Harriet

Don Share

The Name Game

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As an adjunct to my Kneejerk Poetry list (and just in time for back to school shopping) I’m now assembling a list of names and phrases that are sure to generate controversy instantly. This list has been empirically tested, and is 100% guaranteed to work as advertised; no batteries required!
It’s all open source, so please add your own! Comment… criticize.. distribute freely!


In no particular order:
Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor
William Logan
Ron Silliman
Ed Dorn
James Wright
Frank O’Hara
Karl Marx
Kenneth Goldsmith
AWP
MLA
post-anything
“School of Quietude”
“Third Way”
flarf
slow poetry
fast poetry
conceptual poetry
New American poetry
avant-garde poetry
Poetry
class
money (too much, or too little for poetry)
poetry contests, aka Faux-etry
academia
theory
criticism
canon
Poet Laureate of the United States
The following do not generate controversy:
Walter Benjamin
Theodor Adorno

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25 Comments for “The Name Game”

  1. I guess my only question is: If I’m moved to build a soap box before I comment on at least forty-two percent of the list, am I truly a poet’s poet?

    Posted By: dwayne on September 2, 2008 at 1:49 pm
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  2. Don,
    funny stuff. I’m not sure the record bears you out on Adorno, though; their seems, from a cursory survey, to have been quite a bit of haggling about him (c.f. http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/02/who_you_callin_postavant.html#more as only one example) and “cherry-picking,” using him to justify positions he would have abhorred, whether the autonomy of art is the same as the intentional fallacy, and all that good stuff. So I guess it’s just Benjamin everyone agrees on. And pudding!

    Posted By: vijay on September 2, 2008 at 2:40 pm
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  3. Thank you, Vijay!
    So: scratch Adorno, add Intentional Fallacy to the big list, and add pudding to the small one!

    Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 2:51 pm
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  4. I hate pudding.
    Don, this is the funniest post in Harriet history. But what is that gif?
    Controversial:
    Language poetry
    racism
    Norton Anthologies
    Harold Bloom
    formalism
    economic determination
    popular lyrics as poetry
    Noncontroversial:
    big red dogs

    Posted By: michael robbins on September 2, 2008 at 4:14 pm
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  5. Hm. I just read about a correlation between big red dogs and cancer, so I’m not sure about that one! And if you don’t like pudding… well, it just might be the case that Benjamin is the only non-controversial entry we’ll ever have!
    Good new entries there. I almost had Bloom in from the get-go, but thought maybe he’d morphed into a Facebook friendly force of some kind. (Yes, I know it’s not really him on FB.) Could be we’ll have to add the anxiety of influence, though.
    Oh, and that should be: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as you well know.
    The gif is a knee, of course… as seen by your doctor!

    Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 4:21 pm
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  6. I’m completing a manuscript of numerous “fait divers” based on U.S. poets (each poet identified by last name, led off with M., Mme. or Mlle, as the case may be). It’s entitled “Fait Divers du Poésie Américain,” and each piece is in spirit of Felix Feneon’s “novellas in three lines,” his marvelous and strange miniature crime reports for 19th century Parisian newspapers. Some of these are soon coming out in a magazine or two, but thought I’d offer one here, since Don mentions William Logan:
    >“Do you somehow think I am sorry?” screamed the crazed critic M. Logan to the magistrate. Manacled and led away, sentenced to hang, for the murder and cannibalism of seventy-four innocent poets… This in Boussens.
    Kent

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 2, 2008 at 4:29 pm
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  7. Controversial:
    identity politics
    political poetry
    identity poetry
    identity property of mathematics poetry
    property poetry
    property
    scansion
    condescension
    condensation
    dew
    neo-post-ism
    nepotism
    who-you-know-ism
    flow
    traditional prosody
    transitional rosary
    bohemian rhapsody
    queen

    Posted By: john on September 2, 2008 at 4:42 pm
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  8. You know, I’m getting talked about (though with incredible confusion) under Stanley Fish’s NY Times column today. So why does someone like Kenneth Goldsmith get to be on the list and I don’t? Huh? C’mon, Don, toss me a freakin’ cracker here…
    damn.
    Kent

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 2, 2008 at 4:44 pm
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  9. OK, please consider the following emendations:
    Kent Johnson added to big list.
    Crackers added to small one.

    Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 4:48 pm
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  10. A-ha, the knee! I thought it was Art.
    And I actually do like pudding. And crackers.
    Also Checkers. Wikipedia dixit: “Nixon’s dog Checkers died in 1964 and is buried in Wantagh, New York, on Long Island’s Bide-A-Wee Pet Cemetery (3300 Beltagh Avenue, Wantagh, NY). Since Nixon never lived on Long Island, and only buried Checkers there because it was convenient, some locals look upon the dog as an unwelcome outsider. Suffolk County Historical Society President Wallace Broege has been quoted as saying, ‘I think it does Long Island a disservice.’ That doesn’t stop the visitors from coming. And while patriots still plant small American flags next to the dog’s granite tombstone (Plot #5), no one from the former first family has ever visited.”

