see no evil

hey all,

jared, steve, thx for your recent posts - clear, thoughtful, serious, i've really enjoyed them and been turning them over. sorry for my absence - i've been in midland and new orleans, got back and right away had to teach, so i'm just somewhat worn out. sorry, too, for my bit of attitudinizing ('that's trash, that's cool') - hope it didn't seem too snide - but jared, i think you articulated it exactly right (and in a way i couldn't have), when you described the aspect of poetry that's "a way of judging other judgements". that guitar/trash slogan was in a joyous context. aka trash as a particular stance that says "i am having the life drained out of me while you, large or small authority, attempt to tell me what the good is. so instead let's have some wild drumming plus whatever is supposed to be bad." i just realized that i'm about to stumble into an uninformed apollo and dionysus comparison...help me catherine?

but anyway, i guess what gets my goat about the houlihan stuff is this idea that there are these objective criteria that one can measure poems against. things called 'non-cliched phrases' and 'use of momentum and phrasing'. ok, so a great dugan poem is well-paced, is funny, uses language in an interesting way (though that doesn't mean it doesn't employ cliches). but would i really compare it to other poems and say 'it has this proportion of pacing, yea much lack of cliche, etc.'? and a _great_ poem has so much of these stratospheric qualities and a merely good poem a quantifiable less.

i know my idea about this stuff is a truism in its own right, but i think that a poem/poet makes its own rules for the different pieces. (one's own 'form among forms'.) and what judgment entails is whether one is willing to stick around to learn the rules or the patterns. or to accept the piece with the feeling that there is a governing spirit, whether one cares to obsess or learn about its preoccupations. i think that steve and jared both make the great point that often the problem is that the rules are actually too simple, not too difficult (and that's true of so-called front and rear guards). i see that point when steve says "frequent lack of difficulty" or jared discussing the one-dimensionality of a poem of pure 'negation'.

a paraphrase of a quote from a book i'm reading (rosmarie waldrop writing about jabes):

"(interpretation) sets about the task of uncovering the meaning of a text by re-creating the whole process of the genesis of that text. The conceptual premise behind it is Aristotle's distinction between ergon and energeia: Interpretation of a work...consists in translating the ergon - the completed object - back into the energeia that brough it forth."

we've been watching art 21, and we watched ellen gallagher's segment last night. i was looking at some at her work at school, and i always liked it, but her new work seems very insane and good (tony and i were blown away watching her bejewel isaac hayes, shit!). her new stuff had a genetic resemblance to the old things - i could feel it as part of a body of work - but i wouldn't have predicted it. and i don't really understand it. but i respond to it. whereas there are other artists whose work i don't respond to. and one bangs into that thing of why - the ineffable, dum dum dum.... it's predicated on other things i've seen i'm sure. but i don't know how. and that's also why i think it's somewhat frightening to ask these big judgement questions of contemporary art or poetry - bc i wind up just doing a rorschach test on myself. usually what i don't like tells me what i am pursuing in what i'm working on (or, even more frighteningly, could alert me to problems i'm having that i'm unaware of). kind of like the point you were making about olson - that a categorical rejection of the sonnet basically is saying 'i don't want you to make me write sonnets.' whereas bernadette mayer (or laura owens, in the art world) doesn't seem to have any problem just writing a sonnet that isn't granddaddy's. but to my mind that doesn't really ruin the authoritarian anti-authoritarians, at least not as writers - it's just that kind of temperament that needs to proclaim ultimate truth (and maybe even have disciplines) to feel permitted to make up the rules.

whether to steadfastedly shout that one does judge and has ultimate standards or to proclaim that one does not judge at all...hmmmm. jared, my emotional experience agrees with yours that a true 'egolessness' is probably a rare thing. for me, proceeding as though i don't know what's best seems to lead me down a better path of action than allowing myself to feel that i know what's right and what isn't. ('how to live, what to do'.) but i also know that i judge everything all the time. but even in my own tiny world my thoughts and judgements don't matter so much - i am a bad predictor of my own future, and often start out forcefully disliking things i grow to like later on.

fashion and 'cool desires' another big issue. i don't even have the strength to approach that one right now.

i agree with steve that to question the idea of the 'best' is a far cry from finding every piece of writing the same as every other piece. i personalize the whole issue by feeling that i can decry a whole array of smug 70s male type attitudes behind every 'best' and 'greatest'. ("the _femininists_ believe that we shouldn't read chaucer! the _feminists_ have ruined my appreciation of chaucer!"...etc. etc.)

i think i'm fizzling out - want to give you all a call. happy new year!...i love talking to all of you.