Silliman's Monday Morning Quarterbacking

The very male & macho all-American activity referred to in the title seems to underlie much of Ron Silliman’s musings on his blog. Thus on 12 June he proposes a longish disquisition on the Donald Allen anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960 — in this case Monday morning quarterbacking not one day after the fact, but 47 years later: an exercise, in his case, just as sterile as that performed in the world of football fans, and just as much bent to show off superior insight and knowledge when it is of course only a post facto regurgitation of commonplaces.

But what is more noxious in this case is that Silliman uses the occasion to yet again and in a rather underhanded way (via footnote) vent his dislike of volume 2 of Jerome Rothenberg’s and my POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM anthology. So that now, while in Paris, without my books around and very pleasantly busy with other more creative occupations, it becomes necessary to waste time and yet again return to this and try to set the facts straight. For it is finally a matter of facts — as that is what Silliman, who on the surface seems to advance such simple and straight-forward factional “insights,” gets wrong, willfully so, I’d like to suggest, given that he could have checked the facts rather than hide his subjective dislike of our work behind partial facts, curtailed narratives and trumped up analysis.

He gets to vent his anger this time in a footnote that he appends to Rothenberg’s name in a sentence that criticizes Donald Allen for not including certain writers: “Notably missing are non- or anti-academic poets who don’t come directly out of the Pound-Williams tradition, including Bern Porter, Bob Brown, Jackson Mac Low & Jerome Rothenberg.” This leads to the footnote which claims: “Thus one might read the debacle of Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, which embarrassingly under-represents the New American Poetry and its participants, as simply a matter of “payback” several decades later.”

The only embarrassing debacle here is Ron Silliman’s mauvaise foi & distortion of easily ascertainable facts:

1) There is strictly no reason why Jerome Rothenberg would want to consider ‘payback’ (against whom, by the way? Donald Allen??? All of the New American Poets?????) when in 1996/1997 he and I put together M2. (Silliman had to carefully gommer, wipe out, the fact that the book was compiled by JR and myself as that would obviously invalidate his one-man revenge theory.) For indeed, JR’s work was taken into Donald Allen’s revised New American Poetry (The Postmoderns), which came out in 1982, sixteen years prior to M2, and he had by then close and interactive connections to many of the core “new American poets.” Accordingly there is absolutely no ground for Silliman’s bad faith “speculation”: it is a ridiculous underhanded claim with no basis in fact.

2) Silliman’s footnote-claim that M2 “embarrassingly under-represents the new American Poetry and its participants” is just as ludicrous. In fact, both Jerry and I would argue that the NAP poets are part of an overrepresentation, if anything, of the American part of the poetry of that period when viewed on a worldwide basis. Furthermore JR’s own take on the Postmoderns (in a review in Sulfur) took Allen and Butterick to task for their failure, if that’s what it was, to acknowledge, among other post-1960 groupings, the Language Poets of whom Silliman was clearly a part and was several times so cited.

Silliman should know the obvious strictures and limitations of anthologies as he himself compiled such a gathering. All anthologies, by their very nature, are based on exclusion, even those animated by the desire to be most inclusive. One can, for example, easily show that his anthology, In the American Tree, is about as exclusive as it gets, in defiance of the claims made by the book’s very title: what kind of “America(n)” is he talking about? One that “includes” only the United States and thus excludes Canada to the North and every country south of the US border with Mexico? At best a careless use of a loaded title word not worthy of someone who, as a poet with long-standing claims to radical political engagements, should know better; at worst a weird kind of blind patriotic hegemonic arrogance by which the use of the word “America” begins to resemble the know-nuttin nationalism the cultural commissars of the Bush/Cheney clans would propose, if they bothered to have cultural commissars.

There is clearly something more here than meets the eye, yet one is really at a loss to figure what it is. But the reader of Silliman and of Silliman’s blog should be aware that much of what gets written there appears with a startling disregard for fact and at the service of whatever phantom demons he may have in mind. If that’s the case in this instance, one can only suspect that it’s the case in other instances as well.