Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Tony Green
Subject: calling G1G2…this is mission control
Isn’t "the poem", lock schlock and barrel, constituted by a writer who has
continuing relations with the body politic, like it or not – thrown-ness as in Jim
Morrison (rr or r) & Charles Bernstein have liked to say – following Heidegger,
I guess. Oh yes aesthetics happens somewhere else then where, old bean, huh?
Aesthetics is a blind for social and money interests mainly.
Confucius never found anyone who was disinterested – & that makes questions
for a whole tradition of separations and purifications in the name of art (i.e.
Milord’s fetishized pictures and objets d’art, later property of boards of trustees
of museums, or MS of Vergil, as sandwiched in plastic sheeting in Vatican to
be literary. Poet’s letters, Palgrave and subsequent anthologies in the college
market).
Jean Calais’s translations of Villon are all in vain….Everyone wants to be a big
artist these days. There must be more in poetry than anyone has thought. Could
it be that there is a real power in it/always ideologists want to bring it under
their control, as instrument. Like music, it keeps on escaping ideological
control clutches, saying more than it means to, or less. Let’s hope there is a real
poet among the new writers, or even two. Surely "G1" or any G at all including
G-6 (dead poets of circa Mallarme’s time will welcome them, by opening new
readings to us, readings we had missed, but which may be what we have always
really longed for. Belonging to no G in the U.S. (wrong age) but listening as a
reader/user to several U.S. G’s with pleasure, excitement, appropriative glee,
there is no reason to choose among generations, only to pick out the plums.
This you learn in "art history", who says there’s progress between generations,
so that no one can consider themselves righteous who can make use of "early"
artworks? Does the saying of a poem work like a charm as entry to a space of
thoughts and language issues and issues of living and the politics of living or
not? No one can quite tell what will prove to be useful and sometimes it
happens that a misprint retained does the trick. L= was marvelous because it
accepted that conscious control of the way words got into the poem could be
consonant with disorders that seemed to be the preserve of chance procedures
or of lyrical speaking with tongues.
It did not only "displace" "personal poetries" (Downtown poetries various,
variously remaining in some degree acceptable or with affinities) but also the