Pro-Consumerist Poetry

By Kenneth Goldsmith

With a discussion recently here involving Time Magazine’s suggestion that “what poetry really needs is a writer who can do for it what Andy Warhol did for avant-garde visual art: make it sexy and cool and accessible without making it stupid or patronizing”, I think the first thing we need to do is to find a poet who is unabashedly pro-consumerist. In our overdrive hyper-capitalist frenzied world, it’s hard to find poets that actually celebrate, say, shopping. You might think that during the Bush administration, pro-consumerist poets would be coming out of the woodwork. But no, instead our Poet Laureates write about fishing on the Susquehanna in July, or porch swings in September, or ox-cart men (ox cart men???!!! WTF???!!!), hopelessly out of touch with what is obsessing most Americans (and most of the world): buying things.
The poetry world has yet to experience its version of Pop Art — and Pop Art happened nearly 50 years ago. While the New York School fondled consumerism sweetly, using pop as a portal to subjectivity — (O’Hara: “Having a Coke with you /is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne”) — it never came close to the cold objectivity, naked, prophetic words of Warhol: “If you’re the Queen of England you couldn’t have a better Coke than the bum on the corner.” Clearly, Frank O’Hara is not our Andy Warhol.
However, all is not lost. In the two posts below are two contemporary poets dealing with consumerism head-on, in a way that would make Andy proud.

2007-06-12

Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 by Kenneth Goldsmith.