Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Ron Silliman
Subject: Motivation
What I like about Social Formalism is that it combines both the general thrust
of the activity with the general thrust of the motivation for such activity, i.e.,
that these writings are/were motivated for explicitly social reasons, even where
(as often enough was the case) the definition of the social reason would have
been hard to get at beyond "general sense of dissatisfaction w/ the present
condition of things"
What separates most of the writers in In the American Tree, for example, from
poets now ages 25-30 doing superficially similar things on a page, is precisely
that sense of motivation. Not that younger poets don’t have motivation, but it’s
a different one, generally. And the fact that something like LangPo sits owl-like
on the landscape is part of the problem any younger poet must thus face.
The impulse to write in the way that, say, Stephen Rodefer did 10 years ago, is
not the same today. Even for Stephen.
I actually think that is why in the O-blek anthology we see such a "return to the
lyric" as a mode. It represents precisely the draining of the "social" from that
equation.
Which may be why, w/ the exception of Mark Mendel’s appropriation of Jenny
Holzer’s sense of display for poetry, there are no literary devices in that
collection that you cannot already find in The New American Poetry, In the
American Tree or The Art of Practice.
"Experimental poetry" I think tries as a category to express the same
combination of activity & motivation, but both terms in the equation seem too
vague ultimately. And I do think that for many poets, esp. during the 1950s, the
first term in that category carried with it some connotation of the "prestige of
science" – Think of Bern Porter, or even Kostelanetz. Or Eli Mandel, who went
from "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" (one of the interesting attempts
at the American long poem during the so-called modernist era which has not
made it even into the most retro canon as yet)to true crackpot science "curing
gays of homosexuality" on the right-wing homophobe circuit before he died.
Zukofsky has that same sense of wearing the lab coat at the blackboard. The
Doctor will see you now.