Front Magazine >

FRONT Is Not A Real Magazine

Donato Mancini >Published February, 2007

“When Mother first heard my percussion quartet years ago in Santa Monica, she said, “I enjoyed it, but where are you going to put it?”—John Cage, Indeterminacy [1]

One

French poet Roger Giroux wrote, in his poem Blank “Forget, and you begin to know.” [2] The book-length poem radi os,[3] by the American poet Ronald Johnson (1935 – 1998), is just such a forgetting into knowing. It is a crossing out, an erasure, of the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost. As he recounted numerous times during his life, Johnson took his cue for the process from composer Lucas Foss’ “Baroque Variations”. “Baroque Variations” is a composition of erased Handel. After erasing most of the notes, the relatively small number of notes Foss left intact, and precisely in-place, are what the audience hears, with all the new silence encroaching. Johnson applied a parallel procedure to Paradise Lost, leaving only traces of the obliterated original. He could say, with Foss, “I composed the holes”.

Since its first publication by Sand Dollar press, radi os has received a fair bit of attention, but very little of the critical writing on radi os so far has been very useful. The two commentaries on the poem most often cited, the original afterward by Guy Davenport and Eric Selinger’s essay “I Composed the Holes”,[4] both try to normalise Johnson’s subversive tactic.[5] Selinger follows Davenport in insisting that the action Johnson took in erasing Milton can be comfortably understood as a more literal and material example of the processes Harold Bloom describes in his Anxiety of Influence;[6] an Oedipal struggle between “strong poets” of different generations. Like any strong poet, they imply, Johnson simply “found” his poem inside Milton’s, as Milton found his poem in the bible, or as Michaelangelo “released” his sculptures from uncut blocks of marble. “He found a poem inside another poem. All he had to do was to remove the superfluous words .”[7]

The poetic analogy that continues to be passed around in most criticism of the poem is a quote from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.[8]

Johnson’s “A Note and A Dedication” that precedes the poem in both editions describes radi os as “the book Blake gave me”. Of his concept itself he writes: “To etch is ‘to cut away,’ and each page, as in Blake’s concept of a book, is a single picture.”[9] The lien with Blake this created has remained uncut, and the pertinent passage from Blake continues to be handed down as a pass-key to radi os, even though it mystifies many of the important material implications/meanings of Johnson’s poem. Why Davenport completely took-up this connection initially, seems easy enough to guess at. Hitching Johnson’s work to the (flaming) wagon of an English Poet could help rescue the under-appreciated poetry of his friend from obscurity.[10] In turn, Selinger merely seems to expand on the elder’s thinking in his much more detailed, comprehensive study. It seems revealing, however, that in trying to give Johnson’s poem some of the stability (and edifying sterility) of the canon, the correlative they use is William Blake and his “Proverbs of Hell”: hardly a model of social normalcy and good integration. The “anxiety” of influence is, I think, mainly felt in Davenport and Selinger, reverberating from the more powerful—possibly sinister—implications of Johnson’s poem. Whether Johnson saw himself as having a go at Milton or collaborating with him is does not tell readers much about the poem. I believe that he was, in fact, as creeped-out by what he was doing as Davenport was. “…I started crossing out. I got about halfway through it crossing out anything because I thought it would be funny. But I decided you don’t tamper with Milton to be funny. You have to be serious.”[11] He drew in Blake, I think, because he couldn’t grasp the cultural implications of what he’d done.

Johnson knew, however, that his wasn’t a simple case of influencea. If not that, then what? The holes Johnson composed mean more than a lot of poets’ words do. The blank signifies. A lot more in a lot less. His blanks signify in a couple of ways: as Mallarméan crucible (the silence wherefrom language is born), and as archaeological palimpsest. His blank, more like Mallarmé’s crucible than Blake’s powerful but vague “infinity”, is a cultural zero-reset, with consequent promise of renewal, or, at least, of change. His own avowed favourite passage in the poem, no accident, is the most Orphic. Singing out of silence. The blank spaces readers see, like the silences heard in Foss’ work, are where Milton’s words once were in the edition Johnson had:

Through
         the Orphean
       descent, and up

To find
                 The more
Clear
                 song ;

Nightly I visit:

Blind

         thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers

                summer’s rose,[12]

Johnson’s blank is the final, layer in the palimpsest Milton himself had made of the bible, English politics, and his own ambitions and talents. It is archaeological blank, hiding a submerged history, ground now ready to be sown.

