654
LETTERS
To the Editor:
"The language school writers,"
Tom Clark observes in his review–
or, more accurately, his gossip col–
umn - about Ron Silliman's poetry
anthology
In the American Tree
("Sta–
lin as Linguist,"
PR
2, 1987), "are as
long on critical theory as they are
... short on poems ." Surely no one
can accuse Clark of the same! This
is not the place to discuss his own
very short poems (which he is cer–
tainly not "short on"), but let me ex–
press my astonishment that
PR's
editors let the following example of
Clark's own "criticism" pass : "In his
prose [Barrett] Watten seems to owe
a debt to the distancing and dis–
junction methods of the Russian For–
malists , especially Viktor Shklov–
sky. His interest in Shklovsky re–
flects the leftist stance that's common
among language school writers."
An "interest in Shklovksy"
need reflect no such thing. Does
Tom Clark really not know that
Shklovsky, one of the fathers of
Russian Formalism and a friend of
the great Futurist poets Khleb–
nikov, Kruchenykh, and Mayakov–
sky, insisted on a rigid separation of
art from politics well into the twen–
ties, thus coming under sharp attack
from, among others, Trotsky? That
as late as 1926, in his autobiography
The Third Factory,
Shklovsky was
given to statements such as
" ... dialectical materialism is a
very fine thing for a sociologist, but
it is no substitute for a knowledge of
mathematics or astronomy"? And
that it was only under the pressure
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the Stalinist regime that Shklov–
sky began to write "politically cor–
rect" (and correspondingly negligi–
ble and today little-known) crit–
icism?
Given Clark's seeming ig–
norance of Russian Formalist the–
ory, one wonders how much he is
likely to know about poststructural–
ism, whose manifestation, in the
writings of Ron Silliman , George
Lakoff, and others, he so wittily
dismisses as "pretentious intellectual
argot
that sounds a little like an as–
sistant professor who took a wrong
turn on the way to the Derrida
Cookout and ended up at the poetry
reading." C learly, Mr. Clark him–
self hasn't been attending too many
Derrida cookouts lately. For at the
most recent one I attended, I could
swear I saw a bona fide poet , none
other than France's Yves Bonnefoy,
toasting his hot dog . Or was that a
poetry reading?
Marjorie Perloff
Stanford, California
The Editors reply: We are surprised
that Marjorie Perloff is unaware that
we do not censor contributions to the
magazine.
Tom Clark replies :
If
Professor Perloff had been in–
terested in the sense of my article
she would have recognized that by
