My longstanding haggle with Language Poetry & post-avantism (admittedly a form of shadow-boxing with my own peculiar version of those amorphous phenomena). . .

a crux there being that a kind of littery literalism of the letter became a cliche or dogma over the 80s & 90s. . . & one of its affects being that the trope of self-conscious literalism (even as irony) tends to disrupt representation or mimesis. . .

so there is no "walking through the pictures" anywhere. . .

which seems to attack or cancel out perhaps the most interesting aspect of art in general, which is the oscillation between art & nature - the mimicry & confusion of the two. . . & the theological mystery at the root of this oscillation (what is "creation from nothing"?).

so it's interesting to me anyway that the theme of "Byzantium" runs through much of my writing in the late 90s (both in a political sense of US being a latter-day or parodic Byzantium, and in the sense that the old Byzantine aesthetic/theological issue of iconoclasm/iconophilia is so fascinating in itself). . .

I think of the post-avants & the postmodern theorists as iconoclasts (in the Byzantine sense). . .

& the aesthetic values which got sidelined during this period of iconoclasm included representation, mimesis, "thick description", direct presentation, narrative, etc. . . things I've been interested in. . .

(- just a little horn-tootin' polemics, for a Friday afternoon in frozen Blogland. . .)