So on to Jed Rasula's chapter.

My first impulse is to say, "Get a grip, man. I mean, I know that the year 2000 is coming up in less than a dozen months, but this is really not the end of the world. I mean I'm a liberal myself, so naturally my heart bleeds for all those poor poems violently torn from their natural habitats and taxidermized and put into glass cases in anthologies. But I just gotta point out to you, man, these poor poets are all dead. I mean, what I'm saying is, we have to make a distinction between the living breathing flesh and blood organism who is perhaps still walking around and getting drunk and giving readings at coffee houses and generally making a public nuisance of herself (or perhaps living with a very obstreperous lover in New Mexico, far from the pubs and coal fields of Wales).... We have to make a distinction between this living breathing and generally disagreeable organism and the vibrant, vital auctorial persona who we all love dearly but who, by the time her poems have made it into the museums/anthologies is long since dearly departed. And thus suffers no pain when her poems are forcibly ripped from their natural habitats and banished like refuges from Kosovo to an antiseptic environment where they may be safely be viewed by college students. And as to the actual living breathing flesh and blood drunken organism, the money helps pay her pub bills, so I doubt that she's complaining."

I also wondered if we were to take this chapter as a prolonged prose poem in the language poetry mode, or perhaps a source for language poets to sample from. There is certainly an abundance of real gems here ripe for mining by the right language prospector.

"But postmodern heterogeneity, semiotic slippage, decentering and reinvention of identity are emphatically not among those features which typify the poetry that is critically certified and anthologized today."  The thing that scares me about this sentence is that I actually understand all the words except "semiotic slippage."  If I just dropped a little acid, sentences like this might actually start making sense to me.

"Ruins are runes for Benjamin, who sees in the Baroque not only historical desolation but a debacle of language as well: allegory is energized by its flaunting of words broken off from their meanings, become objects in their own right."

"[Frank] O'Hara's poems are like those paths of crumbs Hans leaves as he and Gretel go into the forest, ways of clandestinely marking a possible return."

"Poetric 'license' is deflated when voice is licensed for commercial applicatiuons, carrying language along with it as the effluvia that accompanies image protocols as they efficiently transcode populations and bodies into spectacles of need, fanning 'the desire to reproduce the given as a plenitude of possibility.'"

Plenitudes upon plenitudes of possibilities. That's what we get when irresponsible poets start reproducing the given without restraint.

I'll bet Charles Bernstein's license is pretty well deflated at this point, after his Yellow Pages caper. He'd better set to work to get it reinstated, or some cop will pull him over next time he sets pen to paper.

But then Monday night, instead of doing my homework and reading Dark City, I went to the Art Academy to see a film called Latcho Drom, a semi-documentary about Gypsies with lots of different Gypsy music from all over the world. And the film was wonderful and touching, and the Gypsies were all charming, and people applauded at the end. And I thought, "You know, this really is sort of like taking a Gray Line tour. Maybe that guy Rasula has a point after all."

It's not just anthologies and documentaries, though. A college course gives one a Gray Line tour through literature.

And then I started thinking that it goes beyond college courses. One way or another, we do see most of life through the windows of a tour bus.

We view art (and a lot of life), along with the accompanying voice-over or introduction or preface or whatever, but do not experience it. We do not engage.

Anothologies are certainly very useful. Videotapes of movies are very useful, and I'm certainly grateful that this intellectual wasteland of a university has such a superb audiovisual library. Watching videotapes is a great way of studying movies. But watching a videotape, one doesn't really engage with the movie. One doesn't have the experience.

I started getting intrigued by popular music, and being amazed that this totally new and revoluationary art form of our century gets no academic recognition, because of hearing so much music on juke boxes in bars. I treasure my collection of CDs, but I'm starting to think that one never really experiences a lot of music when one is listening to it quietly at home; to have the experience, to really engage, one needs to hear it on a juke box.

Likewise, I would listen to my Grateful Dead albums, and think, "Yeah, these guys play nice music," but could never quite understand what the big deal was, until finally I understood that to experience the Grateful Dead, you had to have been at a concert after dropping some acid. Listening to CDs at home is like reading poetry in an anthology. Like watching a movie on videotape.

Hearing poetry on a jukebox is something that unfortunately just doesn't happen. English Departments don't even teach the performance of poetry. (A pet peeve of mine.)

I covertly sent a copy of my last communiqué to a select list of trusted friends, forgetting momentarily that among these trusted friends is one whose wife is a poet. And in due course I received a note in return protesting that poets who publish in academic literary magazines are just ordinary poets, and that many of their poems are fully as compelling as any popular songs or films.

Well, that's as may be. I couldn't really say. I'm still in the process of trying to figure this whole poetry thing out.

But as far as I'm concerned, if the Language Poets are doing some esoteric Gertrude Stein thing that only a handful of people are expected to appreciate, then that's fine. But if they really think that what they're doing is a protest against capitalism and the the corporate world, I think they're sadly out of touch with reality.

They should be doing Hip Hop or Acid Jazz. Then at least somebody would be listening.

--Lee
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Unlike past American intellectuals, who saw the educated nonacademic public as their main audience, today's leftist intellectuals feel no need to write for a larger audience; colleagues, departments, and conferences have come to constitute their world.    -- Russell Jacoby