When critic John Guillory writes of the “slippage between culture and civilization” [13] is salient on the point that, in the transmission of canonic works, the museum is the message. “What is transmitted by the school is, to be sure, a kind of culture; but it is the culture of the school.” [14] Davenport and Selinger’s readings of Johnson’s poem-in-Milton are based perhaps in the school-culture’s notion that the dignity of a civilisation resides in, and is embodied in, its collection of cultural treasures/artifacts. The school’s culture works, by “the necessity of defining that [national] culture largely by reference to the High Cultural artifacts to which access is provided in the schools.” [15] To even refer to the culture of the school as “our” culture is to imply that somehow Homer, Dante and Milton are who “we” are. In this confusion Davenport and Selinger “displace the real…. cultural continuities” and context of radi os in order to light it up by plugging it into the extensive power bar of the Great Museum. Unnecessarily so: the real “message” of Milton now has little or nothing to do with what Milton wrote—its message is the (powerful) framework of its transmission. [16] For radi os, Milton represents, then, the culture of the shabby used book store. Rather than being a sacred cultural object, for Ronald Johnson—bookstore customer, not student—Milton is a cheap commodity in his hand, completely at the mercy of his obliterating ballpoint.

Johnson, who was not an academic, seems to have crossed out Paradise Lost on either his first reading, or one of his earliest readings of the poem. Forgetting it as he read it, in other words, he inscribed a new reading of the Milton, and a new mode of reading. If Paradise Lost is something every high school student or 2nd year English student was once expected to have familiarity with, the diminished status of the canon as such means that it remains, mentally, culturally, more a monumental, and mostly unread, ruin than it was for Johnson’s generation. [17] The poem is still there, but not even like a ubiquitous Hamlet, but as merely a rumour. To take the metaphor implied in the title a little literally, radi os is an ever more faint, fuzzy signal from the ideological transmission tower of Milton’s increasingly distant poem. Thus Johnson encounters it as an amnesiac bookstore customer, not a student under pressure. [18]

FRONT magazine is, like Johnson’s re-Milton, a generative forgetting into knowing. In its development since 1998, the year of Johnson’s death, FRONT has become a critique from within of the literary transmission-platform of the magazine. What it critiques, specifically, is the determinant influence that that platform has over writing. If the real culture of Milton’s poem, its real content, is the school or the bookstore, the real culture of CanLit is the magazine and so genre and their departments. [19] To the very point of origin (writing ground zero), literary production or production of writing is shaped by the promises, the (materially limited) possibilities of eventual publication, in particular by magazines’ organisation according to boundaries of genre and discipline. In its print extension of the Western Front’s interdisciplinary mandate, FRONT has therefore conformed neither to the conventions of arts magazines – with articles on artists’ works, exhibition reviews, mini-essays, perhaps alongside some artists’ projects – nor the departmentalisation by genre of a typical literary journal. It replaces the generic role-call – Poetry; Fiction; Creative non-fiction; Books in Review – with a fetchingly vague “Art and Ideas”. In crossing out all this, FRONT implies changed relationships between writer and published object, which must change the writing. Thus FRONT opens up a significant space in legit (i.e. funded) Canadian magazine-publishing where writing of a trans-generic, non-generic (and even trans-disciplinary) nature is regularly cultivated.

Two

Before going further, it would be appropriate to consider briefly the meaning and place of genre in writing and publishing. The Bulgarian poeticist Tzvetan Todorov writes of genre from the standpoint of its historical conception in his Introduction to Poetics. The model he proposes applies well to current experience:

If we study the discussions bequeathed by the past, we realise that a work is said to have verisimilitude in relation to two chief kinds of norms. The first is what we call rules of the genre: for a work to be said to have verisimilitude, it must conform to these rules. […] Verisimilitude, taken in this sense, designates the work’s relation to literary discourse: more exactly, to certain of the latter’s subdivisions, which form a genre. [20]

