Seems I posted the first paragraph  and quip below, about a week ago to the
old Poetryetc2 address, after Ron's comments on the Vietnam experience of
poets gathered in In The American Tree.

Ron's point re. politics is perhaps more provocative than he suggests.  If
Warhol and Spicer seem more "contemporary"--by which I take it he means
saying more, offering a more powerfl critique, of where the zeitgiest is
today, and I rather agree with him, it also suggests that 'right' or
'correct' thinking about the political (something W. & S. rarely if ever
exhibited to my knowledge) has little to do with the future of their work.
A thousand different things may have beeen more important to what we read
into those works: Warhol coming out of advertising, his intimacy with NY
plutocrats, or Spicer being gay in a time of metal jacketed closets or a
linguistics scholar, or something not quite nameable.  In fact, that a large
number of language poets were on one side (my side as well) of the Vietnam
issue doesn't mean much if considered along with the fact of all the
non-language poets, take your pick, Oppen or Lowell for good contrast, who
were also on that side.  In fact, as I speculated in a late 80s lecture (it
was later in Sagetrieb) at the MLA in San Francisco--Ron was there when I
delivered it--(let me use 60s phraseology) the poetics of language poetry
could also be seen as exemplary of the zeitgeist's problem or even its very
fulfillment rather than as something leading to the solution of problems in
the culture. (I was led to this possibility via the Bakhtin/Voloshinov
"Discourse on Art/Discourse on Life" and via B.'s critque of Formalism in
The Formal  Method...etc").  In other words, with art as with so many other
things, to borrow Ernst Bloch's marvelous phrase, the future is as yet
"unfated."

By the way, sub-neo-Symbolist sludge is quite tasty; Nerval spoon-fed it to
his lobster.

--Let me add a bit.

Candice and Deborah and Katie widen the discusion considerably.  I think
some of D & G's most useful political thoughts(the ideas are larger than
ends & means politics, perhaps) come in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
with its plea for something very different from what usually obtains in
poetry culture:

        "How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small
ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to
offer themselves as a sort of state language, and official language (for
example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the
signifier, of metaphor, of wordplay).  Create the opposite dream: know how
to create becoming-minor. (Is there hope for a philosophy, which for a long
time has been an official, referential genre?  Let us profit from this
moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to be a language of power.) (27)

As for political poem of the last millennium, I would not exclude Zukofsky's
"Mantis," nor can I forget--when I go to pick up my polemical gun--these
lines in "A":

        Reject no one
                and
        Debase nothing.
        That is all-around intellect.



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