Michael E. O'Reilly

Ron Silliman is a wild rebel of the signifier  "Language is material and primary and what's experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations."  Steve McCaffery        I want to talk about Ron Silliman’s Book, Tjanting, as well as his views on how politics and class fit into poetry. How does Silliman think poetry can help the lower class, or promote political change in America?  What is so political about writing poetry that people might like but that nobody understands? Why does he call them paragraphs when there is no unifying subject matter?  If language is a commodity, whose meaning has become transparent, how does that effect real-life oppression and hegemony among humans?                Tjanting is a book that exemplifies Silliman’s idea of “The New Sentence.”  ...

I have read Ashbery in anthologies, and decided I like him, but The Tennis Court Oath is the first complete collection of his I have read.  It doesn’t seem like he takes on the subject of popular culture in this book, the way he does in some of his later stuff.  A couple of my favorites in other books include “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”                                                         This book is full of quickly changing moods, tones and settings which provide a rather bone-jarring ride through each poem.  It didn’t, however, seem so dislocate me to the point that I no longer care about the poem, which happens when I read Susan Howe or Gertrude Stein.        As disjointed as the lines of this book are, they stand alone as good lines, so t...

David Melnick adopts a chaotic sort of anti-grammar to comment on the lives of the men in Aida, in his poetry book of the same name (1983).  His use of language as something outside the normal rules of English usage has a direct, symbolic link to the gay lifestyle, which exists on the outside of a post-Roman, and very Christian cultural grammar.  Melnick positions his writing within a frame of Greek mythological figures, presumably for the purpose of establishing a paradigm of acceptance and normalcy, regarding homosexuality in ancient Greek and Roman times. The abandonment of traditional English grammar in conjunction with the subject matter of homosexuality illustrates the modern, western world’s lack of accommodation and understanding of homosexuality.  In other words, Melnick had chosen to take something “outside” the system, and talk about it using a grammar that operates outside the same system.  In doing so he says:  Homosexuality is outside the system, ...

Robert Creeley’s book, Pieces , is very much concerned not only with a struggle to return to an original body or form, but the coming to terms with the possibility that such a return cannot exist.  There are several ways Creeley takes on the idea of “form,” and the word itself is pervasive throughout Pieces.  He starts with a quote from Allen Ginsberg’s Song:  “I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born.”                                         Those lines resonate in poems, like “The Boy.”  “My mother had hair,/ and when I grew older, so did/ I, all over my face, which I wanted/ to be there, and grew a beard henceforth.” Clearly, we find the physical images relating to the desire to return to the womb. There is also the strong desire in Creeley’s voice to return to the physical forms of this world....

Louv loves the outdoors, dislikes hunting      I found dismembered elements of this Richard Louv hit piece floating amongst several orphaned essays on my hard drive. Here they are, cobbled into what I can only promise is legible English.       After listening to an interview with Richard Louv on NPR one day, I was excited to read his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder.      There’s nothing about being a hunter that requires me to encourage others to hunt. Nor was it incumbent upon Richard Louv to include hunting as a way of bringing kids closer to nature. Still, I was a bit surprised by his treatment of the topic, and the queasy tone that crept into his prose, at the first mention of our popular American pastime.      “For reasons that have more to do with emotion than reason,” Louv writes, “I don’t hunt, nor do I encourage my boys to hunt—and they are appalled at the idea tha...

Recalling the golden age of eco-skeptic think tank journalism  The following double book review of The Really Inconvenient Truths, by Iain Murray , and  Eco-Freaks, by John Berlau , was written in 2009. Murray’s book was good enough to earn status as “A Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club,” which no doubt has an endless trove of quality entrants to plow through. It makes one wonder though how Murray got the club’s main selection, when much of the information, chapters about DDT, CAFE fuel standards, the Endangered Species Act, property ownership, pollution, and climate change, are virtually the same as those found in, Berlau’s book, which came out two years earlier. No bad blood, though. They work for the same outfit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute which, like other think tanks, has streamlined the whole “journalism” racket by moving all operations in-house. My only question is: Why do so many think tanks have the word “enterprise” somewhere in their titles? The...

Greenwashed and Hardwired: Climate change denial meets cognitive science Climate change gains acceptance, and skeptics The following essay compares the work of George Lakoff, Bjorn Lomborg and Paul Driessen. It was written in 2009, for Skeptic , but was not published.      As more people are beginning to accept the idea that climate change is real and attributable to human behavior, there remains a lack of understanding as to how we should proceed in addressing the problem. Reasonable people who were once skeptical of global warming’s existence have joined with reasonable people who never doubted it for a minute. This expanding population of Americans has become overwhelmed by the “greenwash” marketing campaigns of companies ready to cash in on public panic.      Two of the three authors I’ve chosen to compare, Bjorn Lomborg and Paul Driessen are of the ilk we might call “eco-skeptic,” but each comes from a different angle. Lomborg, a Danish adjunct prof...