To Pan or Not to Pan?

A passage from Wilson's critique of free verse caught my eye:

Far from those eroded banks, work that responds to the name “avant-garde” usually takes this tendency to a far further extreme, and robs words of their status as language by printing them in such random, self-confuting order that they no longer constitute a statement, but are merely a hunk of jumbled pseudo-subversive phonemes spat upon the page. We see the latter in, say, Lyn Hejinian’s senseless Writing is an Aid to Memory, which I quote at random (honoring the fashion in which she wrote it):

its consent to time

mass perhaps in a form against it

a cheap reading of what surrounds

this taste of opinion

it all can be admitted up

Thanks to her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry, which by some hundreds of pages dwarfs her poor little ticker tape of “poetry,” I am aware of the radical intent of this work. Above all, I am aware she has succeeded in creating a kind of writing that refuses to be read...

Sometimes slamming someone else's work just doesn't have a place; it never enhances your argument unless your argument is "this sucks, and I'm pissed." Although a poetry review is a decent place for paltry scatterings of such malice, a supposedly accredited journal of academic criticism is surely not. Wilson's undermines his own persuasions here, taking cheap (albeit well-written) potshots where he could be developing a more convincing line of reasoning. It's rhetorically ineffective, to put it nicely (although personally, I find it deplorable, pompous and vain, but in order to maintain my ethos I will withhold such opinions from my argument, reserving them instead for this bit of parenthetical irony).

There is a conspicuous line between support and insult, and choosing to breach the threshold is a professional risk; I'd be surprised if Wilson didn't sacrifice some esteem in doing so.