Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

characterization of some the structures of the poem would in many critical
circles be a pan, a thumbs down in siskel and eberteze. Yet, under my criteria
and reading practice another, quite successful text surfaces.
I don’t "read" this text so much as allow it to sound out its own cultural
relevance. This is not as passive as it may seem. This sounding invites a text
which is an "imaginary form" which insists no matter how disgruntled I may
become with the way the text sits on the page. Its imaginary form becomes a
discussion between my imagination and the culture’s and the poem’s, a
discussion which is often absent from the page entirely. This absence, or in
effect ascribed culture, is what keeps me. Often this keeping is similar to the
hostage taking as mentioned above, but it remains political in the slippage
between those participants in the discussion. It is this slippage which is the field
of intervention for me. This is the level of engagement. This is personal, it is
ideological, it is social. You mention the social as a field of intervention. So
often, even in O’Hara and Reznikoff, I feel the poem is a description of
something material, a personalization which elementizes some margin running
the gamut from imprisonment (I as the disenfranchized interlocutor of
poetic/cultural condition) to oration (I as arbiter of the imaginary condition).
This field of intervention I often find less entreating, in some ways less the
jouissance, an more an effigy of the entrapped or of entrapment. As to the
materialization of the social field of intervention Wittgenstein said "Psychology
connects what is experienced with something physical, but we connect what is
experienced with what is experienced." I ask what then does poetry connect?
Now is this "blackmail?" (the Barthesian blackmail of theory) I’m not sure. I’m
also not sure what you mean by the poem’s and the theory’s autonomy; I’m not
sure there has ever been such a thing as theoretical autonomy, certainly not
technological autonomy. And when it comes to technology, not much can be
left out. The theoretical apparatus evident here of course is not culturally
bankrupt, certainly it isn’t grammatically bankrupt even if it is sometimes
critically tedious. The fact that the theoretical apparatus no longer provides the
surprise, and then perhaps the strangeness, needs desperately to be examined.
But the condition elemented by the grammar emerges, or maybe the grammar
elemented by the condition emerges. Sure the often "found text" quality of her
work speaks to a possibility of a text made powerless by its automaticness, that
risk that much experience-based art suffers (I’m thinking of Surrealism, Dada,
Minimalism, even some Abstract Expressionism). But her insistence that this
experience never be deflated, or deflected by appropriative gesture, be that
through an acquiescence to theory, to the text, or to the culture, or importantly
to imagination, speaks to the possibility of this text to reveal the often