I'm out of practice debating with Ron Silliman. Wrote a long response to his post of today, on David Ignatow. Then had to delete it.

Silliman takes a faintly patronizing attitude. If only Ignatow had had the sense to make common cause with the Objectivists or the New Americans! He would have found a happy home & cameraderie. "an American tragedy".

He says Ignatow equates the genteel, quietist strain with "intellectualism" - and WCW, Olson and himself with "anti-intellectualism". But Ignatow never uses those terms himself. I suspect Silliman is imposing these categories, because at some point Ignatow criticized the language poets for too much abstraction. Langpo would never be accused of being "anti-intellectual"! Ignatow's personal poetics are a threat to theoretical poetics - this is what helps get him labeled as part of the general School of Quietude.

Silliman writes that Ignatow's antagonisms reveal the "deep divisions" within the SoQ. It might be more accurate to suggest that those antagonisms and differences call the "School of Quietude" pigeonhole itself into question.