08 August 2014

A few weeks ago I became aware of the pronouncement in The Boston Review, which I don't read, that "To confront, reinvigorate, and complicate the conversation about class in contemporary poetics, we are launching a poetry forum with this capacious essay by Daniel Tiffany." They could start by checking the attributions on the quotations and paraphrasing.  I just checked to see if I had forgotten some point that Margaret Cohen made and I hadn't..  I will leave this up here briefly...

"Tiffany cites Margaret Cohen's writings on Gothic Marxism and then moves on to the unattributed conclusion "..not only must the working class destroy itself, but it cannot become fully conscious of itself until it does so."  This is made to sound like a paraphrasing of Cohen's writings on the topic, but nowhere does she make that statement directly or indirectly.  The quotation cited to explain Cohen's concept of Gothic Marxism in the previous paragraph is not Cohen's, but an unattributed passage from David Arnold's Poetry and Language Writing.  Whether this conclusion bears some relation to Tiffany's reading of Gáspár Miklós Tamás or his own wish-fulfillment is unclear, but it is essential that Cohen's sentiments not be so misrepresented by someone cutting, pasting, and stringing together logical constructions about a class culture and tradition apparently alien to him."

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