I have to disagree, at least somewhat, Dave.
One can resist what MacLow & cage did & still find creative imaginative possibilities in these forms. I admit Ive mostly done word/line acrostics, where the words found have pushed me to imagine phrasings that take me into interesting places (or so I hope), but I can see purer acrostics making for that too. There have been some terrific ones, by bpNichol, for instance.
Now, as to the commercialization of art, the consumer basis event horizon, well, that;s a cultural drag across much of the western (at least) world by now, & some resist (as best they can), & some (anyone want a glass skull?) dont...
Doug
On 2011-07-20, at 11:11 PM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> There are of course alternative views of MacLow and diastics - for example
> http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/diastic+poetry - I quite like the phrase
> 'literary sudoku' - but really the end of all this is the land of Gnoetry. I
> find it quite interesting that elements in bourgeois US 'poetry culture' is
> so keen of wiping out the 'creative', Dryden's 'peaceful province in
> acrostic land' has reverberations that arch twister never intended; it's
> peculiar too how the questioning of bourgeois subjectivity has ended up
> becoming the friend of mechanised culture, although the long appropriation
> of the avant-garde by money makes it not too surprising. You start off with
> Rimbaud and end up with Warhol. Fear not managers, the poets are your
> friends. It's like a kind of huge cultural inhume-you-ment.
Douglas Barbour
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