tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post116778820234017572..comments2023-11-05T01:31:14.049-08:00Comments on ASTHMABOY: Questions for the new yearUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168878269164905282007-01-15T08:24:00.000-08:002007-01-15T08:24:00.000-08:00To quote zw: "besides Nichol, who had probably the...To quote zw: "besides Nichol, who had probably the good fortune of dying young"<BR/><BR/>Barrie Nichol was a dear friend of mine, and had he lived he would have further enriched our lives as a person and an artist.<BR/><BR/>I take offense at the insensitive remark.melmothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14508714304571777745noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168641886289382742007-01-12T14:44:00.000-08:002007-01-12T14:44:00.000-08:00Sharon:To compare my challenging you on issues of ...Sharon:<BR/><BR/>To compare my challenging you on issues of journalism or criticism (as I did elsewhere, for those not familiar with her references) to someone expressing pleasure that someone else died young, or to someone posting your personal info in a public place (which is disgraceful) ... well, to me that's absurd. And manipulative.<BR/><BR/>Zach:<BR/><BR/>bpNichol was a friend of mine. I wept off and on for days when he died. His writing didn't always interest me, but he was consistently one of the most generous, encouraging, good-humoured, decent people I've ever met. If you think that Poetry is more important than a person's life, I think that is pathetic.<BR/><BR/>StuRazovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168627605853431942007-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:002007-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00==================================hell,ojust to be...==================================<BR/><BR/>hell,o<BR/><BR/>just to be very clear, i am not jack.<BR/><BR/>gustave m.<BR/><BR/>==================================Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168579072533190162007-01-11T21:17:00.000-08:002007-01-11T21:17:00.000-08:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Razovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168577507062209492007-01-11T20:51:00.000-08:002007-01-11T20:51:00.000-08:00It's true that Avison was much better in her young...It's true that Avison was much better in her younger days. However, I would prefer Nichol any day. Nichol had a real sense of humour that I find regrettably lacking in both the "avant-garde" and the "not avant-garde" --- far too many writers fall prey to the delusion that one must be serious at all times in order to produce quality work. Jason Christie and Ryan Fitzpatrick are two very clever writers who are excellent at being smart and fun while still being intelligent. And Christie's i-Robot book is a great book to read if one is perhaps interested in the "experimental" but intimidated by the apparent inaccessibility of it (though I would never say "experimental = inaccessible" that is nonetheless the stereotype --- Christie's i-Robot book is incredibly fun and accessible, however).<BR/><BR/>I believe that the songs of Def Leppard are definitely poetry.Jonathan Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07658778404579677051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168573868007814332007-01-11T19:51:00.000-08:002007-01-11T19:51:00.000-08:00Dear people,I know you're all writers, and maybe I...Dear people,<BR/><BR/>I know you're all writers, and maybe I'm stating the obvious, but<BR/><BR/>words mean things.<BR/><BR/>If you get caught up in your own rhetoric and find yourself saying nasty things like someone had "the good fortune to die young," you CAN'T fall back the following defences:<BR/><BR/>1.It was just thoughtful criticism. Are you against thoughtful criticism?<BR/>2.The comment was made in the spirit of art.<BR/>3.I don't want to be boring.<BR/>4.I got carried away -- gee, doesn't it show how much I care about this debate?<BR/>5. Aren't I quite a curmudgeon? Poor me. Please feel sorry for my tortured soul. I am such a genius, but can't figure out to carry on a conversation. The world is an unfair place, so maybe you should just worship me.<BR/><BR/>I've had the recent experience of having my home address posted on one of Toronto's busiest websites, with a call to "trash" my house. Boy, that guy must have really felt passionate about the issue at hand. What a hero.<BR/><BR/>I'd really prefer people to be boring rather than act aggressively. Actually, aggressive behaviour IS boring. <BR/><BR/>Love,<BR/>Sharon HarrisI Love Youhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14011138936571387065noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168568988773693962007-01-11T18:29:00.000-08:002007-01-11T18:29:00.000-08:00Zach, you wrote:"Funny, hard to think of any other...Zach, you wrote:<BR/><BR/>"Funny, hard to think of any others, besides Nichol, who had probably the good fortune of dying young"<BR/><BR/>What exactly is that supposed to mean?