Of course, there is also the tendency to create binaries that may exist primarily to keep and maintain attention on the sub-divisions co-opted by the arbitrary dialectic presumed, heralded, argued, announced, denounced, accredited, suggested, invested, re-invested. Case(s) in point include the clever and funny poem by Darren Wershler-Henry, in arras 5, for example, "Lang Po vs. the Wu-Tang," and much of the overall poetics daily, monthly, perennially designed/remanufactured by several of the Language poets, including probably the most highly regarded Language poet, Ron Silliman,who may be the late 20th Century's most significant poet.

In Silliman's case, I must point out that I do, myself, regard him as post-modernisms or, perhaps more importantly, Experimental Poetry's greatest poet. Therefore, if the following observations sound like a criticism or even a critique, they're not particularly intended to do so.

Is it a problematic "dialectic?" Does continually defining new poetries or "schools" or "movements" or "developments" in terms of their opposition to, difference/differance from, continuity/discontinuity in reference to Language poetry obscure new developments? Does this practice prohibit or restrict new developments? Does it falsely elevate new developments feeding or playing off of it? Could experimental poetry survive without continued central reference to the almost infamous and surely contested "mother tongue?"

I am surely NOT qualified to answer these questions and I not particularly comfortable raising them. To be sure, my own attention to this quite thoroughly debated issue probably incriminates me for the very attention grabbing behavior I'm bothering to question.

Nonetheless... There are several beliefs I have that some would perceive as conflicting:

(1)A great deal of writing and poetry still being produced by "first generation" or core Language poets still stimulates readers and engenders new explorations; their value would not be diminished were the arbitrary dialectic dropped and outgrown.

(2)This so-called arbitrary dialectic serves at least one other major purpose; it provides a deep and rich background or horizon against which new poetries can be, (not measured, but) received, apprehended, appreciated, accessed.

(3)"Apprehending" a given poetry (or for that matter any new art form or intellectual development) against a fixed background or within the fixed parameters of a static poetic may obviously obfuscate the true "use" of the given (and "new") poetry, limit its value, and restrict apprehension to old use, whereas the new poetry may well have much broader and more relevant or more exciting and fresh new applications.

(4)Condemning or limiting a new poetry to its role in the on-going development of a preestablished poetic pigeonholes the new poetry and/or tags it with sometimes obsolete labels.

(5)The whole notion of operating off of an arbitrary dialectic is in no way limited to Language poetry or the broader avant garde "tradition." This entire tradition maintaining, tradition marketing, tradition institutionalizing fetish or practice is securely established in all of literature and perhaps most succinctly articulated by the Freudian Lit Crits' malpractice of defining literary objects by their "Oedipal stage" breaks from presanctioned and apparently "fatherly" earlier objects. Much of Freud will be around as long as Shakespeare, possibly forever, but I'm not so sure that Freudian Lit Crit will survive the next few decades. For one thing, it serves a "higher" function; it fetishizes the Critics and their stacked deck, academic games, whereby neither new poets, new perceivers/readers, nor new poetries are opened up to (or by) the life force that created them; it "fixes" apprehension of new form and content to that which serves to reinforce priviledged academic hierarchies and their insular job security needs. Two, both the neo-Freudians in their adherence to Oedipal complex analysis and the Lacanians in the misplacement of "identity" development in the Oedipal stage (or their argument that there can be no Self or that it's just a construct of language, who knows?) will likely find themselves replaced by newer and more advanced scientific thought such as that which is developing in the area of Object Relations. Three, if there are other more fecund, more generative , more nourishing approaches to the apprehension and dissemination of literature, then they will, by nature, emerge as the more adaptable "mutations." Male-order Freudian Lit Crit will not be, as a Cher song I like would sing, "strong enough" to actualize the greater and truer potential(s) of new writing and thus flourish.