Poetry, Poetics and Social Discourses

Considerations of poetry and poetics are resurgent in contemporary literary study. This has occurred both in tandem with, and in reaction to, a cultural studies approach to writing that has, for thirty years or more, taken a strong interest in biographical and institutional contexts, social meanings, political rationales, and authorial subject positions for the literary text. However, when some critics talk about poetry, they limit their remarks to "the aesthetic," which has, lamentably, become an encoded injunction: "let's ignore the social matrix of writing." Yet all writing is social in its origins, in its concerns, and as a praxis. The sociality of writing is at least involved with questions about the poetic career, debates and influences among poets, examination of traditions, adhesions and resistances to poetics, the construction of audiences, and the motivations to write. It is crucial in understanding poetic practice to link textual production to social institutions of dissemination and reception, such as the publishing industry or the academy. But there are further critical perspectives involving social discourses, political and historical events and meanings, the various identities from which writers engage their texts and their tasks. Hence some critics have been engaged in a socio-poesis or a social philology, investigating how the social inflections and meanings emerge in poetry. Making this investigation for the poetic text is (as these articles make clear) fruitful, generative, textually acute, and hardly over-simplified or reductive. With this special issue on "Poetry, Poetics and Social Discourses," jml crosses these two strands of contemporary literary studies—interest in poetry and interest in socio-political matrices. These essays all, in various ways, are deeply textual and aesthetic, saturated in poetry (and saturated, too, in particular archives and libraries where modern and contemporary poetry has a significant place). At the same time these essays all investigate the social discourses of gender, sexuality, nation, and technology—among others, for and within poetry. We have chosen this special issue as a way of announcing at one and the same time that I have become one of jml's four editors, and that poetry and poetics—from modern work through the most current, in anglophone and in other language traditions—are of serious interest to this journal.

An article on George Oppen by Peter Nicholls heads up this issue because Oppen's debates about poetry and politics stage, for himself as an artist, some of the terms and dilemmas that we as critics (and poet-critics) engage in asking how (whether, and why) poets bring their poetry and their politics together in their work. That is, if we want to discuss social discourses and political stands, are we not facing the (potential) banalities of an art written to program? Is asking how social and political discourses appear in the career of the poet, the poetics, and the poetic text falling into a poetic and critical trap? The nature of the trap—loss of a sense of ambiguity, inattention to the "poeticity" of the text, the reduction of poetry to a haranguing stagy art—was examined by Oppen throughout his career. Nicholls focuses on these questions in his choice of an exemplary historical encounter (with the Living Theater) that literally performed or theatricalized the question for Oppen. In his consideration of Oppen's career, Nicholls suggests a variety of potential relationships between art and politics that might be chosen—their reconciliation, their conflict, their alternation in a specific career, their "cohabitation," their mutual questioning. His article turns to Oppen's sense of liminality and a permeable relation between poetry (taken as poetics), politics and (a new term) philosophy. These particular and succinct findings at a key moment in the 1960s, as well as Oppen's career as a whole, offer an entry into some of the questions of politics, social discourses and poetry posed by other poets, and by the critics published here.

For some of this issue, we are in the realm of "The New American Poetry" (named from the historical Donald Allen anthology, and comprising at least New York School, Beat Generation, and Black Mountain poets). Articles in this issue treat central figures: Charles...