Woo hoo, I'm a strawman.

It doesn't take that much of an imaginative leap to consider the work of, say, Olson, or Niedecker, or Khlebnikov, to be as much a part of one's present as the work of living friends. Jordan says, "The present moment will be here when he's ready. And it'll still be uncertain, undefined, uncontrollable. Scary, isn't it?" Which is fine, but the same thing can be said about the past -- attempting to come to some understanding of Bottom on Shakespeare or Words nd Ends from Ez, or trying to develop a view of the contexts in which these works arose, can be just as uncertain, undefined, uncontrollable, etc. Obviously I'm not going to be indifferent to the contested field of the present -- I am going to be clear about how I view that field, at least in terms of Fascicle. I'm going to try to have a greater emphasis on work outside America & in translation, a greater emphasis on what is going on in communities (via 'local news' and a conscious attempt to feature work from NC, DC, Arkansas and other communities which myself and the other Fascicle editors are engaged), and also demonstrate a strong bias towards work that come out of the "growing group of writers [I consider] key, essential figures." I should emphasize again that this manifests itself for me in a lot of different ways -- I view flarf, vispo, hyperauthor work, etc. as all being extremely relevant to my own views of poetry. Not ignoring the present so much as not pretending the past doesn't exist.

The new Silliman? Okay, I'm a little pudgy, have a beard. I work for a software company, like to continually harp on the contexts for poetry. Oh god . . .