from Ron Silliman's blog, January 7, 2005:

This entry appeared unexpectedly and was a surprise to me. I was particularly pleased at how perceptive and concise Silliman's comments are. We hadn't been in significant contact for a long time when the blog entry appeared, and our approaches strongly difer. This didn't get in the way of his picking up on half of the major points of what I've done since we put out the Coolidge symposium, and that means more to me than the popularity of his blog at the time this installment went online. He may have over-estimated my generosity and underestimated other reasons for my not developing a "Brand," but if so it's pleasant to se him erring on the side of generosity. Here's what he had to say specifically about me:

Young is undoubtedly the most widely known of the three. Karl was one of the very first poets to understand the potential of computers and the internet as a mechanism for enabling the creation, distribution and archiving of poetry. His Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry is the grand-daddy of web poetry archives & remains a great resource. It was Karl who originally invited me to edit a special issue of Margin[s]on the poetry of Clark Coolidge, which more than anything made me conscious of the value of being able to talk & write critically about new modes of poetry. Karl's own poetry is diverse in mode & impulse. And while he might be more famous today if he were to hone in on a single mode poem around which to build a brand (I'm actually being serious when I say that), what'd really kept him from becoming the household name he deserves to be has been that he's reserved his great energies to promote poetry, rather than to advocate for Karl Young's poetry. That's a generosity of spirit that should never be discounted.

Here's the permalink to the entry

And here's the link to Silliman's ongoing Blog

from Charles Alexander's Blog, April 30, 2009:

I'm just putting in the permalink asince the entry is only about me, and has not rhubarb cluttering up several initial paragraphs. It's particularly important to me in this instance that Charles was a student at U.W. Madison at the time of what for me the full flowering of my Vice-Presidency of Woodland Pattern, and he came regularly to events that I organized. His appreciation of my role in creating the parent organization, co-managing it during this period of flowering, and placing special emphasis on comunity building hasn't gotten lost over time, and he fully acknowledges and appreciates the way he formed life-long artistic ideas, associations, and friendships through the organization when that's what I wanted the organization to do. Like others who haven't said anything about it in blogs, Charles has reowrked some of my ideas into his efforts in Tucson. There is a strongly bitter-sweet quality in looking back at this time, since leaving Milwaukee for what I though would be just a brief period turned out to be the strongest regret over the worst mistake I've made in my life, and I have felt like an exile during the time since. I have made arrangements for my ashes to be scattered back home in Milwaukee if circumstances prevent me from returning.

Of course, aside from this, how could I object to the rest of his comments?

To go to the ongoing blog, click here

Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics Blog, Saturday, May 16, 2009

Jerry's approach to blogging is to provide quotes from other sources with a brief introduction. In this entry, he quotes the first half of my essay, "Toward an Ideal Anthology." This is a commentary on my online Light and Dust Anthology written in 2002, about half way between the time I started it in 1994 and the present. For the Merlin of contemporary anthologists, this includes all sorts of delightful strands of interconnection. Although just about everybody who has written about me generally in the last decade has mentioned my anthology, and some still claim it's the best or most original or most complex or most thought provoking (or some other superlative), this example has a special position precisely because it's coming from the most important print anthologist (in my opinion, as well as that of a lot of other people) of the last quarter century. It's also important to me since Jerry has included something of mine in aproximately half his print anthologies - the only anthologist for mainstream presses in the U.S. to have done so. On a personal level, we were close friends at one time, to the point where I thought of him and Jackson Mac Low as literary uncles, since I met them when I had formed too much of my literary personbality through reading for anyone I could actualy spend time with to be the kind of father figure that Ezra Pound had been. Our thinking in many areas has seriously diverged over the years, and due to many circumstances have not been in frequent contact for decades. Sad as this may be for me, it does include a slight hint of a potentially bright light. That he still keeps me partially in his loop, considering all the poets he's backed over the years, confirms my sense that he retains some belief in what I do, and that the time when this could be a form of nepotism is over. That Jerry's not altogether gone, even though now distant, touches some profound existential cords. They are deeply personal, but that depth would not be there without Jerry's continued literary respect based on something other than personal history.

Anyway, here's the permalink. The ongoing blog is available by clicking here

Charles Bernstein's Blog, January 28, 2007

My retrospective at Big Bridge drew a number of comments in the blogosphere. To me, the most curious was the entry at Charles Bernstein's Blog. Bernstein annotates his link to the feature plainly and simply "A fascinating two-part retrospective of the publishing work of Karl Young is featured in Big Bridge, along with detailed commentaries by Young." My initial reaction to this was to amusement. I had been refered to the blog by a friend considerably after the entry went online. The blog is not broken into segments, includes huge graphics, and hence takes a long time to load. Bernstein and I share little in general outlook and conception of contemporary poetry and other arts. It is important to note, however, that I, like a number of other poets, have worked with many of the formal properties and conceptual frames as the language poets, but have not wanted to be part of it as a movement. I was curious as to what Bernstein would find facinating in the retrospective. Particularly after I'd had to wait for something like fifteen minutes for the web page to load. I burst out laughing when the entry finally appeared on my screen. But given the way some bloggers simply compile long lists of references to other sites, this entry, by its teasing nature, might have been a mode of promotion. And an exmple of the oddity of the blogosphere.

from Geof Huth's Blog, April 4, 2005

This is a review of what Huth called The Show of the Year held at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami. For the complete blog entry, click the name of the show. It was an extremely good show, marking the high point of one trend in U.S. visual poetry exhibitions. The breif passage about me is about as strong as praise gets in art criticism:

But the piece in this show that blows me away, the poem that is visually and verbally stunning, another poem that shows the growth of a master, the poem that teaches us all how to think, the poem that makes me weep with joy, is Karl Young's Punctuation Hands. I cannot bear to describe it, or to say what it means. Make this poem your experience for the day. Just follow the link above and read each of the poem's four panels, one by one. Slowly.