Nada Gordon wrote to me via myspace in a message (I tried to write her back, but I think she blocked me): "If we were to purify our usage of all derived terms, we would be rendered speechless."

As far as poetics is concerned, how many terms are actually used? I mean, it's not as if the jargon is infinite. Few of the terms within poetics find a range outside of poetry. With this small quantity, one should know the terms and their origin. This shouldn't render a poet speechless, it should render them non-derivative or original or new.

Pound didn't write "Make it new!" for no reason. He wrote it so other poets of following generations would read poetry and learn a poet's poetics. Once that knowledged is gained, that particular poet would know when they are referencing another poet who came before them and would be able to expand on the poet they are referencing's poetics.

Now I've written more then a few times: Form is the extension of content. Some might attribute this idea to Charles Olson's Projective Verse essay. Others will attribute it to Robert Creeley. However, when speaking of 'form' or 'content' by themselves, we can freely reference a multitude of scholars, artists and philosophers. If form and extension and content are contextually linked in a phrase or sentence or paragraph, the list of references to these ideas from which these ideas could be derived becomes a very short list.

So when I write "torque is overused and meaningless," I'm really stating that the person employing the term hasn't read Silliman's "The New Sentence" and/or is not expanding on his idea of torque. In this, I don't think Silliman would disagree.

Of course, one can find many poets and writers who gave up on writing and maybe even life when they learned or thought that they could not add anything/anything more to what had already been written.

I hope none of you who read this do that, but you do this: read more then you write.