Oh! What did I do last night? Drunk on HTML advice from webmonkey, I uttered ideas as inconsistencies. No, I guess not drunk enough since I can still remember… The point I was trying to make I still hold to, viz: the context of the study and production of a lot of poetry will ultimately limit it. Artists, architects, and musicians are often cross-fertilizing and constantly looking at new sources of ‘perspective’. Look, for example, at Xenakis who used mathematical theory usually reserved for stock market traders to compose music. Or Gins & Arakawa who are drawing on all sorts of cognitive and experimental sciences to inform their work. Are “literary” artists doing similar things in a creative way? There are more than enough poets sourcing the Critical Theory cannon, deconstructive poets, post-structuralist poets. Et al. Moreover, the Crit theory jargon is becoming the dominant cant of even the non-academy (I might add that I have no objections to academia). My complaint is not that this makes the poets obscure or meaningless etc But rather that it is compartmentalizing poetry. I’m running out of time. By way of example, Marcel Duchamp, widely known as an artist also took hold of poetic ideas and composed at least one poem that focused on sound. He wrote a poem and with a black marker put lines through words to create duration of sound, thus creating a visual document on top of a (quasi) literary document that entered also into the realm of music and sound as well. This is my favorite example, and you can hear it on Kenneth Goldsmith’s (Kenny G’s) Thanksgiving show. KG also provides a better rendering of the creation of the text. Go to www.wfmu.org The other work I’d like to consider, since I’ve been reading about it recently in that great book by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. Telling it Slant (avant-garde poetics of the 1990’s), is Tina Darragh. I think the claims being made for her works are far above what the work achieves in any sense of it’s actualization in a book (I’m avoiding calling it finished). adv. fans - the 1968 series, for example, does not really do much in the way of showing connections/ surprising relations between words coined in the 60’s and the other pages in the dictionary, mainly because the dictionary cut outs are more or less incomprehensible. I think it is also false to assert that the coinages tell us much about the reality of 1968.. only if we want to also assert the authority of the dictionary. A dictionary is a collection of dead words, is it not? Thus coinages are words that have left a life behind them…However, and I really owe the work more than this but I’m running out of time, her work also embodies a visual aspect that is more compelling than concrete poetry, for example… If only we could get beyond the visual..