towards an anarchist poetics ::

1. can poetry live without theory?

That language can reproduce and perpetrate power there can be no doubt. That the form of power's life within language is complex, obscure and demands an expert specially trained to decipher is a more recent innovation, due to Foucault, and one that, to me, is both elitist and transparently false.

That no use of language at all can escape the relations of power in the wider society is a particular conceit of an American derivative of Foucault, the so-called New Historicist movement, whose principle function today appears to be the widening of the dissertation horizon, a necessity due to the current economic structure of higher education.

Whether Foucault himself believed no language at all could escape is a matter for debate: when challenged in an interview in 1970 as to whether his own writing implemented the operations of power, he remained silent.

That the need for a linguistic elite -- one should properly say, since the academics involved in this fiction take their inspiration from late Marx and the Bolsheviks, the need for a linguistic vanguard -- that this need is a fiction is simple enough to see: those who create and generate the structures of power are not particularly careful to hide their tracks, and, indeed, a crowd is better subdued by cannon than a scapel.

The language of George W. Bush, to bring us to specifics, or of Karl Rove's campaigns, bears the marks of power on its chest. Indeed, the function of power within these systems, the flow of fear, hatred, violence, is so obvious that it must be suppressed by violence.

The fashion in which a speech by the President demands the extension of the domain of war to every aspect of life is so obvious that it may be written on a t-shirt -- and those wearing that t-shirt must be arrested at campaign rallies or expelled from shopping malls and high schools.

The Pentagon's formal and informal use of language, of course, has long been a transparent attempt to accomplish the same things in the citizenry and its ranks: pacification. Soliders who in World War II trained on bull's eye targets today shoot at realistic depictions of the human body, to better overcome the innate repulsion of violence. Language must be destroyed in a similar fashion.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ao8nQ4CEQFE I've got numerous individuals on the road you want me to take those out? Take 'em out. Not a good day for them. Impact. [laughter] Oh dude.

2. a disgression

But we need not go to the dark extents of the American projection of power to find the decay of language and its dissociation from actual human functions.

At the nearest intersection to my apartment building there is a branch of a national coffee chain. Since my daily labor is of the intellectual sort -- reading, writing, computation -- I sometimes spend an hour or two there, working.

With the onset of the Fall comes the recruitment season at the nearby Graduate School of Business, associated with the University of Chicago, and a number of firms conduct their interviews in the cafe. This year, the cafe also appears to be the center for interviews of those trying to move up within the chain's regional hierarchy: from store manager to district manager, district to region, region to zone.

Overhearing the language of these interviews is, I believe, a powerful argument that can be made for the contemporary necessity of poetry. To listen to the elaborate speech of both interviewer and interviewee is to hear the force of language directed by one man or woman against another.

While the interviewee nearly always has come to a point of absolute consent to this form of domination, the violence of the event -- and the violence must be enacted each time, in a fashion rooted in science but reduced to ritual -- remains imprinted on the distortions of not only the words and sentences, but in their very rhythm, a rhythm that delights in vacuous pause.

Each interviewee learns by demonstration the particular verbal straitjacket into which conversations about her inner nature will be fit. The constriction is one of the anti-poem: language reduced not to words and letters, but to brute cliches whose relation to each other, in a semantic sense, is null.

Without historical study it is hard to say how recent this form of ersatz communication is. It is tempting to think of it as the product of the post-industrial world, in which psychological techniques of social control are used to determine the fitness of an individual: is she "committed to the group"? Is she "a team player"? Or, alternatively, does she know "how to go it alone," how to "work independently"? Of what "caliber" is he? One "takes the opportunity"; one is always "fortunate."

On the other hand, language has been used as a tool for reenforcing and, indeed, creating power for a long time. To refine this further, it is the particular technique, of integrating the meaning-bearing nature of a human being into a system of meaningless signs -- and thus divesting her of anything beyond some kernel of "human rights" -- that, following the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, one might say that is the "gift" of the Enlightenment.

3. the crux

The true question is not, then, how to elaborate and entangle words so as to extricate them from some sly Protean ghost of power.

Rather, we must ask: given the brute obviousness of power, its massive colonization of the actual daily use of words, how can the poet create a work that challenges or renounces this power without becoming incomprehensible to the ear?

4. the reactionaries

This analysis of language as conductor of power would seem to place me in the avant-garde realm. The current categories, framed by Ron Silliman as "School of Quietude" and "post-avant" seem to be more connected to the economics of production than to value, however, and it is value that I am aiming at.

