Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Jennifer Moxley
Subject: Wobbly Institutions?
I think you boys must be getting a little saddle weary from all that wobbling.
Those who muse around in definitions of community without self-referentiality
obviously can "step away" long enough to question: are we in one? do we want
one? etc… Most people on this earth are born into your vagary. And I think the
likelihood of any significant change happening surrounding community is very
low among our current poetic dissidents if we don’t feel "wrongly defined"
only "wrong definitions" –changing definitions is easy, we’re poets, or are we?
I noticed that M. Hult admitted he goes to the grocery store which reminded me
of something I read about the new left in the 60’s, it’s not that anyone said to
the women leftists, "you can’t speak," it is simply that the dynamic was such
that even theorectically sophisticated women felt invigorated but shut down
from participation. The way they were defined proceeded any definition
changing they might have wanted to take part in. Being left out, cut off from
the dominant modes of whatever, while remaining in a position of priviledge
via class and gender, can sometimes make us forget to keep a keen eye peeled
on the house that shut the door in the first place, and subsequently our shack
takes on an inflated importance. I find it interesting that while we spend a lot of
time opposing our enforced and chosen communities we still accept their terms.
I think this is because it isn’t that we hate our communities, but rather that we
hate that the possibilities they open to us (academic, poetic, love relationships,
virtual and democratic communities) are rarely realized. I just hate that. But it’s
like always waking up to a sink full of dirty dishes, you must say to yourself, at
least I have dishes. We cannot extirpate ourselves from community any more
than we can talk about the social as if we aren’t in and defined by it, neither can
we give up hope that we might be able to risk humiliation and defy these spaces
that define us.