<BR/><BR/>StuRazovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168564231700420092007-01-11T17:10:00.000-08:002007-01-11T17:10:00.000-08:00Thinking about it further, I mentioned Bowering an...Thinking about it further, I mentioned Bowering and Davey because I was looking for poets roughly of the same vintage as Van Toorn, but who followed the stream of the New Americans. Funny, hard to think of any others, besides Nichol, who had probably the good fortune of dying young, who haven't either outright disappeared, drifted into obscurity (e.g. Victor Coleman), or who submerged and reappeared doing work completely different, such as Wayne Clifford. I've had a number of conversations with Wayne about this sort of thing actually. He was a collaborator of Nichol's back in the day and was CH's first acquistions editor. But he had a revelation one night how empty, pointless, dead-end a deconstructivist approach to poetry was and quit writing for several years. When he started again, it was in rhyme and metre, mostly sonnets, but not in any dusty Victorian way, in a way very much informed by his quirky contemporaneity. He was kind of reborn as a poet and is doing his part in turning over the compost heap of verse technique. He's stayed true to the spirit of innovation, which has basically always been that of renovation, whereas so many others of his generation seem to have calcified into pseudo-experimental habit-tics. Anyone read Davey's <I>Back to the War</I>? Don't bother.<BR/><BR/>Speaking of Nichol, Jonathan Ball, I don't know if you're aware of it, but he and Avison had a very fruitful artistic friendship. I'm not a huge Avison fan either--the god-y stuff always brings me up short--but she could be wildly innovative, particularly in her syntax. There's not much orthodoxy in her prosody, if you're paying attention.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168563209636505692007-01-11T16:53:00.000-08:002007-01-11T16:53:00.000-08:00Perhaps "granddaddies" would've been more apposite...Perhaps "granddaddies" would've been more apposite... Given the love-in for Davey at UWO, central Canada's high seat of high theory, a couple of years ago, I'd say his standing's still pretty, well, high. Either way, those two get a lot of press for the way they changed Canadian poetry, whereas a poet like Van Toorn, who leaves them in the dust, has been rather widely ignored.<BR/><BR/>And c'mon, that was a funny line in the essay. You left out the part about him being like a feather pillow who "bears the marks of the last theory that sat on him." It's mock gentility; it's a joke. Lighten up, man.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168560603602115992007-01-11T16:10:00.000-08:002007-01-11T16:10:00.000-08:00Zach --Alrighty, on the subject of the Hilder bann...Zach --<BR/><BR/>Alrighty, on the subject of the Hilder banner, after reflecting on Starnino's essay during this debate, I'll withdraw the charge of "dishonesty." I'll stick with sloppy, perhaps as a result of his being so eager to piss on his hydrant and get around to calling Mark Truscott "weak-minded."<BR/><BR/>As for your calling George Bowering and Frank Davey "heroes of the avant-garde" ... wow. I'd say not even heroes of the Canadian avant-garde.<BR/><BR/>In the spirit of the thing,<BR/><BR/>StuRazovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168551097037304202007-01-11T13:31:00.000-08:002007-01-11T13:31:00.000-08:00Antoine, c'est correcte; j'imagine que votre angla...Antoine, c'est correcte; j'imagine que votre anglais est plus bon que le français de nous autres.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168549370965192232007-01-11T13:02:00.000-08:002007-01-11T13:02:00.000-08:00Stuart, I know your comment's gone now, but I woul...Stuart, I know your comment's gone now, but I would just say that any piece of writing is open to interpretation and writing about writing is open to levels of interpretation. I don't disagree that Carmine was unclear and perhaps "sloppy" in making his point about Hilder, but this is a markedly different thing from being "dishonest." Which is bosh, because his argument had nothing to gain from dishonesty; clearly you didn't need to be convinced that the text on the banners wasn't poetry.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168549090087683812007-01-11T12:58:00.000-08:002007-01-11T12:58:00.000-08:00Mark, your question is a very good one and a compl...Mark, your question is a very good one and a complicated one, so the answer must likewise be elaborate.<BR/><BR/>First of all, a distinction. When it comes to poetry, there are a couple of basic umbrella meanings. One of these is encapsulated by statements such as Mill's and those made by Aristotle, Sidney and very recently by Robert Bringhurst in his new collection of lectures. According to this view, poetry is a broad state of manufactured or evolved excellence/beauty/sublimity/achievement (recall Hopkins' "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing") and it can be attained in all fields of endeavour and might even be seen to exist in natural phenomena.