ten + 1

A few furtive thoughts about the ten + 1 poetics quotes from yesterday:

1. The challenge of the task wasn't limiting myself to only a slight excess of the proposed limit. It was finding statements succinct enough to stand on their own.

2. I tried not to shape the list too much, really only deciding between two contenders when they expressed nearly identical ideas. Nevertheless, most of the quotes deal with three not unrelated themes: poetry as a study of language; attention to language as a transformation of language and a re-thinking of the relationship between language and world; the re-thinking of the world as an involvement in the transformation of social organization. No surprises, I suppose...

3. I probably wouldn't have expected John Taggart to end up on the list. It's not that I don't like his work, but that I've not made an extensive study of his poetics. I'd happened to read the text in question, and it came to mind as a way of thinking about a poem being rooted in sound, as emerging from something like nonsense or gibberish. A mouthing. And I envy his ability to use an incredibly repetitive musicality in his poetry.

4. The Craig Dworkin quote also took a convoluted route to end up on the final list. I'd recently re-read a number of Kenneth Goldsmith's essays, and went back through one or two, hoping to find something useful. It was this quote that stood out, though I'd mis-remembered its sentiment as Goldsmith's. I was even tempted for a moment to include just enough of Goldsmith's signal phrase introducing the quote to call it his, but thought that wouldn't be fair to Dworkin. I think Goldsmith might have liked it, though...