Michael. You've read the original article, have thought about it and reached 
these conclusions. As I said, my own were based merely on Silliman's account 
and I only found a few of his points convincing. He had accused Simic of 
"bullying" and yet nothing he quoted had that character, whereas his own 
tone, at least to me, did.
  In the end, the two big volumes of Creeley's poems (1369 pages) are in 
print (as well as a 366 p. Selected and his Collected Essays) so no-one is 
going to gatekeeper them out of existence and readers can find what they 
want there. Creeley is an extraordinarily prolific poet, averaging around a 
book a year for most of his writing life, so readers are going to be divided 
about that kind of bulk - excepting those for whom his every word is gold, 
most are likely to enjoy some aspects or periods better that others. Your 
Jackson Pollack analogy would be fairer if you had, say, fifty canvases 
rather than "a six-inch square sample".
  On reflection 80 poems for poets that one likes is, as you say, "a little 
strict" - more than a little. And of course we need Collected Poems and will 
get them for poets we keep coming back to.
Jamie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2012 11:00 PM
Subject: Re: Beef


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