Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

Apropos Claim 1: I see plenty of evidence in both volumes of the New Coast to
suggest that G2 meets the minimal definition of "social motivation" provided
by Ron ("general dissatisfaction w/the present condition of things"). If
anything, the failure of the New Left and the impasses of identity politics seem
to have increased that dissatisfaction, while the fact that G1’s claims for the
social efficacy of its collective poetic project have only been partially borne out
suggests the necessity of exploring alternate routes.
Apropos Claim 2: The ominous scenario in which the social is somehow
"drained" away only makes sense if such devices as one finds in ITAT
represent the exclusive means of criticizing existing social relations and
evoking potentials for social transformation. Ron establishes a double bind for
G2: continue to employ G1’s devices (in which case you’ll be labeled
derivative and your motivation will be characterized as improper) or
invent/adopt other devices (in which case you’ll be accused of permitting the
"social" to "drain" away). I’ve been seeing variants of this argument since the
mid-80s, and I’d have thought it was clear by now that there is more than one
way to compose/propose the social in poetry, and that the employment of
devices associated with the lyric genre does not automatically entail the
abandonment of an oppositional literary and social project.
Apropos Claim 3: Does it make sense to compare the New Coast, an
emphatically "prospective" collection of 119 young writers, to such
retrospective anthologies as the New American Poetry and ITAT? (I leave
aside The Art of Practice, though the fact that 10 of the 45 writers presented
there also appear in the NC makes the attempt to set them sharply at odds
untenable). I think the question of what devices these young writers will
develop in their careers is anything but settled at this point. The suggestion that
G2 has "returned" to the lyric implies that the question has already been settled
in favor of a modest conservatism: in which case it remains to be explained
why no three poets in the New Coast could be inserted into the NAP or ITAT
without substantially changing the texture of either preceding collection.
I think the summary judgment that G2 brings forward "no new devices" is a
conveniently veiled way of discrediting work that mobilizes a host of "devices"
and puts into play a range of "motivations" that haven’t yet been codified (and,
in response to the perceived "programmaticism" of G1, may not elect to use the
strategies of codification favored by that previous generation).
There are other questions that could be posed here (why for instance the Apex
of the M has been taken as the chief development requiring explanation in the