Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

that you cannot intend your own autonomy without intending that of everyone
else (universalization).
From: Ron Silliman
Subject: Re: haoles
One sentence here stands out:
> My problem with equating the poem with "ethnic cleansing" is that the
> Hawaiian sovereignty movement is a separatist movement, not an
> imperial one (as in the "former Yugoslavia").
This would seem to be a "classic" question of a group’s relation to power (the
center). That which is at the center (or conceives of itself as a center) moves
outward, imperial motion. That which perceives itself at the margin merely
defines the margin (builds that border). Both seem to involve an essential(ist)
xenophobia. Such is at the heart of every identity politics. The relative danger
comes from the relation to power, no?
And at the real center comes that almost snow blindness of presuming it’s "just
us." Hence prop 187 in California and the Bubba vote throughout the US in
1994, revenge of the white males.
Interesting how, given what a "boy" discussion this has been for the past week
or so, nobody here at all takes the standard Bubba position, even while the
range of politics and poetics involved seems pretty broad. To be a poet makes
an internationalist out of many (at least here in the US–Dubravka Djuric has
noted how many opportunistic poets in Serbia have taken advantage of the
situation there to gather little fiefdoms of state power and how even the
opposition Croat and Bosnian poets have quickly moved into nationalist
positions that seem to have as much to do with what’s in it for them as it does
the needs of "their people."
So what is this concept "my people"?