Language Writing

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 21 · 26 November 1987

From Terence Hegarty

SIR: America is justly famous for casting its great writers into outer darkness. The first to make a really big stink about this was, I believe, Poe, even before 1830. A little bit of education, however, reveals that the issue is more a question of timing, and has a lot more to do with post-revolutionary (Industrial, French, etc) patterns of ‘democratic’ society. America, it must be admitted, has consistently shown up worst in this particular kind of uncivilised behaviour. The great American expatriates had to leave, of course – we can understand why – but their very decision to flourish elsewhere has only reinforced the myth. (I use ‘myth’ not in its current American-Orwellian sense of ‘lie’, but in its real and original meaning, i.e. ‘truth’. There is no better word.) The purpose of this introductory harangue is merely to hint that America’s cultural sterility has complex roots. I say ‘sterility’, but I could as easily say ‘myth of sterility’: here I am apparently using ‘myth’ in both its ancient and modern meanings. I don’t quite contradict myself.

Does my ‘discourse’ abuse you? Yes, it does. It’s an agented event of definite arbitrariness; it distances you. Somewhere in the middle of the first paragraph I decided to stop caring about you, but my self-absorption carried me on. But I’m tired of it now; I’ll not make a living of it like Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, and the thousands upon thousands of other ‘poets’, publishing themselves all over the USA, that Jerome McGann (LRB, 15 October) doesn’t mention. He wouldn’t want you to know that they’re a dime a dozen, as we say over here. Each proclaims sterility via sterility, on purpose. As a phenomenon, they represent the current (actually a bit passé, now that they’ve been tagged and caged) manifestation of a recurring nightmare in American culture: that of the outcast survivor self-condemned to a closed and narrowing circle of emotion, calling the cruel limits of his or her prison by the name of ‘freedom’, spiralling ever deeper into a lost world of fragments and echoes and crying out that it is reality. T.S. Eliot, that great American (they even put him on a postage stamp this year!), dealt with this nightmare more definitively than anybody else. Since The Waste Land, culture has advanced, hearts and minds have grown and learned to accept previously unimaginable kinds of love and hate. Even in America itself, this ghastly desert of the modern mind, there have been stirrings, even among poets. Finding themselves in the desert, poets strike the rock; the good ones can still make the water flow. but such cultural commitment does not enter the discussion among the phonemic – nay, graphemic – spectres of ‘language’ poetry (excuse me, poetries). In fact, ‘the incapacity, in the cultural centre, to speak the language of poetry’ that McGann mentions is in large measure due to these grisly jokers; their arcane and ugly product has helped to make the very word ‘poetry’ abhorrent. The phrase ‘they kill the thing they love’ would be appropriate, if love could be conceived of in connection with these smug wordmongers.

Terence Hegarty
Melrose, New York

Vol. 10 No. 2 · 21 January 1988

From James Drake

SIR: If you insist on publishing letters such as that of Mr Terence Hegarty, re ‘Language Writing’ (Letters, 26 November), then you are in effect supporting his claim that America is a ‘ghastly desert of the modern mind’. Gibberish such as referring to his ‘discourse’ as ‘an agented event of definite arbitrariness’ certainly suggests the ‘sterility’ or ‘myth of sterility’ that he ascribes to American culture. Likewise, his calling the writers reviewed ‘wordmongers’ seems more a case of projection. If he had read the major anthology reviewed. In the American Tree, he would know that many of the writers included profess to be interested in the phrase and the sentence and not the word, with some, such as Jackson MacLow, having so many reservations about the name ‘language poetries’ as to scarcely qualify as any sort of languagemonger. I don’t think Mr Hegarty has read any of the work reviewed, but is merely basing his opinion on Jerome McGann’s description of it. I don’t think his qualifications as a guide to the small-press publishing scene in America are any better. His statements that similar writers to Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews are a ‘dime a dozen’, while it parades a showy knowledgability, does not square with what I am able to find in either of our two local small-press bookstores. I am not sure that I agree with Dr McGann’s rather positive evaluation of ‘language poetries’, but his review was quite perceptive and his quotations extremely well-chosen. The seriousness with which he was willing to discuss this work is, I gather, what Mr Hegarty meant to question, but how seriously can be taken the objections of someone who writes: ‘Somewhere in the middle of the first paragraph I decided to stop caring about you, but my self-absorption carried me on’? This is the posturing of a college boy. The whole letter reeks of naivety (‘America is justly famous for casting its great writers into outer darkness’). No doubt this provides comedy for those wishing to see America as overflowing with yahoos, but your responsibility is to enlightenment, not entertainment,

James Drake
San Francisco