The dominant mode of the discursive poem is to take language as given, as something uncomplicated, uncontaminated, encountered by a single isolated subject as if setting out from the salt box house on fresh snow. Contoured, if that, by the safely dead literature of the canon.

Schooled in Silliman's distinctions, one might immediately think that such poems are written by those who would imitate, without being, Robert Frost or, variantly, the later T.S. Eliot. I believe the truth is rather different: poems like this are written daily by those who consider themselves radical innovators at the level of diction and sentence structure.

Questions of style aside, the nostalgia -- barely sensed as such -- for a time before language was called to serve power is for a time that never was. It manifests itself in certain repeated tropes --

A. a pretense that technology has yet to arrive. Narrators rarely use tools invented after 1970, and if they do, such tools are encountered as disarmingly strange, as a rupture.

B. a pathos of the isolated man. Narrators encounter their occasions in an isolation defined as separation from the corrupting mass. A wordless society weighs down: the narrator's unique power to use language frees him.

C. words as talismans. Narrators invest single words -- sometimes italicized, often in foreign languages -- with magical powers. Often a poem's entire function is to draw attention to a word that has particular resonance for the author.

The connection of these tropes to the animating belief that language exists only for the elite poet in an uncorrupted state should be obvious. The discursive poem, however, is on the wane, except for in isolated journals subsidized by certain university creative writing programs and provided mainly as a source of publication credits for their graduates.

What is more in the forefront of contemporary writing is a form of poem that one might term the jokester. The most prominent practitioner is, of course, Billy Collins, and his recent anthology Best American Poetry is, among other things, a gathering of such devices.

Many excellent things have been written about the Best American; I will not attempt to repeat them here. It's notable that the jokester poem appears in many journals that would be considered "avant-garde" or "experimental," such as the often-excellent Fence and Jubilat. Economics of production aside, the notable aspect of the form is that it is, essentially, a neurotic repetition of the discursive poem.

The jokester poem, in other words, wishes to insinuate what the discursive poem asserts. It does so through a series of tropes:

D. a self-hatred. The joke is, sometimes nastily, on the narrator, who writes a shadow poem of the discursive sort that he is mocked for.

E. social (as opposed to economic) populism. The primacy of the magical poetic utterance is asserted through its discovery in the unconscious speech of the working class. Within a fixed series of economic relationships -- these poems, for example, often take place at the shop counter -- the poet recovers, woven in, the purity of language.

F. a terror of other poets. The poem is threatened by the possibility that someone, somewhere, is also engaged in poetic activity. The narrator is a stand-up comedian jealous of his stage. What must remain unassailable is the narrator's unique access to insight and the timing of its disclosure.

It should be added that not every poem in Best American follows one or more of these tropes, but that they adaquately describe the kind of poem Collins set out to include -- whether or not he succeeded -- should be obvious. That these tropes carry over into the "criticism," of the sort found in Collins' introduction, that stands behind these poems should be similarly apparent.

Most poets, if not the overwhelming majority, alive are politically liberal and are more than able to see the wreckage of the American language for what it is. The discursive and jokester poets believe in, and search for, an escape hatch through which they might avoid the currents of power and transparent inauthenticity.

The virus that both discursive and jokester poets fall victim to is, as viruses tend to be, disarmingly simple. It is a refusal to admit that one participates in a language that requires active engagement.

5. polarities of freedom

If the discursive and the jokester poem are the major forms of poetic falsehood, where is truth to be found? As I have discussed above, I believe the current crisis of language is directly subordinate to the current political crisis, and that it is one of freedom and power. A poem that does not respond to power denies the fundamental condition of language.

There are two directions a poem can take.

ONE: response to power is flight: to leave the language field and make for the forests.

One might link these responses to the Primitivist strain in contemporary anarchist thought, but in contrast to that movement's elevation of ancient society, I will examine a style whose approach to the notion of technology is decidedly opposed --

That of "experiments" in language similar to the ones of a particle accelerator, where ordinary words are wrenched from their usual semantic structures and collided together. Or even -- and this has not, to my knowledge, been the subject of sustained attention since the Zaum of the Russian Futurists -- to collide syllables in a similar fashion.

Particle physicists are rare. There is a general assumption that this is, or was, the constituency of Language Poetry exemplified by magazines like This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. I believe the relationship of this movement to the methods of, say, Zaum, is tenuous at best and appears clearly only with some -- Lyn Heijinian being the most familiar example.

