some ideology for the new year
• Poetry, like other interventions in language, is political.
• Political poetry is a poetry of public (polis/publica) intervention, invention, and invocation that calls on (and up) language to call out a public, a people.
• Political poetry addresses “both the material character of the political and the political character of the material†(L. Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, 2000).
• To name or imagine an explicitly political poetry is to assign particular meaning to the political possibilities of poetry.
• Possibilities for political poetry include a deliberately radical (in the sense of ‘root work’) form and content.
• Political poetry educates (elicits, draws forth) toward response, action, and awareness and therefore models a pedagogy as much as a poetics.
• “Revolutions are preceded & accompanied by a breakdown in communication…. This breakdown in communication is first articulated by a poet & carried on by other poets.†(J. Rothenberg, “Revolutionary Propositions (second series),†1966).
• Political poetry is committed to what precedes and accompanies revolution and therefore breaks down (in) communication.
• “What counts as an instance of a category depends on our purpose in using the category†(Lakoff/Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980).
• Political poetry is a category that suggests a multiplicity of gestures, actions, resistances, and events taking place in language.
• Political poetry in print (codex, paper, ink) is a serviceable sub-set of those gestures, actions, resistances, and events.
• “A revolution involves a change in structure; a change in style is not a revolution†(J.R., “Revolutionary Propositions (first series),†1966).
• Structural changes include adjustments to the means by which literary materials are written, gathered, arranged, produced, reproduced, distributed, propagated, and consumed.
• The form of the book is a form of political (and literary, and material) production.
• The book acquires (and holds) “interindividual significance†and is therefore ideological (Volosinov, “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,†1930).
• A starting point for political poetry—and a political poetry book series—is the recognition of the book’s significance “in the world of ideology†(same).
• A book series is a performance, in books, and is therefore a political (and socially significant) performance.
• Gaps and contradictions, in these and other statements about political poetry, should be expected, cherished, and challenged.