Said arrogance and pretentiousness seem also to be manifestations and results of having a father who only attended a year of college but became an IBM electrical engineer almost immediately put to work on the guidance system for Apollo (very academic of him, I’m sure), so that I grew up being groomed for physics and technology (pretentious old dad wanting me to surpass him, the asshole), moved from place to place following rockets, often watching them launch at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, sleds at Alamogordo, and being shown how computers were shrinking year after year. But, in the end, winding up being more interested in Greek literature (certainly the arrogance and pretentiousness of studying Ancient Greek and reading Homer are by themselves alone beyond the pale of arrogance and pretentiousness), English language poetry, and philosophy at the expense of a career in science and technology are and were the surest signs of arrogance and pretentiousness one could locate in any individual, but particularly in me.

Thank you for identifying them.

According to your lexicon, that’s arrogance and pretentiousness. Fair enough. It’s kind of you to define your terms, to refrain from mere attacks on me personally, and to confine yourself to reasoned and well thought out criticism of subject matter and style. You’re to be commended for your depth and insight. I’m sure Bukowski and Henry Miller would also admire and be in awe of you because you’re so revolutionary far reaching in your ideas and approach.

But you’re mistaken about one thing: I don’t claim to be better than Bukowski. What would be the point of that? I don’t enjoy his writing and I’m sure he wouldn’t like mine. But what would he care and what do I care? I’ve never written a word looking for Bukowski’s approval and I’m sure he’s never written a word looking for mine. (Well, pretty sure. Unlike you, I’m not privy to the deepest thoughts and motives of people whose poetry I’ve read. I suppose it’s possible that he gives a shit what I think about what he writes, but I sincerely doubt it.)

With respect to where you and I encountered one another, participation in Combat Words was nothing more than a friendly gesture to Wessington. It doesn’t surprise me that my participation was somewhat offensive since I never invested in the contest. Poetry workshops, however packaged, no longer interest me. I’m content to let those who like what I write read me, and to let those who don’t like what I write ignore me. You’ve called me an academic poet, whereas I don’t and never have belonged to any academy. I seek no rewards, have no school, no gang, and no posse, and I simply don’t care for your recognition or lack of it, which, ultimately is likely what you consider most arrogant — but why even bother to tell me? Do you really not have anything better to do?

You haven’t even said anything directly about the poetry itself. In your mind, it apparently doesn’t warrant being called poetry at all. You’re entitled to your opinion about it, but is there anything useful I could learn from your comments about it? No. In fact, my responses to you stem only from courtesy, to take time to reply to the effort you’ve made to reply to me. But my courtesy has worn thin, even though you feel my courtesy is nothing but arrogance.

On the other hand, of what does your humility and originality consist? Buying into the anti-intellectual popular academy that believes itself to be different when repeating (similar to expressing “individuality” by wearing clothes from The Gap), insulates itself from investigating or directly engaging anything it doesn’t already know (or with which you disagree) by calling it names like pretentious, arrogant, and academic, and in being absolutely certain that you’re right about all of it since you’ll never look into anything that might challenge your views. I suppose in your mind this makes you practically a prophet and saint, certainly the arbiter of taste and poetry.

But I’m hurt. Your opinion is so deep. I mean, you’re such a master of the art of poetry, and have read, worked, studied, and practiced so deeply in it’s development and history that it would be impossible for me (so intellectually limited, pretentious, and arrogant as I am) to be aware of anything you haven’t already thought of — or is it simply that you’ve already thought of everything and there’s not even a possibility that anyone at all might step outside of or beyond what you already know?

I’m curious, though, why you even bother attacking me if what I write is so sterile, derivative, pretentious, arrogant, ineffectively academic, and atrocious. It’s not as though I’m a well-known poet, dominating the journals with my drivel, garnering awards (I’ve only ever won one award, and it wasn’t an impressive one — though you seem to think it pretentious to include an allusion to it even though the context in question required some reason they’d pay the character to read at universities at such a tender age — and I’ve never sought a single award). I don’t rake in grant money, mold university students, control what gets published and what doesn’t, churn out articles in journals and magazines to bolster my critical viewpoint, sit on contest panels, and so forth. So why do you even care about what I write at all if you hate it so much?

If what I write is so utterly bad and lacking in redeeming qualities, and if your critical acumen is so penetrating, why not simply let me fade into complete obscurity, where I’m clearly bound to wind up, while you pith meaningful targets with your acerbic wit and deep learning?

If you reply to this with an additional attack on me, you get the attack for free, because I’m not going to play any more. That’s right. If you want it, you can have the last word. I’m done.

This poem took me a while. I wrote and revised it many times in the space of about, oh, maybe an hour or so, once I’d decided what direction to take, which took a couple of hours of brooding and distraction. But I’ve been working with the ideas (dare I call them insights?) for about 30 years, which is probably a determining factor of its difficulty for many people.

As I grow old and more likely to wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, I’m less and less likely to be discursive about the determinate function a long and deep cultural relationship with the Christian mythos exerts on the imaginations of current day scientists, from the enumeration of forces to setting limits of time and extension on our universe (which is clearly nothing other than a lack of imagination), even though I never was very willing to discourse much about them to begin with because to me they are and long have been so obvious as to render much elaboration redundant.

I believe that in the not very distant future, these relationships will also be obvious to most educated people, though for the moment most (certainly not all, and I claim no uniqueness or originality here) seem to be locked into a structure of these limitations on their own ability to project thought into infinite time and space to the point of reification.

On the other hand, I’m more and more interested in the dialectic of elaboration that takes place between science and technology, a series of events in both thought and application which continues to push the limits of the earlier determinate fictions more and more into the the historical background, as it has been doing, with accelerating speed and expanding power, since before Copernicus.

Which is not to say that I “believe in” empiricism, but every tool has its use.

Oh, yeah, that was very clear. Ha!

Thanks, man.

The opening sentence in the first stanza really focuses the reader.

I would strike: “Actual i.e.” and just leave the line as “interperceived” for the sake of legato-thought. It strikes me as a moment of second-guessing. Maybe that’s why you chose to write the poem like that; but the following stanzas already drive that point home, so I find it redundant.