----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barry Alpert" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: [ Volumes 01 - 07 of Remove A Concept are available now ]


I don't believe, from what you've written, that you do know "the" theory. 
Write a major
article or a book about your reaction and convince intelligent editors to 
publish it, instead
of spasmodically jerking your knee each time your eyes glimpse the names of 
writers you
dimly connect to "language poetry".   In fact, there are so many intriguing 
figures in
virtually all the artistic idioms who extrapolate at least a bit in theory 
and practice from
John Cage, that a pathetic, naive, egotistical voice like yours doesn't 
count.  I'm unaware
of any writers (let alone artists in other media) who have found your 
practice at all
useful.  Can you refer us to an essay or book about you by a critic or 
scholar?  If you're a
poet, it would be embarrassing for John Cage to be so labelled.  The two 
sentences
quoted below embody such arrogant, indefensible claims that they could be 
penned by
one of George W. Bush's speechwriters:

"I admit that I haven't "read" "Volumes 01-07 of Remove a Concept."  Sight 
unseen,
however, I'm quite certain that my work will survive when those volumes are 
landfill."

In fact, Peter Ganick's achievement as a writer, editor, and publisher is so 
wide-ranging
and helpful that you ("a vile little prick", to quote Mark Weiss' earlier 
formulation on a
similar occasion within Poetryetc) are utterly dwarfed by comparison.  No 
one buys the
books authored by you listed for sale within the used book market, despite 
the give-away
prices.  They are already landfill.  Join them.

Barry Alpert


On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:14:15 -0500, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:


>I know the theory.  I was reading Cage 43 years ago; even attended one of
>his lectures at Yale.  And like any member of the vast herd of independent
>minds, I told myself I was impressed by him, as by Sontag's essays and the
>other protopostmodernist classics of the time.  But the theory is bullshit.
>Ambient sounds don't "rush in to fill the void" when the pianist sits there
>not playing.  Ambient sounds are ambient sounds.  What happens is that the
>hip postmodernist audience-member - who has read that "any seat in the 
>house
>is the best seat," etc. - pretends that he is shaping, enjoying, 
>'composing'
>those sounds.  I suspect he will do this for ten or twenty seconds but
>pretend (to himself, and to others if called on) that he did it for the
>entire four minutes plus.  Like relgious ecstasy in the 1600s, sensibility
>and sentiment in the 1700s, sublime Romantic exultation in the 1800s,
>pretending that circumambient sound is music is one of those fake aesthetic
>experiences that people - if they are sufficiently hip - convince 
>themselves
>they are having.  As far as I can see, postmodernist critics (including 
>some
>enthusiastic long-winded sectarians on this list) don't even try to have 
>the
>supposed experience (of seeing noise as music, for example.); they
>rhetorically assume it can be had and that someone is having it, and 
>pretend
>it is the basis of their aesthetic rather than a product.
>
>Yet even if someone out there genuinely enjoys Cage's music -- and I liked
>his lecture, in which he cleverly talked against a metronome beat - it has
>nothing whatever to do with poetry.  Claiming it as the basis of a poetic 
>is
>a second-order pretension.  Words indeed have many, even contradictory
>meanings and connotations; that's what makes poetry possible.  But to
>pretend on that basis that signifiers can be entirely set free from
>signifieds, and that endless columns of word salad a la Raworth are poems,
>and that a reader "putting meanings together" from these elements is the
>same as - or something higher than - reading --- these assumptions, so
>prevalent on this list, are nonsense.  Eventually, when the
>poststructuralist fad dies, they will be seen to be nonsense.  Words are
>different from sounds or from smears of color.  An abstract art is
>worthwhile, and still full of possibilities; an abstract language is a
>contradiction.  It's a kind of academic parlor-game pretending to be a 
>vital
>cultural development.
>
>To associate such word-salads, whether or not they are based on aleatoric
>techniques, with the late Holderlin is especially abominable.  Holderlin, 
>on
>the verge of madness, was reaching after meaning - many, complex meanings.
>He was trying to reconcile irreconcilable visions: of Christ and of the
>classic gods.  He was not "leaving meaning to the reader."  Any more than
>Pound did in the Cantos.  Splashing half-thought or utterly random
>associations on a page may look like (modernist) poetry but isn't.  A poem
>is something shaped and thought through.  It can incorporate
>improvisational, even chance moments, but these must be justified by an
>overall coherence.  For an example, a poststructuralist sectarian (not you,
>Hal) might look again at my most recently sent work.  I admit that I 
>haven't
>"read" "Volumes 01-07 of Remove a Concept."  Sight unseen, however, I'm
>quite certain that my work will survive when those volumes are landfill.


Strange how someone so unimportant can touch a nerve.  Might have been my 
(admittedly unprofessional, unauthorized) speculations about pro forma, 
conventional, expected emotions.  Pride, and ideological commitment, and 
perhaps status anxiety are, of course, real emotions, and the rage they emit 
when threatened is oh so intimidating.  But somehow neither it nor those 
absurd blurbs for Volumes 01-07 of Remove a Concept makes me inclined to bow 
to anyone's "achievement as a writer, editor" etc.