A Poetics of Its Own Occasion

Abstract

n the introduction to his anthology In the American Tree, Ron Silliman gives special emphasis to Robert Grenier's declaration, in the first issue of This magazine (1971): I HATE SPEECH.1 Certainly one current of the writing represented in Tree has been a search for a poetry beyond what these poets took to be the conventions of an older lyricism, what they often conveniently saw as the Romantic and bourgeois voice, the coherent and personalizing illusion of an autonomous poetic subject. Rather,