Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Benjamin Friedlander
Subject: "allowing to sound"
Pardon my abstracting from Patrick’s long message on Diane Ward the
following passage. The message was addressed in particular to an unnamed
interlocutor but was distributed to all of us on the poetics list. I deleted one set
of statements from within the passage (marked below by ellipses within
brackets) because I didn’t quite understand what Patrick was saying and
because the technical character of those statements seemed to derive from the
"reading" of Diane Ward’s Imaginary Movie–a book I don’t know–and so I
was unsure how relevant they are to a discussion of poetry and poetics in
general. And I put the word reading in quotes only because of what Patrick
himself says, that is:
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 [**on what? here is where I begin
to lose track–b.f.**] no matter how disgruntled I may become with the way the
text sits on the page.[**…**] 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 [**but why "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…
I return to this message because I would like to take issue with what I take to be
an analogy Patrick is drawing between the two sides of two different
distinctions. On the one hand, between reading a text and allowing it to sound
(with the implication being that the latter discovers a world of discussion and
interaction unavailable to the former); on the other, between two conceptions of
the social poem, one that seems performative (Diane Ward), the other linked to
modes of representation (O’Hara and Reznikoff). Unstated as such but
governing Patrick’s remarks (or so I believe) is the twin association of (1)
"reading" with "representation" and (2) "allowing to sound" with
"performance." Is that correct?