Hello Marjorie - this one's going a bit feazed, I sense at either end;
would just say that 1. No of course Fenton etc aren't LPs, but then we
never would talk or think of them at all so it's kind of extrinsic to the
question (which they wouldn't deign to imagine themselves to be part of)
2. I just don't believe that non-L poems, whatever they might be and
granting for a moment that category's monstrous absorbancy, use a
"transparent" language, designed merely to instate an argument or whatever
sense-stickup, but feel rather that this has become a merely negative and
evasive appraisal having the primary function of constituting for LPs
their own insulated apodosis in which they are able practicably to state
the terms of a supposed and critical difference - what makes them special
is what other, better paid poets lack especially.  This is hopelessly
programmatic.  And simply unwitnessed: when LPs make or gesture toward
critical commentary - anything which might without howls of dismay be
evaluated via any kind of alternate synopsis - are they merely _less_
'transparent' than their Faber adversaries?  Aren't there grades of
transparency?  Of course - no-one could possibly maintain that everything
outside (and before) LP is simply and indistinguishably transparent in the
quality of its disclosure, and that just because this very question is
pinned to the neomarxist noticeboard by a group of poets, their
inquisitiveness makes them suddenly and utterly exmept from what they
condemn in everything else.  So when you read Ron Silliman, you notice
that his words refer to their wordness; but there's a cycle of
argumentative renewal, within which such prioritised reference
inevitably becomes secondary: the instance of refering to wordness (an
absolutely ageold trick, as Silliman himself in one case attempts but
fails adequately to recognise by citing Skelton) itself becomes
in-immediate, provoking a further and radically separating inquiry into
the -relevance- and contextualised -sense- or argument that each specific
instance automatically entails.  Not to register this imperative -
effectively not to suppress each specific instance of words referring to
wordness -in favour of- the wider instances of its locatedness - is to be
taken in in precisely the manner that Adorno for example would instantly
abhor.  I'm not advocating conventional syntax or trite message-stuffing,
but the descent of a general claim over a whole practice, e.g. that LP is
not predominantly "getting you to a "theme"" and that it is therefore of
diminished deceptiveness, seems to me to be in effect precisely the
opposite to the values that such a claim hopes to observe: it's deceptive,
speeds up the critical faculty only to leave it prematurely exhausted, and
needs to be scrupulously anatomised if a reader is not to take the
anterior LP blurbs at face-value (and why should she).            
         
Yrs, Keston




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