Ted Pearson with Larry Price at Poet's House, New York City, 2011
Note: The following is the second (and concluding) part of a larger conversation examining Ted Pearson’s An Intermittent Music, a serial work begun in 1975 and completed in 2010. The first half appeared in Jacket2 and can be read here.
Luke Harley: Ron Silliman has resisted attempts to label your work as “minimalist,” instead arguing that it is “all about how much pressure you can exert on a few select words or lines.” Do you agree with Ron?
Ted Pearson: Yes. Resemblance is not identity, though it can lead to mistaken identity. As applied to poetry, a “minimalist” tag refers to texts that are formally spare and verbally concise — but those features are common to such a disparate range of works that to remark them is obvious and does little to account for significant aesthetic differences among those works. Yet those differences determine a work’s relation to the “restricted economy” that the label implies. In my work, that relation is essentially oppositional.
Tan Lin (center) and others at Edit: Performing Networked Publishing, April 21, 2010, Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia.
Note: Published in 2010 in the Wesleyan University Press poetry series, Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies defies generic categorization. Lin redefines “the book” for our cultural moment of networked communications, new technologies that threaten — or promise, depending on one’s point of view — to render obsolete many longstanding assumptions about our reading practices. In the following interview, Lin provides extensive commentary that becomes a textual extension of Seven Controlled Vocabularies.
