Language writing

This week I'm reading Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman. Perelman's _The Marginalization of Poetry_ (1996)--only the first two chapters, so far--is the key text. Silliman's response (1997) is an add-on to provoke a bit more thought from me. Both Perelman and Silliman write against binary thinking (the either/or), and both are more or less effectively trapped in their own binary thinking. Silliman points out Perelman's caught up in the academic/critical context with his Princeton U. Press book, and then Silliman sets out to describe what might have been a book for _poets_ instead of academicians.

Still, though, Silliman does articulate clearly what he sees as the problem with Perelman's approach. Silliman uses Grenier's _Sentences_ and other writings to show how total the focus/import of language writing is on _presence_ and how central to achieving _presence_ is the absence of meaning, the absence of _aboutness_ and _value_. And _presence_ is what Benjamin's _aura_ is.

Some names: Ron Silliman, Ann Lauterbach, Juliana Spahr, Steve Evans, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Spicer,

Some anthologies: Allen. _New American Poetry, 1945-1960_ Silliman. _In the American Tree: Language Realism Poetry_ Messerli. _"Language" Poetries: An Anthology_ Hoover. _Postmdern American Poetry (1st ed. 1994 and 2nd ed) Swenson and St. John. _American Hybrid_

 Some precursors: Stein, Zukofsky, Oppen,

Walter Benjamin, etc.

I'm taking a class this fall at Southern (Southern Connecticut State University) in post-modern poetry and poetics. One of the readings this week is Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay that's translated as "The Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." I hadn't read it in about 30 years. Maybe, 35. Anyway, we're reading it because of its obvious connections to art in a digital age, which can be understood as an subsequent revolution in reproducibility. I had remembered that aspect of the essay, but had forgotten its Marxist basis and its Marxist interests. Fascinating that Benjamin sees Fascism as introducing aesthetics into politics and conversely sees Marxism as responding by introducing politics into art. For Fascists--read Capitalists, war becomes _the_ art form. Benjamin doesn't say this, but it seems the logical consequence of his analysis that for Marxists, art is revolution (not propaganda), an act of liberation (not of persuasion or coercion.) Many other pieces of the essay are fascinating and productive: the connection of the uniqueness of a hand-made object in its particular place and time--its authenticity, its authority, its aura--to ritual and magic or religion; the loss of the possibility of apperception by an individual of that authentic authority by being in the presence of the object's aura in the age of photography and film with the consequence that only _mass_ and not _individual_ responses are possible? Maybe. And so how to fit this with Paul Hoover's introduction to the _Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry_ with his discussion of the _avant-grade_ and the post-modern era? Benjamin's essay is certainly far stronger, more rigorous, more predictive or powerfully illuminating than Hoover's, which seems a facile re-hash of the conventional thinking about the avant-garde and post-modernism. Avant-gardists think of themselves as revolutionists, liberators (not necessarily Marxists, of course, but that is the usual drift of self-regard.) I'm pretty confused by the terms avant-garde and post-modern. I haven't read anything as clear about what they are as Benjamin's essay. I'll have to look around for good essays to clarify these concepts for me.