Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
177. "Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in pursuit of new constellations of relationship. In other words, community is as much what I am trying to get away from--reform--as form."
182. "all this stuff about poetry groups and movements is a publicity stunt for poets without the imaginative capacity to assert their unique individuality in forms and voices utterly indistinguishable from the other prize-winning poets who vote these awards to each other on panels and juries that systematically rule out any trace of individuality expressed by particularity of tone, diction, syntax or form"; "You want to take things that appear accessible and linear, I reply, and show how they are complex and inaccessibly nonlinear; I want to take things that appear complex and nonlinear and show how this complexity is what makes them accessible in the sense of audible (auditable). And, I continue, waving my arms and upping the tempo as my colleague's eyes begin to spin in orbits, isn't the nonlinearity of much so-called disjunctive poetry indeed a point of contact with the everyday cultural experiences of most North Americans, where overlays of competing discourses is an inevitable product of the radio dial, cable television, the telephone, advertising, or indeed, at a different level of spatialization, cities?"
185. "you get a far greater range of poetic explorations in the pages of Temblor or o.blek than you'll find in the truly schoolish, dispiritingly conformist poetry pages of the New Yorker or most of the mainstream poetry journals."
188. < irony >"Subscribers to Poetics@UBVM agree to
end all "back channel" communication. All
communication among subscribers shall be
sent to the list as a whole: no individual
e-mail or conventional mail may be
exchanged, no face-to-face verbal
communications will be permitted
(nonverbal communication is in no
way restricted by this rule).
At first, this may be difficult
for those who live in the same area.
But, over time, the enormous advantages
to community-building will become
apparent." < /irony >
190. listserv sig: "POETICS@UBVM--we're taking the unity
out of community! Unsubscribe today!"
191. "I use "aesthetic" not to suggest an ideal of beauty but rather to invoke a contested arena of judgement, perception, and value where artworks and essays operate not as adjudicators of fixed principles but as probes for meaning, prods for thought."