If flight brings freedom, and even a kind of vertiguous joy, it also brings distance from the community of readers. It has, however, been the most successful aesthetically, if beauty is measured by the ratio of successes to failures. I sometimes think that an appriciation for this kind of work is connected to a congenital defect of the Chomskian language centers of the brain. There are things that never would have been said were it not for these defective alchemists.

TWO: response to power is fight: to attempt to batter the language into shapes that cannot be conduits of power.

The ability of poetry to function as a direct challenge to power is slight. Poetry can not present facts: facts presented immediately gain the distance of metaphor. One can not write a poem about the Holocaust, that presents salient facts about the Holocaust, without being obscene.

Only if poetry renounces itself as poetry and becomes a form of organization for prose -- as in, say, the work of Anthony Hecht -- can it function in this fashion. In general, the arena for the presentation of fact and argument has not changed for centuries: it is in the language of the essay, where certain assumptions smooth the rhetoric and experience of reading to faciliate rapid comprehension.

Instead of direct challenge through factual opposition, poets are forced by the twin demands of contemporary conditions and the possibilities of poetic expression into a form of guerilla warfare. Existing between the nodes of power, the cliches of the democratic politican, the corporation and the General, the poet must carry out sorties or be forever confined.

Metaphors of war, however, both bother my conscience and obscure the subtleties of this kind of linguistic action. The moral horror of contemporary language is not that is it worn out and needs to be invigorated -- the conceit of the mainstream Modernists. Rather, it is in the very use of language as a tool of power. The language of the interview is the immolation of a child.

What is crucial, in other words, is that poets renounce power itself. The true poetic language is that which does not attempt to exercise control. This is what is meant by an anarchist poetics. It is the language that allows language to be language.

6. anarchism

Given the confusion among even the left wing as to the nature of anarchism, I will attempt first to outline the three salient threads of anarchist thought in the political and social arena.

The first is an aporetic account of freedom. In contrast to liberal thought as embodied in, say, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, where a set of axioms claims to be a complete account of the rights of humanity, anarchism considers the question of human freedom to be open and as yet unanswered in full.

The openness of this question is considered radical in the sense that anarchists distrust any attempt to codify and finalize a list of "rights," however expansive. A right often asserted by both 19th century and 21st century anarchists that is unamenable to the axiomatic depictions of, for example, the United States Constitution, is the right to creative control over one's labor. It is hard to see how the coercive powers of a Federal state could acheive such a goal.

The anarchist envisions an account of human rights that is as complicated and subtle as the account of human nature itself: no fixed system can be adequate. Anarchists explicitly reject the tabula rasa account of the human mind, seeing social structures as answerable to human need and not, as in contemporary academic accounts, seeing the human mind as a programmable if distorted reflection of its external conditions.

Expansive notions of new human freedoms are hardly unique to anarchism. The anarchist contribution is to bring together these accounts with the liberal democratic notion of universalism: that these rights belong to all by birth, and are not things to be earned by labor or good fortune.

The second is a fundamental opposition to any concrete form of power structure. Connected to the aporetic account of freedom is the recognition that freedoms we may only dimly perceive today will always be violated by state structures, and that thus any relationship that is predicated on hierarchy, monopoly of force, or an imbalance of consent, is illegitimate and unsupportable. This forms the core of the anarchist critique of both Capitalism and Communism.

The third is a denial of the vanguard. No person or subgroup has special access to the correct notions of freedom and power. In some sense an elaboration of the second principle, the third notion is critical because anarchism opposes itself to such eschatological "end of history" accounts promulgated by Marxists and neo-Conservatives alike.

Absolutely opposed to the notion of an intellectual or political elite, however benign, anarchism demands a radical notion of consensus. In this formulation, anarchism is opposed to, for example, the authoritarian versions of identity politics.

It is my belief that these three notions provide the only simultaneously moral and practical basis for human interaction.

Versions of these concepts have been put into wider practice over the years: in isolated pockets during the Russian Revolution such as Kronstadt, during the Spanish Civil War, and among the Zapatistas of Mexico today. In general, anarchistic ideas and social organizations appear in various forms during periods of upheaval.

Anarchist ideals also appear in the social networks committed to the production of Open Source Software, that underlies the functioning of both the Internet and its nodes, and in recent protests against globalization conducted by groups such as the Direct Action Network. Such organizations have also provided the practical basis for the development of the strain of Quakerism known as "unprogrammed" worship -- the form of anarchism with which I am most personally familiar.