<BR/><BR/>Secondly, there is poetry as literary genre. At one point, this might have been more or less coterminous with metrical verse, tho even the most ancient of critics insist that this is not necessarily so. So let's just say it's "literary writing." We can include the non-fiction of Nietzsche, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the novels of Nabokov, the short stories of Kafka, etc., etc. But we exclude the novels of Grisham, the poems of Maya Angelou, the song lyrics of Def Leppard, etc. etc. There's of course a shitload of grey area in between, but that's where critics, and arguments like this one, come in, and this is where it gets fun from time to time.<BR/><BR/>For my purposes as a critic, I limit myself almost exclusively to commenting on the written word--and within that limitation, I have also mostly restricted myself to commenting on poems (prose or verse) or to prose related to poems and the writers of poems. I do this for a few reasons. One is that poetry qua genre is the artform I know the most about; I don't have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to identify and delineate poetry in the fields of, say, painting or dance. I'm pretty much an ignoramus when it comes to other artforms and am hard pressed to be more sophisticated in talking about them than "I know what I like." I am somewhat more qualified to talk about narrative prose fiction, but I generally don't because a)I'm a slow-reader and it takes a lot longer to read a novel I don't like than a book of poems I don't like; b)because of reason "a)" I don't read a whole lot of contemporary fiction, so can't talk knowledgeably about the context in which a given novel appears; c)I like to leave some areas of my reading for pleasure only, which is difficult to do when you're engaged in minute critical examinations; and d)not many people ask me to review fiction, and most of the reviews and essays I write are written because someone's asked me to do it. My "project" (a word I dislike intensely because it belies the piecemeal, scattershot way I go about things and suggests some kind of pre-meditation that doesn't really exist) is largely journalistic; the only reviews I turn down, generally, are those in which I have too close a relationship with the author in question to read the book without the interference of my personal, off-page knowledge of the person who wrote it. I review books for pin money and to keep myself abreast of what's going on out there. When I have a choice of which books to review, I tend to steer clear of ones that I think I'd find dull. But one never knows until one actually reads the book.<BR/><BR/>Now, some might say that I don't have the requisite knowledge and vocabulary to comment on "difficult" or "experimental" poetry. But I say this is bogus. If it's words on the page and it calls itself poetry, then it is not, generically, different from anything else that is words on the page and calls itself poetry and I will read it as such and respond to it as such. I've read avant-garde poetry, I've studied avant-garde poetry and I've read criticism of avant-garde poetry. Ultimately, how it relates to other avant-garde poetry is irrelevant and anthologies like S&S do little more than build walls around a ghetto. How it relates to poetry as a genre more broadly is the question. We don't continue to read Pound and Eliot, Woolf and Joyce, Kafka and Hopkins, Borges and Celan, because they were experimental. We continue to read them because of the originality and artistic force of their books, the keenness of their minds, the indelible imprint they've left on the literary landscape.<BR/><BR/>While I would never argue that metrical verse and/or regular structures of alliteration or rhyme are necessary preconditions for poetry, nor that their presence is any kind of guarantee of poetry, I find that most writing that displays little or no awareness of the broad range of established prosodic techniques is, shall we say, significantly less than accomplished. It's like trying to build a house with trees and scrap iron for materials and a screwdriver for tools. There's a maxim of Lao Tze's that goes something like, "He who innovates while ignorant of the constant is lost." Peter Van Toorn quotes it as the preface to a poem in <I>Mountain Tea</I>. Van Toorn, to my mind, is an infinitely more innovative and inventive poet than such heroes of the avant-garde as George Bowering and Frank Davey, and it's largely because he has a more sophisticated understanding of what true innovation entails. True innovation tends to be the product of eccentric individuals with genius -level talent. It doesn't happen in communities and schools. The only thing that can be reliably perpetrated in communities and schools is convention. And the point that Carmine is making about S&S, I think, is that a lot of it is conventionally innovative. I don't really have a strong opinion on this question. I have only read excerpts of the book and tend to steer clear of anything that announces itself as "experimental" or "innovative" or "avant-garde" because I find such self-styling pretentious and have rarely found what I feel is genuine art in the company of pretentiousness. Similarly, I am averse to the preciousness of little bardlings of the inconsequential who go around calling themselves poets and having meetings in which they affirm to each other that yes, indeed, we are poets and hear us mewl. Leonard Cohen had it right in a recent interview when he said that he doesn't call himself a poet because that's for someone else to determine. I've long felt the same way.