A work’s truth-value, then, depends upon the specific relationships of its form and content to its own generic limits of form and content. The work itself is constantly signalling where those boundaries are, by the ways in which it appears to conform to a model (or set of expectations), and, especially, by its apparent minor transgressions. A veritable work—a “successful” work—must always somewhat overspill the very generic boundaries it marks for itself. [21] Each work that participates in and contributes to a genre does so by redefining that genre. [22] That is, in a living literary culture, genre is always in transition. That process of (usually) incremental transformation, in sight of a set of generic principles set by the other successul works seen to in the genre, is what genre is. As Derrida writes on the subject:

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because the trait of participation itself, even cause of the effect of the code of the generic mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself. [23]

One implication of his own argument that Derrida doesn’t address is that genre then often becomes, in many ways, the actual content of the work, much like the content of Milton becomes, for John Guillory, the culture of the school. The institutional setting or framework for this is the departmentalisation of publishing. In relation to FRONT magazine, the key is that magazines’ department-headings both provide generic slots for writers to fill – places for texts to make their generic marks, and for authors to colour across the lines – and provide guidance for the reader. They direct both reading and writing, arguably moreso than the texts.

Developing this point, Todorov further writes:

In every period, a certain number of literary types become so familiar to the public that the public uses them as keys (in the musical sense) for the interpretation of works; here the genre becomes, according to an expression of Hans Robert Jauss, a ‘horizon of expectation.’ The writer in his turn internalizes this expectation; the genre becomes for him a ‘model of writing.’ [24]

Hence experienced readers (editors, especially) can often make their readerly commitments or refusals after only reading the first few words or lines of a text. Genre and department signal who, how and what (in a generic sense) is being addressed before he/she must completely commit to reading it. The structures have been internalised. Hence writers “spontaneously” produce works ready-made for magazine publication, works that slot right in. A lot of the pleasures in the most artful narrative arts would indeed be impossible to re-produce—production-side or consumption-side—without having studied and internalised the (changing) rules. Hypotaxis relaxes, sure, while expected surprise, planned spontaneity, or local deviations maintain a minimal threshold of attention. Boring and confusing works that don’t obviously demarcate themselves are therefore often responded to (negatively) in terms of their social address. The flummoxed reviewer asks the wrong question: Who is the intended audience? [25] What the reviewer should ask is: What is the intended department?

So the question is at all whether genre is inherently a bad or good thing. The sentiment, either way, would be absurd. Nor is it whether its effects on writing are immediately positive or negative. Genre itself, as Todorov, Mikhail Bahktin, and Derrida each suggests in his own way, is an inevitable effect of the continuation of a literary culture, not a cause. The dynamism of genre, however, and a foreshortened cultural attention-span mean that there is also a kind of planned obsolescence in every genre. The constant adaptation of genres to immediate circumstance requires also that all must eventually fade, die out, and others arise that are products of their own social moment. It is often in places where the all important genre contract is transgressed, flouted, or abandoned that new genres begin to form. Essentially, in Todorov’s view, if the newer evolving tendencies catch on, get reproduced, carried forward, they may become genres.

Cultural critic John G. Cawelti writes insightfully about the life-cycle of narrative genres in an essay on Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown:

Generic exhaustion is a common phenomenon in the history of culture. One can almost make out a life cycle of genres as they move from an initial period of articulation and discovery, through a phase of conscious self-awareness on the part of both creators and audiences, to a time when the generic patterns have become so well-known that people become tired of their predictability. It is at this point that parodic and satiric treatments proliferate and new genres gradually arise. [26]

If such exhaustion arguably set in in the visual arts in Canada in the 1960s-70s, when the Eternal Network was forming, in Can Lit it seems to have set in hard in the mid 1980s. In the time since, the exhaustion has deepened, and as a result more and more new elsewhere-looking formations like FRONT’s editorial have arisen. Transgeneric writing is dangerous in its critical disregard of norms of address, but it is not apocalyptic. Neither is radi os particularly apocalyptic, although it has been called as much, but it probably came 10 years too early. Nor is FRONT’s stance a kind of pitching-eggs-at-the-VAG oppositionality. All signal not doom but the new possibilities, following from the necessity of “generic regeneration”. Cawelti continues a page later:

The present significance of generic transformation as a creative mode reflects the feeling that not only the traditional genres, but also the cultural myths they once embodied are no longer fully adequate to the imaginative needs of our time. We may eventually see emerging out of this period of generic transformation a new set of generic constructs more directly related to the imaginative landscape of the next millenium. [27]

FRONT may not be a first rate magazine all the time[28]—but its move into unknown interdisciplinary territory, as bold as the Western Front’s own initially was, is harbinger to a great deal of unimaginable and unimaginably interesting writing activity already under way, bound only to increase in mass, scale, and quality as 21st century unfolds.

