Silliman's Monday Morning Quarterbacking

The very male & macho all-American activity referred to in the title seems to underlie much of Ron Silliman’s musings on his blog. Thus on 12 June he proposes a longish disquisition on the Donald Allen anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960 — in this case Monday morning quarterbacking not one day after the fact, but 47 years later: an exercise, in his case, just as sterile as that performed in the world of football fans, and just as much bent to show off superior insight and knowledge when it is of course only a post facto regurgitation of commonplaces.

But what is more noxious in this case is that Silliman uses the occasion to yet again and in a rather underhanded way (via footnote) vent his dislike of volume 2 of Jerome Rothenberg’s and my POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM anthology. So that now, while in Paris, without my books around and very pleasantly busy with other more creative occupations, it becomes necessary to waste time and yet again return to this and try to set the facts straight. For it is finally a matter of facts — as that is what Silliman, who on the surface seems to advance such simple and straight-forward factional “insights,” gets wrong, willfully so, I’d like to suggest, given that he could have checked the facts rather than hide his subjective dislike of our work behind partial facts, curtailed narratives and trumped up analysis.

He gets to vent his anger this time in a footnote that he appends to Rothenberg’s name in a sentence that criticizes Donald Allen for not including certain writers: “Notably missing are non- or anti-academic poets who don’t come directly out of the Pound-Williams tradition, including Bern Porter, Bob Brown, Jackson Mac Low & Jerome Rothenberg.” This leads to the footnote which claims: “Thus one might read the debacle of Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, which embarrassingly under-represents the New American Poetry and its participants, as simply a matter of “payback” several decades later.”

The only embarrassing debacle here is Ron Silliman’s mauvaise foi & distortion of easily ascertainable facts:

1) There is strictly no reason why Jerome Rothenberg would want to consider ‘payback’ (against whom, by the way? Donald Allen??? All of the New American Poets?????) when in 1996/1997 he and I put together M2. (Silliman had to carefully gommer, wipe out, the fact that the book was compiled by JR and myself as that would obviously invalidate his one-man revenge theory.) For indeed, JR’s work was taken into Donald Allen’s revised New American Poetry (The Postmoderns), which came out in 1982, sixteen years prior to M2, and he had by then close and interactive connections to many of the core “new American poets.” Accordingly there is absolutely no ground for Silliman’s bad faith “speculation”: it is a ridiculous underhanded claim with no basis in fact.

2) Silliman’s footnote-claim that M2 “embarrassingly under-represents the new American Poetry and its participants” is just as ludicrous. In fact, both Jerry and I would argue that the NAP poets are part of an overrepresentation, if anything, of the American part of the poetry of that period when viewed on a worldwide basis. Furthermore JR’s own take on the Postmoderns (in a review in Sulfur) took Allen and Butterick to task for their failure, if that’s what it was, to acknowledge, among other post-1960 groupings, the Language Poets of whom Silliman was clearly a part and was several times so cited.

Silliman should know the obvious strictures and limitations of anthologies as he himself compiled such a gathering. All anthologies, by their very nature, are based on exclusion, even those animated by the desire to be most inclusive. One can, for example, easily show that his anthology, In the American Tree, is about as exclusive as it gets, in defiance of the claims made by the book’s very title: what kind of “America(n)” is he talking about? One that “includes” only the United States and thus excludes Canada to the North and every country south of the US border with Mexico? At best a careless use of a loaded title word not worthy of someone who, as a poet with long-standing claims to radical political engagements, should know better; at worst a weird kind of blind patriotic hegemonic arrogance by which the use of the word “America” begins to resemble the know-nuttin nationalism the cultural commissars of the Bush/Cheney clans would propose, if they bothered to have cultural commissars.

There is clearly something more here than meets the eye, yet one is really at a loss to figure what it is. But the reader of Silliman and of Silliman’s blog should be aware that much of what gets written there appears with a startling disregard for fact and at the service of whatever phantom demons he may have in mind. If that’s the case in this instance, one can only suspect that it’s the case in other instances as well.

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8 Responses

  1. Dale Smith says:

    PIerre, so glad you wrote this. RS needs to deal with his snide, innervating aggression in more creative ways. A therapist maybe? Medication?

    I simply can’t read him anymore. Everything from his lame attempts to categorize things (SoQ / post-avant) to his strategies of ad hominem character assassinations damage his ethos tremendously. He’s simply no longer (if ever?) a trustworthy voice. Intervention anyone? “Poets in Need,” where are you?

