Oh ... No

So, I'm sending the following letter to my editor:

As I complete the chapter on Perse and return to the chapter on Stein, I am finding that the fit is not good. The chapters on Bonnefoy, Perse, and Graham are close and interconnected readings. The chapter on Stein is becoming more clearly inorganic to the rest of the project. It’s turning into a bridge to another book, a metacritical piece on Stein as the Objectivists and Language poets quite consciously descend from her work. Those schools are so coherent, and so critically conscious of their relation to Stein, I am finding that while their poetry and critical work can be thought through under the umbrella of a poetics of being two, cramming that other branch of poetry into this book, even a little bit, is not an elegant approach. I had thought that the difference in origins would not matter so much, Bonnefoy, Perse and Graham descending more clearly from the Symbolists – but it does.

To a good reader, a refusal to recognize these points of difference in a project very much about how difference matters would seem confusing at best and quite simply stubborn at worst.

So, I propose this change: the book still develops Irigaray’s ethics as a critical frame, as a poetics toward and around which Bonnefoy, Perse, and Graham are writing; but with the added dimension that both Bonnefoy and Perse are influences on Graham’s work heretofore not discussed. Every critic connects her to Stevens, but no critics have yet connected her work to Bonnefoy and Perse. The echoes of them in her work are quite strong, sometimes nearly imitations at both the level of structure and linguistic style.

The result of this change would be a more aesthetically organic project that develops a poetics of being two, and establishes (the beginnings) of a line of poets who approach that poetic. The key to this line of reasoning lies in the performance of close readings on the terms of the poetics I develop, and since both Bonnefoy’s and Perse’s poems are quite long (both in the range of 80 to 100), we won’t have to worry about the book seeming ‘thin.’ Further, those close readings fully prepare a reader for the readings of Graham’s poems, which are considerably shorter, but can run to three and four pages and whose themes and metaphors develop across whole books (one result of Perse’s influence).

In short, it’s making more sense to go for depth rather than breadth. I had very much wanted Stein and the introduction of the tradition that descends from her work in here. I think it’s an important bit of reading to do for the purposes of feminist aesthetics, but it simply does not fit in this book. The work on Stein’s poem, the critical readings of them, and the poets related to her simply do not fit the larger direction or style of this book.

My deepest hope is that this realization is not a major impediment for you and Lexington. The book you will be receiving will, I think, be the stronger and more compelling for the change – the work in it and its implications the clearer for the shaper focus.

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Mercy. -- No, the iPod had nothing to do with it. Really. REally. I've just been W.R.O.N.G. about this all this time. As I said to Red Lotus, writing is mostly listening and crashing into your own stupidity, as I glean from the honesty of Avital Ronnel. It's just so true.