Harold lifted some lines of Prynne, Coolidge and McCaffery and
then asked:
>not wishing
>to oversimplify, but is it obvious that there is any
>big difference in erudition or reader-response
>expectations here (or indeed of poetics in general)?
More obvious the longer you look at them, Harold, yes. MOST
obviously, the Prynne quote involves some intense and complex
punning, which form of reference does entail differently erudite and
responsive responses from the other two quotes. The Coolidge and
McCaffery works, I would say, if you know more of their stuff, are
part of the US branch of the modernist tradition that goes back at
least to Williams and which works to skew or to minimise
syntactical relations and reach an irreducible objecthood of the
word, as an equal counterpart to an irreducible objecthood of the
thing - Coolidge and McCaffery inflect that project in their own,
primarily politically divergent ways, of course.
When Keston refers to different takes on the protocols of reading
in the L and C camps, he's referring to a whole set of arguments
that Harold and others on the list may not be aware of. Prynne,
with many different emphases, has written on the topic for nearly
forty years, from "Resistance and Difficulty" to the lecture on de
Kooning but most pertinently, for the purposes of this discussion,
in his so-called Letter on Language Poetry (all of these texts are
ridiculously difficult to get hold of). Insofar as the Cambridge camp
can be said to have a whole different conceptualisation of the
reader's relation to the poetic text than the L poets, then I would
say that they must be following Prynne's lead. Perhaps someone
(Nate?) who has the Letter to hand at or near this moment could
post the section in which Prynne attacks the notion of the reader's
supposed freedom to create the meaning of a text as spurious and
complicit with a free market ideology?
all best
robin
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|