Three

In reading the contributors’ bios, it becomes clear that a considerable part of the writing published in FRONT is put together by artists using language to make works, apparently unfettered by any sense of generic propriety. An equal number of the contributors self-define as writers, and are either submitting their least departmentable writings, or perhaps striving towards the nongeneric in their oeuvre. The screw-threads of genre may be stripped for many, but the impulse to write persists. Many of the writers, although not all, published in FRONT succeed in re-thinking writing because they either aren’t writers, or they are writers untroubled by literary education. [29] They wouldn’t know how to mark genre in their works even if they wanted to; instead, in the application of another kind of constructive intelligence to language, they idiosyncratically begin to stage new generic tendencies. FRONT’s institutional critique is threatening in precisely the way interdiciplinarity in other contexts was initially so threatening to disciplinarians: it evokes the unfriendly ghost of forgetting, of lost “knowledge” of the school culture, the fear that the transmission of literary High Culture could be replaced with giddily DIY cultural formations like the Western Front. That is exactly the kind of world Professor. Guy Davenport abhored, exactly why he couldn’t read radi os face-on.[30]

I’m sure that a lot of nongeneric writings are either never finished, or never sent out because of a dearth of legit publishing outlets for them. I mean, where are you going to put it? Whole careers imagined, never realised. Although the publishers of Sand Dollar clearly saw something in it, unrecognition was indeed the initial fate of radi os. Since then, radi os has become Johnson’s most widely read and influential poem. Even L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E pundit Ron Silliman jealously dismissed Johnson’s choice of Paradise Lost as “too obvious”, [31] but rescinded decades later, writing, on the occasion of its recent republication by Flood Editions, that this book is a “must-have” [32] for any collection of contemporary poetry. Other reviewers, when they noticed at all, were not surprisingly even sniffier [33] Hence Davenport’s salvaging afterward. [34] But surveying the last 9 years of FRONT, it’s obvious that a poem like radi os would have been instantly recognised, welcomed, and published. Johnson would have got his (badly needed) 75$ for his 5 pages or whatever, long before the punditry or Miltonists had any revelation of the poem’s profound cultural significance. FRONT’s critique of “magazine” is therefore carried out partly by just publishing a lot of writing that couldn’t find a paying home in manywhere elses in the vast wilds of Can Lit, helping trans-generic writers pay the rent since 1998.

FRONT wasn’t always as good as its name brand promises. A lot had to be changed in the structure of the magazine to make it what it is today. It is no doubt a sign of the crucial divergences between historical developments of CanLit and CanArt that the magazine didn’t really come into its own until so late, [35] but it also points to the very limited creative uses to which magazines are generally put. For a long time, from 1975 – 1998, FRONT was just a magazine. Its main function was as newsletter of the Western Front Society, beefed with a little (though often good) content. Summer 1998 must have been a psychedelic one for someone, however, because when editorship was handed over in the fall to Kerri Embrey and Andreas Kahre, FRONT immediately started its development towards what it is now: not a real magazine. It was a stroke of brilliance when in Sep/Oct 1998 issue the new editorial crew crossed out all vestiges of the departmental/genre headings. With that decision, the magazine began to gain ground as a singular “magazine” of “Arts and Ideas”. FRONT’s intentions became ever more ambiguous, until no one knew what they were talking about. FRONT’s editors adopted a way of designating themes for issues in a way that must have discouraged most submissions. At best, the themes weren’t nearly concrete enough: Abandon; Devices; Motions; Hoax; Topic; Cause; Nominal; User; Ought. Consequently, the contents of the issues started to shift towards the shiftless and FRONT came into its own: a genuinely creative arm of the Western Front, extending in a uniquely valuable way the centre’s longstanding mandate of interdisciplinarity.

