Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

It seems to me that if poetry is going to be taken seriously, it is going to have to
ask more of itself. I would suggest that we take Parmenides, Lucretius, and
Blake–Blake the thinker– as our models. It is going to be tough to teach the
Workshop to do that, and we do not have much time, but we have time for
nothing less. If no one writes a poem for fifty years that is okay. There was
plenty of pass-times.
I do not mean that we can write like Parmenides, Lucretius, and Blake, but we
might undertake the task of producing a world that offer the commodious
possibilities for knowledge that theirs do.
The notion of avant-gardism and avant-garde experimentalism are profoundly
progressivist. Even as the avant-guardists explored the most primitive recesses
of culture and mythology, or the depths of dream and intoxication, systematic
or random disorganization, the orientation was toward an expansion of
consciousness into the unknown. The avant-gardists were the imperialists of the
spirit, brothers and sisters to the colonists. The parallels between Walt
Whitman’s adventures into the soul and the United States adventures on its
passage to India cannot be dismissed. Just as the modernists traveled along with
the colonizing anthropologists. It is not for us now a matter of judgment. The
time is long passed, and we can say only that that something, which had been
lurking in human possibilities, hidden, made itself powerfully manifest: it was
beautiful, unjust, vicious, and inevitable, and now complete. One cannot
imagine the usefulness of such a concept in a world devoted to sustainable uses
of resources.
The best assessments of the ecological damage are produced by different
models and do not give consistent results. It would seem that after this extended
period of cultural sacrifice for the sake of developing representational
techniques that are accurate and complete it should be possible to model the
world environment with considerable accuracy. The various representations,
however, give a remarkable range of results, and we do not have a science for
determining which representation is the best. We have theories and theories of
theories, but in this most significant of matters, where the stakes are all or
nothing, we do not know any thing for certain. It is generally clear, however,
that the present industrial- environmental practices cannot be continued
indefinitely without causing irreversible damage to the world ecosystem. In
1990, the well respected World Watch Foundation estimated that present trends
would cause irreparable damage in forty years. Even if we have five times that
long we are already in the crisis.