‘Heretical Texts’ Poetry Series

Basic Idea: A political poetry book series called ‘Heretical Texts’ which will build by fives twice per year until funds and steam (or oil) run out. Why political poetry? Short answer: Because God has sent us Poetry to give America a better sense of how the culture of liberal humanism is under attack in this country.

Precedents and antecedents are detailed below, but the temptation at first is to catalog the ways in which this will NOT be ‘political poetry’ in the sense marshaled by establishment and avant-garde elites to diss modes and mannerisms offensive to each (and usually for the same reasons). I begin by resisting that temptation—not because I don’t have my own aversions to certain modes and mannerisms often lumped, by participants and observers alike, into the damp dough ball called ‘political poetry.’ I resist because this series is first and foremost about resisting easy conclusions, exclusions, and preclusions—among them the potential losses and lapses inherent to thinking too quickly past old categories (and their reputations) simply because they smell, feel, or taste funny at first blush (that dough ball).

The challenge proposed here, in fact, is to re-sheaf the codex of political poetry (a two-sided metaphor further explored in "assumptions and specs" below). To meet this challenge, we draw on a few helpful traditions, models, and guides, such as:

• Very broadly, a gnostic emphasis on generational revisions and transformations.
• More specifically, and for example, the movement-in-modernismo of poets like Vicente Huidobro (“We are in the age of nerves.”).
• Also Spanish Civil War posters and the (visual-poetic) art of political urgency and expediency.
• Italian Futurists (Carrà, Marinetti) for their emphasis on “intervention” and the blurring of hi/low culture.
• Brecht’s Verfremdung--satiric or polemical “turns” on familiar texts.
• Francis Ponge (“…open up a work-shop and take in the world for repair…”).
• Assorted “renunciations” of poetry, such as that of Laura Riding, on behalf nonetheless of poetry and the poetic.
• The “anti-epic” of Langston Hughes.
• The historical-political text assemblages or “documentary” poems of Muriel Rukeyser and Nicolás Guillén, among others (a “multitude” of historical and literary events).
• Amiri Baraka--resistance and poetry as field-of-action.
• The Tammuzi Poets of the 1950s (“Poetry, this immortal carcass, bores me.”) with their troublesome emphasis on both tradition and liberation (“putting the language itself to death”).
• Levertov, between “the fear” and “the despair”--from direct statement to direct evocation.
• The revolution-born-in-poetry of the Situationist “turning aside.”
• A “counterpoetic” concern for ecology, language, polis, tradition + “a view of artistic experiment as a form of political and social action.”
• The up-to-date alchemy (or anti-poetry) of Nicanor Parra.
• Vision (H.D.) + re-vision (A. Rich).

A broad and varied assemblage itself, so I add to that the following assumptions and specifications for 'Heretical Texts':

• Poetry, like other interventions in language, is political.
• Political poetry is a poetry of public (polis/publica) intervention, invention, and invocation that calls on (and up) language to call out a public, a people.
• Political poetry addresses “both the material character of the political and the political character of the material” (L. Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, 2000).
• To name or imagine an explicitly political poetry is to assign particular meaning to the political possibilities of poetry.
• Possibilities for political poetry include a deliberately radical (in the sense of ‘root work’) form and content.
• Political poetry educates (elicits, draws forth) toward response, action, and awareness and therefore models a pedagogy as much as a poetics.
• “Revolutions are preceded & accompanied by a breakdown in communication…. This breakdown in communication is first articulated by a poet & carried on by other poets.” (J. Rothenberg, “Revolutionary Propositions (second series),” 1966).
• Political poetry is committed to what precedes and accompanies revolution and therefore breaks down (in) communication.
• “What counts as an instance of a category depends on our purpose in using the category” (Lakoff/Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980).
• Political poetry is a category that suggests a multiplicity of gestures, actions, resistances, and events taking place in language.
• Political poetry in print (codex, paper, ink) is a serviceable sub-set of those gestures, actions, resistances, and events.
• “A revolution involves a change in structure; a change in style is not a revolution” (J.R., “Revolutionary Propositions (first series),” 1966).
• Structural changes include adjustments to the means by which literary materials are written, gathered, arranged, produced, reproduced, distributed, propagated, and consumed.
• The form of the book is a form of political (and literary, and material) production.
• The book acquires (and holds) “interindividual significance” and is therefore ideological (Volosinov, “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,” 1930).
• A starting point for political poetry—and a political poetry book series—is the recognition of the book’s significance “in the world of ideology” (same).
• A book series is a performance, in books, and is therefoe a political (and socially significant) performance.
• Gaps and contradictions, in these and other statements about political poetry, should be expected, cherished, and challenged.

(specs)
• All books in the series will be perfect bound, soft cover editions, available through trade distributors and the Factory School website.
• Manuscript length will vary, but suggested length range is 50-150 (single-spaced mss.) pages.
• Author will be paid in copies, including a complete set of the volume in which hir book appears.
• Books will be published in the 'Heretical Texts' series under the Factory School imprint.
• Planned release date is Fall, 2005 for the first run (five titles), Spring 2006 for the second run (five titles).
• All books (text and covers) will be designed by the series editor in collaboration (welcomed and appreciated but not required) with the authors and other Factory School collaborators.

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