Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Benjamin Friedlander
Subject: the social poem
Steve, I have what I suppose must be an antinomian streak that forces me, often
against my will, to take issue with positions that in fact attract me a great deal.
Something of the sort occurs now, reading your eminently useful contribution
to the discussion of the social poem. Take issue with is too strong–to question,
and so, perhaps, modify.
What you say about value seems both right and necessary. The implications
with regard to our discussion are significant. That evaluation is a social form,
an activity whose meaning and whose value, constituting an "historical event,"
is objective (in a sense that clarifies what Zukofsky and Reznikoff had in
common as "objectivists," i.e., more than some sentimental attachment to
Pound’s dictum "direct treatment of the thing"), that the subjective is therefore
no less "objective" than those forms of evaluation which call themselves
objective (i.e., that subjectivity no less than objectivity has a social content and
a political form), that the individual is derived from the social and not the other
way around–these are all helpful correctives to the "untenable polarizations" (as
you put it) that at every turn threaten to undermine discussions of poetry, to
turn discussion into an argument between schools. Not that there aren’t
differences between Ward and Reznikoff–of course there are–but that the
differences we have been attempting to identify as essential between their
projects occur first of all within them.
To take one example: if "social value" is "the medium that pervades, supports,
and constrains the generation of specific meanings from the field of linguistic
(or grammatical) possibilities," then the "social value" of Reznikoff’s
Testimony will be most directly evident in those places where his actions are
ostensibly individual–his choices, his juxtapositions, the ways he alters the
original material. The "social value" of the material itself, which we might
naively assume to be an unmediated glimpse at the United States, is in fact
measurable only by way of a regression to the archimedean point of
individuality where the social first allows itself to be glimpsed. To take the
social content of the poem as an unmediated view of the social field out of
which the poem is lifted would be to forget that the social is mediation. (And in
this forgetting the "eerie affectlessness of much of Testimony" begins to be
felt.) The poem thus flips the relation we might expect to find between the
social and the individual: "outside" the poem, the individual is a construct of