cannon, The

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1998 by Scalapino, Leslie

Thought or apprehension-in this conception of utility-is not to be in relation to action.

All demonstrations [as writing or speaking] are irrelevant. There's no answer to one as that would admit of something other into the conversation.

At a time when the bookstores are closing, the market argument is that books are not needed because they won't sell. Barnes & Noble is receiving manuscripts from publishers to guide them as to which manuscripts should be published. Big chains are crushing other bookstores, as well as publishing companies (i.e. Barnes & Noble's returns policy and their selection against non-format books). "And the diluted formalism of the academy (the formal culture of the U.S.) is anaemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality."5

The notion of defining `the life' narrative as inferior is also defining what `the life' is.

Defining is conceptualizing that separation of the public and 'interior' as power.

Writing may be discursive connections or stream-series of distillation of apprehension, the acknowledgment of its narrative being its scrutiny. The contemporary poetic-academic association of "narrative" as being only convention-'experience' thus denigrated, not regarded as exploratoryin fact does not allow scrutiny of one's own polemic.

Actions that are rebellious, in response to whatever conditions, are seen as personal. Articulating outside's warp imitated as being one-I've actually been described as being personally aberrant-my mind-or unable to comprehend, therefore dislocated-couldn't put things together.6

The failure to make distinctions 'makes' a glaze where political / social / private [events at all-regarded in condescension] are overlooked, become [it is an exclusion which is an action] non-existent or irrelevant `over-time.' [As if there were an 'objective' insight that monitored or is `history.']

Polemics was to be demonstration [that was the intention]-yet now poetry is society's secret interior-thought's demonstration is scrutiny [there is no `history]-whereas polemics-based writing merely imposes point of view and suppresses demonstration.

Right-wing Republicans castigate labor on the radio by asking "how can 'our' society's labor compete while wearing combat boots?" That is, they should not have labor demands in order to compete in the world market.

One should dismantle protection of oneself in laboring for others in order to compete with outsiders-who can underbid one if employed by those others.

The attitude that the writing is invalidated by it being experience has its corollary-in the objection to there being in writing 'thought' which is at one in the same time as `occurrence.'

This is what makes the present-time troubling, Gertrude Stein said.

That 'one' is separate in occurrence-[as if collective] is particularly heinous to Americans.

Perelman is taking both of these positions at once, deftly enshrining authority seemingly in the 'outside' as if that were causal.

`Social power' is the formation [I] am trying to ['must] dispell.