Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

My reconstruction of the argument is necessarily hazy because I’m unsure what
this "allowing to sound" actually consists in, and I’m also unsure what sort of
social engagement this "allowing to sound" engenders.
I’m all for the discovery of new modes of reading, and for rich
phenomenologically tinged accounts of how the poem solicits the reader’s
attention. I only recently re-read Nick Piombino’s essays from
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine and was struck with the depth and beauty of
what he describes. His work in that area has not been taken up and I dare say a
critical practice that took Nick’s theories of reading as its starting point would
look different than anything presently being practiced. My problem in the
present context is with the promotion of a certain sort of text and a certain sort
of "reading" that defines itself by disparaging reading as such. To disavow
reading would seem to me to dictate the terms on which the text can be
approached. Speaking as a reader, my inclination is to cry foul. Also, however,
I wonder what the actual value of this "allowing to sound" can be if it is only
applicable to one kind of poem. If it’s impossible, for instance, to allow
O’Hara’s poetry or Reznikoff’s "to sound," I wonder if the social engagement
discovered in Imaginary Movie is not MORE rather than LESS restrictive.
But these are simply questions that point to a need for clarification. My other
interest in all this is more pedestrian: What is the social poem? What ideas
about the social poem do we entertain without reflection, and where do we see
poets working to articulate newer or deeper ideas about poetry and society?
Patrick mentioned that he is teaching Diane Ward’s work and that his musings
were inspired by that. By a strange coincidence, my own teaching takes me to a
similar line of thinking. I gave my students Langston Hughes’s essay "My
Adventures as a Social Poet" (from the recently reprinted collection Good
Morning Revolution). In the coming weeks I’ll be trying to figure out how best
to teach them Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, which in my opinion is a
profoundly complex text, not at all a simple collection of voices and stories.
After Reznikoff I’m taking up texts that are not poetry, but at the very end of
the semester I’m going to try to incorporate Alice Notley’s poem "White
Phosphorus" (from her book Homer’s Art) in a more general and historical
account of the Vietnam War.
Anyone else working in this area? Any thoughts?