Michael’s right that I find the scan­dale de Sil­li­man com­pletely point­less, but one small comet to achieve escape veloc­ity from the orbit of inanity is some­thing Robert Archam­beau posted today. Seems to me Bob is con­cerned not so much about Silliman’s com­ment policy as he is with why people care. He sug­gests that unknowns want these forums as a place to make them­selves known and says “we might lay the blame for the cur­rent state of affairs…on the attention-​economy of poetry, in which people want to be noticed any way they can”:

I think this attention-​seeking con­di­tion is endemic to the whole Amer­i­can poetry cul­ture now, and at root the issue is the sur­plus of supply (of poems, of opin­ions) com­pared to the demand. It is with poets as it is with aspir­ing Hol­ly­wood star­lets: there are a mul­ti­tude of them on the scene, hoping to be noticed, and few stunts are too low for some­one to stoop down to them. I haven’t seen any poets doing the “exposing under­wear while get­ting out of a limo” trick, but I’m sure it can’t be too far off — I just pray it isn’t Sil­li­man who goes there.

Which is a more-than-plausible, if not par­tic­u­larly novel, expla­na­tion for much of what gets oxygen in poet­ry­land. Bob pins the change on the internet:

When the dis­sem­i­na­tion of poems and com­men­tary was lim­ited by the tech­nol­ogy of print, rel­a­tively few people were able to dis­sem­i­nate their work, and they could imag­ine that the audi­ence for what they had to say was larger than the number of other pub­lish­ing writ­ers. Now every­one with a laptop can get their work out there, but get­ting it noticed amid the crowd is an issue…. Every­one is famous, now, to fif­teen people.

Here I’m less con­vinced. Remem­ber that in 1991, which has to count as pre-​internet by any mean­ing­ful mea­sure, Dana Gioia could write:

What makes the sit­u­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary poets par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing is that it comes at a moment of unprece­dented expan­sion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry pub­lished, so many antholo­gies or lit­er­ary mag­a­zines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet…. A ‘famous’ poet now means some­one famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame rel­a­tively meaningful.

Even this latter isn’t a debate that I have the time or incli­na­tion to get into now, but I couldn’t help but think—because these days I’m only allowed to think—about Dante, and his own story of making a name for him­self among the young aes­thetes of 13th-century Florence.

Ange has a great new prose piece on Beirut, occa­sional DE glos­sator Anthony Madrid has a title-​cursing poem, and I’ve got a con­tri­bu­tion to the future of pub­lish­ing in the new issue of Poetry. Check them out…

My latest Lingo column, Lin­guis­tic Cur­rency, is now up on the Nation’s web­site. It takes off from Ferenc Karinthy’s novel Metro­pole, and a fas­ci­nat­ing book on the role of Eng­lish in the trans­for­ma­tion of Slo­va­kia into a modern Euro­pean (read: free market) nation.

With spe­cial ref­er­ence to this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

1/ (a) Is the form of poems like Seidel’s “Sii Romanitico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare” ade­quately described as dog­gerel? (b) If yes, how does this affect your sense of his enter­prise? If no, how would you describe it?

2/ One jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the appar­ent lack of sense in Wheeler’s work is that this lack mimics the sense­less­ness of the world we live in. (a) Do you think this is a valid jus­ti­fi­ca­tion? (b) If so, what do you take to be the point of the mim­icry? (c) Does this jus­ti­fi­ca­tion apply to Seidel? How? (d) Does it apply to Flarf and con­cep­tual poetry? How?