ABOUT THE ART OF BEING TALKED ABOUT

Robert Archambeau has been thinking about Kenneth Goldsmith lately, probably not least because Goldsmith has just had two provocative posts on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog: "The Bounce and the Roll" and "Death of a Kingmaker." RA writes: "It [Goldsmith's account of how poetry careers are created these days] all seems a bit caught up in the logic of fame, cultural capital, and the reputation market." RA wraps up at the end of his essay (an example that epitomizes really how well the blog format suits this kind of informal discourse) by observing how the pendulum swings: where once the fashionable thing was to denounce text and scramble after reputation directly, it might now be thought more risky, more daring, to renounce status, and instead crawl unnoticed into a cave to write runic verse on the rocks. (Corollary: The School of Quietude is a cabal of meditative radicals.)

Joseph Wood concerns himself with similar questions and hypotheses, albeit with more existential squirming, in Open Letters Monthly. Wood seems disquieted by the same status game that Archambeau noncommittally calls a "hedonic treadmill." I myself can see how the person who starts each day by checking blog stats and whether she earned a mention on Silliman's Blog, resembles those Danaïd daughters trying to carry water with a sieve.

In a recent post, Henry Gould grapples with similar issues, though his starting point is Pushkin. He writes:

The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition.

Does Gould know he's channeling Roger Shattuck's "Nineteen Theses on Literature"?

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Issue 27 of AGNI (1988) featured a symposium titled "'Lairs of God': Spirituality after Silicon Valley." Eliot Weinberger contributed an essay, titled "Is God Down?", which seems relevant two decades later, to this question of how technology and poetry relate, whether by mediation or obstruction. This is from Weinberg's conclusion:

Finally, the less important question of computers and literature: is the writer a robot, or has the robot become a writer? To take the second question first: certainly the computer has forever proved that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years will not produce Hamlet. There are a few serious writers who have made use of hte computer (not as "word processor") to "generate" texts, most notably Jackson MacLow and the members of OULIPO. These are not, as would be assumed, impersonal: behind each text is the human who programmed it. The results are weird or amusing, the ultimate pleasure deriving mainly from seeing the rules of the game put into action, like extremely complex poetic forms: chant royal, say, or Chinese poems that can be read forwards or backwards.

The typewriter certainly had an effect on the writing of poetry. It is impossible to imagine the stepped lines of Williams, Paz, and so many others without it. Pound's Cantos makes much more visible sense in his manuscript than on the printed page, and Robert Duncan in later years insisted that his books directly reproduce his own typed manuscript. With the advent of "desktop publishing," there will no doubt be poems that take advantage of its various features, including the mixing of type styles. (I know of only one poet, Jed Rasula, who has done so to date.) Furthermore, the computer has democratized certain tricks of the trade. Auden's far-reaching and witty rhymes lose much of their charm after a glance through the computer-generated Penguin Rhyming Dictionary (with its hundred rhymes for "Freud," but only one, "broaden," for "Auden"). Rhyme-- lately championed again by young conservatives-- becomes more than ever a question of selection rather than invention. But this is not "word processing," that wonderful phrase that turns writing into packaged cheese. (Poets, said Chesterton, have been strangely reticent on the subject of cheeses.) Word processing is essentially a means of manuscript production that eliminates retyping.

He makes a good point about the execution of rules providing pleasure of a more durable kind than that deriving from the mere concept of rules (as in Goldsmith's books that he tells people not to read). As a grace note on this pell-mell of material, here's Wisława Szymborska giving advice to "Mr. K.K. from Bytom" in an excerpt from her newspaper column on poetry:

You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?

Writers who would rather be rune-carvers and in caves instead of cities, might want to buy a ticket to see Herzog's new film, Cave of Forgotten DreamsSh.