    I see him now as a sort of Ezra Pound figure of the Langpo generation, descending into knee-jerk reactionary freakiness. At least Pound had imagination.

    Dale

  2. Ron says:

    Actually, your second bullet confirms what I was saying in that footnote, now, doesn’t it?

  3. Christopher says:

    Well said, Pierre. Quite glad you decided to respond.

  4. Murat says:

    That Ron’s view of poetry has been totally narrow and basically an attempt at canon building has been clear to me for years. I was not shy about expression this opinion in many occasions.

    But the same criticism can be made about the Milennium volume. As the word “American” in Ron’s title excludes Canada and countries south of the United States, the word “Milennium” (with historical and all encompassing connotations) excludes many literatures. Since my intimate knowledge is in Turkish, I can say for a fact that it happened in that case. Outside the old chestnut Nazim Hikmet, Milennium had no intention to include any other Turkish poets despite my repeated attempts to make both Jerome and Pierre aware of the existance of a power poetic movement in Turkish during that time. The poet Ece Ayhan was finally included because, coincedentally, his “A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies” was published by Sun and Moon Press during the final stages of editing the Milennium. Douglas Messerli, from what I understand, directly contacted you. The poet Orhan Veli was excluded because, in Pierre’s words, “Veli was high-modern and not post-modern,” whatever that may mean.

    Turkish poets like Seyhan Erozçelik, Lale Müldür, Sami Baydar, Ahmet Güntan, etc., represent the very essence of the ethos at the beginning of 21rst century (the beginning of “The Milennium), that historical moment when many borders are broken and a titanic movement starts to occur among cultures. All Jerome and Pierre had to do was to take an “outsider’s” words seriously and spend some effort and read a few text they were not familiar with.I tried to bring out this point at the beginning of my essay, “A Godless Sufism: Thought on 20th Century Turkish Poetry.”

    As Pierre rightly claims, Ron suffers from a total American/Language School centrism, The Millenium Anthology suffers from a Euro-centrism, particularly in its determination of poetic value. While Jerome and Pierre’s approach is infinitely more open-minded, it still suffers from an implicit, innate Euro-centricism, an attitude absolutely inadequate to the realities of our time. All one has to do is to travel outside Europe, particularly in asia, for a while to see that.

    Ciao,

    Murat

  5. John Schertzer says:

    Yes, over-rep of NAP for sure, and under-rep of others. How can you have Mayakovsky without Pasternack, and where’s Zanzotto, jst as a for instance?

    On the other hand there’s enuf Zzzz… American poets who are barely minor variations of other better marketed (instead of “greater”) ones.

    Anyway, this isn’t really a complaint, more an agreement, since anth’s can only be so inclusively well mapped.

    peece,
    JS

  6. John says:

    With all due respect, Ron’s trippin’ if he thinks your second bullet confirms his point.

    Very strange — the idea that Rothenberg would punish poets for having been chosen by someone who ignored him at the time, and that you would go along with it, wittingly or no . . . Bizarre all the way around — and not just bizarre, but an accusation of bad character against Rothenberg, with no evidence, and a bizarre supposition — wow.

    Thanks, by the way, for both volumes of PftM. I enjoy them both very much.

  7. Ian Keenan says:

    The Poem for the Millenium is a favorite book of mine and I immediately protested his exaggerated footnote, mindful of the spat from a while back. I agree with Ron that Spicer and perhaps Welsh, Whalen, and Koch are glaring omissions in the second volume, but think that everyone would be better off by focusing on the matter at hand rather than making up payback scenarios or criticizing other people’s integrity. I don’t agree that more Americans should have been in the anthology.

    Ron did not make a factual error in his comments, because Ron doesn’t make factual errors very often (maybe once a year in about 200 essays). Since you have shared with everyone your suspicions about the factual basis of Ron’s essays, Pierre, I can tell you that your suspicions are unwarranted because a number of regular readers are ready to note any factual errors and they don’t occur.

    If you read someone associating the Yale Anthology of French Poetry with Le Pen for its use of the word French, you’d think it was idiotic, wouldn’t you? That’s how I read your paragraph associating In the American Tree with Bush.

  8. Johannes says:

    While Pierre’s Bush statement is perhaps self-consciously inflammatory, it does point out something of importance: Ron is totally incapable of reading outside of the boundaries of the US (because the second he does so, his little binaries and categories break down) and that’s not an apolitical stance. That’s very much a reflection a poet who’s not engaged with literature from other languages. And such politics of provincialism become rather problematic when it comes from a poet of the US Empire.

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