<BR/><BR/>No, I'm not particularly interested in drawing genre boundaries. But as a critic, I respond to what I read in an evaluative way. Everything I read as a poem in a book, whether it's a free-verse lyric, a metred sonnet, or a slogan on a banner affixed to an overpass, has to answer the question, "Is this poetry? If so, how and why? If not, how and why not?" I do give marks for perceived effort. If someone is trying to make a poem, some credit is due. But if it seems to me that someone is merely taking the idea of poetry apart and displaying one piece or another as a poem in and of itself, I lose patience. It's too easy, there's too little ventured and even when one "does the work," there's way too little payoff. This is what irked me about, for example, Brian Joseph Davis' <I>Portable Altamont</I>: not that it wasn't poetry, but that it wasn't even trying to be poetry, that it pissed all over the very idea of poetry (in a way far less interesting than say Pietro Aretino, Villon, Rochester or Bukowski have) and that it was every bit as formulaic as a potboiler novel--only less work to assemble--and that it was, in the end, a very boring book. Naturally, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I don't <I>want</I> everyone to agree with me. That would be dull, and dullness is the only thing I'm dogmatically opposed to.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168542646176939302007-01-11T11:10:00.000-08:002007-01-11T11:10:00.000-08:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Razovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168540675951253752007-01-11T10:37:00.000-08:002007-01-11T10:37:00.000-08:00forgive the typos: english is not my first languag...forgive the typos: english is not my first language.Antoine Boisclairhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04272400055406123023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168540391361076022007-01-11T10:33:00.000-08:002007-01-11T10:33:00.000-08:00Razovsky, are you for real? I'll repeat. The Starn...Razovsky, are you for real? I'll repeat. The Starnino's question was on what basis THE EDITORS OF THE ANTHOLOGY considered hilder's photograph a poem. The sentence is as follows "It is so unreasonable to know why James Hilder's use of a photograph earns the right to be called a poem?" AND IN CONTEXT it clearly wasn't not an open question -- ie. can photographs be poems -- but directed to the intentionality of the editorial policy: why makes THIS photograph, Hilder's photograph a poem.<BR/><BR/>There is a difference, and in explaining it, permit me to say, I am attacking your ARGUMENT and not attacking you. <BR/><BR/>What is actually "tiresome," Jon, is how completely incapable the group of you are in taking responsibility for your destinies. You are represented in poorly-assembled anthologies, are defended by poets who are very poor apologists for your ideas and are psychologically unable to close the gap between your craving to be read and your disdain for those who don't do it "properly."Antoine Boisclairhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04272400055406123023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168537606978514182007-01-11T09:46:00.000-08:002007-01-11T09:46:00.000-08:00Parrish does come out "on top" in a sense, but per...Parrish does come out "on top" in a sense, but perhaps more because Starnino simply does not know what he is talking about in reference to specific poems. My favourite part of the Parrish article:<BR/><BR/>"Starnino’s vision of this group of poets and editors as a unified vanguard is a laughable myth. The only thing that this bunch of poets can agree on, perhaps, is their disregard for Starnino. But not because they don’t want a debate. They’d just like a new debate, (preferably with someone who has taken the time to properly read the work.) The “how dare you call that poetry” question is getting tiresome"Jonathan Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07658778404579677051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168537386166236332007-01-11T09:43:00.000-08:002007-01-11T09:43:00.000-08:00Antoine --Easier to attack me than actually take o...Antoine --<BR/><BR/>Easier to attack me than actually take on my arguments, I guess, eh?<BR/><BR/>Starnino did not question how "such a photograph" could be a poem ("such a photograph" would imply that he explained that the photograph depicted a banner containing text). He questioned how "a photograph" could be called a poem.