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PARTISAN REVIEW
programmatic and yet highly intentional juxtapositions . .. " ).
Unfortunately, the jargon also leaks over into the poetry, which
comes out sounding a little like the drone of Hal the Computer in
2001.
These writers have indeed, as Ron Silliman claims, rejected
"speech" and thrown out the "speech-based" poetics of William
Carlos Williams, but at what price? Williams's historic decision to
base his writing on the spoken American language-paralleling
Chaucer's decision to write in English instead of Latin or French,
the "literary languages" of his time-was the great democratic
gesture of poetry in this century, expanding its audience to fulfill the
grandly inclusive aims of Walt Whitman. The language school has
set out to draw back the perimeters of that audience, contracting
poetry until it fits around only themselves.
Coming in
Partisan Review
• An Interview with William Phillips
• Arthur A. Cohen on Judaism and Modernism
• Poetry by Joseph Brodsky
• Pearl K . Bell on Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne
Jewett
• Raymond Aron:
A Memoir
• An Interview with Stephen Spender
• Nathan Glazer on Life in the Bronx
• Edith Kurzweil on Melanie Klein and Karen Horney
• Steven Marcus on Ernest Hemingway
• Barbara Probst Solomon on Marguerite Duras
