
> believe in individual authors, he still basically follows the New Critical
> m.o. for establishing author function by (a) authorial celebration, (b)
> apodictic tone (assertion parading as demonstration), (c) divisive
> rhetoric (dismissive or conciliatory), (d) obsessive concern about what
> will stand "the test of time" -- and probably the thing that most anchors
> Ron as a grandchild of New Criticism: (e) the ritualistic "close reading"
> (pretending to focus on "form" and "craft" as a means of carrying out an
> attempt to consecrate or dismiss).
>
> Another way of putting it: Ron's blog is a giant mechanism whose purpose
> is to create, if absent, and anchor, if present, belief. Belief in
> distinctions -- rather than awareness of relations.
>
> Or another way to think of it is: The enactment of orthodoxy by a former
> heretic.
>
> If Ron's blog were a religion, it would be Mormonism.
>
> Or. The enactment of a doxological illusion common to literature: the
> belief that one can locate somewhere in the field of polemics or
> celebration something upon which one can never exhaust the urge to
> fetishize. Olson? Creeley? Dickinson? Barbour? Ballardini?
>
> Ron's blog is a hunt for that inexhaustible object/author.
>
> So, that's what I think of Ron's blog. What I think of Ron himself, or
> what he presents of himself on his blog and in his work, is that he's a
> good Joe who's maybe a little too enamored with the illusion of "poetry"
> and who maybe needs to read Bourdieu. :)
>
> Poetry really is about human beings. It's not about poetry.
>
> Sorry if this is a bit too much information, Kasper.
>
> Gabe
> http://gabrielgudding.blogspot.com/
> http://rhodeislandnotebook.blogspot.com/
>
> <<oh. I was asking Gabe what *he* thinks of Silliman's blog. if his poem
> is a nightmare or absurd dream or true reflection.
>
> KS>>
|