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378 leslie scalapino and ron silliman What/Person? From an Exchange This well-known exchange between Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman,over his introduction to a selection of work by Scalapino and three other contemporary poets in Socialist Review (1988), begins with Scalapino’s disagreement with Silliman’s distinction between poets “who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history” (e.g., white male heterosexuals, or WMHs) and poets “who have instead been its objects.” Silliman attempts to describe a divergence within aesthetic practice in which the former are motivated to dismantle conventions of narrative, persona, and reference, while the latter “need to have their stories told.” For Scalapino, this distinction is hierarchical and thus derogatory in that it assumes the first group is more predisposed to formal innovation, while the other is more“conventional.”For Scalapino,“no one is free of their narrative,”nor from an obligation to contest it. This debate, which is still not concluded, took place on the threshold of a major shift in the cultural politics of the avant-garde and its relation to identity politics. While black, gay, and feminist liberationist movements demanded the recognition of identity , a new generation of minority writers consider identity not as a given but as a site for exploration. Poets like Harryette Mullen, Renee Gladman, Pamela Lu, Tisa Bryant, Tan Lin, and Rodrigo Toscano took full advantage of the contradictions disclosed in this provocative debate. Dear Ron, We agreed on an exchange concerning views expressed in your introduction which prefaced writing (requested and in some cases excerpted by you) by eight poets including myself published in the July–September 1988 Socialist Review. I’ll quote the passage which contained, in my view, the most problematic aspects of your argument: Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals, for example—are apt to challenge all that is supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question , if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum are poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The what/person? 379 narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience. Your argument as I understand it is that white heterosexual men in groups (i.e., elites) being free of their social condition are more able to write formally innovative work than are women, gays, and minorities who by virtue of being caught in their social condition have the need to “have their stories told” and therefore tend to write “conventional” narrative. The word conventional by definition is value-laden in reference to any art or scholarly/thought form, implying inferiority. Elsewhere in your statement, you associate awareness of the formation of subjectivity in writing with questioning “the role of the unified subject.” Though I do not deny the prevalence of ‘conventional narrative’ (the characteristics of which you do not describe more specifically than those of making connections and ‘telling one’s story’) written by many including white men,the argument thus phrased—though you are entirely concerned with radically questioning social structure—is authoritarian. As you know, I wrote a letter responding to your introduction which I intended for publication in the Socialist Review. I was refused publication on the basis that my language was too poetic and did not qualify as political discourse. That is to say, I must speak a language recognized as discourse before it can be regarded as public and as germane. The issues regarding narrative phrased very simply seem to me to include the following: No one is free of their narrative. My own poetic construct is similar to yours in wanting to ‘deconstruct’ our illusion or constructions of reality— which I see as including the illusion that ‘elites,’ whatever these constitute, are able to have objectivity by removing ‘themselves’/as critiquing subjectivity . The corollary to this is to say that...

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