Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Larry Price
Subject: Politics and derivation
Allen Ginsberg once noted that being an anarchist didn’t mean you could throw
your trash in the street. Similarly, saying poetry won't feed the hungry masses
has about the same meaning as saying a rice grower's fields won't scan or are
overly committed to closure. The political can just as easily begin in the
rejection of an easy forgetfulness, of saying, Since so many others DO (throw
trash, etc.), what would be the point etc. of my not? That sense of resistance is
not, I think, about autonomy only, but equally has implications for the
intersubjective.
That said (and because I do think it has to do with form), I'd like to air thoughts
about Duncan's poetics of derivation. Pushed by Charles Alexander’s note on
THE OPENING OF THE FIELD, I also went to the shelf, to FICTIVE
CERTAINTIES and to AFTER LORCA.
"I find again how Emersonian my spirit is. All of experience seems my trust
fund to me; I must CULTIVATE THE MISTRUST THAT ALONE CAN
GIVE CONTRAST AND THE NEEDED INNER TENSION FOR VITAL
INTEREST. In this I stand almost heretically disposed to Olson's insistence on
Melville's sense of inner catastrophe against the Emersonian bliss." [caps mine]
That poetry is a contagion does seem like a good place to start, but Duncan's
sense of "back and back and back" seems too comfortably located:
"When I first decided to be a poet…this itself was a disordering of the world
and its orders in which I had been raised...I had been preparing to enter that
world…but my conversion to poetry was experienced…as being at war with
every hope the world before had had of me...to give one’s life over to poetry, to
become a poet, was to evidence a serious social disorder."
On the other hand, Spicer:
"Things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage…Yes, but the
garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in
turn, visible -- lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As
things decay, they bring their equivalents into being."