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- POESIS IS POEM-MAKING- emphasis on making, constructing, the artifice possible in
language as material; no special privilege for expression;
- FETISH OBJECTS R US- letter, word, line, poem, book; sound pattern, page
dimensions, paper texture; poetry is active with meaning at all levels and composition may
take all into account;
- ONE's SELF INCLUDES ITS ANTI-SELVES - exploration of poetic stances beyond the
metaphor of voice; exchanging historical or visionary or cosmic stance for the individual
self, as a few of many possibilities;
- The "I" IS AN OTHER - taking up social position as integral to poetics
but seeing alienation as less pathology than indictment of a sickly world; finding purpose
and even ethical imperative in "speaking" from the margin, for the dispossessed,
et al;
- WORDS FORM A FORM OF LIFE - imbibing insights from Sapir, Whorf, Wittgenstein, et
al; the 20th century linguistic turn from metaphysics; language constitutes meaning, does
not merely express it; vocabulary, grammar, all the facets of a given language construct a
world;
- PRISON HOUSE - grimmer consequence of the linguistic turn; recognition of the
totaling power of language systems, which constitute individuals with their structures and
limits; think outside the box? with language as the one crucial box we cannot think
outside and apart from;
- CULTURE WORKERS of the WORLD UNITE - concept of poet as writer and poetry as
produced by and involved with the social world; emphasis on the local, specific, perhaps
immediate over aspirations to the Universal; proletarian rather than ivory-tower poetics;
- LEGISLATING - poetry is in conversation with power, whether as unacknowledged
legislation, legislation of the unacknowledged, or as determined refusal of 'power
exertion;' often born of perception that world is a site of domination and cruelty,
necessitating witness, challenge, critique, suspicion of norms and authority;
- THE PRIMITIVE "IS" COMPLEX - from anthropology, Stanley Diamond, through
Jerome Rothenberg's ethnopoetics; a general unsettling of ingrained notions of progress
and cultural hierarchy (telos); contrary to the Enlightenment 'great chain of being'; in
tune with ecological visions and counter to vulgar Darwinism;
- OTHERLY FORMS - neither the conventions of traditional (pre-given) poetic forms nor
the naturalized or organic approach to free-verse entail the total possibilities of
poetry, which can be a mode of discovery; if the medium is the message, then the
medium/form must not be allowed to reify; it is never inessential.
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