<BR/><BR/>Language is important: "such a photograph" is entirely different from "a photograph." In defending Starnino, both you and Zach seem to be evolving his original words into something far more than the sloppy volley they were.<BR/><BR/>I think your own arguments are interesting and valid; but they're not Starnino's.<BR/><BR/>StuRazovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168537043659497292007-01-11T09:37:00.000-08:002007-01-11T09:37:00.000-08:00you're right Stu, it's not necessary to "rabidly a...you're right Stu, it's not necessary to "rabidly attack" things... I am simply prone to making such grandiose claims. though i do feel that it's more fruitful to engage in critical debate than to pretend that "everyone can get along." certainly, everyone CAN get along, but that would be boring. i do share Jon's oft-repeated frustration with the seemingly fruitless division in Canadian letters between the "lyric" and the "avant-garde" .... neither of which ACTUALLY constitutes a coherent movement and both of which contains their fair share of good and bad poets. I should also mention that my personal tastes are more partial to the so-called "avant-garde" ... I would rather read a book by Jon Paul Fiorentino or Christian Bok than one by, I don't know, George Elliott Clarke or Margaret Avison any day. Also, for the record, I quite enjoyed both Shift & Switch and Post-Prairie, though as (I think) Jon implied somewhere up above, they contain their hits and their misses. I was also relatively unimpressed with BOTH Starnino and Parrish. I don't think Starnino can read closely where the "avant-garde" is concerned, though he may be a good close reader of other poems, and I think Parrish spent too much time defending experimental poetry in terms of what constitutes a poem and not enough time actually examining the language of the poems and their particular effects. I was somewhat disappointed with the introductions to Shift & Switch as well, especially when beaulieu's own book (Fractal Economies) contains such a lucid and intelligent essay on concrete poetry, and in many respects provides an excellent model for people who insist that "such poems" NEED such introductions/afterwords. (I don't necessarily believe that they do, but beaulieu provides an excellent afterword in any case.)Jonathan Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07658778404579677051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168531549218467552007-01-11T08:05:00.000-08:002007-01-11T08:05:00.000-08:00You're right, ZW. I apologize about the "circle je...You're right, ZW. I apologize about the "circle jerk" comment. I am after all a guest here, and some good manners is in order. <BR/><BR/>Starnino did NOT "slag" the Hilder photograph "on the basis that it was a photograph". He very CLEARlY asked what was the basis upon which such a photograph, offered up in poetry anthology, was to be considered a poem. His larger point was that the introductions were absolutely useless in helping us read work that seemed to need some help in being properly read. To put this another way: if you have an anthology of poems that purports to radically break exisiting rules to unforeseen results , then it might not be a bad idea to point out what the rules being broken are, why they deserve to be broken, and why the result needs to be respected as literature. The anthology, as Starnino pointed out, completely failed to do this. And as ZW has pointed out, he's not the only one to say so.<BR/><BR/>Razovsky it's usually not a good idea to attack a critic, known for his close readings, in such a slipshod manner. You're obviously not very good at this sort of polemic (which is fine, not everyone is), though it does explain -- to me at least -- why you're so sentimentally attached to Parrish's very poor reply.Antoine Boisclairhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04272400055406123023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168530225025727832007-01-11T07:43:00.000-08:002007-01-11T07:43:00.000-08:00Antoine & Zach:You have taken on Hilder's piece in...Antoine & Zach:<BR/><BR/>You have taken on Hilder's piece in a way that Carmine didn't. At least you acknowledge there is text involved, and that perhaps it is documentation, before you go on to legimately question whether it's any good or whether it's even poetry. Starnino didn't bother. He just slagged it on the basis that it was a photograph.<BR/><BR/>Antoine:<BR/><BR/>I wasn't offended by the use of the word "Christian." I just think it's a pretty loaded word to use, as it evokes Christian morality and standards. It is *not* the same as saying "good guy," as Zach suggests.<BR/><BR/>Zach:<BR/><BR/>While I like the idea of putting thought-provoking text in unexpected public places, I don't think Hilder's piece is a poem. I think it's an interest art intervention, though.<BR/><BR/>Jonathan:<BR/><BR/>Why is it necessary to "rabidly attack" art that you don't like? It seems like a George W. Bush way to approach things.