Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

It begins to sound like the POETICS list is quite varied, with perhaps only a
few subscribers exclusively L= poets. So I’d been given the wrong sense of
what the list was.
I begin to wonder, too, whether the big division proclaimed between the LP
movement and the rest of poetry is really useful. Some of the recent posts
suggest that it isn’t. For after all, poetry using unfamiliar methods of
communication goes back at least to Rimbaud (1870) and Mallarme’ (1880-
1890). Everybody knows about Dada, Modernism, Surrealism, and Black
Mountain. Plus various unclassifiables like Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding,
Bunting and Ashbery. And the Naropa Institute. So I’m not yet certain that LP
has introduced anything that wasn’t already there. If writing nonrepresentationally
is the key, we have to acknowledge that almost none of
Wallace Stevens is representational. If disjunctiveness is the key, then no one
could be more disjunctive than Ashbery. If collage is it, then the Surrealists did
it long ago–ditto for automatic writing. Meanwhile the other poetry, the one
based on narrative, on representing sensory impressions verbally, or providing
philosophical or meditative discourse, was always attentive to experimentation
and used some of the new techniques as well. Just maybe the same situation
obtains today, with some poets fusing the two approaches. My own impression
of Hejinian was that My Life was an autobiographical narrative and therefore at
some level representational; plus a constant intrusion of cognitive
"interference," words used like (metaphor) paint–a kind of alogical interruption
to transparent narrative. Isn’t this a fusion of the two? To use a comparison
from music, "classical" music of this century has again and again borrowed
from jazz–but then so has jazz borrowed from "classical" music over and again.
There’s no Stravinsky without jazz and there’s no Mingus without Stravinsky.
Maybe LANGUAGE poetry really isn’t a separate movement at all, but instead
is just poetry, multisourced and not really describable in simple terms as truly
distinct from the other poetry?
As for signing on to POETICS, I’ll think about it, Maria, it’s just that there are
demands on my time and a mailbox already overloaded with messages from
two other groups.