Poetry, Spilt Religion, and the Poetic Imagination by Paul Lake

'The most experimentally radical and socially ambitious movement of recent decades has been “Language Poetry.” Born of various schools of Post-Structuralist criticism, and deeply influenced by Marxism and feminism, the movement’s theorists argue that language itself is a code that contains and reproduces the larger code of society; and that more than anything else, it binds us to traditional notions of self, gender, and identity. In this view, not even poetry is immune to the corrupting influence of a capitalist culture; rather, poetry is itself a commodity, infused with something called cultural capital, and must be recognized as such in order to demystify it and destroy its seductive illusions. To aid in this process, movement theorists believe that the practice of writing should be revolutionized; closure should be avoided and meaning made indeterminate so that reading becomes more democratized as each reader learns to construct a text’s meaning for him or herself. Narrative, argument, the poetic line, grammar, syntax, and even spelling should be broken open to allow an infinite play of interpretive possibilities, as well as to expose the sinister workings of language (poemanias italics).'

This is an odd one, but at least we get to see a Contemporary Poetry Review piece for free.