In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

nine | ann vickery In/Complete Locating Origins of the Poet in Jennifer Moxley’s In Memoriams to Helena Bennett in new social ties, Deborah Chambers argues that friendship ties “are beginning to be viewed as an expression of intimacy that replaces the sense of social integration associated with the concept of ‘community ’” (2). Novel forms of socialization, global communication, urban movements, and sexual communities have all impacted upon discourses of belonging. As “community” is viewed alternatively as impossible or, at best, in flux, there has been “a postmodern shift of emphasis from kinship and community networks to personal bonds” to the extent that friendship is now the privileged term (Chambers 2).1 This shift from community to friendship can be seen first in how poets themselves are imagining their relationships to one another. While the late 1970s and 1980s saw a more explicit theorization and enactment of the practice and values associated with community, particularly among Language writers , poets emerging in the 1990s were interested in exploring different, looser but still intense social bonds. The paradigmatic shift is also being registered critically, with recent books like Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) and Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (2006) tracing the sociality of poetry through the framework of friendship. Although community remains integral to an understanding of literary practice, the identification of a writing self to a community has become complicated and, indeed, rendered interpretatively awkward, by a recognition of relationships as incessantly mobile, dependent on circumstance, and variable in the degree of what Gerard Delanty calls their “thick” and “thin” levels (115). As social theorists like Chambers discern, friendship and community share many characteristics, and there is often a slippage between the two terms. Aristotle argues that friendship is a foundational unit of commu- 192 | ann vickery nity, enabling political consensus. Yet he also discerns that what people have in common in various types of community may be more limited than friendship. Whereas community has a public orientation, friendship is more personal, ambivalent, and complex in attachment. Karina Butera notes that friendship has often been treated as a “peripheral and seemingly accidental occurrence located outside core social structure” largely because, unlike marriage and kinship, friendship is viewed as “an individual choice based on emotional bonds rather than binding personal contracts.” Friendship, as Butera points out, “receives no institutional status” (19). Whereas community can often be tracked through instrumental belonging, friendship is marked by a series of affective transactions. As Chambers suggests, it “conveys positive values about the voluntary nature and self-expressive aspect of relationships” (2). This essay explores how Jennifer Moxley represents the formative making of self as poet in light of her friendship with the late Helena Bennett. Moxley’s poetry falls within a particular tendency of twentyfirst century new poetics that, according to Lisa Sewell, is marked by a “lyric mode that is historically aware, socially generative, and overtly interested in movement toward an expansive and connective consciousness ” (4). In both her poetry and her extensive memoir, The Middle Room (2007), Moxley considers an intellectual and aesthetic fashioning in light of the jointly pursued life, as well as the shifts that may occur between philia (friendly love) and eros (erotic love). Against the association of eros with the highest form of friendship and the drive towards immortal union (the possibility of envisioning the “really real”), Plato contrasts a lesser, vulgar eros of sensual love. For Moxley, the role of desire in the interrelated concepts of love and friendship is continually brought to bear on any possible recording of a poetic past. And unlike Aristotle’s highly gendered model of virtuous friendship, Moxley endorses an unreliable and radical constitution of intimacy between women. While Classical analyses of complete or pure friendships construe them as elevated above all other social relations, Moxley contextualizes her friendship with Bennett within a mid-1980s social grouping teasingly coined “the San Diego Literati” by Stephen Rodefer. This group included emergent writers like Moxley, Steve Evans, Bill Luoma, Doug- In/Complete | 193 las Rothschild, Chuck Cody, Shelley White, Scott Bentley, and John Granger. As with Moxley, many of the group went on to write critically and creatively about the intimate social composition that informs poetic development, such as Luoma’s Works and Days and Evans’s work on coterie and gossip.2 In light of the fact that contemporary language use is indelibly shaped by the totalizing forces of late capitalism and the...

Share