In the summer of '99 a group of us gathered to talk at great length about a single poem by William Carlos Williams - "To Elsie" ("The pure products of America / go crazy"). At one point Bob Perelman, one of the participants, said something about the way the poem leaves elements open and contradictory, and then implied (and then at one moment said outright) that this became and still is a key idea operating in contemporary avant-garde poetics. I think Bob frames the point very nicely here, so have a listen to this very brief excerpt from the longer discussion of the poem.
Monday, November 10, 2008
permitting contradictions
In the summer of '99 a group of us gathered to talk at great length about a single poem by William Carlos Williams - "To Elsie" ("The pure products of America / go crazy"). At one point Bob Perelman, one of the participants, said something about the way the poem leaves elements open and contradictory, and then implied (and then at one moment said outright) that this became and still is a key idea operating in contemporary avant-garde poetics. I think Bob frames the point very nicely here, so have a listen to this very brief excerpt from the longer discussion of the poem.
"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 
