Po-Mason Handshake

these are the examples of impervious writing that houlihan holds up:

No, dirt aliens: don't waste good mascara, fiber gives you confi-
dence. Spin doctors vs. gravity, do you spandex wooden leg plus spaz
hemp tempi seize the fey crawlspatiality creatures peel off. Barbie pro-
tons slobber the manual seedling wrapped in human skin. Happy puppy
preconscious vouchers don't brownnose your pal's girlfriend, a swagger
unanointed affect in its gob phase. Automated preparation H—a non-
goosing, a midriff melody—stir the rack up…mere child has her
permit.


Bruce Andrews, “from Dang Me”


And:



Stacked circles (rain down) say green it releases nothing. Bundled
wires. Ellsworth Kelly strides from one red iceberg to the next. Each face
projects onto antennae forging a domain expressed as a skewered pod.
Transparency behind a desk elusive plunge. A dissection of thought into
its components the weight of meat up the wrong street the wrong
backdoor. The blazer missed too as the wiry one observed. Someone
slipped him diet Orangina and he went ballistic. The whole staff cray-
oned their names onto the good luck card while unwitting partygoers
waited for the elevator. Mogul and musician separated at birth one
suggested. Hubris. The directions very specific and yet so many stood
idle. She ravished in black. He charmed in lime.


Mark Bibbins, “from Blasted Fields of Clover Bring Harrowing and Regretful Sighs”

like i said, the "intelligble" poetry that she describes (as well as the contents of the magazine she edits, perihelion) is among the most boring shite i've ever read. but simply because her taste is crap doesn't mean her point isn't well taken. what do you do with this stuff? do you, as hejinian does, reject the very idea of quality? or, as john cage would have it, in this passage:

when richard kostelanetz interviews cage, he asks him if some theatre pieces are better than others; cage dismisses the question: "why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgements? don't you see that when you get a value judgement, that's all you have? they are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

there is something seductive in this idea, despite the fact that cage himself makes a value judgement (ie, that the question is a "bad" one - which automatically reminds me that duncan insisted that sonnets where a valid form, which olsen, in his open field statements, rejected. duncan would call it just another form among forms). I am truly sympathetic to these ideas, but their egolessness is, to me, not verified by my emotional experience. in a sense, poetry is judgement. it is not eliotic, and it is often a way of judging other judgements (that's trash, that's cool), but to insist that such poems exist in a vacuum is an unconscious reification of the same old "well-wrought urn," an object that exists outside of time.

so, it seems to me, that this whole point abut denaturing the poem (despite the specious metaphorics that assume that english is 'natural' -the president just said "the good lord"-what's more denatured than that?-) means to me that it does not exist in commerce with a particularly wide world. i like these andrew's poems, but they're one-dimensional, and i will insist that a poem has to insist on multiple readings, ya know?

steve, i know what you mean when you say that critical practice hasn't kept up with poetry, and i heartily agree that poetry should be in the lead. i also tend to agree with you, upon, further investigation, that this "resistant to criticism" stuff is a way of whipping anyone who gets outta line, and that sucks. I've been able to think a little bit more about the question, and i think, truly, that my concern is for the reader, way way more than for any possible critic. the question is, because readers nowadays have no vocabulary (or interest) in the traditions of poetry, that proceeding with the kind of ghetto-ized work that andrews seems to be doing here is essentially a work on nihilism, and negation. and that, is truly ok with me. "NO" is one of my favorite words. but it's only part of what the poem should do. It's got be "yes" AND "no" at the same time. this is the only way that a poem won't be denatured. like atoms.

So, thanks, stephen, for the corrective. my initial post was quick, and i think your post reminds me that, really, critics are an awful bellwether, but that too much of the time, fashion (or at least "cool desires") takes the place of any weather at all. oh.

hi everybody.

lauren, i called ya, but got tony. i think we should change the name of the blog to That's Trash, That's Cool.

cat, i owe many gratitudes for attitudes. HELIOS!