Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

of "elective affinity" by selective processes operating at the level of the social
totality is of especial importance in the context of the New American Poetry,
which consistently foregrounded its own passionate informality and ‘openness’
in contrast to the bureaucratization of culture epitomized by academic poetry
and the institutionally-affiliated journals that sustained it. I would argue that
both the independent publications and the poetic formations that crystallized
around them did represent gains in the democratization of culture relative to the
corporate and university publishing structures, but these gains were not without
their own contradictions."
[The Hazel Carby piece referred to is "The Multicultural Wars" in Gina Dent &
Michele Wallace’s Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay P, 1992)]