Introduction: Ethics and Objectivist Poetics

I n “Language, Poetry, Realism,” the introduction to his pathbreaking anthology of contemporary American poetry entitled In the American Tree (1984), Ron Silliman writes: “Much, perhaps too much, has been made of the critique of reference and normative syntax inherent in the work of many of the writers here, without acknowledging the degree to which this critique is itself situated within the larger question of what, in the last part of the twentieth century, it means to be human.” 1 Leaving aside any millennial implications in this, Silliman alerts us to the whole issue of the ethical, an issue that has effectively been skewed by the attention to the death of, the absence of, or the failure of referentiality in a good deal of recent poetry. A great deal of emphasis in the reception of contemporary poetry has fallen on its linguistic games, its lack of referentiality, and “the play of the signifier,” with its shift from metaphor to metonymy. And indeed, in Silliman’s expla­nation of the formal strategies adopted by these American poets, one can easily skip over these words, buried as they are in a larger narrative about the advent of “Language” poetry. Yet it is not an isolated example: Elsewhere in the same introduction, Silliman states that “[Greeley and Eigner] ... offered important models of rigorous and honest practice,” 2 and commenting on the ethical stance of the participants in writing and reading, he says: “In turn, the poet must be responsible for everything. A parallel demand is made of each reader” (my italics). 3