Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Patrick Phillips
Subject: The Wobbly Social Poem
The exposure of a personal/public here speaks on at least a coupla fronts. One
is as a formal gesture toward "the other" conversation on "community."
Another, and the one I’ll attend directly to, is a notion of frame, or field. My
desire, as Steve suggests, not to "conceptualize a notion of social value" is so
bound in my appreciation of unframed field of aproximate signs that some
people may see this as a destablization of particulars. That this destabilization
could in turn lead to the demise of a critique, even my own sense (or lack
thereof) of contiguity, and could thereby promote an ugly conjunction of "911"
and Testimony. In the terms of the political question arises: How can a critical
theory lack a particular ideological framework and is it this a lack of
particularity that conjoins such things? Although the first part of the question is
somehow more interesting it is the second part that I think has more relevance
in terms of the "social poem." (For some reason this idea, the "social poem,"
seems anemic, like generic drug; something’s hiding in there.)
On the surface of things, like words, I "wobble out of orbit," often as a matter
of course. In my wobble the terms of argument become indiscrete; however,
this is not to say that this wobbling undermines my reference, nor does this
wobble undermine a word’s reference. Here lies the kicker. At what point does
this wobble become an element of theory distracted from the social discourse (a
point brought up in Steve’s initial personal, now public post)? And at what
point is this wobble a "social evaluation." My wobble is social, not theoretical.
Its point of arrival is quite close to its point of departure. It would appear that
this is an important point, one that in my book is an edge of confluence which
resists conceptualization, but one which is constantly demanding it.
Here’s one of the reasons I included that "private" post. What I’ve just begun to
try to uncover are the similarities in the expedient forms in Imaginary Movie
and Testimony. What are the motives, how are texts, words motivated inspite
and because of their wobble. Testimony veils a culture just out of reach both
temporally (the turn of the century) and, spatially through the constantly misplaced
modifier ("The United States"). This veil positions the reader, creates a
point of reference from which judgements are made and then, through
"subsequent" portraits, those judgements are stressed in to a re-making. The
coordinate structure of Testimony forces a de-limitation of reference points
while never relieving the reader of a concise condition. This reinforced