Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Steve Evans
Subject: The Social Poem
I want to follow up on my posting "for the record" with a few thoughts that are
perhaps a little more substantial. In light of the postings by Juliana, Ben, Ken,
and Patrick himself, it would appear that the salient moment in my private reply
to Patrick is the somewhat flippant graph of my own value-constellation
represented by the claim that "I would trade the whole gamut of pronouns…for
a few committing descriptives (but then I like Reznikoff and O’Hara because I
like the social as a field of intervention)."Upon consideration, I think this
largely gestural move on my part introduces some untenable polarizations
(Ward vs. Reznikoff & O’Hara; lexical indeterminacy vs. social commitment).
In brief, I throw down a gauntlet that I feel fairly certain non of us on this list
would consent to run. But if there is something redeemable in this remark, it
might be in the connection (albeit so enjambed as to be indiscernible) between
"value" and the "social."
My thinking in this area owes a debt to Bakhtin/Medvedev’s The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship, and especially to the discussion of "social
evaluation" that is found on pages 119-28. I will excerpt just three claims made
in this book. First, and mainly as a corrective to personalizing the theme of
value, I would recall their statement that "the notion that evaluation is an
individual act is widespread in contemporary ‘Lebensphilosophy,’ and leads to
conclusions no less false. Evaluation is social; it organizes intercourse" (126).
The second claim is perhaps more specifically relevant to our discussion. M/B
argue that "social evaluation is needed to turn a grammatical possibility into a
concrete fact of speech reality" (123), basing this on their premise that "the
utterance is not a physical body and not a physical process" [something some of
us might wish to contest, certainly], but rather "a historical event, albeit an
infinitesimal one. Its individuality is that of a historical achievement in a
definite epoch under definite social conditions" (121). Finally, because it serves
to indicate their more general take on "value" and its relation to "formal"
decisions, there are the following sentences: "Social evaluation organizes how
we see and conceptualize the event being communicated, for we only see and
conceptualize what interests or affects us [or as Stein says: It is very likely that
nearly everyone has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting
is interesting them]. Social evaluation also organizes the forms by which the
event is communicated: the arrangement of the material into digressions,