Buggeryville

(Well, OK, no one involved is a moron, not even Ron, whose take on this situation is abhorrent. I just liked the pun. So sue me.)

Collecting a few of the comments I've made on other blogs:

I respond to Kasey, who is worried about being irritated by Issue 1:

Yeah, what about those of us who aren't irritated, but pleased? Can we be irritated at Ron's post instead, which at least on the surface seems to be anti-free speech, anti-art, and pro-capitalism?

I respond to Rodney, who does a nice reading of the texts that goes beyond what is, by now, obvious:

Would it be too much for me to suggest that those who didn't realize that the connection between poem and name was more-or-less arbitrary basically don't know how to read 21st century poetry?

Well, of course it would; but there is perhaps some truth to it. (Would it be too much for me to suggest that Ron Silliman's reaction to these poems places him closer, politically and artistically, to his beloved SoQ than to anything I'd recognize as belonging to the experimental traditions of poetry?)

Your post here comes closer to what I've been waiting for (read: too lazy to write): An analysis of how the attachment of people's names to poems serves as a force that guides your reading of the text, impelling you toward reading a bit more of an otherwise self-similar text that seems immediately understood (i.e., "conceptual") (i.e., "read") upon "getting the gimmick"; but looking up and analysing the poems with one's friends' names attached brings you back to actually reading the text, actually thinking about what is going on in the text (as a text) rather than referring back to your pat conceptual understanding of the text. This motion, which undermines our sense of how a "conceptual" text operates, is what I'm really digging about Issue 1 right now.

What would be really brilliant: If they had someone actually write their own poem in the style of the other poems and insert it amidst the 3000+ poems. Who would find it?

Somewhere, I think, I also point out that Ron calls for suing these "perps" for fraudulently presenting work as his own right after explaining how it is entirely clear from the text that the claims of authorship are undermined by the text, that no barely skilled reader could possibly mistake the poems in question for Ron's, whether they knew his work or not. This might undermine his potential lawsuit, though IANAL.

Should I ever manage to claw my way towards having a "reputation" as a poet -- though that is not my goal, not my project, not anything I find worthy or respectable to do -- I hope I don't get so drunk off my presumed power that I threaten the creators of what might be the most interesting-to-talk-about conceptual poetry (that is how you measure the worth of conceptual poetry, right?) since Kenneth Goldsmith's Day (and long overdue, since we're all fairly tuckered out from discussing that doorstop) and use my eminence grise to suggest that obscene amounts of money might be made by litigating against poets, so please won't you join me?

Revel in "late capitalism" while you still can, eh? There's no poet too small to extort, or to shout down from the bully pulpit.

Blech.

I am proud and honored to announce that I have been included, along with a few thousand other people, in a new and exciting anthology of poetry. Issue 1 is available for download here.

Like all the contributors to Issue 1, I did not write the poem with my name attached to it. (It's on page 3017 if you want to skip right to it.) Unlike some of them, I couldn't be happier to my name attached to this work.

I have been reading Pseudo-Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium for a class; I might have some quotes from it to share with you all soon. But I've been talking about how delighted I will be if someday there are Pseudo-Piuma works. That that day would come so soon was not expected however. (I knew I was being included in this project from the initial announcement, but I assumed it would be a process text based on my blog, or something to that effect; this seems to be a computer-generated text that is independent of me, beyond having my name attached.)

Anyway, kudos to editors Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter and thanks for including me in this memorable project!