so I started to (re)read both Call Me Ishmael and Moby Dick. I take Ish as exemplar in criticism, or how I want to involve myself therewith, at least. it's Olson's thorough involvement as a writer that makes it for me. that is, criticism as descriptor is only mildly useful to me, and this because my sense of taxonomy isn't particularly sharp. I like seeing Olson tussle familiarly with Melville. it's an energy exchange, and still highly charged. Moby Dick is dear to me as well. modernism became (as I see it, in that old century) a re-vision of boundaries. the poem as this deft enclosed field of posture, and the novel as romanticized neighbourhood of the unliving portrait: both these tributaries flexed into a repositioning stream. the nature of which slurs expectations. the interesting novels have released plot from its imperial directive. and poems aren't gems. MD is a poem, and why not. I think the stuck poems nowadays are practiced sessions with other poems, half-assed cloing experiments. you know, NY School Mach 99, LANGUAGE POETRY v 27. history, science, philosophy are saviours of both, allowing fresh air to instill, simply to instill. there's some critical lojinx going on, causing literature to turn into something slack and segregated rather than proficient and alive. art isn't decoration any more than it is a cv bullet. the arts are something integrally inside life, a communication and process and integration that doesn't just enrich but motivates and encourages. which is why the art maven naysayers as well as the blind eye provocateurs are so wrong. I know I'm screeding out, when I only want to remark the vivacity of both Melville and Olson in their astonished work of discovery. "What did happen to measure when the rigidities dissolved?" asked Olson in a Melville essay. kick ass, you tards, is the message, grown into the spring wind of lovely grass and leaves and hopeful flowers for a while.