cannon, The

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

Assessing relations of power between people-such as that say based in gender-merely becomes the articulating of those relations, as oneself having power. One would have to disrupt in writing one's own articulation of power at all.

A communal syntax being community could have occurred in an instant. When it occurs again it isn't in the same syntax?

Format [when experiment becomes format] is not articulating occurrence [events / thought]. It cannot, inherently. That is, those experimenting formally (as per Silliman's description) by accepting polemic directive are per se not practicing experiment-in that they are divorced from the live gesture?

["Experiment"-not as itself a brand of writing or as `unfinished"attempts' rather than the `finished product'-but as `scientific experiment': to find out what something is, or to find out what's happening.]

Similarly, in the view (such as Anne Waldman's statements lo that [which is the real] poetry is "speech," there's a sense of "speech" [spoken is social, convention of 'conversation'?]-that is not "thought" [interior], is not `felt spatially/ such as correspondences in the limbs.' Tonal is considered thus as ranges of speaking voice or breath.

Yet poets have been writing other tones-that are in the written text only-tones not occurring as speaking. These are 'sounded' silently, spatially-a separation; between 'one' and `social?' Or separation between 'one' and `correspondences in the limbs'-and night. [As if a butterfly and the butterfly motion of a swimmer.]

We've mutated and become ventriloquists who speak 'inner' unspoken 'movements' and various types of speech at the same time.

My argument to Silliman was that no one can conceive within the 'given' language-and articulate reality, as that. It can't be 'there' because it isn't that.

This may or may not be a different concern than that of women and imported minorities working here as illegal indentured servants who are slaves, for example.

That is, the individual in writing or speaking may create a different syntax to articulate experience, as that is the only way experience occurs. Or they may describe their circumstance and context, as if from the outside, using normative language.

The dichotomy is in anyone as a function of our mind: Language as interior and entirely from the outside at once-which is a series of actions.

"Holding to a course with the forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine what is unclear to be scrambled later from its perception of perfection by that continuing. Which is to change the world. As it does which is why, nothing individually lost, there's a difference to be told."ll

Notes:

1. Clark Coolidge, Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (Norton, 1994), 652. My intention in taking all the written quotes from one source was to indicate the similarity of direction articulated by poets with widely varying aesthetics collected in one text. I was pointing to the existence of a commonality, which is `public' even if not numbered in millions. However, Joan Retallack accurately pointed out to me that I didn't comment on the role in the canon of anthologizing: "A surface illusion of comprehensiveness gives these compendiums the power to conceptually blot out the possible presence of multitudes of other interesting writers and (in the case of the Hoover and Messerli anthologies) the small presses that publish them. I.e., they become a substitute (for teachers and writers) for going to the individual books of individual poets. That there are many anthologies of contemporary work coming out right now seems to me the only good sign.... Since the essay is entitled `The Cannon' I immediately assumed you would be commenting on the way in which anthologies take over the reference market so to speak."