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Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters

23 November 2005: One of my latest arguments at New-Poetry concerns a minimalist poem that stasguard Chris Lott brought up yesterday. Something I posted made him recall "a truly immortal poem that exemplifies the power of the post avant" that he posted with the Following commentary that Ron Silliman made on it at his blog:

More important than the presentation was the content. One example:

JOE

One could hardly find, or even imagine, a simpler text, yet it undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about titles, repetition, rhyme, naming, immanence. If we read it as challenging the status of the title, then on a second level it is the most completely rhymed poem conceivable. & vice versa. As language, this is actually quite beautiful in a plainspoken manner, the two words hovering without ever resolving into a static balance, never fully title & text, nor call & response, neither the hierarchy of naming nor parataxis of rhyme.

I tried to find the blog entry by Silliman the quotation is from but could not. So I am not sure who wrote the poem. It sounds like Grenier's work, though (which surely is a point in its favor--that is, despite being minimalist, and--in the view of such as Lott--worthless, there's something about it that makes it recognizable as a particular poet's. If it's Grenier's work. In any case, I retorted to Lott that he was incapable of appreciating minimalist poems. Then the lead stasguard at New-Poetry, David Graham, posted a pseudo-parody that several people, none of whom have displayed any ability to appreciate minimalism, were charmed by. To write a good parody, you have to understand the text, or kind of text, you are parodying, and Graham may be more ignorant of minimalism even than Lott. His parody of the poem consisted of the single letter, O. It was a parody within a parody of Silliman's text, though. That was somewhat better because he pretty much just repeated what Silliman said about "JOE," but applied to "O." He got one minor thing right: by raving about the O as also a zero, he indicated that he's somehow learned that one frequently employed technique of minimalist poems is visual punning, or a text whose visual appearance can be interpretted as two different words, or the equivalent, that do not sound the same. But he didn't demonstrate he really knew anything about minimalist poetry or about "JOE"--which I hope to give my defense of tomorrow.

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