Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

does it mean if the writer’s words are not his or her own, or if they’re modeled
on the language of the courts? (Reznikoff’s Testimony.)
Because I prize all the texts I’m teaching, I’m hoping (for myself–forget the
students here!) not only to discover what the resources of the so-called "social"
poem ARE, but to illuminate these resources as a continuum of values, not a set
of mutually exclusive choices (here is where my students really do enter the
picture–can I somehow escape my own didacticism in order to make these
choices available to them?). Isn’t the subtext of the "often drawn contrast"
between Brossard and Rich an attempt to proscribe certain forms of writing?
And what kind of task is that? I mean, I love Nicole Brossard’s work, but
doesn’t the sanctimoniousness of the sheer use of that work to criticize
another’s make you want to prefer Adrienne Rich? (And isn’t that contrary
preference the very essence of an oppositional poetics!) This seems to be a little
of what was at stake in the upholding of Diane Ward as versus O’Hara and
Reznikoff.