Why should you pay attention to this writing as opposed to something else? I would say if you don’t enjoy it, don’t read it. Think of how you might respond to someone who asks why pay attention to a more difficult later text of Beckett. If the pay-off’s not there, why not read Joanne Kyger or Eileen Myles or any number of other wonderful writers. Just as some people think readers of Beckett are mere masochists, others think readers of Silliman are the same, but the truth is that there is pleasure there in both cases, for those for whom pleasure is there.

Still, WCW’s sentence depends upon the need for a connection between the fact or experience & the word. I’ve always taken that for granted, but realize it is now a position that needs defending. Really, I have been scribbling notes to myself all day with hands dirty from the garden.

Added a moment later: I don’t want this to be about Silliman, except insofar as he is representative of a method. It was Jonathan who chose the example. For the record, in my few exchanges with him, Ron has been utterly without presumption or cant. (So has Jonathan, too. I’m just clearing the ground so we can all camp here.)

“When arguments about poetry resort to taste, there is always an implied value judgment, I think.” Does the “I think” turn your sentence from a value judgment into a taste description? That’s the way I often end up deploying “I think,” I think — when there’s something I can express only as a universal declarative despite its fleeting, speculative, or eccentric status. Anyway, I genuinely feel comfortable trying to describe an experience without making any implicit claim that it ranks higher on an imaginary linear experiential scale than some other experience would. Two-dimensional space supports an infinite set of different one-dimensional rulings, and culture takes place in many more than two dimensions. My view of a blackbird doesn’t block Stevens’s thirteen.

Getting down to cases is a good thing, and a hard thing, and (I’m sorry to say) never a guaranteed thing. I would be very impressed if you were able to convince everyone you’ve ever encountered that “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a top-notch sentence. Which, as you know, was originally encased untitled in a top-notch book which also included a prose CHAPTER 19, followed by a CHAPTER XIX (“I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence”), followed by this happy news:

Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch
of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)
Line and you are there in a few
minutes

Which makes me wonder if some of the aesthetic disconnect here is that you’re focusing on individual lines. Looking for “the good parts” in Silliman would be as melancholy a chore as looking for the swinging solos in a collective improvisation. He seems to me more like Patricia Highsmith than like Oscar Wilde: he works in units of book.

Anyway, I agree that parody can sometimes help us work out aesthetic puzzles. For example, your paragraph reads nothing like any of Silliman’s or Hejinian’s poetry. So one approach might be to ask why that is. What labor would be needed to improve the fit in either direction?

Too many places to go from here, too little time…. Does the Pelham Bay Park Branch run on weekends?