Eileen Tabios pointed out to me that I might have been a bit hasty yesterday in using the pronoun “us,” as when I said that Silliman has “made the rest of us have to think about what directions we see our own work, and that of others, going.” She rightly noted that this could be seen as presuming to speak…
Author: Timothy Yu
Talk about paranoia: yesterday I was worried about where Ron Silliman had gotten to. Today I tune in to find that he’s talking about me again… We’re back to the topic of my first post, where I described the style of Silliman’s blog as “aggressively public and authoritative” and suggested that it’s “given the poetry blog-sphere a center.” It’s that…
Stephanie notes today that prayer has always struck her as “inherently elitist,” as when you pray for a particular person (as opposed to all sick people) to get well. I think my favorite example of this particular behavior is when sports teams pray before competitions. I also share her paranoia about Ron Silliman’s silence today…
Thanks to Kasey Mohammad and Josh Corey for their responses to my post on the Poetry Project Newsletter forum. I think Kasey’s entirely right to say that those poets who feel most hurt by Silliman and Hejinian’s comments aren’t the ones who are really in need of such criticism. I also think he’s right to warn against a “dogmatic reverence”…
Mea culpa: I’m the mysterious back-channeling Bay Area blogger quoted in Ron Silliman’s blog, sparking further hand-wringing about kids today. More precisely: “the problem of younger poets in particular lacking much sense of recent literary history.” By the time this reached Jonathan Mayhew it was “younger poets in S.F. no longer know who Ron Silliman is” (certainly not what I…
I was interested to see Ron Silliman’s post Friday on the most recent issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter, and on how the current war might—might—provide the “historical moment” of politicization that he and Lyn Hejinian found lacking for younger writers (or so the quotes in PPN suggested). Silliman notes that the remarkable outpouring of protest in the first days…
Jim Behrle is on the move again. Don’t know how we’re supposed to keep up with this guy.
At a time when many people are proclaiming the Poetics list a fossil (and one friend who admitted that he’s started deleting the digests *without reading them*–shocking), I’ve just resubscribed to it, after a hiatus of, oh, about five years. I quit the last time because unread digests were piling up to such a degree that they crashed my account.…
A clever piece by Geoff Nunberg on NPR this afternoon, observing that the pronunciation of “Iraq” as “eye-rack” (as opposed to, say, “ear-aak”) by certain administration officials was a calculated “faux-Bubba” gesture, in line with pronunciations like “A-rab” or “I-talian.” Or, for that matter, “nyu-cle-ar.” I remember in high school doing a report on the development of the atomic bomb,…
The blogverse responds… My remarks on the essayistic style of Ron Silliman’s blog (well, actually, my quoting of Stephanie’s remark that the essays could all have been written in 1987 and are being released one by one) drew a response from Silliman himself, who tells us that, alas, his posts are written at best a day or two in advance.…