Alison: Keston's comment needs to be understood in the context of the
pronouncements of (certain) Language poets (at certain points...) & their
poetry. Much of this poetry often does not permit of "research", of a
progressive establishment of lines of inquiry & modes of exterior reference
and clarification. Readers were sometimes asked explicitly (in the
"theory") to make up their own imaginative extrapolations from the
disparate tissue of words presented them, with no expectation that any two
readers would imagine the same reading, or that there would be any way of
adjudicating between readings as to plausibility. Thus "play". (For
instance, in Silliman's _New Sentence_ there's an essay which gives the
reaction of a number of students to a three-line Rae Armantrout poem.
Every one is different, and Armantrout's own explanation--that it's an
oblique description of sexual lubrication--is accorded no greater authority
than the others. Thus "privatise": to make private, not sharable.)
Compare this with, as the most obvious example, the more conventional idea
of the modernist long poem--Pound's or Eliot's or Olson's--which is
progressively illuminated by a small band of dedicated readers/researchers.
I'm not sure I'm prepared at the moment to say much about what readerly
model I prefer, or on what occasions I prefer one over others. All I'll
say is that it _is_ often dull and unilluminating to read someone else's
imaginative reassemblage of the fragments of Language poetry (e.g. those in
Reinfeld's _Writing as Rescue_); this isn't to say it's necessarily dull to
read the _poems_ though. (It's often dull to hear about someone else's
dream but it's not usually dull to dream.) Nor that the demands of
Language-associated poems and poets aren't in fact _much_ more various than
the above might make it sound. --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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