Feeling a cold breeze blowing from blogland since my stance on the Houlihan brouhaha. The world is as small as the people in it. Though I was harsher than I should have been on Fence (every magazine has its mix of good & not-so-good) & on the poem Houlihan chose from it (still, sans the sarcasm, I think my evaluation of it was about right).

Josh Corey has some interesting musings on Atlantean communityhood. I am far more sceptical than he is. If membership in the true a-g requires some non-aesthetic political mutual understanding or allegiance (as per Steve Evans), that's fine, if you want to be political; but it's not worth selling out your poetry for it.

The poet, in my view, is working with an originary, primordial, anarchically free mode of speech, the special aptitude of which is to absorb & transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range. I'm not saying it transmutes all these things in reality : I'm saying that within its own sphere it remakes them into something else (poetry). The values of poetry that remain through time & historical change are centered in this originality : we don't value Whitman or Dickinson or WC Williams or Crane or Pound or Stevens or etc., for their political opinions or social commitments, but for the original force of their poetry, which synthesizes all the various social & ideological & intellectual & emotional elements into something rich & strange.

I've said it again & again & again & again (see especially the interview with Kent in Jacket #10). . the ideals & commitments of various social & political communities may be very noble & fine, but when they try to use these values & ideological formations to make claims on poetry, they exude, as Mandelstam put it, "the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the Word."

[added later:] However, the notion of poetry cleansed isolated idealized iconized - as if it were a living entity and not a human creation - only sterilizes the notion of poetry & dehumanizes its cult-worshippers. What's the answer to that? The poet, as poet, expresses human feeling & thought & commitments & values through & within poetry; this process cannot be judged, channeled, manipulated, massaged, promoted, or controlled by anyone or anything outside it, without corrupting it & losing its essence. (Pantaloons, indirectly, reminded me of this.)