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Silly Man II
Ron Silliman’s latest musing on trivia dressed up as poetry uses the idea of narrative to add William Stafford to his enemies list, the so-called “School of Quietude.” Silliman attacks Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” as a “high point of American kitsch” that “uses plot to set up the arch-silliness” of the poem’s penultimate line, which according to Silliman is “a perfect instance of feigned & posed seriousness & just possibly the single most pompous line ever written.” Okay. He dislikes Stafford’s poem, as any reader is entitled to do.Read More
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Another Response to Christian Bök
Over on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, a fellow named Christian Bök—who bills himself as “an experimental writer,” although he also constructs “conceptual artworks” out of Rubik’s cubes and Legos— has posted the sixth (!) in a series of musings about so-called poetic machines, which he rhapsodizes about in terms that would make dear old Kurt Vonnegut spin in his grave. Here’s my comment on his latest…. ________ I’ve been alternately annoyed and amused by Bök’s past postings, but now I see that I’m meant to be only amused.Read More
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A Response to Christian Bök
Here’s a response to Christian Bök that I posted on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, for what it’s worth….Read More
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Silly Man
Ordinarily I find Ron Silliman’s blog link-rich and intellectually entertaining. But his latest post on the work of Larry Eigner reads like a pastiche of avant-garde poetic theory. Here’s the particular passage that stuck in my craw: “Eigner really was a philosopher of consciousness who used poetry almost architecturally to sculpt the most marvelous observations of the particular, even when he chose the simplest categorical terms to plot this out. There is one poem in this relatively slender volume that is perhaps the apotheosis of this approach to the poem.Read More