This particular (peculiar) moment of self-consciousness kept reoccurring in different ways. From Vol. XIV, no.4 Sep/Oct 2003 “Reckoning” to Vol.XV, No.3 May/June 2004 “Distances”, the editors introduce parodies of the missing department-headings that completely change with each issue. They must have been invented after the works were chosen: “obsessive/compulsive”; “culinary theory”; “local geography”; “advertorial”; “the outer limits”; “family corner”; “unexpected emanations”; “expect to be surprised”; “anticipating”; “the disappointing animal”; “make-overs”; ”(Enclosures)”; “Aide-de-memoire”; “irreversibilities”; “getting away from there”. These provisional departments, giving the pieces arbitrary and absurd pseudo-generic contexts, reasserts the overall critique of publishing by making the works more legible. The fact that the trick works so well, which has something to do simply with the power of titling, makes genre-bound magazines look unadventurous indeed.

Later in 2005, broader departmental headings themselves reappear: “Correspondence”; “Repeatable”; “Artists’ Projects”, while the meta-departmental paratexts become newsy descriptions of the items themselves: “Elizabeth Fischer advocates free speech in her customary detached, analytic manner”; “Jeremy Turner casts his mind ahead”; “leannej meditates on ethical dilemmata”; “Lora McElhenney emulates Elizabeth Fischer”; “Jeremy Todd wants to know the truth”—probably quite irritating to some of the writers. With the March/April issue of 2006, this jumps from the Table of Contents to the cover of the magazine, and soon they are ironically beaconing the magazines’ virtues: “Now 100% Axially Symmetrical!”. Now the magazine-rack, like Johson’s bookstore, is the message.

Issue Volume IX, Number 5, May/June 1998 shows one of the longstanding editors, Andreas Kahre, in a rare moment of near candour about his intentions. The framework of the issue—apparently on the theme of “terrorism” or “resistance”—perhaps provided the mask that allows him to write honestly. [36] The cover shows blurry images of what look like Weimar sex-terrorists in front of a hanging white sheet. It bears the slogan from which I drew the title of this piece: “this is not a zine”. Andreas Kahre’s editorial on page 5, pardodies the zine-revo-reno-speak one would expect from something made on a photocopier, while giving insight into Kahre’s thinking:

Rather than a single heroic moment based on the redistribution of capital there now looms a permanent. revolving of interlaced and interdependent events that scandalize us by profoundly altering every aspect of life, being and consciousness …. Whole continents and their peoples are alternately gorged and starved in what can only be described as true revolutions of enforced and withdrawn consumption, but as this advertisement shows, true revolutions create strange and violent juxtapositions. [F, pp.5, Ixno.51998]

If this is parodic/ironic in intent, it nevertheless suggests that FRONT’s strategy (Kahre remains editor in chief) is based in a clear concept of continuous social crisis induced in late capitalism. Revolution or even resistance mean something quite different in a social context where there is no possible “outside” or un-complicit position. What the situation requires is, Kahre’s punchline seems to imply, is a radical act of forgetting:

Best Rethink Rethinking perhaps.

It’s no accident either that the inspiration of radi os came from a discipline other than writing. We are fortunate that Johnson recorded for readers his “voila” moment, as it is a more substantial, and verifiable instance of disciplinary cross-pollenisation than most. The success of radi os may then be a good argument, in writing, for transgeneric writings of the kind that FRONT cultivates. The forgetting of the school’s culture, of the great cultural artifact, and of generic decorum opens the possibilities of new writing strategies. The immediate influence of a poem like radi os is almost always bad. Enthusiasts may respond, I think, by “johnsonizing ” other poems, which gets nobody nowhere. The long terms effects, however, are probably quite good, crucially changing the relationships between writer and published object. An institution in-miniature, FRONT magazine puts such re-imaginings at the core of every issue. The blanks on the pages of radi os are pregnant textual silences, holding out the dangerously democratising promise of the reader’s writing. A thousand (mostly lousy) zines are born in the blanks of a poem like radi os, far more zines than scholarly expositions. FRONT, equally, should grant all kinds of new generic permissions to writers. Although the insignia on the lower right hand corner of recent issues announces that it is a GENUINE CANADIAN MAGAZINE, I know FRONT is not a real magazine. For that reason FRONT is an important magazine.

