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.