Ron Silliman: On Political Poets


Ron Silliman has written: "Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history--many white male heterosexuals, for example--are apt to challenge all that is supposedly 'natural' about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of the spectrum are poets who do not identity as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers--women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the 'marginal'--have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience."


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Document URL: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/silliman-on-pol-poets.html
Last modified: Wednesday, 18-Jul-2007 16:28:30 EDT