Final Thoughts

December 15, 2004

[Someone asked me on ubuweb why I even bother writing about Ron's blog -- good question! I've pasted my reply below, my final thoughts on the matter.]

It really doesn't bother me. I figure I've been out of the loop for a while, and Ron's just pushing my buttons so that I'll flame him. I'm assuming he's very aware of his own tactics, and like I said, the publicity is good for the work though I would have preferred it after a proper launch, when I've finished the poems (it's part of a sequence of 24 short works). I really don't know why anyone reads his blog anyway, I haven't gone near it in months.

I do get a little angry when someone professes to have applied a "test" to a work of art, and not prove in any way that the test has actually been done -- i.e. a quote from the poem, some sense of how the test was applied, etc. He couldn't have applied it unless he's actually recreated the text from the Flash piece. But I don't think he read the thing at all -- even one of the commenters on his blog picked up on one of my favorite lines from the poem, "Mandy Moore Sparkles" -- which makes him a liar when it comes to making any sort of claims of knowledge about the work, or "Flash Poems" in general.

I.e. why claim to have done something if you haven't? Why the "Blake test" and not a mere opinion? It's false authority.

But he's done this with works he likes, too -- I feel terrible for Carla Harryman! That's the puzzle: why bring everyone down because of your own laziness, in reading, understanding, terminology? It makes poetry and art seem quite cheap. Sometimes I want to pull a John Stewert (i.e. on Crossfire) and just say stop -- partisanship for sport is boring.