[New-Poetry] RE: strawperp

[Anny Ballardini]

Me for one, Bill. I think you are extending the concept beyond its original 
meaning. Solitary in this context means: lonely, something like spending the 
entire day alone typing without seeing anybody. While I am aware that I owe 
everything to everybody. But that is something else.

From: "William Knott" <William_Knott at emerson.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 7:05 PM


From: JforJames at aol.com


When he claims to be solitary, the artist lulls himself  in a perhaps
faithful illusion, but the privilege he grants himself is not real.  When he 
thinks
he is expressing himself spontaneously, creating an original  work, he is
answering other past or present, actual or potential creators.  Whether he 
knows it
or not, one never walks alone along the path of  creativity.—Claude
Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks
(Quoted  in “The Artist as Critic,� Every Force Evolves a Form by Guy
Davenport)

*
. . . the problem with hierarchic or auratic (is that a word?)
pronouncements like this is that they never name names.
They're winning their argument against a strawperp.  WHO
are the solitary self-lulled artists who delude  themselves thus?
I can't think of any artist who hasn't honored or felt indebted to
his or her predecessors and or contemporaries. . . .