In the brand new Poetry Project Newsletter, Steve Evans expounds upon his notion of “The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation,” whose method he outlines (in his words, “stooping to assonance” [STOOPING??? from what heights of rhetorical refinement?]) as follows:

NAMING

FRAMING

EVALUATING

POSITION-TAKING

NEGATING

ANTICIPATING

Whoa!

Am I the only one to have seen mafia tactics at work in this series of actions? Think about it:

NAMING (the stool pigeon)

FRAMING

EVALUATING (type of punishment)

POSITION-TAKING (of snipers at the banquet)

NEGATING (blowing their heads off)

ANTICIPATING (retaliation)

Am I…. overreading????

I’m totally down with his argument — especially with its whammo conclusion: “By their [works of determinate negation] swiftness and acuity, their precise articulation, their cathartic humor, and their unswaying hostility to dominance and the agents of its reproduction, they serve to negate the distractions, delusions, and complicities of everyday life. Fucking with the structures of conformist thought, negating them on their own ground, these acts of ‘negative testimony to the possibility of the possible’ belong more to a poetics than to a politics, but they are not not political.”

But I can’t stop seeing that banquet massacre scene (‘”on their own ground” if you will) from The Godfather in my head.