A thread for tom and others to ask pesky questions about post-60s poetry, also known as: Syriana.

This book will make you want to get books that are nearly impossible to find (except perhaps on pdf these days).

But perhaps that's overkill.

What do you think of Robert Hass?

I haven't read Hass.

(plz do not go qualming 'meaning' on me, although it is admittedly the obvious thing to do with that question.)

the article i linked on the poetry thread - which i don't think i want to link here, bcz it's long, and pretty academic, in more than one sense, unless you really think "how should we anthologise the poetry of the successors of the beats (bearing in mind that we may just be using 'successors' in a strictly chronological sense) (and that maybe beats should be replaced with 'modernists')" is not an academic question - my syntax has gone to hell, here - probably raises, or at least is inhabited by, most of the questions i might ask.

why doesn't the movement to include all kinds of on the surface non-'poetic' writing as 'poetry' get rid of (the need for) 'poetry' as a separate aesthetic uh sphere? what impact does this have on poetic praxis?

(chris i am actually real interested in yr answers to that last question & i beg you not to let the awkward term-paper construction of it to put you off.)

PCOET always worked more on the levels of sound and, ah, the delight of letters scattered across the page. It seems a bit more removed from "sense" than other similar works, such as Bernstein's "disfrutes" or P. Inman's excellent "Ocker". But I'll reanswer that when my copy arrives.

I'm not all that interested in the idea of "the avant-garde" but sure, some of those people are in the academy now. It's not as if the academy is solely made up of such people. But there are more of them now than before. But so what? I dunno, I'm not sure what's interesting about these poetries is their rebelliousness against something official. And that article you linked to did a good job of pointing out how arbitrary that sort of reading can be. (Then again, I like Ammons well enough and I'm sure Silliman would have good things to say about him on his blog.)

And if I understand that last question correctly and am not just filling in what I kinda WANT you to be asking, then my answer is: I have no idea, and I've argued something along those lines here. (Variations along the idea of how "Poetry is the last place to look if you want to find poetry.")

But at the same time it might make sense to mark as "poetry" that which can't function as anything else. As soon as a poem can do something else, it gets moved into another genre, and it's only the poor souls who really can't do anything else that get stuck being poetry.

Uh, and if that doesn't seem in the same zone as your question, which it might not, then try asking again maybe.

- that's not really much of a reply for ten days after, is it? sorry.

- still not sure what other things i want to talk about, here.

- my copy of from the other side.. has yet to arrive. i'm slightly annoyed.

- the 'top myths about electronic music' thread just revived on ILM has drew daniel (actually that drew daniel, apparently) and others discussing language poetry. oddly. - anyway, whilst discussing the 'rockism of poetry' (!) he mentions this - "I so wish I could say Clark Coolidge = Matmos because of his book of Old West themed language poems but I am in Matmos so I better not write my own ticket like that" - does anyone know any more about this book?

Link to thread?

I don't know the Coolidge wild west poems, I don't think. I am not a Coolidge expert, for he has written a shit-ton.

It's hard to talk about it, though, because it is so non-representational that it's hard not to start filling in details even though there is little-to-nothing in the text to confirm them. For instance, it's hard not to read some of the sections as relating to the gay sex (Melnick is gay and the work was written in 1972) which is not nearly as explicit as in "Men In Aida". Especially with the language that does not exist, that only kind of points to English. (Although one section, which has a few "je"s in it, does seem to point to French, which is possible since he did live in France for a while.)

But that's really hard to explicitly support, which doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it the sort of way of talking about writing that I don't care for.

So what is going on? One thing I notice is that it points to a certain type of non-English and yet it keeps throwing in OTHER types of non-English every so often. For instance after about ten poems you get the sense that it isn't "just typing" -- vowels and consonants come up in Englishy or at least not totally random patterns -- and then a few pop up with thick thick consonant clusters -- not utterly "cjrchhrgrts" impossibles but certainly thicker than they had been before. But there are just a few, and they're all in the same poem. Then, a few later, numbers appear, but they are always at the beginning of the words -- "3va" is a sort of example (although I should probably wander over and grab the book) -- and that is how they're used -- so it is not unlike "3rd" or ways that numbers could be used in an English poem (esp. if you're used to "cd" or "shd"). So those incursions of "different rules" reenforce the sense of a logic behind what at first looks like "random typing". (Similarly, at first you think no English words will appear, and then suddenly a few do, and then a few more do in what seems like it might be their English senses. And if, like me, you are mouthing the words in a coffee shop as you read, you'll realize that you are tempted to pronounce "hat" as if it were an open Romance language "a", and it will be a nice moment of reconsidering some of your assumptions.)

So anyway, part of the joy of the book is this sense of sustaining the specific tone of non-Englishness. Part is the fantastic collections of phonetemes that come out. Part is the sense of seeing "the shape of poems", what a modest chapbook's poems look like even if you can't make out the words, which is interesting, especially as, towards the end, it starts to fall apart.

Plus, if you are giving the book the benefit of the doubt, you start to naturally fill in all sorts of "background" to the poems, and you see how they start to relate to this added background (such as the idea that some of these poems seem to be about the gay sex -- not all certainly, some had decidedly different feels -- but some were "clearly" that once seen from that perspective, though of course that doesn't really mean anything).

A little later I'm going to post one of the more seemingly "naughty" poems to the poetry thread.

Anyway it's a pretty fascinating little book. The last few poems in it are mostly one-word poems, some of which are interesting, but the ending is very curious, and mostly feel like "warming up exercises" rather than the fully thought out poems that came earlier in the book, which is an odd way to end.

I think I'd love to hear him read this, although perhaps I'd rather just imagine him reading this.

that search did bring up an interesting looking volume by bob perelman on the search inside function, though:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691021384/sr=8-3/qid=1143406838/ref=pd_bbs_3/102-4160797-1104957?%5Fencoding=UTF8

or

My knowledge of British poets is far worse than my knowledge of Americans, but perhaps better than my knowledge of Canadians.

so i've now assembled my copy of PCOET with a hole punch and a ring binder. reading it earlier it seemed there was something sort of - upsetting? - sad? - about coming to the end of it, everything giving way to the one-worders. i dunno that i have much to add about it. my 2yo nephew has been staying at the same house the past couple days, and before that i was staying at a friend whose mother's a childminders - there's something about the way pretty much pre-literate kids use language, seizing on and repeating words for the pleasure of saying them, which seems like it is probably one of the things i want to be reading the language poets for .. they may have articulated this point themselves long before me. (the principle also holds, i think, with the way kids relate to objects. a sense of their just being there, before they're aesthetic or functional...)

also one of the pcoems seems to mention Gertrude Stein. i laughed.

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/

threads i had forgotten about

i actually read that perelman book last year, though i'd completely forgotten ever being told to