Hi Jamie,
I quite agree with you about Bob Archambeau's post. I don't visit his blog nearly enough.
I'd also perfectly agree with you that any poet can be represented, for one purpose or another, in a very small compass indeed. But that isn't what Simic says. He says: "More to the point, there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading." That seems different, and a little strict. Even so, given that what's considered "worth reading" is evidently dependent on why one is reading, it probably wouldn't in itself be worth having an argument about. But Silliman, I think , picked up on it because he saw it, in the context of the rest of the review, as staking out a position that is basically inimical to the reception of open-form type writing. One will not have much joy with Creeley or Zukofsky or Allen Fisher if one is leafing through the pages trying to single out small and perfectly formed well-wrought urns that can be distinguished from the rest as being especially worth reading. That's a bit like saying that Jackson Pollock wastes a lot of paint, after all you can get the gist from a six-inch square sample.
Simic in the rest of the review picks out and quotes a number of slender Creeley poems, for the most part with apparently fair-minded approval, but in my opinion without any sincere enthusiasm. Creeley when approached with this mind-set, totally unengaged from the aspirations and issues that drive Creeley's project, can only offer up returns that are exposed as cruelly minor. The effect of Simic's article, which I think was deliberate, was to present Creeley's thinking as confused and stupid, and to let his readers draw the conclusion (without actually saying it himself) that since the "good" poems are so slender and so buried in such a morass of wrong-headed trifling, one can safely forget about him and about all those other self-styled poets out there who (from Simic's perspective) write poetics rather than poems.
That's my reading of it, anyway.
Michael
>Michael, I've only been able to read the opening of Simic's article online, and for the rest I've had to follow the quotes via Silliman. The opening remarks about Collecteds being unportable and offputting to the reader, and the idea that most poets can be adequately represented by 80 or so poems seem to me not only harmless but true. Silliman's deconstruction of all this is astonishingly heavyhanded and pompous as though he'd never encountered such an arrant bit of philistinism.
What you say about "gatekeeperism" is certainly Silliman's argument which, with all the evidence he produced, I still found unpersuasive. Simic is reviewing a couple of books in a newspaper, not speaking ex cathedra or flailing a crozier. If the paper is the NYRB and he's the present US laureate, then what...? Is he to suppress his own views so as not to offend irascible sections of the poetry world? From the quotes it sounds as though anyway he has quite a marked respect for Creeley.
On Peter Riley's 'Beef' there's a characteristic post at Rob Archambeau's blog Samizdhat - which shows, in case a doubt was setting in, that poetry blogs can be openminded, elegant and explorative.
Jamie
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