Notes

  1. 1. Cage, John. Indeterminacy. http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi?158
  2. 2. Giroux, Roger. Blank : The Invisible Poem. trans. Barnett, Anthony. Lewes, East Sussex, England : Allardyce Books ; Berkeley, CA : Distributed in the USA by SPD Inc., 2001.
  3. 3. Johnson, Ronald. radi os. afterword by Guy Davenport. Berkeley, Calif.: Sand Dollar, 1977. [original edition]
  4. 4. Selinger, Eric. ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os. Contemporary Literature (ConL). 1992 Spring; 33 (1): 46-73.
  5. 5. Marc Scroggin’s review of the new edition of radi os from Flood Editions echoes their position, unfortunately. While duly recognising the importance of the poem, Scroggin slips right into Davenport’s slippers when explicating the grounds for that judgement. See: http://www.pkblogs.com/kulturindustrie/2005/07/ronald-johnson-radi-os.html
  6. 6. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety Of Influence : A Theory Of Poetry. New York : Oxford University Press, 1973.
  7. 7. Davenport, in Johnson. P.103.
  8. 8. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (1790-93) Text available several places online, including: http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Blake,_William_-_The_Marriage_of_Heaven_and_Hell.pdf
  9. 9. Johnson, ix.
  10. 10. Davenport writes “At this writing Zukovsky, our greatest living poet, is not considered to be our greatest living poet; Olson is slowly being read and studied. Our liveliest literary tradition, as usual, is an unknown, even an unsuspected one. It is Ronald Johnson’s tradition, his family, and the custodian of the things he honors.” pp.95-96.
  11. 11. O’Leary, Peter. “RONALD JOHNSON INTERVIEW, November 19, 1995.” http://www.trifectapress.com/johnson/interview.html
  12. 12. ibid. p.50.
  13. 13. Guillory, John. “From Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.” in Richter, David. Richter, David H. ed. New York: Bedford/St.Martins, 1998. p.1589.2
  14. 14. ibid. 1589.1
  15. 15. ibid. 1589.2-1590.1
  16. 16. Guillory’s argument provides a powerful way of understanding how it is so possible that such radically different ideological content has been found in the same canonic texts. It thus helps explain how Milton speaks to Ronald Johnson and to Stanley Fish, but also how why Shakespeare seems to be inexhaustible.
  17. 17. Not to mention the Pound and Eliot’s rejection of Milton, which left Milton shelved it for many with other D&D anachronistica.
  18. 18. It so happens that Johnson wasn’t the only writer/thinker of his generation to re-write Milton by process of re-reading, and re-forgetting. The younger Stanley Fish, a literary critic whose institutional politics are incompatible with Johnson’s, found himself rewriting the same poet’s same work seven years before the publication of radi os. Fish completely reimagined the role of critic and criticism in his book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1968). He developed his theories not as a Milton expert, but as a young scholar ignorant of Milton who learned the work as he read along, precisely observing his own responses play-by-play. Coincidentally or not, the new criticism Fish developed out of his unknowing reading is one that, like Johnson’s poem, overthrows New Critical doctrine of “affective fallacy” re-empowering the reader as the work’s co-author. His “reader response” criticism, which became extremely influential, insists that the meaning of the text is at least partly the trace of the reader’s experience of it, in a strange coincidence with the splendid conflation of reading and writing that produced radi os. (Not sure if Johnson could have read Fish’s book, although it seems unlikely he could have.) What the strategies and histories of FRONT (and the Western Front as a whole) signal is that when the revival of tired creative species is possible, it often has to be achieved by similarly radical means. A lot must be forgotten, a lot must be re-written. See: Fish, Stanley. Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the _Variorum_”. The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. ed. New York: Bedford/St.Martins, 1998. 976-990
  19. 19. Along with the book, of course, but that’s another essay.
  20. 20. Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. trans. Howard, Richard. Brighton : Harvester Press, 1981. (p.18-19)
  21. 21. If writing overspills those determined boundaries too much, if its generic limits are not made explicit, of if its generic address is to an obscure tradition, the writing becomes classed as “avant-garde” or “experimental”. This is one of the reasons that genre remains a useful concept for understanding the production and reception of contemporary literature.
