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PARTISAN REVIEW
(from "outside" critics) the "authority" to "characterize" their own
work (in their "talks," statements, manifestoes, etc.). To Lakoff these
writers were acting not like your average yuppified literary careerists
(whom they resembled to some "outsiders") but like revolutionary
"workers" who'd "taken over the factory."
Anyway, the editors of
Poetry Flash
must have felt a little anx–
ious about Lakoffs article, because they asked me to write a
response. (This assignment, Watten later suggested, amounted to
my being "used" as a "bad-guy figure" by the devious and cunning
Flash
editors.) My response was called "Stalin As Linguist." The title
was taken from a passage in Watten's poem, "Progress." The passage
read: "One way contradictory use is to / Specify empty. / Basis, its /
Cover operates under insist on, / Delineate. Stalin as a
linguist ... ". The title probably caused as much furor as the article
itself.
Watten reacted by composing a two-page, single-spaced, indig–
nant, "not-for-publication" communique to
Poetry Flash.
The letter
demanded redress of grievances and threatened a boycott by adver–
tisers. Attached was a list of people to receive copies. The list was
almost as long as the letter itself.
It
contained the names of language
school sympathizers with influential positions - institutional poetry
administrators, reading coordinators, publishers, book distributors,
bookstore owners and employees, university teachers, gallery
representatives, etc. From these people and from others in the
language school's local rank and file,
Poetry Flash
received a flood of
letters. A selection appeared in subsequent issues of the paper.
Several correspondents, such as Robert Gluck of the San Francisco
State Poetry Center, charged me with "red-baiting." Joe McCarthy
was evoked more than once, as were the "mau-maus" (by Silliman,
though that letter never made it into print).
All of this suggests that despite its dedication to the
ideal
of
criticism as equal in importance to creative work, the language
school has a very thin skin when it comes to
taking
criticism. In the
minds of Watten and other theorists of this movement-or at least in
their pronunciamentos - the movement itself is nothing less than a
forward surge of the great Hegelian dialectic of history. Any "out–
side" critic is forced into the role of reactionary. Hence the outraged
tone of their plaints about "language-bashing." "Attacks have been
made on this writing," Silliman says in his introduction. "No other
current poetic tendency in America has been subjected to anything
