Here's what happens with US oppositional poetics: see Ron Silliman's blog entry for 26 December 2002, where he suggests there is a kind of deliberate bad writing, a tactical dumbing-down, in mainstream poetry, exemplified by a sample Billy Collins poem. Contrast that blog entry with his extravagant praise for Lyn Hejinian in blog entries for today (1/3/03) and yesterday. Silliman sort of deifies Hejinian's formal maneuvers (37 chapters of 37 sentences; later edition with 8 new sentences added to each chapter), as though she were some kind of Chinese Empress carving out, pioneering, with a geometrical literary augury, a new literary space. It's an exaltation of formalism which establishes the border between mainstream & oppositional, codifying the boundaries of the new village.

This maneuver is only made possible by the denial of tradition-at-large, the Eliotic paradigm, which I described in the email to Kasey Mohammad earlier today. The vaunting of Hejinian's simple but ritualized numbering technique exemplifies the American originary pretense - which, in the context of an awareness of the complex numerology of ancient, medieval & Renaissance poetics, looks like a deliberate dumbing-down too. I believe, however, that this is NOT the case: I don't think for a moment that either Hejinian or Silliman are trying to pretend that they invented numerical formalism. I just think that by the late 20th century, US poetry balkanism necessitated the reinvention of simple wheels for small village life.