By contrast, he finds William Carlos Williams generous because he "understood that time is a mess, the world is a mess, and therefore time and the world are simultaneous. His openness to being in the world and his uninterest in "getting out of it or beyond it" as Stevens sought to do makes him the better poet. He leads to the climate in which Olson, Creeley and other postmoderns wrote.
Pound helped set the postmodern stage by his interest in the ideogram: Revell says this led us to "treat words as physical things rather than as symbols or totems." (p. 32)
Revell emphasizes the difference between the function of poetry and the function of language. Poetry "is about making language happen." Language "is about making things [events in the real world] happen." (p. 33) He seems to be saying that the modernists did not see this difference and that postmodernists like Olson, Creeley, and himself do.
The quality of poetry, he seems to be saying, leads to the quality of language. The quality of language affects the quality of action. This has to do with telling the truth and lying. "Lies" seem to mean, for him, the use of words that lead to "totalizing inhumanities" such as the holocaust. (p. 33)
"Truth" in Revell's view seems to come from Pound's dictum of "calling things by their right names" and heeding Pound's warning that "abstraction is a greased slide." (p. 34)
"There are certain hallucinations called Stalinism, and there are certain hallucinations called free market economy. The issue is to demystify the hallucinations, whatever they happen to be." (p.34)
Revell admires John Ashbery because he does not seek to make the poem a representation of something else. "He's the most available, the most welcoming of poets I know. Everything is what it is. It's not a symbol for anything else. It's this entire exteriorization of the inward life, this humility that says there is nothing in me that didn't come from the world." (p. 34)
Revell thinks Whitman's commitment to continuous process, a postmodern attribute, did not prevail in his poetry. He sought closure in the end. He saw that a soul is not given but is made. He differs from Revell's sense in that Whitman "believed you could finish the job." (p. 35)
Revell resists closure, finishing. That's why he favors Ashbery, who "realizes that it's an endless improvisation until you die." (p.35) He opposes naming and defining things. That leads him to have a radical "humility" as a poet. He wants to "unbuild myself," to become transparent, to be innocent in the sense of doing no harm. He wants to "put words together that do no harm." (p. 35) He wants to "rescue a few phrases from becoming murderous or murdered." (p. 35)
He seems to have a passive view of the poet, who lets language pass through him like light through a prism.
"In my work now I'm trying to explore ways of saying nothing at all." (p. 36)
Revell's avoidance of closure, his fear of creating a kind of terror with words, is reminiscent of Lyotard. We meet Lyotard in THE PROGRAMME in Honi Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics..
Revell's thoughts about the dangers of abstraction remind us of Korzybski's ideas in Science and Sanity of the 1930s. That makes us wonder whether in Korzybski we see a precursor of the postmodern analysis of language. It is a quaint and odd book.