Hello again, people of the world. I greet you from the mountaintop off-centered in the vale which is Providence, former armpit of New England, now fragrantly deodorized.

My lecture this morning centers on Language. Language, the thing, the poetry Movement, the something something.

In recent decades "Language" has been re-conceptualized for us by a looseleaf-bound collective of poet-thinkers, who around the mid-70s discovered the comic potential of tautology and self-reflexivity, if you "know" you know what I "mean" mean. How do we know we know? Since in "knowing" ourselves we enact a fission of subjectivity, producing a knower/known dichotomy where once was a single "identity" (I put "identity" in quotes in case someone tries to hit me)?

Let me ask again, "?"

Ron Duluth foresaw the cul-de-sac of "language" about "language" several years before language poetry came to the fore (perhaps intuiting the epistemological conundra by way of his own name, often implicated in a radically unstable way with the third largest city in Minnesota, at the apex (or nadir, if you will) of the largest freshwater body of water in the world, Lake Superior. Duluth, twinned with the town of Superior, Wisconsin, has as a result been "subjected" to an inferior "position" (since Superior, Wisconsin will always be "superior"), and Ron Duluth, unavoidably linked with his namesake city, Duluth (the dual "u"s in Duluth undulating with reinforced abjectivity), is himself consequently abjectified within a form of urban "inferiority complex", resulting in an emotional shading of surface phenomena denying meaning to itself, in itself (& for itself, obviously).

Thus in this sociological complex we recognize by analogy a structure of hierarchical power relations, whereby "poetry" - already abjectified as "inferior" to utilitarian prose (which does things with itself) - when identified with Language-As-Language, reverses these power relations by instaurating them in formal actualization. In doing so, however, "language poetry" attaches to itself a permanent Achilles heel, a wound or scar, the mark of Cain or ritual victimization, just as "Duluth" (Ron, I mean) by the very fact of identity of name-and-(inferior)-city, is immoveably positioned in his victim status (as inferior to Superior, Wisconsin). Thus we see how the tautology of self-reflexivity has come full circle : the abjectivity of poetry, having been granted a "name" ("Language"), is now confirmed in a kind of official academic-ceremonial status-granting ceremony (indicated by my lecture, which you are "reading" at this moment (I think so, anyway, unless you're slurping some coffee all over your keyboard instead)).

This week's assignment : re-read the Collected Completely Long Poems of Ron Duluth, and "write" an essay based on your "responses" to his "work". Due Friday; no excuses.

- Professor Hinkel