Certaintly the principles above are the basis of firm friendships and loving families. What is radical in anarchism is the demand that they be widened to encompass whole societies.

This links, I believe, an account of poetry to accounts of anarchism, in as much as poetry strives to be the authentic communication between two strangers: author and reader. Much could be made done here to complicate the distinction between private love and public anarchism in poets such as Emily Dickinson whose poetical work merges seamlessly into private communication through letters and notes.

7. three poets

It is not my goal to announce or describe a movement. Both of these actions have, by the progressively greater involvement of the University system in poetic production, become part of the rhetoric of power. It appears that movements can only now be declared in a fashion that immediately undermines their claims: perhaps the greatest intervention -- one can not call it a declaration -- is the Manifesto of the anti-Real.

Instead, then, of outlining a set of poetical principles I want to point to what I see as of immense value in three disconnected poets: Mina Loy, Tom Raworth and Lisa Robertson. In the work of all three one sees, I believe, anarchist principles at work.

These poets, while admitted not yet to any canon, have been the subject of extensive critical attention. Mina Loy's work has been rescued in the last two decades by a number of modernist scholars working in conjunction with contemporary poets, with Roger L. Conover's edition of the Lost Lunar Baedeker at the prow of public notice.

Tom Raworth's work has drawn attention as an avant garde body aligned in many ways with American experiments such as Language Poetry; his collected poems are available from Carcanet, a major poetry press in the United Kingdom. Lisa Robertson, the youngest of the three poets under consideration, has been the subject of a recent special issue of the Chicago Review.

It is not my intention to respond to, or elaborate on, past critical sorties on these poets. Instead, I wish to show how they may be read anarchistically: how their successes and occasional failures may be understood by the ways in which they resist and renounce power, the ways in which they propose extensions and expansions of human freedom.

There is another way to end this essay, but I will not attempt to diagnose the ways in which the discursive poem, and its neurotic repetitions, strive to frustrate these human projects: to me these operations seem transparent.

8. mina loy

We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spill'd on promiscuous lips We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily news Printed in blood on its wings (from Songs to Joannes, 1917)

What I think is most striking about Loy for the reader familiar with the modes of contemporary poetry are the particular syntactical structures she brings to bear. One of the most prominent choices is, indeed, the adjective. For a poet of the early twentieth century her use of the adjective recalls uncannily both Victorian propriety, as above, and radical postmodernity, here:

To clear the drifts of spring Of our forebear's excrements And bury the subconscious archives Under unaffected flowers Indeed -- Our person is a covered entrance to infinity Choked with the tatters of tradition (from O Hell, 1919)

The experience of reading Loy is a double one, then. Her language is familiar, a kind of parlour-talk or 19th century newspaper diction, swollen with modifiers. And her language is strange, almost automatic in sense:

We have flowed out of ourselves Beginning on the outside That shrivable skin Where you leave off Of infinite elastic Walking the ceiling Our eyelashes polish stars (from The Dead, 1919)

It is instructive, I think to compare Loy's work to the 1980s and 90s Cyberpunk-inspired vogue for computer-generated text.

friendlier blue packages from shopping mall fallen together (produced by the Thinkle program from source text) Slide and tumble and fall among The dead. Here and there Will be found a utensil. (from The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed, produced by RACTER, 1984) GAMES WHERE STRANGERS WERE STRIPPED AND SMEARED WITH SYNTHETIC HONEY (Cigarette Boy: A Mock Machine Epic by Darick Chamberlin, 1993)

The history of computer-generated poetry is relatively simple: it is the history not of a computational project but rather an idea. No computer has even been able to produce, in the absence of human-created input, anything approaching a readable text. Every attempt to produce authentic text with a computer equipped only with a dictionary and syntax rules has failed.

Instead, what became known as computer-generated text came from one of three sources. It was either the rearrangement, according to aleatory rules, of a human-generated source text, as with the Thinkle program output here. Or it was heavily massaged -- output so altered and predetermined that nothing even vaguely approximating it could have been produced by the programs cited in the absence of massive human involvement at all stages -- as in the case of the perhaps most famous output of the genre, The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed.

Or, most revealingly, as in the case of Darick Chamberlin's Cigarette Boy, it is entirely human-constructed but written in such as fashion that both author and reader believe it is what a computer would have generated should such a computer exist.

The arrival of the programmable Personal Computer in the 1980s, in other words, provided hopes for the construction of readable texts whose aleatory structure was far more complicated, and could be produced far faster, than in previous generations.

