Social Poetics

Maybe social poetics is also a poetics of abject failure and muteness. A bile-ridden, silent disgust over shuttering plants, job loss, the incessant lies of politicians and capitalism. Maybe it’s not that easy or even imaginable to turn devastation and redundancy into verse. Maybe an invitation to a primal scream class

One worker from an electricity factory, Ban Meiqian, wrote a poem that describes how Chinese workers must, out of dire necessity, “become brothers with the machines.”3 This is precisely how capitalism wants solidarity to be defined.

The most scandalous scene of all for the bourgeoisie is to imagine that the proletariat might wrest control of the cultural means of production away from them

Koch’s anthology became, quite simply and rather unfortunately, a Fordist model for the mass production of youth poetry. As Phillip Lopate argues in his assessment of Koch’s technique, “There is still something mechanically induced about the hip, modernistic surface of many of the Wishes, Lies, and Dreams poems…. This method is a fail-safe pedagogic machine for the mass production of surrealist metaphors.”53

“If we are free, we are free to choose a tradition…”
—MURIEL RUKEYSER, The Life of Poetry