Notes
notes introduction nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6. 1. Literary critics frequently acknowledge the revolutionary possibilities of early modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century, though the postwar poetry of the Beats or Black Mountain is usually not considered in the same revolutionary context. Marjorie Perloff, for instance, argues, “The first thing to understand is that in the early avant-gardes, the aesthetic and political were inseparable . Especially the Russian avant-garde was politically AnD aesthetically revolutionary , marking a sharp break with the past.” Postwar modernist writing for Perloff, however, no longer retains the same vital revolutionary promise. “Poetry today,” she argues, “must be understood in terms of the modernist revolution, a revolution much more dramatic than that of Charles olson in ‘Projective verse’ or Allen Ginsberg in ‘Howl’.” By dropping revolution as a requirement for modern art, however, the features of today’s writing can be better understood within contemporary social realities that determine specific actions in poetry. See Jeffrey Side’s interview with Perloff in the Poetry Salzburg Review, no. 10, Autumn 2006 (available at The Argotist Online, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Perloff%20interview %202.htm/); and for recent social, political, and philosophical commentary on revolution and global capitalism, see Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (new york:verso, 2010). 2. for recent cultural histories of postwar formations of US poetry communities , see Joseph Harrington, “Poetry and its Publics in the 1990s,” in Poetry and the Public:The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 159–86; Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); for backgrounds to the more recent cultural significance of slam poetry, see Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); and for a discussion of how literature is discussed by public audiences in contemporary 140 / Notes culture, see Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Champaign: University of illinois Press, 2000). 3. This institutional success is most recently seen with the publicity surrounding Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Usually associated with a group of writers known for their relationship to experimental formalist practices as well as Marxist political commitments, Armantrout, through her prize-winning book, has helped establish Language Poetry in the ongoing canon formation of contemporary literary history. 4. Part of this problem has to do with traditional rhetorical views of literature . for instance, Christopher Burnham, discussing James Britton’s theoretical approach to expressivist rhetoric, reveals a common attitude: “Poetic writing is language used as an art medium, as a verbal icon whose purpose is to be an object that pleases or satisfies the writer. The reader’s response is to share that satisfaction. in traditional terms poetic writing is literary discourse, language that ‘exists for its own sake and not as a means of achieving something else’ (Britton et al., 91)” (26). Michael Warner similarly regards lyric poetry “not as communication but as our silent insertion in the self-communion of the speaker, constructing both an ideal self-presence for the speaking voice and an ideal intimacy between that voice and ourselves” (81). While this traditional view of poetry, as Warner shows, can be found at least as early as 1833 in an essay by John Stuart Mill, who says, “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (quoted in Warner, 81), my goal is to go beyond these “traditional terms” to show ways that poetry can be used for “achieving something else.” See Christopher Burnham, “Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/ Practice,” in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, ed. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick (oxford: oxford University Press, 2001); and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (newyork: Zone Books, 2002). 5. it is true, however, that the darker side of certain modernist revolutionary agendas, such as italian futurism, was explicitly fascist. See, for instance, Robert Casillo’s discussion of Ezra Pound in The Genealogy of Demons:AntiSemitism, Fas cism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, iL: northwestern University Press, 1988). 6. Many, of course, continue to protest events at state and federal capitols: numerous examples of recent marches in Washington, DC, include, for instance, a “Tea Party” march “promising to mobilize conservative voters on election day to take...
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