Here’s to talking things through! I appreciate the gesture, and I support your insight about the unnecessarily pejorative nature of the name “School of Quietude.”

Again, sending my best to you,

Tom

Actually, I think a real history of American poetry since WWII needs to be written that balances the tendencies of what Silliman calls the post-avant & what I am proposing to call post-confessional. And it is important to see these tendencies not as opposite camps but as currents that overlap in interesting ways. I’ve just been reading Bob Perlman’s new book Iflife & there is a remarkable amount of personal anecdote woven into those poems. To go back to my own experience, I took a class with ur-SoQ poet Donald Justice many years ago in which we spent weeks studying WCW’s poems, to which Justice was deeply sympathetic. The categories are not merely useless, they erase great swaths of poetry.

In any case, thank you for your good-tempered response. I’m going to edit without erasing some of my post to reflect the fact that I am retracting, not the substance, but the manner in which I expressed myself.

Apologies for rubbing you the wrong way with my post and/or comments. The idea for the post was actually pretty simple, and really not intended, as you point out, “to add anything to the discussion.” I was simply trying to inform myself and my 20 or so readers about what Silliman meant when he used the term “School of Quietude.” I’ve noticed that among poets that I associate with (thirty-somethings, New Americans lineage), we have adopted Silliman’s School of Quietude moniker without giving it much thought. All I did (which I explain on the post) is to do a little Google searching and to look through Silliman’s posts and piece together a lineage of The School of Quietude. I posted the Mlinko letter (as I say on the post) to demonstrate how contentious the issue has become. As far as I can tell, I don’t really take an “angry” stance myself in the original post. For the record, I’ve been a bit skeptical of this School of Quietude idea, but since I’ve started working with Bennington/Breadloaf writers, I’ve been shocked a number of times by their automatic dismissiveness of anything not official verse.

What bums me out is your attacking nature. The name throwing “Silliman groupie,” “flim flam,” etc., seems actually to perpetuate the “bullshit” that you speak of more than anything I posted or said. That sucks! By agreeing with many of the responses to my post—including some of the criticism—I wanted to simply demonstrate that I’m not a know-it-all. This is true. I really don’t have the answers to all of these questions. In fact, the post was an honest attempt to make a map of the current debate. As you point out, some of the responses that I got actually add more to the debate than I do in the post. I found some of these replies informative and helpful myself. Furthermore, I agree with you as well that a neutral term for the SoQ would be much more useful than a pejorative one (However, I’m worried that for saying this, you will think of me as even more of a flim-flammer!). Naming a new term for the School of Quietude simply wasn’t my intention.

Best to you,

Tom Morgan