I think that in one sense it is useful still to 
think of Language Poetry as a grouping, because as a
grouping it still has a grip on Keston's or mine's or some 
British poet(s)imagination. Not as poetic practice but as
different canon-making practice.
	May I venture to suggest that the criticism that
LangPo writers are somehow brilliant hype-merchants who
have stormed the bastille of the academy is powerful 
not because it is factually true (it isn't - few of the
*writers* and only a few Uncle Tom's from the *writing"
in In The American Tree have such posts - no
greater a proportion than poets I know Keston admires
have posts at Cambridge University from a selection of
British poets) but because the powerful vehemence comes
from incompletely articulated desire? Not so much envy
simply, but desire....
	One thing that does group Language Writers is that
their ascendance was much more like an 80's small business
taking off (like Microsoft); produce a product yourself,
with your package design, and let publicity run, then be
bought out by a large corporation.* There was financial
investment in a product, a successful (intended or not)
coup (for a small product) on the market. To mention Eric
Mottram here, I gather from hearsay that that's exactly
the kind of salesmanship he immediately stigmatised i.e.
moralised against as if watertightly, certainly 
successfully. 
	Just that anecdote seems to speak volumes
about a different tactic in 70 and 80s British poetry:
to storm the bastille by force (taking over the Poetry
Society) or by appeal to one Lord Reith or another; the
canon-makers at universities**. But never by business,
advertising, consumerism (and are these three ever
engaged with as well as by Lang Writers - see Marjorie's
Radical Artifice - not just as content but in the whole
action of the LangPo book in its culture)? Does BritPo
want to stand outside (outside the universities, it seems
mostly not) and is that a place to understand; a place
of negative dialectic where the dialectic is entered into
by the many potential readers in business, advertising,
consumerism? Are the soothing tones of consumerism to
be eschewed by such an outsider, attacked, mocked? No
media language used but with a harsh punchline or visible
signs of rot? Doesn't that *cede* the ability to soothe
in public language to consumerism, instead of realigning
and integrating (or just detaching) it as a thing it is
honourable to do and want? If I think of the brightness,
the colour and the joy in LangPo I like, that's where I get
it from, not having to mark the soothings as always bad,
always commercial, always to be forsaken by the reader-monk
following the writer-puritan. And I think it's from this
comparison of tactics on getting onto the canon that some
of these differences in using "media" language (Oprah 
language/ hope language) spring. What ho.


Ira Lightman



 * (long footnote)      If we compare the New
American Poetry launch of Ashbery and Olson and Creeley,
it happened much earlier on in the careers of the writers;
the New American poetry was much more like a magazine issue
of the new writing, as if assembled from writers sending in
their first manuscripts, and was very much connected with
the post-war boom, a particular search for the-new-as-not-
the-old, especially if the old meant staying in the issues 
of the first half of the twentieth century, the 
anti-semitism in the good *and* bad guys, the war atrocities 
of both etc (Pound having been the new and having been 
caught on the losing side). On that threshold of "new" and
"old", is it LangPo that, "being American", continues to 
sentimentalise WW2, ie not look at the past just flee it,
or 70s and 80s British poetry?

** is there some lingering
nostalgia, for example, in Keston that the universities
are no longer sifting contemporary poetry for merit but
just notoriety i.e. electing Seamus Heaney one can put 
down to a simple childishness of taste that good criticism
can rectify, but electing a Language Writer doesn't figure
as such a (callow) stage on the way to reader maturity
but as succubming to hype/mammon?


On Sun, 19 Oct 1997 21:31:28 -0400 (EDT) Keston Sutherland 
wrote:

> From: Keston Sutherland <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 21:31:28 -0400 (EDT)
> Subject: Re: Marjorie's letter
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Marjorie - whilst accepting that 'language' poets (as you 
say, a somewhat
> facile tag, but then which isn't) are by no means super 
stars and
> therefore hardly seem to require a culture-industry style 
going over, I
> can't agree that criticism - however peculiarly located or 
limited - is
> counterproductive.  Sure, obviously Heaney is huge cheese 
here at Harvard
> (I'm visiting for the year), as he is at all the retail 
variants, and as
> such he is roundly slated (see the list archives, Allen 
Fisher's recent
> message for example) and, -what is more-, he is within 
this list largely
> ignored.  Ignored because of a merely tangential, 
inevitably polemic
> relevance.  I for one am happy to criticise LPs because I 
have become
> accustomed to the high likelihood of their significance, 
even under such a
> team heading.  This criticism seems incumbent, of 
increased rather than
> diminished bearing precisely because silence through 
decorous expectation
> of some kind of passive alliance is so entirely affected. 
 I find language
> poetry questionable; it would be a dismissive 
determination that would
> prevent me from putting the questions as I see them (it 
would be the same 
> dismissiveness in me if I didn't listen to the answers of 
others).
> Criticism is after all at least part flattery, despite the 
opposite urge, 
> because it recognises crisis; unpolitic negligence is 
expressed
> differently - as inattention.  Besides: "hallowed" is 
hardly -our- term
> for this place (H), and matters as little (and as much: in 
the same way)
> as it matters that Heaney is a nobel winner.  We can 
groan, howl our
> proactive aversions.  And:  the 'larger world' doesn't 
need LP, -yet- at
> least, or doesn't need it in the desired mode of that 
relation; is there a
> helpful small world indemnity (is this virtual community 
of criticism
> subject to community-criticism?)?
> 
> 
> Keston   
> 





%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%