Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

in you to hate it properly." In the context of this discussion, I would say: the
poem must have society in it to hate it properly. Against one variant of the
"necessity for rewriting the language" argument Juliana mentioned, I would
add: society is neither reducible to, nor even "structured like" a language….
One could, hypothetically, "hate" the structures of signification, and one could
(though not without paradoxes) even practice that hatred or opposition in one’s
writing, but that would not be, in my definition, necessarily the same thing as
"hating society properly."
But to get that word, "hate," to have the inflection I want, I’ll need a couple of
stanzas from O’Hara:
Poem
Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don’t be shy of unkindness, either
it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something
out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe…
The fact is that oppositional practices can stay clear of neither hate nor
violence: that Reznikoff’s Testimony admits and re-cites (while refusing to turn
into arias) scene after scene of hate and violation releases us into a
comportment beyond fear and amazement, beyond the "awe" that O’Hara
speaks of. Testimony refers us not to the unmediated traumatic occurrence, but
to the comportment that might make such occurrences impossible: "why be
afraid of hate, it is only there"–why be afraid of hate, in other words, when the
absence of our ability to respond to it is what truly is fearful?
But Benjamin said it better in 1939: