Dear Oren:

I've read your article on Language Poetry in Critical Inquiry. I'd be interested in debating the ideas with you by email and putting the results up on my blog. (http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com) I was thinking of sending in a response to the journal itself, but I don't particularly like the tone of those debates, in which the participants try to vie for theoretical supremacy by misrepresenting arguments, or claiming that their own arguments have been misrepresented.

Basically, I don't agree that language poetry is programmatically and "objectively" dull. I find it quite aesthetically challenging and varied in scope. I don't think it can be limited to the production of Chomskian sample sentences. This might apply to a poet like Barrett Watten, although I don't think he would agree. I don't think it has much relevance to Coolidge, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, most of Hejinian, Bernstein, or Silliman. But then again, I find Samuel Beckett's writing beautiful as well. I'm not saying your taste in poetry is deficient, but rather that you perhaps "universalize" your own reaction in excess.

Marjorie Perloff has written many essays in which she discusses LP in aesthetic terms, using a fairly traditional Poundian vocabulary. It is poetry with melopeia, logopeia, phanopeia, etc... and is rooted in avant-garde poetics. How would you address the fact that this poetry is in fact amenable to such an approach?

Your critique of the community building aspects of LP are quite interesting, if inconclusive. If language poetry's community building has been for naught, so be it. You demonstrate some problematic aspects of the Leningrad project, but it seems to me different from "literary politics as usual." Earlier you said that the LP community was indistinguishable from any other literary community, but, as you yourself demonstrate, they were at least trying to do something different.

Silliman's use of the computer program does seem naive to me. It is a crude measure at best. I agree with parts of your critique at that point in the article.

I don't see as you as particularly interested in engaging with the actual ideas of LP. You substitute a simpler, more elegant paradigm, but one that leaves out quite a bit of the potential theoretical debate.

If you choose to respond, please indicate whether you want me to post your response. Congratulations on getting the article published in such a visible and prestigious journal. Although I disagree with the premise that LP is thin gruel, I think your thoughtful arguments are worth consideration.

Yours,

Jonathan Mayhew