“The surprise is not that the School of Quietude is ruthless in its practice of power politics. That has been its hallmark forever – beginning with a century-long pretense that it represents the whole of poetry, rather than just an anti-modernist / premodernist sliver within a far larger spectrum. No, the surprise is that the SoQ is so very bad at it.”
Ron Silliman on the School of Quietude and the Oxford University Professor of Poetry controversy.
otherroom.org 
Whereas Ronnie is such a nice guy, of course. What intrigues me is how long he can pimping a practice of poetry that originated in the first half of last century and calling it avanteguard. Truely radical poetry these days has rhyme and meter, post modernist abstraction is so old hat.
I thought the term was ‘post-avant’? Anyway, not to be contentious or anything, but surely radicalism in poetry is more than just a formal concern? There’s what you write about, the way you write about it – meaning tone and perspective for instance rather than meter or rhyme – the context in which you write, and a range of other elements.
To reduce poetry to simple binaries – rhyming/not rhyming or metrical/non-metrical – doesn’t mean much at all.
I agree, radicalism of subject matter (see any of that in Ronnie’s work? Any political content at all?) Radicalism of tone or perspective, seeing as how he and the rest of the so-called post-avante are merely repeating an ancient fetishism of the word? The only tone in Ronnie’s blog is the pretentious waffle of a second rate academic, famous only because he was one of the first poetry bloggers. His work is not ‘radical’, it is not in any way informed by a left-wing politic, it is a rehash of ideas at least 80 years old.