1.05.2004

I see Ron S. has mounted another defense of his heroique historie of anti-School-of-Quietude Americana.

Last year I started this blog with a critique of the oppositional mentality.

Ron believes there is a reactionary-establishmentarian cabal which is holding back & resisting the triumph of oppositional poetries.

My idea as mumbled here last year was, that "oppositionalism" in the poetry world is a mental prison-house more fearsomely fortified with dulness & blinkered thinking than anything a supposed cabal could come up with.

The enemies of poetry : dullness, boredom, hypocrisy, fakery, lack of talent, lack of inspiration. Neither the redoubtable resources of these enemies, nor the forces that poetry arrays against them, have anything much to do with institutions or bureaucracies of supposed progress or reaction. To turn poetry into an illusory rivalry of factions is the best way to render it too petty and negligible for any serious public (or private) purposes.

Talent and dedication and sensibility will come to the fore in the arts, on their own merits and by their own efforts. No program or critique will ever keep up with them.

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