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Stephen, it's late & Ive had a long day, but I wanted to try to correct an apparent misperception of my point of view. First, I don't have any objection in principle to paying any amount $N for a book of poems. Like anyone, I will make a market calculation that has to do with the situation of my life. In fact, I have seen the Drucker books--they're in the permanent collection of St. Lawrence University where my wife is a curator--& they are indeed lovely objects. My wife & I buy art from time to time, including artists books, & I have no objection to artists of different sorts getting paid for their work. I was trying--always difficult in e-mail--to be ironic: given all the talk about materiality, I found it odd that an avant garde poet like Drucker was so into fine editions, which are ready-made elite consumer products, however lovely they may be. I guess I like a feistier kind of materiality. And then this morning I found it remarkably ironic that someone as cutting edge as Alaric Sumner could so easily divorce price from object--as if books were somehow outside the economy. A real materialist like me cannot perform this feat of reification. Really, it's a form of aestheticism, no? Fact is, I've never been much drawn to collecting first editions of Faulkner or Whitman, though I was happy to hold a first of Leaves of Grass in my hands in the rare books room of the U of Iowa library many years ago. But that was a religious, not a literary, experience--I read very few of the words in the book as I held it in my hands--I just knew Whitman's hands had held the same object. Look, I'll have to take up the Platonism thing tomorrow, I'm too beat tonight to think it through properly, but I do want to offer a defense of content. It's not that I don't love & value beautiful books--I am just skeptical about the claims being made for some of the ones mentioned here recently. jd ====================== Joseph Duemer School of Liberal Arts, box 5750 Clarkson University Potsdam NY 13699 315.268.3967 [log in to unmask] http://web.northnet.org/duemer http://www.grammarbitch.com/ppp/index.html ====================== Sing so dogs bark, oxen bolt, So a girl walks out on her lover. Sing so dogs bark, bulls bellow, So the old coot crawls out of his hut. [Mekong Delta 1971, trans. John Balaban] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%