I am not a number!

I was reading Ron Silliman's post, which drew parallels between Flarf and Conceptual Poetry and Projective Verse and the New York School, and it made me feel a wee bit shadowed. It seems that interest in a certain poet or certain poetry is perpetuated only through the use of labels. We find a figure or a group of figures who are doing vaguely similar things, and then we name them, and then we have a box to put them in, and we spend the succeeding years decorating that box with glyphs and emblems without ever opening the box to check that what's inside hasn't rotted, or transformed, or even drilled a hole in the bottom of the box to make its escape. Worse still, poets or groups of poets that can't fit inside boxes (let's say because they're too busy in Zorbs) may find someone writing notes on the insides of their palms, or perhaps asking them to hold still while they scrawl on their foreheads, but the lack of boxing leads to exposure to the sun, which is often so bright as to obscure view of the poet(s) completely. There is a wall-building brutality to the appreciation of radical, experimental, linguistically innovative, avant-garde, call it what you will - all labels, all fundamentally useless - that is fermented within the structures and debates of academe. It is the result of a devious pragmatism that allows poets, whose subtle differences are often more important than the overarching themes of their work, to be bracketed and straitjacketed by terms that are as useful as empty boxes. Those poets who don't find a space inside these boxes (and there are poets who actively attempt to climb into them) are often left out in the wasteland. Who has time, when there are so many poets, to consider them one by one? As for the poets who build boxes for themselves to climb into, that's their prerogative, but spending that time writing poetry might be more worthwhile. Labels fray, words change.

- Alex

Comments

[Cara]

(ooops on previous "comment" with no comment...

Right on!

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