Doug, what on earth do you mean by the total-poet life? Do you believe
that you are less 'careerist' than other poets?

Also I disagree that it's wrong per se to work for or in a university
whose press publishes only old poetry. This seems like an aversion
contrived to celebrate the small press simply, which objective is quite
ok, except that it aggressively fails to consider the value of editorial
work in the field of literary history. Isn't it a good thing that poets
aren't published by the Cambridge University Press? Who'd want to be?
But of course some poets ARE, eg their educational book of
contemporary women poets. This is the kind of book you'd get shoved into.

cris -- how did the performance go down at the ICA? I hope you had a good
time despite the stools and beers etc. Thanks for your long message, as
ever flooded with exuberant and illuminating reference and passionate
appeal. It's a while since I read any De Certeau, but I've been meaning
to take a better look some time soon. Has anybody read the book on the
quotidian life? (not the practice of everyday life, but two vol. work,
not sure if it has been translated yet). Of course cris I didn't mean to
say that everyone disagrees only with me, but wished rather to prod people
into sharing out their retorts a little. It seems to me, for example,
that you and Doug have a lot to disagree about, and I for one would find
it very interesting to hear how you might discuss your apparent
differences of approach. Now I sound like an inverse Pandar. But you see
what I mean [?].

I often feel cris that the patent rejection of [stephen: early warning]
what Lyotard called 'metanarratives' in your posts, makes them quite
preoccupied with what we could call 'metacircumstance'. What an ugly
word. Its ugliness may diqualify it, I don't mean to coin a term the very
dissonority of which is pejorative. I suppose what I mean, is that your
attempts to distinguish between types of attitude, seem often -- to me --
to be so preoccupied by the desire to distinguish (to reject and renew),
that I find it difficult to understand the real grounds on which you want
to make a distinction. For example, you say:

"...No, what I'm suggesting is inscribing
pertinent value into articulation as in itself a process of subtle
mobilisations of position. A jointed fluidity (not pointy stunt
necessarily). Engagements with flow sufficient to negotiate controls of
flow (not 'go with the flow' at all). For both writer-readers and
reader-writers."

I know that this is supposed to be suggestive rather than demonstrative,
and that this difference is very much to the point; but when you talk
about negotiating the controls of flow, I'm not sure that you're really
saying anything that requires a suggestive rather than a demonstrative
style of locution. Can you give a real example, eg a decision made or
unmade, of what you mean?

Is there much of a difference really between

1. Engage with X ---> negotiate controls of X

and

2. Control (in part) X
   
If so, for whom? How much of the difference is the ear's difference only?
The cosmetics of self-assurance? Control is a strong sounding verb, but
a neutral (in the plural, technological) noun?

You see I think 1. flows easily and everywhere into 2., and vice versa.
That's what we have jargon for. [Not that your formulation is jargon; but
wouldn't this language work well in eg the mouth of a floor manager
telling his staff that he has to negotiate the controls of their working
environment?]

k





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