The immediate discovery was that these dreamed-of readable works could never be created without the introduction of extensive human intervention. This, however, proved no impediment to the genre, because people already knew what they wanted to hear from a computer and were able to produce it themselves.

Mina Loy's work is often discussed -- as in passing in Conroy's introduction -- in the context of a creation of a new language. What I think has been missed is the nature of this language.

Loy, in other words, does not attempt to construct a language that would answer to new human demands -- she is not the generator of a poetic Esperanto. Instead, I think the way to read Loy's early work is as psychologically continuous with the goals of the computer-generation movement: as the attempt to discover a alien mind within language.

This is why, I think, her work recalls both the Victorian and postmodern: she begins with the tools at hand, and attempts to work backwards towards something a-human that can yet speak to the human condition. What is I think most affecting in Loy's work is the way her speech hovers precariously between these two gulfs:

If Cesira should not become as a wild beast It is merely Phthisis This being the wise woman's instruction Knowing she has to die We drive home To wait She certainly does in time It is unnatural in a Father Bewtiching a daughter Whose hair down covers her thighs (from Italian Pictures, 1914)

In this passage what produces emotion in the reader also generates linguistic confusion: lines such as "She certainly does in time" have no trivial analysis in terms of the surrounding text. They separate, or, in wilder passages, blast, themselves from narrative.

It is this kind of polylingualism that makes Loy amenable to an anarchist reading. It is in her search for new forms of speech that the traditional author-reader hierarchy is displaced. In reading Loy one encounters a certainty that can not be ascribed to an author, but must instead be read in tandem with the author.

Neither author, nor reader, in other words, has a priviledged access to the text. What is immediate in Loy is so in a deep sense.

Whether or not Loy understood her own project in this fashion is I think up for debate. Certainly, in later years, she left behind some of these more ambitious goals in favor of a kind of dialect-collage with sometimes cringe-worthy results:

An uninterpretable wail stirs in a tangle of pale snakes to the lethargic ecstasy of steps backing into primeval goal White man quite his actin' wise colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes (from The Widow's Jazz, 1927)

Here, despite superficial similarities to her earlier work, we see a simplification. The alien syntactical enjambments is no longer interrogated, but presented in opposition to a pidgin Negro dialect. Loy here sees herself as a reporter, and not creator, of speech: one can no longer engage her as an equal.

9. two shorter essais : tom raworth & lisa robertson

follow the same pattern the door closes you look at it, walk to the other wall try to reach the window sit on the bed then get up, look in your pockets for something with which to scratch your name (from Notebook, 1966)

If Raworth has a trope it is the open hand: an invitation to participation in a larger poetic project with which the reader is particularly identified. Even as projects later than Notebook move towards the hermetic, it is with a consciousness of absence: the hermeticism of Raworth is one of a painful absence, as can be seen in his Logbook poems of 1976:

       beepbada beep beep. Or the pages. Or the faces in the tree's sillouhettes at night. Around us was the country of Whimsy where, huddled around leaping orange fires, the natives let their cigarettes dangle unlit in their mouths, thinking only petrol or butane could light them. Stripping bark from each native to reveal our track we followed one string of dulcimer notes after another.

The logbook for Raworth is a moment of distance. These pages almost reek of seawater and it is that arrival at the reader by long moment that brings us to the point where we recognize a distance to the poet that nonetheless we can, by magic, bridge.

not a wit display god lives on the sun in the small out cabin of the mind doctor, he seemed more angry than frightened 'the same fury that was evident in the defiant' we must not move and survived and there can be no margin for error multi-shadows i look at it (a) she touched it (b) (a) ear-ring (b) ear-ring r--> | everyone here will die | report to central control L_ shaped by the things we love (Transports of delight, 1973)

Here, in a poem that, along with the previous two, barely cracks the chronological surface of Raworth's continuing production, is to me the encapsulation of the anarchistic poetics I have been trying to arrive at discursively.

Everything is here. The slow accumulation of line length in the first stanza like some kind of prehistoric poetic form lost for all time begins this poem, and prepares the reader for a world of devices laid bare. It is in the forceful push towards transparency, the demand that the connection between the reader and the writer be one of equality, of equal access to technique, that the poem aims at a form of linguistic justice.

I want to draw the most attention to the awkwardness of the devices, most obviously the redundant cross-referencing and the childlike redirection, because I believe it is here that Raworth's emotional core exists. It is in this generous opening up, a kind of magicians conference where secrets are shared and the public is admitted, that aims towards an unravelling of language, a dispersion, an equal ownership of poetic law.

       my muse is bored with the company i keep. i wait for her to flash the mirrored paper in my eyes and she does this.