    Posted By: Michael Robbins on September 2, 2008 at 8:49 pm
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  11. Isn’t “cracker” considered a slur?

    Posted By: john on September 3, 2008 at 12:10 am
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  12. (just in case: my last comment was a jest.)
    (people can be touchy — me included!)

    Posted By: john on September 3, 2008 at 12:29 am
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  13. Sexist list! What, NO controversial females?
    Daisy

    Posted By: Daisy on September 3, 2008 at 9:03 am
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  14. Added to the long list:
    WOM-PO
    Daisy Fried
    Alicia Stallings
    Ange Mlinko
    Marilyn Chin
    Joan Houlihan
    Jorie Graham
    Alice Quinn
    Now, having done that, I feel that I’ve been rather patronizing and paternalistic.

    Posted By: Don Share on September 3, 2008 at 9:10 am
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  15. Since the topic is poetic controversies, thought I’d share the letter I just sent to NY Times, in the comments stream under Stanley Fish’s latest column:
    A brief comment in reply to Alison S’s letter of September 1 (#20) concerning the Araki Yasusada controversy. There are some things she seems confused about.
    No one, that I’m aware of, “insists” the writings contained in Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada are by a poet of that name. It’s been well-known for twelve or thirteen years that the work is a fiction and Yasusada a poetic heteronym–something openly acknowledged on the cover and in the appendix of Doubled Flowering, which appeared over ten years ago.
    The attributional case, rather, is this: The author or authors (presented under the pseudonym “Tosa Motokiyu,” one of the fictional translators of the work) imagined the found poems, letters, drafts, English assignments, and other writings of a Hiroshima survivor and published this work with a decision to not take conventional credit for it. The choice to preserve an ongoing space of anonymity was seen as coextensive, at least from the authorial perspective, with the aesthetic and ethical nature of the creation.
    A number of years ago, The Nation magazine called Doubled Flowering “the most controversial work of poetry since Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” In the years since, various dozens of articles, essays, presentations, and graduate theses have appeared on the issue, here and abroad. Some, like Alison S. and Charles Bernstein, have seen the Yasusada work as a manipulative transgression of literary and cultural principles with motive of personal gain; others, like Eliot Weinberger and Forrest Gander, have seen the work as a radical, moving expression of tribute and empathy. There have been emotional polemics, and there have been thoughtful studies–pro and con.
    Given that the background subject of the writing is one of the most contended and troubling events of the 20th century, the continuing debate seems entirely apt.
    Kent Johnson

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 9:58 am
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  16. Ron Silliman is mentioned above, in Don’s list. Here is his fait divers:
    “Yes, it is true, Your Honor, that I am obsessed with Project Runway, but it was only part of a performance project,” said M. Silliman, with earnest sincerity. Three months in jail and suspended blogging license for shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret.

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 10:40 am
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  17. And since Flarf is mentioned:
    The little urchins Gordon and Mohammad, of Nangis, hid behind a curtain, making loud farting sounds with the pits of their arms. Just as Mme. Lauterbach was beginning to read! The Vice-Chancellor of the Sorbonne led them out by the ears.

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 10:53 am
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  18. And since Language Poetry is mentioned:
    Coming from an all-night soiree in celebration of some group-written memoir, Mme. Hejinian was most fortunate to escape with but a broken pelvis and a hefty fine: Trainspotting on the BART.

    Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 11:01 am
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  19. controversial:
    Zizek & Lacan (sounds like Siskel & Ebert!)
    non-con:
    Lana Turner (get up, we love you!)
    mimeographed journals
    ekphrasis

    Posted By: Doodle on September 3, 2008 at 2:22 pm
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  20. Gordon? Mohammad? Little?

    Posted By: Travis Nichols on September 3, 2008 at 2:25 pm
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  21. Wait, is Lacan controversial around here? Have their been Lacan debates that I’ve missed? Gyp! (No offense to my Magyar friends).

    Posted By: Vijay Chaudhoury on September 4, 2008 at 12:55 pm
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  22. I think the idea is that just mentioning Lacan automatically makes him controversial – which just happened.
    On the list he goes!

    Posted By: Don Share on September 4, 2008 at 1:32 pm
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  23. If Lacan is controversially non-controversial, well, this sounds very much like a Lacanian impasse, comme on dit. Alors, je pense que c’est necessaire d’ecrire une liste seulement pour Lacan, une liste des bouleversements Lacaniens tout-seule, comme on dit. Le noude integrale d’un “petit a”, comme on dit, ou “petit oeuil”, ou possiblement un “petit oeuf” – voici certainement la faiblesse des problemes psycho-litteraire, comme on dit, ou tous les hommes et un nombre innumerable des femmes trouvent leurs “identities pseudo-ecrives”, comme on dit.
    Eh?

    Posted By: Henry Gould on September 4, 2008 at 1:56 pm
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  24. Personally, I find big red dogs a sentimental gimmick to get someone’s pet on a poetry blog. I would add them to the list.

    Posted By: Lucia on September 6, 2008 at 3:32 pm
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