Yesterday Ron Sil­li­man jumped into the dis­cus­sion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Col­lected Poems. Not sur­pris­ingly, Sil­li­man comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tra­di­tion of poetry. Echo­ing Mark Weiss’s orig­i­nal sen­ti­ment, Sil­li­man writes “[Simic] uses Cree­ley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Noth­ing in the dis­cus­sion on the POET­ICS list­serv that fol­lowed my orig­i­nal post con­vinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nom­i­na­tions has cer­tainly made me recon­sider it. But since no one seemed espe­cially inter­ested in the point I was actu­ally con­cerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social stand­ing in cer­tain cir­cles on the recep­tion of his work—it didn’t seem worth car­ry­ing on, espe­cially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t par­tic­u­larly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blink­ered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review para­graph by para­graph, but it doesn’t add much to the argu­ment that wasn’t already men­tioned in the POET­ICS dis­cus­sion. Like others, he takes Simic’s state­ments about aes­thetic theory as proof of his incor­ri­gi­ble philis­tin­ism; like others, he avails him­self lib­er­ally of some cheap ad hominems: “Simic him­self isn’t intel­lec­tu­ally capa­ble of fol­low­ing a seri­ous dis­cus­sion of the arts.”

Where Sil­li­man diverges from the pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion is in two intrigu­ing sen­tences that come fairly late in his post. He writes, “Pieces rep­re­sents the first fully man­i­fested instance of actual pro­jec­tive writ­ing. This, we should note, is the onset of the rev­o­lu­tion in writ­ing that is most often asso­ci­ated with the term Lan­guage Poetry.”

In other words, the impor­tance of Pieces is to be mea­sured not so much by the end of Creeley’s career as by the start of Silliman’s. In this respect it strikes me as sig­nif­i­cant me that while Sil­li­man spends much time defend­ing the “revolutionary” Pieces he only talks a little about the work that fol­lows it.

As the quote makes clear, Sil­li­man would have us believe that it’s a matter of form—”actual pro­jec­tive writing”—that con­nects Cree­ley to the Lan­guage poets. This story is less con­vinc­ing when one con­sid­ers that Creeley’s aes­thetic and philo­soph­i­cal pre­oc­cu­pa­tions were frankly incom­pat­i­ble with the declared meth­ods and goals of much Lan­guage writing.

Sil­li­man today defends Cree­ley in the name of Husserl, Hei­deg­ger, and Merleau-​Ponty, but one should not forget that back in the bad old days of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E it was the cri­tiques of phe­nom­e­nol­ogy that got most of the atten­tion. (Sil­li­man him­self wrote almost noth­ing about phe­nom­e­nol­ogy and almost every­thing about Marx­ism back then. For exam­ple: “[Language poetry's] attempt is the spelling out of all the defor­ma­tions of lan­guage which result from the repress­ing mech­a­nism of the com­mod­ity fetish.”)

It’s a mark of just how suc­cess­ful the Lan­guage group has been, soci­o­log­i­cally at the very least, that this kind of Whig his­tory is pos­si­ble, in which Sil­li­man is able to make the slide from Pieces to Lan­guage writ­ing seem a halfway cred­i­ble inevitability.