Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Steve Evans
Subject: Re: poetry and politics
Apropos the friendship/politics/poetry question, I have been thinking about the
way "friendship" is inflected within the context of the broader attempts at racial
resegregation such as we have been experiencing since c.1980 and which now
threatens to pass the critical mark (pace the decision of my alma mater, the UC
system, while the students were away this summer!).
That’s what was on my mind when I wrote the following in a paper on Frank
O’Hara and the way O’Hara criticism (my examples: Perloff and Bredbeck) has
worked to reproduce the racial segregation his work put into serious question.
Please forgive, if you can, the ungainly prose:
"Independent, as opposed to commercial and institutional, publishing tends to
be directly embedded in the immediate social relations of the people who
undertake it, and this the more so the closer one approaches the basal unit of
such independent production: the restricted-circulation poetry magazine. The
social conditions of production of this form typically involve an editor (or
editors), relying on monies not generated within the poetic field (i.e. earnings
from a "real job," inheritance, or patronage), and possessed of sufficient
amounts of time to absorb the whole spectrum of activities (selecting, editing
and proofing, reproducing, binding, circulating, and publicizing) that in
institutional and commercial contexts are divided among different specialists.
This situation of embeddedness, in which literary project and personal life
converge to the point of mutual subsumption, is an objectively ambivalent one:
though often perceived from the inside as the positive confluence of poetry and
the sphere of elective affinity and friendship, viewed from the "outside" it can
appear as clique-ish arbitrariness. The same ambivalence can be registered in
racial terms, for if independent publishing is at least potentially a site in which
the "spontaneous" desegregation of cultural production can occur–since no
formal mechanisms restrict the editorial decision-making process on racial, or
indeed any other, grounds–it is by the same token, however, that the very
appearance of "spontaneity" can work to veil the de facto segregations of
everyday life and to elide the way that even (one might say "especially")
friendship patterns are overdetermined within a society "in which systems of
dominance and subordination are structured through processes of racialization
that continuously interact with all other forces of socialization" (Carby 193).
The objective ambivalence resulting from the pre- and de-formation of spheres