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who? me, david? i confess i haven't read prynne. have read and seen and heard more of cobbing's work. is there one book of prynne's i should not die without having read? the way people talk about him is similar to the way people in north america talk or talked about ashbery. i don't know what a "conventionalist or a naturalistic conception of language" would be, really. i read that cratylus, whom you mention, advocated the idea that language is natural rather than conventional, which would seem a rather naively essentialist or platonic approach. so then 'conventionalist'='nominalist'? materialist or materialistic poetics, yes, i agree, has been around for a while. but they can differ quite a lot amongst themselves. perhaps essentialist/platonic/idealist materialistic poetics is divination and the like. ja ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 11:38 PM Subject: Re: Better Books, for those who can recall... > I'd still like clarity here. It can be very difficult when literary people > use philosophical terms for reasons that would be uncharitable to mention. > It would of course be absurd if it was being claimed that Prynne, or > anyone > else of recent vintage, were the first poet with a materialist philosophy. > So, can I ask, is 'materialist poetics' being thought of in terms of a > conventionalist or a naturalistic conception of language? Think > 'Cratylus'. > Road directions help. > I don't have any problems with the description of the processes given , > I'm > interested in the why. > > On 22 October 2011 04:40, Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> disruption of syntax. disruption of the image. disruption of the audio >> signal, of the media. cut up. cut together. algorithmic weaving together >> of >> the materials. disruption of semantics. the surrealists approached it as >> automatism. oulipo approached it quite differently but they still share >> this >> materialist poetics of disruption/disjunction. the language poets >> approached >> it different from both the surrealists and oulipo but, again, the >> disjunctive materialist poetics. disjunction. the disjunctive. >> >> and then the computer age. which assimilates these methods very >> naturally, >> even organically, into materialist poetics of the algorithic/processual. >> >> ja