Back to Maria Damon's critical essays for a moment. I've just read "Was That 'Different,' 'Dissident' or 'Dissonant'? Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions."Charles Bernstein’s breakthrough book called Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1998) is full of good essays on the aural ellipsis, the poet’s voice, speech effects, and a history of the contemporary poetry reading, but only Damon’s essay, for better or worse (I say mostly better), really engages the irony and dissonance and difference in the writerly critic’s act of setting into print the problem presented by oral/performance poets such as Benjamin Zaphaniah, whose line “But dis is de stuff I like” becomes Damon’s own intrepid critical refrain (“I’ve tried Shakespeare, respect due dere / But dis is de stuff I like”). When Damon sets the line
into roman type, outside quotation marks, the phrase becomes consciously her own. After that, her brief summaries of open readings and the slam movement have about them the intimacy she hopes to achieve, not an easy feat in a fancy book published by Oxford University Press.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