(The Beckoning Harpoon, 1986)

Speech-like strangeness is today somewhat of a cliche, born perhaps out of the diction of John Ashbery. Poems of perlocution arrive at a steadily increasing rate, breaking all rules of rhymic trade. What I believe these poems miss, that Raworth's do not, is the fact that the strangeness of reported speech is infinitely distant from the speech itself.

It is, in other words, impossible to recover the spontaneous vocalization on the page. It dies there, instantly, and its corpse can be interesting, intriguing, focusing, but it cannot be alive. Raworth's poetry, in its transparency of affect, ressurects the spoken as a kind of human machine, where each joint in the jaw is revealed to be handmade.

light in the first moon ahdwos s and n whose name of the flower? none of my stares are vacant none of my aircraft are missing (England, 1978)

The youngest poet of the three considered here, and in some sense the one with the greatest versatility per unit word, Lisa Robertson's trajectory is one of constant reversals. A kind of nomad, Robertson stays long enough in one place only to finish a single, perfectly formed book.

It is thus, I think, best to focus on a single work of Robertson instead of attempting to unify what have been created as disparate projects. XEclogue (2006) is what I wish to look at here, even if the typesetting sometimes puts it in the realm of prose or drama and not the traditional broken poetry. The opening sentences provide a clear introduction --

       I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress' complicity with a socially expedient code; to invade my own illusions of historical innocence. The proud trees, the proud rocks, the proud sky, the proud fields, the proud poor have been held before my glazed face for centuries.

Robertson's book is indeed a direct encounter with freedom, with the nature of freedom, but what I think makes it an anarchistic project is the confusion it makes with the usual domains of language. The language of the political science seminar is woven into fairytale, into Restoration dramatic, into 20th century personal essay, into innumerable genres.

Robertson, in other words, enacts in perverse form the very conditions of language today. Again as in Raworth the keyword is transparency, obviousness, the absence of the desire to conceal -- a desire pushed almost to the point of obliviousness.

11. aporias

The necessity of a finite essay has meant that I could not include a number of poets who I believe exemplify in their successes the anarchist response to power.

Juliana Spahr is one woman whose recent this connection of everyone with lungs is a rare book that functions as a kind of Fifth Column within the celebratory language of American military might. Her work deserves greater attention and is especially amenable to being read anarchistically.

Another form of contemporary poetry that is especially vital but that I have not been able to address here is the grotesque. Two extremely vital workers in this vein, with completely different personal and social histories, are Lara Glenum and Fredreick Seidel.

Both to a first view can be read as opposing complication and imperfection to state and media narratives of cleanliness and perfectedness. Glenum works mainly in the field of the human body, using the reader's emotions of disgust and terror of the compromise of bodily integrity, while Seidel achieves a portrait of the human psyche distorted in similar fashion.

It is overly restrictive, however, to see these poets as simply forming a kind of "protest" against sentimentality and the vacuous aesthetics of hierarchies both societal and personal. The grotesque, as I see it, can be understood in relationship to the question of anarchism as a form of counterpower, a theme which deserves greater elaboration.

In traditional sociology, the power structure of a society generates forms of counterpower: insurgencies who develop power structures dedicated to the destruction of the dominant modes of control. In societies that function in an anarchist fashion -- i.e., without centralizations of power -- counterpower survives in a psychological fashion.

Anarchist societies, in other words, fashion their own myths and stories that function as imaginary responses to an imaginary power: these often take macabre and terrifying forms. As described by David Graeber, for example, who is responsible for the account of counterpower I give here, the tribe of Piaroa has elaborate horror stories that depict power as the cannabalistic consumption of the body.

In the same way, I think, Glenum and Seidel provide myths and stories of such horrifying content and narration as a verso to the narratives of human compassion given by Spahr.

:: Simon DeDeo

Further reading

Anarchism from Theory to Practice, Daniel Guerin, Noam Chomsky et al.. Monthly Review Press (1996) [available online]

No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, ed. Daniel Guerin. AK Press (2005)

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber. Prickly Paradigm Press (2004) [available online]

Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, Noam Chomsky. New Press (2003) [available online]

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1997)

Collected Poems, Tom Raworth. Carcanet Press (2003)

XEclogue, Lisa Robertson. New Star Books (1999)

Manifesto of the Anti-Real, Lara Glenum et al. (2005) [available online]