Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Marisa A Januzzi
Subject: discursive disruptions//whether poetry makes anything happen
Greetings from a formerly silent lurker!
With the indulgence of the list, I would like to revive the question of the
political content of poetic form, implicitly continuing a discussion which arose
at an MLA session called "Poetry: The Visual Dimension." Alan Golding gave
a helpful paper about Susan Howe’s visual poetics, and during the Q&A,
Marjorie Perloff asked "the big skeptical question" (I wish I could remember
her exact words!), wondering about the connection between the disruption for
instance of the linear form of the poem on the page and the disruption of
patriarchy. And Bob Perelman accelerated the question by raising the specter of
the "history of the avant-garde."
Since then I have been wondering why poetry can’t be construed as having
political potential in a metaphoric mode. It seems to me that metaphors
(whether formal or more simply rhetorical) not only express but also potentially
restage political issues (as in for instance the work of Medbh McGuckian) in
educational ways. When Mina Loy chose an open form for her notorious 1915-
17 "Love Songs" (THE best since Sappho, she called them) the rhetoric of form
and content immediately sent critics into a delirium of invective against free
women, free verse, free love… in other words critics got the point before they
"got" the poems, a situation which recurs every day in the poetry classroom
where students and teachers can usefully confront prejudices in the guise of
aesthetic questions.
Ten years ago I wrote an ill-thought-out essay about T.S. Eliot which earned
me a ‘D’ from Kathryne Lindberg and caused this student (from a deeply
traditional and right-wing family) to attend consciously to the question for the
very first time. Although it now may sound nostalgic to say so, Williams and
Olson (also on the syllabus) helped me out…and so did Kathryne, with a
magnum of patience…
Language: the parent, not the child of thought? (Wilde)