It is [poetry] because I say it is

"Poetry is that which occurs within the institution of poetry. That is to say, form is not inherently important, words are not necessarily significant, language is utterly irrelevant, 'I''s can be put out with impunity, there can be nothing but thick-skinned idiotic literality, and [yet] it is still poetry because it exists as poetry." -Vanessa Place, "A poetics of radical evil"

Place hones in on the exact "place" where has lately been my poetic consideration: the frame of art. Of course, she's done the terrific scholarship (and creative output) that I wish to initiate, but the genius of conceptualism's "unoriginality"/"uncreativity" is that, as John Cage responded to the remark that 'anybody could do that,': "Yeah, but I did." A page from the phone book is simply that, until someone blows it up or submits it to a literary journal, at which point, if given to momentous circulation among the right people, it takes on the (whether Charles Bernstein likes it or not) "honorific" classification of Poetry. I'm not summarizing her short, lucid essay (anyway, you should read it whether or not I do summarize it), nor am I remotely conveying what she delineates as "radical evil," but I'm simply appropriating a quote for my own hackneyed (and yet still developing) poetic/political agenda. And there is a lot more to be savored in this the latest (3rd) issue of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion. New work by Marjorie Perloff, Derek Beaulieu, Augusto de Campos, Cole Swenson, Aleksandr Skidan, Susan McCabe, and more!

"Asocial" authors involve audience

The latest advances in e-literature include:

Blurring the Line Between Apps and Books
the smashed writer/programmer distinction, by making the author literally approachable through the book which is installed as an app (with communicative capacities)

The Medium: E-Readers Collective
the marketing of a work/passage by the populist (and, yes) compositional practice of readerly highlighting, here called "crowd-sourced literary criticism"

Art as the Unnameable

A plea was published in the NY Times by Robert B. Pippen, In Defense of Naïve Reading, on behalf of the as yet, and thankfully, uncemented and not well-framed relationship of Literature and scholarship. He mentions an important point along the way about the sort of knowledge/understanding gained through experience of a piece of art that resists purely formalized and theoretical explication, and in turn, any necessary application of "results" in the scientific sense. Radical poets (even tenured ones) recognize and celebrate this reality in their performances/publications that call attention to the inadequacy (and aft-reckoning, really) of academic observations and valuations. Of course, the humanities programs must insist on having methodological criteria so to be taken seriously enough by the populace to receive funding. And given the fear of artistic compromise and assimilation by academic forces of rigid, expositive communication, I think most true, working artists prefer it that way. But what interests me is this casting of Theory as professing to be a totalizing or summative extraction of a "whole" or wholly exploited meaning. Granted, the worst kind of criticism pretends to this very idea. But some, and let's employ that word, the best, critical analyses that I have read typically admit from the get-go their reductive and cognitive mythologizing or archetypal tendencies, and really only crippling one's admiration for works of art (classical as well as modern) when taken as the say to end all says, rather than one ideologically grounded inference within a vast constellation of possible inferences. The business of academic discourse has, so far as I've seen, recently been to detract such monumental positions toward aesthetic experiences/investigations. Drawing one's own sense of several critical perspectives can be daunting, but we already (hopefully) do it with the two-party political system, acknowledge this and that exaggeration or misstep, and being widely informed enough to justify voting for/against a party-sanctioned candidate. Of course, this is my take, not necessarily yours.


"Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or 'researched' by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of 'first level,' an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more 'sideways on' or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the 'arts.'"