Social address and the modernist word in Louis Zukofsky, Bruce Andrews, P. Inman (Ezra Pound)

I examine three limit-cases of poetic address to the social as a distinct medium. In the background to Zukofsky's, Andrews's, and Inman's social stance is Pound's, which required a fascist Italy to realize the modernist word---"language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree"---as ideas in action. These three do not equate the social with the political---nor do they equate it with the aesthetic. Zukofsky uses a secularized esoteric address to the social in order to critique Pound's exoteric extremism. I turn to Spinoza's writing method as a model for understanding Zukofsky's quotational technique and use of esoteric address. Andrews and Inman continue this Zukofsky mode which is characteristic of Language Writing, theorizing and expanding its use into a broad societal critique. I propose a lineage for Andrews by arguing that he reinvents Mayakovsky's obscured categorical imperative of a "social command" for poetry, which was intended to resolve contradictions between Formalism and Marxism. I read Andrews's mid-1980s booklength poem, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or Social Romanticism ) as a negation and inversion of Socialist Realism, and as posing a crisis for the idea of a social command in poetry. Andrews is a limit-case for the Marxian social in poetry. Inman's textual opacity continues Zukofsky's career-long effort to reduce words to seen things. Inman explores what I call a nonce level between letter and word. Nonce-words socially undermine the well-formed sign that neologisms aestheticize. Inman is a limit-case of the nonce-word as language and as social critique. Critics have aligned neologisms with Pound's injunction to condense meaning. Nonce-words dis-assemble what neologisms assemble: the visual and phonic axes of the modernist word. The nonce-word is an accident waiting to be recognized as historical contingency, pointing toward economic and linguistic factors structuring language as a social medium prior to authorial intent---from Westernizing products in Beijing markets (dis-assembling the Chinese ideogram) to cryptic ciphers as motivated or arbitrary signs.