Hi, trying to join this thread on my first week
on this list... really liked Ken Edwards' fiery
response to dismissals of LangPo, and of Mottram,
based on not reading the stuff, and I agree with
Miles that Keston is right to say LangPoets'
critical writing often doesn't address itself
enough to all writing - tho Charles Bernstein's
Artifice of Absorption, in _A Poetics_ looks
at Forrest-Thomson and Bunting at length; Johanna
Drucker's writings on Apollinaire, the Cubists,
the alphabet, are great; and Ron Silliman's essays
in _New Sentence_ are good evaluations of Spicer,
and of "third phase objectivism", a particularly
good reclaiming of W.C.Williams and all, who do,
surely, feature as ghosts in almost all of the British
poetry Keston likes and I like, and indeed in just about
all the post-WW2 work I suspect a lot of people on this
list like. Silliman's analysis of Williams really draws
a line between uses of Williams by mainstream American
poets and LangPoets, so is it the case that if you don't
resemble the LangPOets' use of Williams that you
resemble the American mainstream (ie form laziness?)
or if some BritPo takes a middle ground, is that a
middle ground from which a writer now can proceed
drawing on both BritPo and LangPo, and if not then is
it a middle ground, and does everything have to be
a synthesis/middle ground to be progressive/good,
anyway? And is there more to a poetic than a rebellious
gesture (book/poetic as gesture), ie if it has content,
or if you don't like the gesture? - 2 separate criteria
I'd like to see frame the dissing Mottram and/or LangPo
discussion. If a book is all gesture, is that book's
value historical, as a timely gesture, and what is its
value to writers now, how should it be acknowledged?
Longville and Crozier drew a line between Pound/Eliot on the
one side and Pound/Williams on the other. Is there a new
line to be drawn with Williams/Pound on one side and
Williams/Stein on the other - that's the question of larger
twentieth century relevance that Ron Silliman's LangPo
critical writing raises for me.
Ira Lightman
p.S. please come hear my band: 12 Bar Club, Denmark
Street, Sunday 19th October, 10pm, ring me for a flyer
that gets you in for #3 instead of #4 - 01603-616708
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