Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Charles Bernstein
Subject: Community and the Individual Talent
I had a number of thoughts, over these past weeks of posts, about community,
but I’ve misplaced them.
Every time I hear the words literary community I reach for my bivalent autocad
simulation card emulator.
Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in pursuit of new constellations
of relationship.
In other words, community is as much what I am trying to get away from –
reform – as form.
So there are a spectrum of communities, from the closed community modeled
on the family, to communities fixed by location (what might otherwise be
called, for example, neighborhoods) or civic identification (the community
bounding a literal and figurative commons or commonplace) or political
ideology, to utopian communities that have either sought to form a new place
or to remain open by refusing to be grounded by a place.
Literary communities have often been understood in terms of place – the
"local" – as Michael Davidson writes about the emergence of a literary
community on the West Coast in his book on the SF Renaissance, or in terms of
scene (a local hub within a place) or group. Black Mountain remains crucial
because it forged an arts community from writers and artists from many places.
Most recently, the connections of writers within ethnic, gender, or racial groups
have been designated as communities. Schools or movements have not usually
been called communities, although Ron Silliman, among others, have wanted to
insist that a shared aesthetic project among writers in different locations can
best be understood on this model of community. It’s possible to speak of the
"poetry community" in the sense of "the poetry world" (in the sense of "the art
world") – but such a formulation immediately suggests that arts funding
agencies are nearby (more commonly, one speaks of the "small press
community"). I would say "poetry communities" but this begs the questions
even as it suggests relief. Many poets that I know experience poetry
communities, say scenes, as places of their initial exclusion from publication,