Poetics of coterie

Getting back to Vanessa Place's poetics of "radical evil," the trouble, really, comes when a radical/experimental Leftist poet accepts that (whether intentional or not) his/her audience is of a similar ilk poetically and/or politically, which therefore permits the kind of value-ations which radical Leftist poets are always trying to deconstruct; the task is not so "indeterminate" as LangPo would have it seem. This is really just a further exhaustion of the tacit notion that "Yes, we are the writer-audience, we guard the threshold of what passes for 'good'". Carl Rakosi, in a soundbite I just discovered (thanks Al Filreis) admits this very problem. And by problem, I mean obstacle, I mean challenge, I mean enablement (which by extension might also lend credit to the repressive traditionalist poetic factions: New Criticism, New Formalism, etc. that gave Leftists a defined poetic/aesthetic from which to diverge; but, whatever you do, don't count me in their ranks):

"To express your passion in a straightforward way, directly. It will not be interesting. They're already there, you haven't done anything to/for them. So, the... subject matter has to be transformed... something both powerful and beautiful." -Carl Rakosi, on being a communist poet

Filreis, I believe, understands this standard-bearing as more incidental (while still useful) rather than some deliberate act of pure elitism; as does Bob Perelman, who once made the aside (which I'm paraphrasing, I heard it in an interview, a long time ago): "Not enough criticism has focused on the more regressive aspects of avant-garde writers, I think."

Anti-incumbency doesn't (let's hope) begin to explain

Sink provides a sensibly thorough, while ambitious, agenda for public education. Scott states his opinion on the perennial issues. Why, then, is he ahead?

Also, I hope more Floridian Dems show up in November than did this August.

Blindly co-opted, complicit Barthesian, or too lazy (impatient) to explain why so?

"Nobody will deny that there is such a thing, for instance, as a writing typical of Esprit or of Les Temps Modernes. What these intellectual modes of writing have in common, is that in them language, instead of being a privileged area, tends to become the sufficient sign of commitment. To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under the pressure of all those who do not speak it, is to proclaim one's act of choosing, if not necessarily one's agreement with that choice. Writing here resembles the signature one affixes at the foot of a collective proclamation one has not written oneself. So that to adopt a mode of writing—or, even better, to make it one's own—means to save oneself all the preliminaries of a choice, and to make it quite clear that one takes for granted the reasons for such a choice. Any intellectual writing is therefore the first of the 'leaps of the intellect'. Whereas an ideally free language never could function as a sign of my own person and would give no information whatsoever about my history and my freedom, the writing to which I entrust myself already exists entirely as an institution; it reveals my past and my choice, it gives me a history, it blazons forth my situation, it commits me without my having to declare the fact." -Roland Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero"

(The real excuse is that Roland Garros devours more of my attention at the moment)