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like the constant flow of dismissals and exposes [sic], many of them
composed in the threatened rhetoric of fury, as have the poets here."
Silliman attributes such "dismissals" and "exposes" to the
anachronistic persistence of "a simple ego psychology" dependent on
such outmoded bourgeois values as "communication" and
"emotion" - thus setting the state for a familiar language school
morality play : persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the right
wing. Shortly after my
Poetry Flash
article appeared, a former direc–
tor of the San Francisco State Poetry Center (this fellow made a
name for himself locally by staging language school events) sent me
a postcard with an x-rated cartoon on the front and a message that
charged me, in no uncertain terms, with being "right in there
weenie-to-weenie with Reagan and the Pope safeguarding those
Western Judeo-Christian verities," and even of being in the "pay" of
"the Vatican"!
It's been pointed out more than once that the tyranny of
method over material in the language writers' work and of group
unanimity over individual variation in their political strategizing
add up to the very thing they pretend to abhor most , a sad
authoritarianism. But who or what is on the left and who or what on
the right? In the administered world of the present, as Theodor
Adorno has said, "all works of art including radical ones have a con–
servative image, for they help reinforce the existence of a separate
domain of spirit and culture whose practical impotence and com–
plicity with the principle of unmitigated disaster are painfully
evident." The phrase "including radical ones" points up the mean–
inglessness of current "left" vs. "right" arguments on aesthetic issues.
These writers' claim to social value is not that they are building
a discourse but breaking one down. They have informed us
repeatedly that they are "de-constructing" language, "de–
familiarizing" it, even (as one "language" writer, David Melnick,
has put it) "re-claiming the American language from the trash
heap. " If the corporate world and the media have given us an objec–
tionablejargon, what the language school has managed to do isn 't to
deconstruct that jargon, but to substitute another jargon for it-one
that's every bit as impenetrable by common sense. Much of their
new anthology's critical prose is written in it (see Steve Benson's
essay "For Change," with its anti-"outsider" rhetoric and smug in–
sistence on the mechanical competency of his friends' writing: "ap–
parent units within their works often function by apparently non-
