cannon, The

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

The passage which Perelman quoted from my response to Silliman implies that I simply `favor"narrative" (whatever that is); that is, it reverses, erases the argument I was making by quoting a tiny passage out of context.

A person describing a creationist view that all minute events and phenomena are in God's eye or plan beforehand-so evolution cannot existor occur-nothing is occurring first or separately-no actions are later events, astonished, I made the remark, "This is completely alien to poetry." Alien to observation, and also to action.

There is no cause or effect-the moment of occurrence doesn't exist either-in that the present moment is disjunction per se only [Nagarjunian logic (early Zen) rendering modern physics?] All times [past, present, and future] are occurring at the same time separately as that disjunctive space or moment [rendition of Dogen's and Einstein's sense of being as time] . So occurrence is not hierarchically ordered.

One point I made to Silliman in the exchange was that the form of one's articulation may be a reconstituting of the general social narrative; may be a radical change in expression arising from one's separation from social convention.

Silliman's position was negating the factor of the individual's articulation as motions / shape in syntax being a radical change in thought.

In the early eighties, Silliman in conversation and talks in San Francisco urged poets to write syntax which was paragraphs without linebreaks, paratactic, described as a communal, non-individualistic expression. The syntax has a recognizable sound pattern [as does poetic syntax from other periods, say languages characterized as Beat or New York School]. In the same spirit in that period, Bob Perelman stated, during a talk given by Michael Palmer on autobiography, that the erotic was not to enter into writing, the erotic was a form of ego to be stricken or omitted from writing.

There is no way in which women can write an actual freedom from conservative social articulation if they write uniform syntax (dictated by men) which excises the erotic.

One could not be separating the event-from / as thought [or apprehension].

Recently a man giving a [literary] talk showed slides of a `pin-up girl,' by this time dead-interpreting the past to make the point that he thought she had a lot of "autonomy." The subject [pin-up girl] has no writing `as poetry'/expression that's its writing-and she's dead. Granting the dead, in their erotic being, "autonomy."

Autonomy '-as defined of the dead in their erotic being-as he's without power 'there' is 'there' not being `narrative- at all.

Present as disjunct per se only-that space/time cannot be his narrative-or one's. Event is between. One has to modify one's tone if one happens to be a woman to be heard as saying anything.

"To change without belief is anarchistic as instinct pricks from the Latin (stinguere), no law but that the absence of law is the resistance of love instinct with tact like the expression of this thought."9