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Henry, I have a feeling you're trying to articulate something with both these moves--putting Jorie Graham "under erasure" with your father's initials and reducing the ongoing or periodically resumed debate over Langpo's place in American poetry to the name of a single scholar/critic--and I'm wondering if it has to do with poetry's maybe triangular relationship with the textual and the personal, and in these virtual spaces, above all--? We gather here personally to talk about poetry textually, via e-mail, but we can't seem to avoid making every poetry-related topic person-al. Not that I'm saying we should, necessarily, but I wonder why we can't. And has this always been the case in these forums or is it a recent development? I was thinking about this earlier today when David Birc posted a response to my attempt to tease out an argument about the (simple) heart, the poem, and the spirit relative to theory/"literary philosophy" in that paragraph by Doug Oliver and rose to Doug's defense, among other things, but unnecessarily, it seemed to me. And I realized at the same time that couldn't recall a time (there must have been one!) when it felt new or odd to be text-tapping out this conversation with strangers, most of whom I seem to have known for years now without ever having laid eyes on. Even those I've met since making their virtual acquaintance have never quite come into their own faces in my mental images of them but still retain the overlaid look and shape of their textuality. And now I'm sounding like a Beckett character to myself! But what is it, Henry, that you're trying to tell us? Candice on 8/2/01 8:10 PM, Henry at [log in to unmask] wrote: > Helen Vendler is a fine scholar, and her basic orientation is correct. > > best, Henry