Ana and Majena, backchannels to come. Very glad you’re interested in participating.

And – Juliana and I remain interested in suggestions/critiques about how the language of the call (original blog post) might be edited or re-framed.

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David (Hadbawnik), hi, and briefly, thanks for providing publication info/context around David Hess’s paper in your first comment. I found Dale Smith’s recent blog post (in response to the footnote where he’s mentioned) thoughtful, and quite helpful in re-understanding and contextualizing that (historical) moment on the buffpo list we point towards in the footnote.

There are plenty of other anecdotal examples we might have included. And it can be problematic to cite anecdotal, individual moments (as your fears about coterie and agenda demonstrate.) A few more contemporary moments, some from our respondents, were removed before publication.

But neither did we include what we did in the interest of fanning old fights. Those fights certainly aren’t mine; I wasn’t a participant, or even in conversation really with poets at the time. But those moments, along with others, still did and do contribute to the construction of a field and communities I’m part of now.

As David (Buuck) pointed out, the examples in the paper (and there are many, many footnotes and examples) are historical. The paper isn’t titled “Sexist Male Poets Trouble” and it’s not ‘about’ any one personality or person. We look at Silliman comprehensively b.c. we’re trying to think about the internet as a site of reception and production, and his blog is a central location, or ‘lightning rod for all kinds of issues.’

We welcome more histories and narratives of contemporary poetry scenes, and this conversation has already provided an opportunity for you to give more context. And I’m glad for that.

I’m hesitant to reply to this, partially out of a reluctance to “personalize” this debate (any further?)–such was not my intention. I do so only to clarify those intentions.

I referenced the context of your essay merely to point out that the Hess footnote is linked to the mention of Dale Smith, in that it also involves criticism of Dale and a response to it. Perhaps “attack” is too strong a word; I don’t deny your or anyone’s right to enter into critiques or debates etc.

Whether your criticism of Dale in that essay is valid is another matter, and again, I wish you had included the whole essay (at the risk of its taking over this comments thread), because the consideration with which you treat Perloff and, to an even greater extent, Silliman, even while criticizing them, makes the criticism of Dale seem much harsher.

To which you might reply, that’s because Perloff and Silliman had a long track record of being progressive, nuanced, understanding of gender issues and so on, while Dale Smith did not.

That might have been true at that time. Since that time–as he’s written on his own Possum Ego blog in response to being footnoted–much has changed. Much has been written. Many millions of words worth of books, magazines, readings, reviews, from Dale’s own pen and through the wonderful and wonderfully diverse SP press, have been produced. How is it fair to mention a ten-year-old “historical moment” without providing any of this context, especially when such an effort is being made to contextualize a figure like Silliman? (I’m talking about the Spahr/Young essay now.)

This is the whole of my question in a nutshell. The notion that Dale gets frozen, Han Solo-like, in a “historical moment,” while others are treated more fairly–and that there’s a pattern of this sort of thing–is what makes it seem to be more than just an objective sifting of moments and facts.

Readers can draw their own conclusions, but I might add that I’m not sure how genuine debate & criticism about something DS wrote becomes an “attack” on him, but it does seem to be part of a general tendency to personalize such criticism, such that historical moments in ongoing debates can thus be dismissed as “old spats” or “feuds” – i.e., something personal and only worth looking at if one has some other agenda. Perhaps I am naive, but I simply don’t share such a world-view – I don’t see critique and debate as about combat or personal attack or score-settling or any of that. I simply felt that Dale’s remarks about an all-women issue of the Hat were similar to someone saying something like, “Wow, this issue of Interlope really holds together, even though it’s restricted to Asian-American poets” or “Even though it only publishes writers from the African Diaspora, nocturnes is still pretty good!” I’ve spoken to too many poets & editors on the receiving end of such “praise” and “surprise” to think that this is not somehow reflective of a broader (often paternalistic) tendency to still view so-called “identity” poetics through aesthetic frames that simply don’t do justice to the historical & contingent contexts through which different modes emerge.

Anyways, the excerpt (slightly over one page from a twelve-page essay):

“In a December, 1998, posting to the SUNY-Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center Poetics List, Dale Smith presents a favorable review of the first issue of The Hat, a small-press poetry journal edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar. Most notable in Smith’s post is his (apparent) surprise that a journal edited by two men has published an issue consisting entirely of women. He writes:

“Two male editors publishing a first issue with only women is quite notable and the results are not what I expected. [...] I understand building an issue of women’s writing is no easy task. To find a grouping of work that corresponds or echoes internally is difficult enough. Restricting that to a particular, traditionally under-represented gender, is moreso.”

It is a curious argument. It seems that a poetry journal (or anthology) featuring only women writers is “notable” only because the editors in this case are male. This would seem to imply that a selection of women-edited women’s writing would not be notable, read instead perhaps as some kind of “political” move (rather than aesthetic). Here male editorship is assumed to be somehow beyond or above this kind of politic, perhaps even “objective,” such that publishing “only women” would in and of itself be notable (because one assumes that such “objectiveness” would surely favor a masculinist poetics?). Again, Smith’s assumption is that the selection under discussion here came about by “restricting that to a particular … gender.” Why? Because only due to such a restriction could one explain the absence of male writers in a male-edited journal?

Implied in Smith’s argument is that a journal or anthology of women’s writing is somehow more validated by its having male editorship. Surely, it seems to be suggested, if female editors produced an all-women’s journal or anthology, it would come about based on some process other than merely “aesthetic.” Likewise, one assumes, for other kinds of “identity-based” editorial interventions.

In a later post on this topic, speaking to issues of representation, Smith claims that “sheer numbers strengthen the political movements, but at the loss of qualitative production.” Besides the implied separation and privileging of “qualitative production” (judged how? by whom?) over the “political” (understood how? for whom?), the condescension in this attitude is troubling. The assumption that a feminist politics (to take but one contested site) is somehow to be furthered only at the (likely) expense of aesthetic practice is to reinvoke some unspoken privileging of what could only be understood as a masculinist aesthetics. As the still-dominant aesthetic and interpretive regime, such an aesthetics has the virtue of inhabiting the “center” that all “others” (assumed to be “other” aesthetically by virtue of coming from “other” identity-positions) might aspire to. Thus being a woman writer in a male-edited journal is more “notable” than to be in a woman-edited journal.”

David Buuck

Reading the “Silliman” portion of your essay more carefully, I realize you actually assert that the numbers of his “single author posts” actually have NOT changed all that much in response to interventions; nevertheless, the very generous consideration of his efforts on behalf of gender equality is still apparent, especially in footnote #14.