> >Any suggestions as to where I might find work which has been
>>conceived, 'from the ground up' in formal and technical terms, as
>>political critique? (I'm deliberately not specifying *what* politics.)
>
>Charles Bernstein.
>
>-- Philip
Yes. Having posed the question last night, I passed the small hours
answering it to myself, and trying to refine it.
Most obviously, the whole L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project is a candidate,
with Bernstein's work prominent. Any suggestions for specific texts,
though, Philip?
Part of the problem with my question, I suspect, is that it's too
general. For example, Adrienne Rich's work has obviously a strong
political drive, but while individual poems or sequences interest me,
it's not because of formal innovation. Similarly, Lorine Niedecker's
pared down austerity would seem to have have a political import, and
it's indubitably formal. But, while I'm growing increasingly to love
her work, the formal drive strikes me as privative: primarily a
stripping away of grandiosities to reveal a core of worth.
Maybe I'm still too attached to old grandiosities myself, but what
I'm looking for is an augmentation of formal possibilities to enable
political critique. Rukeyser certainly does seem to deliver some of
that (thanks, Alison!), but since I only have extracts from The Book
of the Dead in a Collected, I can't yet see how much.
The best I could come up with overnight, as a contemporary, was Kamau
Braithwaite. There's a lot there taken over from earlier pioneers,
but there are clearly new dimensions of critique, formally enabled,
which allow him deal with his specific political experience.
Anyway, more suggestions eagerly awaited . . .
Best,
T
--
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.soundeye.org/trevorjoyce
|