Silliman Vomit

I was going to "blog" about this, but John Latta got there first (thanks):

(Somewhere in the brain-box, in some mouse-turd’d corner reserved for the mealiest-mouth’d scurrilities, is this: “The whole notion of the poet as a solitary practitioner—the splendid isolato—is so out of touch with reality as to be bizarre. Sure there are poets who eschew the companionship of their peers—but there is a reason for it. These are poets with issues.” La Silliman’s insinuating that individualism is something of an aberrance, even—load’d word, “issues”—a mental illness. Note, too, how he blatantly uses the death of one individual, Victoria Rathbun—“a fine young poet who hung with the Actualists in the late 1970s”—in a cynical attempt to bolster—“I don’t know why Victoria Rathbun didn’t publish more in other post-Actualist contexts,” he says, mock-innocently, though the answer (she somehow fail’d at “the phenomenon of groupness”) is at the ready—another argument for careerist groupuscular formation. The sign of how little hoot Silliman gives to poetry itself: there is no Rathbun poem provided, she’s a mere marker in a sociological argument, mere marker in a theory of “groupness.” Silliman himself’s clearly become a casualty of trademark Sillimanick rhetorical bludgeoning, too many hours logged marketing is what produces a line like: “the fate of poetry in a managerial society such as the United States.” Gone is any sense of how individual perception might battle the coveys (convoys) of mere opinion-mongers, or how poetry’s (and a poet’s) aim ought be, wholly, yea recklessly, to counter the speciousness of the Doxa, to defeat the managers by extravagance, rebuttal, daring, jest, and scorn. And exile. What Silliman proposes is precisely the opposite: managerial poetry for a managerial society.)