<BR/><BR/>StuRazovskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204691525944577597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168529638637126712007-01-11T07:33:00.000-08:002007-01-11T07:33:00.000-08:00Mr. Ball,You might be a "relative nobody," but I l...Mr. Ball,<BR/><BR/>You might be a "relative nobody," but I like the cut of your jib. For the record, I wouldn't disagree with JSMill in the least; his statement echoes previous such anti-definitions by no less luminous minds than Aristotle and Sir Philip Sidney. I'm not arguing that text on a banner can't be a poem, just taking your dislike for Hilder's banners one step further and saying that they, specifically, are not poetry, even if he and the editors of the antho call them poems. Just as poetry can inhere in powerful prose and in beautiful, challenging visual art (including some grafitti, sure) and architecture, in music and human movement, and in the forms of nature for that matter, as Robert Bringhurst argues eloquently and as Richard Dawkins argues implicitly--just as it can be in all these things, poetry is not necessarily inherent in every piece of text that calls itself a poem, whether that text is a turgid piece of pomo theory-speak or a limp piece of lyrical vomit, a sonnet or a novel. In fact, it is inherent, to my eye and ear, in very few of such texts. Carmine isn't arguing that avant-garde methods are always wrong, he's saying that the stuff on offer in S&S is disappointing--and he's not the only person to say so. He included Christian Bok in The New Canon and subsequently indicated in an interview that if he were putting the book together now, he'd seriously consider including Lisa Robertson. This isn't someone who has closed his ears to "experimental poetry"; it's someone who isn't prepared to buy every piece of experimental self-congratulation published. His criticism of avant-garde poets no more constitutes an attack on everything avant-garde than his criticism of "good-enough" Canadian lyrics constitutes an attack on lyricism writ large. Just as JPF and others are saying he should "do the work," he's saying the poets in S&S haven't "done the work." And Parrish unwittingly agrees with him when she says that "these are very old questions" and invokes Duchamp's urinal as defense for Hilder's genre-challenging highway slogans. But Duchamp's urinal was an unrepeatable stunt (if it had any fructifying possibility it would only be in the form of someone walking up to it, unzipping, and relieving himself). Dada was a dead end, which he realized (hence his retreat into chess), but his idolaters fail to acknowledge.<BR/><BR/>The work in Stuart's <I>Surreal Estate</I>, by contrast, suggests that surrealism is a far more fertile field for continued experimentation. I say this because not much of the poetry I've read in it seems like repetitions of the original surrealists. There's influence at work, not just imitation; poetry, not just the working out of a theory or three.<BR/><BR/>Antoine, after defending your plea for mutual tolerance, I'm disappointed by the cheapshot about the "smug circle-jerk blog." Those who have pled for keeping it above the belt have the right idea, so could you please, um, turn the other cheek? We're on the verge of salvaging a mud-slinging fest and having some fruitful discussion here.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168526423013748802007-01-11T06:40:00.000-08:002007-01-11T06:40:00.000-08:00"Christian" was a figure of speech. I'm very sorry..."Christian" was a figure of speech. I'm very sorry if I offended anyone (though a smug circle-jerk blog is the last place I'd think to find that sort of pro-secular sensitivity). Anyhow my plea was, as ZW suggests, for mutual tolerance. <BR/><BR/>I've looked at the S&S anthology and there's very little to suggest that Hilder photographs were documenting the unorthodox publication and dissemination of a poem. It seemed that the banner text (which weren't always the easiest things to spot) were background details for a photograph that was itself being offered up as a poem. Starnino got it wrong, obviously, though surely the difficulty of solving that sort of puzzle is the lesson here rather than Starnino's "dishonesty".Antoine Boisclairhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04272400055406123023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168491402704098322007-01-10T20:56:00.001-08:002007-01-10T20:56:00.001-08:00graffiti also being (generally) uninteresting.graffiti also being (generally) uninteresting.Jonathan Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07658778404579677051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10093112.post-1168491370188290082007-01-10T20:56:00.000-08:002007-01-10T20:56:00.000-08:00I should also add that I was very disappointed wit...I should also add that I was very disappointed with the pieces by Hilder... certainly, it is poetry. but it is poetry that is not particularly interesting, and technically less impressive than graffiti.Jonathan Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07658778404579677051noreply@blogger.com