Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Kali Tal
Subject: Re: apex of the m…
I’m outside both the traditional academic and literary poetry circles. Until Joe
Amato introduced me to the work of the Language Poets, I’d never heard them.
I like Joe’s work (that’s why I publish it), but my longest-lasting literary
affections lie with "movement" poets, primarily feminist and/or African
American and/or war veteran writers who see themselves and their work as
inseperable from their politics and their activism. My perspective on the whole
apex of the m debate is shaped by a general distrust of manifestos which seem
to be substitutes for action, or which are taken as actions in and of themselves.
I’d like to respond to some of eric pape’s comments in that spirit:
>every revolution, including any poetry that pretends to be fully fulfilled
> revolutionary poetry, is written in language.
I am not sure that this is true. In extremity, language is a luxury that many
cannot afford. Violent revolutions (and perhaps most acts of physical violence)
are not written–that is specifically what makes them violent; pens are not
swords, however much the revolutionary (or reactionary) poet might wish that
they were, might yearn to make language strike like a blow. My particular
critical speciality is "literature of trauma"–specifically, the literature of
"survivors" of man-made violence (Holocaust, combat, rape, etc.)–and I have
found that a characteristic spanning every literature of trauma which I have yet
uncovered is the agonizing tension between the failure of language ("You can’t
understand!") and the desperate need for language to suceed (You must
understand!). Revolutionary poets yearn to write with such strength that their
audience is traumatized as they have been traumatized (Jones/Baraka raging
that "poems are bullshit unless they are/ teeth or trees or lemons piled/ on a
step," wanting his own poem to be a machine gun, reduced to helpless
ratatatting; the anger is real, the danger behind the poem is real, but the poem
can never be real in the sense Baraka desires it to be).
There was, last year, a lengthy discussion of "terrorist" poetics/poetry on the
[Technoculture] list–some of you will remember. It seems to me that both
"terrorist" and "revolutionary" poetry are impossible constructions unless one is
talking about them as documentary (at one remove) rather than actual (the thing
itself). Soldiers who write or talk about combat state unequivocally that