Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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9 abr 2007
The problem of Silliman's Blog is not the insistence on the decrepitude of the school of quietude, but a kind of critical lassitude that allows him to praise almost every poet under the sun as long as the poet has a few concrete images and is not utterly cringe-worthy. Ron actually likes a hell a lot of poets, probably about 100 times the number I do. This ought to be admirable. Yet somehow I am not convinced. It often feels like he's conferring a perfunctory stamp of approval rather giving himself up to a genuine passionate engagement. He quote a poem today, for example, and says it's not a piece of bad writing if you take away a few metaphors. But this is manifestly false. It's crap even without those lame metaphors. The problem is not that Ron is too mean and narrow, but that he is way too generous. The SoQ label just is a convenience to save him for liking 1,000 other poets.
Silliman's purported niceness is condescending. He referred to David Antin's "verbal noodling" the other day. Antin, one of the most intellectually interesting poets of the past 40 years, "noodling."
ResponderEliminarAnd SoQ is nothing more than an insult, a category so bend-able that its only meaning is "socially respectable poetry that does not appeal to Ron Silliman, categorized in an insulting manner."
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ResponderEliminarRon Silliman's approach often strikes me as a kind of demagoguery. He sets himself up as the leader of a million unknown but deserving post-avantists. In order for there to be a million followers, your standards have to be flexible.
ResponderEliminarI like Ron personally. I invited him to Kansas after all. And he was my inspiration to start my own blog, which means a hefty influence in my own life.
ResponderEliminarCritically, though, I diverge from Ron in several respects. Often I don't voice disagreement as loudly as I might because I don't want to be confused with THOSE Silliman detractors.
And Silliman's comment boxes really have to go. A mainstay of them is a man of whom Ron said, that the fact that he is a college teacher is an indictment of higher education in this country.
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ResponderEliminarSpeaking as one of THOSE detractors, I gotta say, that first sentence in your original post displays an awful lot of 'tude.
ResponderEliminarLet's hear it for 'tude!
Jonathan,
ResponderEliminarExcellent post about Ron's blog. I could not agree more. It's nice that he's enthusiastic and positive. (Call me flaky, but nice is often better than mean.) But the problem is that I, and I suspect you and most of your readers, just don't have the resources and time to buy and read even a fraction of the poetry Ron likes. Sometimes a blunter, more qualitative assessment would help.
And right on, Ornette!