excerpt on lyric and social agency

Talk of witnessing tends to sound hollow without a more sophisticated approach to history, and it tends to presuppose powers as agents that are precisely called into question by our experience of history. As Charles Altieri writes in an essay on Joshua Clover: “If there is to be lyric that can accurately capture the contemporary conditions of social agency, it will have to render the strange impersonal or transpersonal dependencies that bind us to out cultural moment. And it will have to recognise the partial blindness of the damaged subjects who are working their way toward expressing their situations.” Charles Altieri, 'The Pleasures of Not Merely Circulating: Joshua Clover's Political Imagination,' in Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, eds., American Poets in the 21st Century, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2007: 164-79, p. 169..