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Page 2 We who natter have had a good bit to gnaw over lately, what with Oprah's tearful accuracy issues ; and, more importantly, HR 683, the Trademark Dilution Revision Act. Some language workers can't even get past the language: are we diluting revision, or revising dilution? But of course what we always do is dilute fair use. Meanwhile, ancient, rotting news remains for us to swallow. Eldest of them all: Ruth Lilly's 2002 gift to The Poetry Foundation—the publisher of Poetry, if not necessarily of poetry—of one hundred million smackaroonies. For most struggling wordsmiths the number itself is beyond grasp; most of us deal at most in five digits. But Steve Evans, in The Baffler (17), raises new questions about the gift. Our aesthetic investigative reporter exposes the right-wing underbelly of the blacktie -poetry universe. Evans bemoans a "deregulation of poetry" led by the anti-inaccessible: Dana Gioia (appointed by Bush 43 to head the NEA; formerly a JeIl-O ad writer) and John Barr (head ofThe Poetry Foundation ; earlier, theinvestmentbankereliminated tenure at Benningtonandbrokered deregulated energy, Enron-style). Evans writes: The distinctive project shared by [Gioia and Barr] and their partner in several recent projects , Ted Kooser, a former Nebraska insurance underwriter who became U.S. Poet Laureate in 2004, can be summarized rather simply: to...discredit existing networks of poetry production, which are seen as pathetically small, disgustingly smug, and...crypto-socialist, and to restore to his rightful place of preeminence the reader, referred to alternately as "common" or "general," who validates good poetry by actually paying for it on the open market and who never did have much use for the linguistic shenanigans of modernism and its successors. Evans dismisses as "hallucination" the fear-fantasy that poetry has been taken over by academic lefties . (Slam? SpokenWord? The shit in Borders?) The "MBA poets," Evans writes, "wish that the large and diverse audience for poetry that manifestly does exist today would disappear, so that it could be replaced with a more docile and homogeneous one of their own choosing." They would choose a less Democratic (and democratic) audience, it would seem. Nice, treestump poems with no hint of orange-level threat to the Mercedes Benzadrine status quo. Meanwhile, back in New York, and back in October, 2005, Harper's publishes Ben Marcus's exposé ofJonathan Franzen's anti-experimental prose campaign. As with the right-sizing poets, Franzen and others have depicted realist prose as the victim of an elitist plot to degrade that endangered sensibility which monopolizes the entire Ml in the economy known as fiction writing. In particular, Franzen, in a 1996 New Yorker piece, depicted alternative-prose publisher FC2 as all but a terrorist organization. (Circularity: I knowFranzen got pissy with Oprah when she selected his book for her club—ensuring him permanent financial stability—but still. Oprah, Franzen. Franzen, Oprah.) Harper's asked FC2 publisherR. M. Berry for aresponse to the Marcus piece, butdid notpublish said response. Our thanks to its author for the privilege of putting it before you: For FC2, Ben Marcus's defense of experimental fiction poses the question of the present. Jonathan Franzen was past before he arrived, but why other words are here now seems puzzling. The fact of mass communication bedazzles everybody. No longer protected by distance or time, we Uvein the whole world atonce, like postmodern gods, experiencing our own flesh and surroundings only disruptively. How could writing read by millions leave no impression? When Marcus quips, "If only writers could give up their interest in language, then they might truly be able to compete for those enormous money-spending audiences," he recognizes a suppressed ambition. Anybody devoting thirty years to publishing books everybody else knows to be unpublishable feels the stress. Heart rhythms change, breathing quickens. History isn't what's here now; it's what's here now tomorrow too, but surrounded by so much mayhem, how can this sentence still be happening? Of course, there's no telling how the future will imagine us, but ifit imagines us in words, then our imperfect tense should make the future present. Day in, day out, language comes to nothing. At FC2...