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“Art cognizes by implementing old models in new ways and by creating new ones. Art moves, transforming. It changes its methods, but the past does not cease to exist. Art moves using its old vocabulary and reinterpreting old structures and, at the same time, it seems to be static. It changes fast, changes not for the sake of changing, but to impart the sensation of things in their difference through rearrangement.” —Viktor Shklovsky, forward to Bowstring

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Whatever else it is, allegory has today become a social symptom: but of what? I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgement, they are unable to find in the schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.

—Fredric Jameson, "The Ladder of Allegory"

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Benjamin’s watchword of revolution as the emergency brake on the train of history must not be thought as the final word of Marxism, nor should his denunciation of “progress” (whether bourgeois or social democratic) become a crippling limitation on some properly constructivist socialism. The political dialectic follows the classic scientific discovery of the “conversion of energy” as well as Marx’s later discovery of “metabolism”: Umfunkionierurg was Brecht’s word for the transformation of all the unlovely advances of capitalism’s universal accelerationalisms into humanizing achievements: the transmutation of ecological disaster into the terra-forming of earth, and of the population explosion into a genuine human age, an Anthropocene to be celebrated rather than caricatured in second-rate dystopias. Aesthetization can be energizing only if it becomes the allegory of productivity and radical constructivism; the social construction of late capitalism needs to be converted and refunctioned into a new and as yet undreamed of global communism.

—Fredric Jameson, "The Ladder of Allegory"

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This, thus is a portion of the subject of this poem Which is in the form of falling snow: That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole’s becoming so much of a truism That their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this. Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake, Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is, But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract. Mild effects are the result. I cannot think any more of going out into all that, will stay here With my quiet schmerzen. Besides the storm is almost over Having frozen the face of the bust into a strange style with the lips And the teeth the most distinct part of the whole business. It is this madness to explain. . . . What is the matter with plain old-fashioned cause-and-effect? Leaving one alone with romantic impressions of the trees, the sky? Who, actually, is going to be fooled one instant by these phony explanations, Think them important? So back we go to the old, imprecise feelings, the Common knowledge, the importance of duly suffering and the occasional glimpses Of some balmy felicity. The world of Schubert’s lieder. I am fascinated Though by the urge to get out of it all, by going Further in and correcting the whole mismanaged mess. But am afraid I’ll Be of no help to you. Good-bye.

—John Ashbery, "The Skaters"

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Once capitalist social relations have constituted themselves as a self-reproducing—if internally contradictory—totality through the subsumption of labour under capital and the reproduction of the class relation, value is fully determined as socially necessary labour time—or better, socially necessary exploitation time. Value is only constituted negatively through the exploitation of workers, rather than affirmatively through the constitutive power of labour. It is the capital form of value that posits abstract labour, or the abstract exploitation of workers, as its substance or its content. Value, in this ultimate sense, has exploitation inscribed within it, or rather it inscribes exploitation within its form. The point here though is that the question of the substance of value, and how this substance is to be expansively generated, is from the ideal or logical point of view of capital a posterior consideration—one in which social practice will have to be moulded to the logical requirements of capital.

—Endnotes 2, The Moving Contradiction

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While it seems true and politically effective to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital. Socially necessary labour time is the measure of value only because the value-form posits labour as its content. In a society no longer dominated by alienated social forms — no longer orientated around the self-expansion of abstract wealth — the compulsion to labour which characterises the capitalist mode of production will disappear. The reproduction of individuals and their needs becomes an end in itself. Without the categories of value, abstract labour and the wage, “labour” would cease to have its systematic role as determined by the primary social mediation: value. This is why value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself — of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. Communisation is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. Value, understood as a total form of social mediation, cannot be got rid of by halves.

—Endnotes 2, Communisation and Value-Form Theory

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when you look for matter you can only begin after 'life' has turned it self out & framed an area of action apart and strange.

—David Melnick, Eclogs

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Can software destroy hardware? Can a class, acting strictly as a class, abolish all classes as the answer to a badly phrased question might by sheer force of obviousness cause the questioner to rise blankly and walk into the ocean, while the black flags cut from the robes of executed magistrates wave non-semaphorically, where hope ends and history starts.

—Jasper Bernes, We are nothing and so can you

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—William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

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The true value is that peculiarity which gives an object a character by itself. The associational or sentimental value is the false. Its imposition is due to lack of imagination, to an easy lateral sliding. The attention has been held too rigid on the one plane instead of following a more flexible, jagged resort. It is to loosen the attention, my attention, since I occupy part of the field, that I write these improvisations. The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong to an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me this is the gist of the whole matter. It is easy to fall under the spell of a certain mode. But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when he cleaned the Augean stable.

—William Carlos Williams, prologue to Kora in Hell

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—William Carlos Williams, Paterson (Book One, Part Three)

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We still haven't caught up with what Williams meant by the variable foot, which has to do with scoring for tone of voice, which is part of your music & your breath, but maybe even more. Variable foot is maybe about the dominance of tone of voice over other considerations—I do my poems this way 'cause I talk from here—haven't you ever talked to anyone? I'm not an oracle or a musical instrument or a tradition or a stethoscope or a bellows or even a typewriter: I am a tone of voice, warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, including, turning & including. I break my lines where I do, as I'm being as various as my voice should be in our intimacy. I'd like there to be something as firm as you to push my voice into its best most natural place, that would really be measure.

—Alice Notley, Doctor Williams' Heiresses

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Someone has written a poem, as Williams says, but also, as Rich says: "Someone is writing." The work goes on – the world, as ever, is unfinished. The apocalypse is being written and  unwritten, each season an undoing, spring – and all – as yet, undone.  There is something very tempting and necessary in Rich's account of poetry's stubborn counter response to the world, but there is also something incomplete and nearly self-congratulatory about it. A poem (as "any" poem) is not merely a fungible unit of social "otherwise." If each poem were so genetically imbued with this quality of "lapse,"  had such a regularity in its rift-making social function, there would be little reason for poems to exist in their particularity, no need for them to do anything other than repeat the existent patterns and forms clearly recognizable in a historical period  as poetry.  To think of a poem as such is to sentimentalize it: to replace the specificity of anything with a glistening generality often obscures the truth of the social relations which surround it. This is sentimentality’s operation: stripping the complex and spiky particulars, leaving only the vacuous category. But more than this misty-eyed error we can be tempted to make about poetry, that each instance of it is the same, it is often the case that poetry as such – that which most easily fulfills the set expectations of  poetry – is that which, as Williams suggests, "decorates" the era. There is, and must be, a difference between the poem that "decorates" and those poems which seek to do anything but. Even as we are hungry for poetry's anti-spectacularizing force (a force I, like Rich, believe poetry possesses and believe the world needs), it is a mistake to think of poems with such ease, to mistake the potential of a poem's oppositional nature as an ongoing actualization of it. This is why, I suppose, the revelation of Spring and All after a childhood of Red Wheelbarrow was so startling: Someone (in hell) had written a poem. 

—Anne Boyer, 100 years of Spring and All