of the referent or even the materiality of the sign cannot alter the simple fact
that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaf-
fery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O’Sullivan
“verbovisivocal” text from one by Susan Howe. More important: the break-
down of the high/low distinction, accepted as a cornerstone of postmodern-
ism by the theorists of the seventies and eighties, is coming under increasing
suspicion as common sense tells us that all artworks are not, after all, equally
valuable (whatever “valuable” means), and that when, for example, Frank
Sinatra is called, as he has been in the wake of his death, one of the great
artists of the century, this statement is not really equivalent to the proposi-
tion that John Cage is one of the great artists of the century. For one thing,
the two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different
contexts. The word great in any case, means something different in the two
cases, as does the word artist. Even One of is unstable: Sinatra fans were com-
paring their idol not only to other “great” singers and movie stars but to ty-
coons of the American record industry, those savvy entrepreneurs who know
how to market a given label. In the case of Cage, on the other hand, one of
would refer to the international avant-garde market—the Hörspiele heard on
German radio as well as the Zen art of Japan.
Then, too, contemporary poetics has not satisfactorily resolved the rela-
tion of what Jameson calls the “new depthlessness” to the “genius” posi-
tion now occupied by those evidently deep (read complex, dif¤cult) theorists,
whose word is all but law. Indeed, even as Jameson rejects the image of the
“great demiurges and prophets” like “Proust in his cork-lined room” or the
“ ‘tragic,’ uniquely doomed Kaf ka” (Postmodernism 305), on page after page
he cites names like Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and
Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau. If genius theory
is passé, if there is no such thing as unique or individual authority, why are
these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so de¤nitively on the
death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Fou-
cault?
In a recent essay for Bernstein’s collection (1998), Silliman speculates on
this phenomenon. Silliman begins by restating his opposition to “the poem
as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presenta-
tion of sincerity and authenticity that for several decades has been a staple
of most of the creative writings in the United States.”^13 But in reevaluating
what he calls Barthes’s “ritual slaying of the author” (“Who Speaks” 364),
Silliman wonders whether Barthes’s theory of text construction hasn’t gone
too far. The insistence in “The Death of the Author” that “the reader is with-
out history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds to-
Silliman’s Albany, Howe’s Buffalo 133