I've failed the Blake test!

December 13, 2004

[Ron Silliman didn't want to put this on his blog but rather leave it in the comments section, so I'm putting it here. Response to his "Brian Kim Stefans, failed Blake Test" post.]

Dear Ron,

I'll keep this brief just to clear up some inaccuracies. Following is the email I sent to the ubulist, the only place you could have heard about the "Poem for Airports":

***

I worked on a new one today:

http://www.arras.net/a_book_of_poems/please_think_again/index.html

There's a "close" button on the bottom left of the screen.

***

I had been sending my works-in-progress to the ubulist for a few weeks now, with all sorts of disclaimers about how the text wasn't done, the programming wasn't finished, etc., so "I worked on a new one today" should have tipped you off that I wasn't done with the piece.

Also, you don't have to "control-alt" out of it because I included a close button -- see, I'm not incompetent!

There is no such thing as a Flash Poem just as there is no such thing as a Paper Poem. Also, you don't even mention Blake in your blog post, so what is the "Blake Test" and how did I fail it? Who said I was taking a test at all? (This seems to me an example of the unnecessarily bombastic framing that you use often in your posts to make casual observations seem much more important – I like what you say much better when you don’t do this.)

Neither what Blake nor what I do in this poem could count as “graphic design” – I’m entirely too unpractical, and he’s entirely too weird (though he did earn a good penny for Night Thoughts).

Lastly, comparing my writing to Kenny's uncreative writing practice doesn't make any sense at all. Kenny is talking about writing practices that don't involve anything "creative" textually on the part of the "writer" -- it is more about transferring already written texts, or ambient texts, into a paper medium, or maybe, as in the case of my “Howl, One Letter At A Time,” taking it from a paper (or oral) medium and presenting it electronically, not changing a word.

The poem that I set, “Please Think Again,” was written quite conventionally, on a typewriter, coming right out of my leg. It’s not a bad read actually -- it's been up at my blog for weeks: www.arras.net/fscII. Before classing my poem as “uncreative”, you should at least explain what you mean (or what Kenny means) by uncreative writing and then compare. (If you want to find some of my “theory” about what I might be doing in my poem, look at my review of Tan Lin’s BlipSoak01 at Boston Review.)

As a parting note, I think when someone calls a piece “A Poem For Airports,” they are asking for a comparison to Brian Eno (“Music for Airports”), not William Blake. Ironically, it was Carla Harryman’s husband, Barrett Watten, who introduced me to the ambient light show tunnel that connects the old and new airports in Detroit (they have them everywhere now) that this poem reminded me of.

I’m not sure how “Open Box” – whose only graphic appears to be a box taken right out of the standard Windows Wingdings font, and whose only motion is the “file transferring” graphic that everyone sees in Windows – passes the “Blake test.” He drew some pretty interesting pictures. This poem seems to me rather simplistic: a Flash graphic over-elaborating a very uninteresting metaphor -- i.e. we are reading these pages “as if” they were taken from an open box. So here’s the open box. Uh huh.

Without making too many claims for my poem, isn’t a poem that could conceivably be projected on a wall in a civic space more “genre busting” then a set of quatrains that are made to look like they are on sheets of paper flying out of a box? How many pieces of civic sculpture do you know that involve only words and light?

Anyway, I hope I’ve managed to bridge the “Grand Canyon of difference” – ouch! -- between my and Carla Harryman’s writing practice. My apologies if I don’t care as much about words as the Old Guard. It’s amusing to be thrown up against an orthodoxy and being found wanting – should I become a Catholic now? Has Robert Grenier been canonized yet? Can’t I be a “cataloger’s nightmare” too?

Thanks as always for the free publicity and the provocation, but I would have liked it more after I had completed the poem, and if you were more accurate in your description of it.

Cheers,
Brian

PS: Oops, I realize there was a mention of a "Blake test," though why he comes up in a question of "platform-independence" is beyond me.

But if "Open Box" passes the "Blake test," does that mean we can take the graphic of the open box and present it by itself as an interesting work of art, much as we can take the words out of Blake and still have the most innovative 18th English visual artist? Just shows how little appreciation of (what one might call) visual culture some Language poets seem to have.

(Blake, for example, couldn't pass the "Sir Joshua Reynolds" test for visual language, or the "Alexander Pope" test for correct couplets -- the orthodoxies of his time, both rich artists -- but we still like him!)

In any case, my poem is on my blog, if you want to read it. But the "Blake test" doesn't exist. It seems weighty to allude to Blake and all, but after Finlay, McCaffery, Drucker, Duchamp, the Brazilians, Nauman, etc., it hardly matters.

Cheers,
Brian