Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Colleen Lookingbill
Subject: Re: Consent of the governing
Went to a reading/publishing party for a good new little magazine called
Antenym on Sat. and was struck by what the editor Steve Carll had to say in his
statement of introduction called "Humanity and Politics":
"No longer merely mediating, politics determines how people will stand with
regard to each other.
Today, politics governs more and more the relations between people, as more
and more people become afraid to commit themselves to the attempt at genuine
communication, concern and compassion, which all involve listening. To listen
is to stand within another’s speaking, to move one’s viewpoint into the
perspective of another, to share experiences. Instead politics provides an easy
interpretive grid that allows us to get a handle on people, to identify "where
someone is coming from" without having to actually deal with the reality s/he
experiences, without having to engage that person’s speaking, without having
to "expend" or "invest" one’s energy actually communicating without the
incentive of gain.
As politics (which involves the communication of only power relationships
between people) holds more sway, humanity is more and more buried by
reductive modes of relating, with it buried, politics becomes more and more
mean-spirited, if indeed spirit of any kind can be said to be involved."
This is taken from the middle of a three page essay, but the point is that others
in the poetics field find the power and politics discussion a fertile field -–why
the impulse to suppress it on this list?