[New-Poetry] Language Poetry

[David Bircumshaw]

>What is the thinking related to this? I hate to be divisive, but I have never liked much either Silliman or Bernstein -- their work. I can appreciate the "importance," but..  Looking to get feedback and possibly learn. Thanks.

agj.<

I think Bernstein more important for his work as a critic and writer about poetry than his poems although he can be amusing but not, I reckon, as much as Bob Perelman can be. Silliman's blog, although I'm not an avid user, is, I feel, an important presence on the web.

Many of the other Language poets though, I'm afraid do not, er, um, seem to have a sharp enough 'language' to me. Their voices tend to have a sameness I find, a rather formulaic one at that. In fact, they often don't seem sufficiently aware of their language. It also seems to me that little of their writings offers 'dialogue' with the reader.

Otherwise, and I'm not entirely clear on this, if this is the case, I have the impression that there is a supposition that as the forms and formalities of traditional poetry mirror or equate to social division and hierarchies (which notion has a touch of truth in it, but one has to handle the thought with circumspection) so too grammatical divisions (e.g. subject-verb-object) reflect (enforce? compound?) social hierarchy. Which seems to me an altogether dodgier ground. I'd meekly offer that in a sentence such as 'I offer the gibbon the banana' that though the gibbon is undeniably the object of an action of subject which is seemingly in my property portfolio it cannot be said that my actions towards the gibbon seem hostile (presuming that is the banana is not poisoned) and that as the sentence stands, without context, one cannot assume that the gibbon is necessarily in a situation where its libery is or is about to be curtailed and that although the banana seems to be very much a passive hostage of the sentence I have to say I have yet to receive any complaints from it and, finally, that though the 'I' of the sentence could be claimed to be projecting an unwarranted unity and fiction of subject 'I' must insist it is part of a larger continuum in which it has been and is thoroughly ironised, disassembled, rebuked, upturned, dissolved, liberated from itself and definitely and repeatedly made to do lines.


Best

Dave


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Alexander Jorgensen 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 4:22 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Language Poetry


  What is the thinking related to this? I hate to be divisive, but I have never liked much either Silliman or Bernstein -- their work. I can appreciate the "importance," but..  Looking to get feedback and possibly learn. Thanks.

  agj.


  --
  Tennessee Williams: "A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with."


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20071129/327eb1cb/attachment.html