  22. 22. Many published but less successful works provide little more than a milquetoast experience of that boundary-play.
  23. 23. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” in Modern Genre Theory. ed. Duff, David. London : Longman ; New York : Pearson Education, 2000. 219-231. I diverge from the self-consuming course of Derrida’s argument in this essay, but find many of his insights extremely compelling. His basic premise is that the overspilling of generic boundaries is a crucial aspect of how genre is marked. Yet I feel uncompelled to follow him towards his quasi-authoritarian conclusion that genre therefore does not exist at all.
  24. 24. ibid. p.62
  25. 25. Levenson, Christopher. “Four Anthologies” Canadian Literature. Issue No. 176 – Spring, 2003 http://www.canlit.ca/archive/archive2003/176/cl_176.html
  26. 26. Cawelti, John G. “Chinatown And Generic Transformation In Recent American Films”. Mystery, Violence, And Popular Culture : Essays. Madison : University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, c2004. 208.
  27. 27. ibid, 209.
  28. *(#note28)28.*The “quality” of the writing certainly seems uneven, sometimes extremely so, but without clear generic principles in play—which provide a comparative basis for judgement—it’s in fact extremely difficult to judge quality at all. On the other hand, quite a few of FRONT’s material flaws, like its severe copyediting problems, and design mistakes – which sometimes make published works nearly illegible – seem to be traceable to budgetary restrictions. There isn’t not enough staff to proofread reliably, nor enough space room to print longer works with adequate space. The rushed schedule can’t help either; submissions are due only 2 months before publication date. This latter trait however keeps the material far more current than in literary magazines which often have 6 month to 1 year turnaround periods.
  29. 29. Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has often said he owes it all to his literary education. He never had one.
  30. 30. Interesting to imagine Davenport writing his own erased Milton. No doubt his re-Milton would announce itself as a master re-mastering a master. In contrast, Johnson’s technique is scarily direct, even facile. It doesn’t, in itself, prove he had any technical skill whatsoever, only that he could read well, and that Milton’s language is still affecting. It is this procedurally deliberate un-knowing, this naïvete that makes all the difference. Radi os shares the same DIY sense of cultural production as The Western Front. Davenport’s poem would have been definitive, Johnson’s is generative.
  31. 31. Scroggins, Mark. Culture Industry. July 29, 2005. Accessed: February 14, 2007. http://www.pkblogs.com/kulturindustrie/2005/07/ronald-johnson-radi-os.html
  32. 32. Silliman, Ron. Silliman’s Blog. Wednesday 25, 2005. http://www.inblogs.net/ronsilliman/2005/05/gravitations-reads-ronald-johnsons-one.html. Accessed: February 14, 2007.
  33. 33. Pardon me, I don’t have many references for this, but an essay available online about Johnson confirms my suspicions that: “Unlike Johnsons previous books, it was not widely reviewed; even in the Johnson / Davenport issue of Vort magazine, an essential source for Johnson scholarship, the poem is not treated in the detail accorded his earlier volumes.” Selinger, Eric Murphy. Biography of Ronald Johnson, from The Dictionary of Literary Biography. http://www.trifectapress.com/johnson/interview1.html. Accessed: February 14, 2007.
  34. 34. Beachy-Quick, Dan. “The Speaking Ear”. Boston Review. March/April 2006. http://bostonreview.net/BR31.2/beachyquick.html Accessed online February 14, 2007.
  35. 35. Although the WF did have an active publishing program during the 70s that produced many interestingly unclassifiable generically indeterminate publications
  36. 36. The Front was putting on a project called “Rethinking the Revolution”, curated by Antonia Hirsch. This issue was an unironic addendum to that exhibition.
  37. 37. There are at least three ways of “johnsonizing”, à la Samuel Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, and now Ronald Johnson. The latter may be the least dangerous. See: Scroggins, Mark. Culture Industry. July 30, 2005. http://kulturindustrie.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_kulturindustrie_archive.html. Accessed: February 14, 2007.