Nals Goring On Poetry Blurbage

http://osr-tapes.info/osr/americanbuygridfinal.pdf

strangely enjoyable indeed.

"More than a quarter of the blurbists chosen to be in this anthology
refer to an "us" or a "we" or an "our" in at least one of their
selected blurbs. So maybe we should introduce ourselves. There's
some collectivity being invoked by blurbs, which should be weird,
right? Blurbs are supposed to be fundamentally "about" an object,
but obviously this is a simplification. The blurb-"we" is clearly
inclusive of buyers, collectors, critics/historians of poetry, etc., but
it also tends to refer to "our" memory, "our" bodies, "our"
language, the grammar of "our" emotion, etc. This seems really
violent to me and I'm sure that these explicit references to
belonging have to be unpacked, especially in the face of some
blurbists' claims/apparent feelings that poetry is politically
"important" for whatever reason. I don't see any difference
between, say, Kenneth Goldsmith's "our" and Cole Swenson's, and
this is/should be problematic."