Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism

The emergence of a politically sophisticated radical poetry in the United States, a poetry popularly known as Language Poetry, has been one of the most exciting cultural developments of the past two decades. Not since the thirties has there been such a sense of aesthetics and politics converging in explicit projects, whether poems, publishing, or dialogues with those engaged in other more evidently political struggles. Many of the poets have helped construct a formidable body of theoretical discussion that not only situates the work and its interventions, but provides a form of resistance to its easy consumption as an object in need of external mediation by institutions of interpretative validation. The recent article published here in Social Text' was one more example of the importance these poets attach to the reception of their work, and the commitment of some of them to a socialist politics in the cultural field. Even the calm, measured tone of the article, which distinguishes it from so many of the manifestoes* of earlier avant-gardism, the surrealist claims to new sources of transformative power, or the Dadaist outrage committed on well-presented argument, is characteristic of the seriousness with which these writers approach their potential readers and appropriators. They want their texts to be useful. Yet a doubt remains in the face of this article's good behaviour. Isn't this the statement of a linguistic delinquent who is only pretending to good language use? Or was the linguistic madness only mad by craft, as Hamlet put it? Are these writers disowning responsibility for vandalising intelligible poetry by saying that the crimes against the state of language were inevitable society was at fault? Take the article's sentence: For following American poetry over the last decade, it is evident that there has been an intense and contradictory response from enthusiasm and imitation to dismissal and distortion to work2. Intensities and contradictions are just what expect of a modern capitalist society, but this remark, which is designed to draw the reader in to a sympathetic response as the anyone who has been keeping up with his or her homework, sets against the contradictions this other space where identity remains intact, where we can speak of our work to an anyone. The essay itself recognises the need to elucidate the inclusiveness of the collective pronouns by specifically identifying the poets referred to, but continues on in this friendly mode of one subject addressing another. The experiments of the poets themselves are placed outside this circuit of achieved intersubjectivity,