Comments on: Rebels

By: ange

ange — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 21:51:17 +0000

I also wanted to point out to Kenny that the insistence on avant-garde historical progress in poetry is indistinguishable from capitalist planned obsolescence. An old criticism, but one that I haven’t seen disproved yet.

By: Ange

Ange — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 21:49:36 +0000

Oh Kenny, don’t get sensitive on me now. Madonna and Koons were rebels for asserting that “depth” is a middle-class pretension. That is certainly money talking.
An anonymous poster wrote, “But we always return to the dilemma of rebellion as an act against the status quo. Easy enough. the problem is defining the status quo, isn’t it? When we have clearly defined ideologies–Marxism, Capitalism, Evangelical Christianity, we think we can define the status quo; but it remains quite complex. I really like the Williams’ poem–the plain-speaking considered tone of the thing, and the juxtaposition you talk about; but her rebellion has to be her bare legs, yes? Everything depends on her bare legs.”
I agree (wearily) that rebellion depends on the status quo, but that the status quo changes fast depending what company you’re in (and again, Koons and Madonna seem apropos).
But are we really at the point where anytime a man mentions a woman’s legs it’s prurient (or is it just WCW)? In fact, what is moving about the poem is his treatment of her *face*, as worthy as Lenin’s or Darwin’s. Not to mention both her legs AND head are bare, a connotation of freedom don’t you think? It’s the woman’s carefree mien, rocking the carriage while engaged in non-purposive talk, that moves Williams. The eroticism stems from that mien, not bare legs alone.
Given our culture (no thanks to Madonna & Koons, etc.) I can see why some are cynical about the power of eroticism, femininity, etc. to suggest an alternative value system.

By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:30:20 +0000

Oy vey, Ange. You’re painting with a mighty big brush here. What’s next? My relationship to poetry and international banking conspiracies?

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:24:16 +0000

Also, someone posted a great comment to Kwame and Ange’s post, but did so anonymously. Just a reminder that we need you to enter your name and valid e-mail address for us to publish your comments. Otherwise we have no way to clean out all the spam.

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:21:30 +0000

Dear Ange and Kwame, Great posts. I thought about them yesterday as I walked home from work along Lake Michigan—the white-sails-on-blue dream we hold dear on one side, the blasted traffic of commerce and convention (Lake Shore Drive) on the other. Does rebellion arise from our need to escape these oppositions, to find a way out through some idea that melds them and so alters this reality? If that’s the case, then rebellion is a constructive force. Even the suicide bombers who kill and maim themselves and others do so out of the belief that it will alter the present moment. (Though I think they are misguided because the future that results from such horrific violence breeds more violence.) Or is our continual unrest with reality, with convention, a mark of an adolescent culture? For example, was my longing to quit my job and join a tank-top-and-bikini—well more like spandex low-riders—volleyball team the same as William’s longing for the blond with the good looking legs? By that I mean, am I attached to some fantasy that I prefer to shouldering responsibility? And isn’t it a sense of responsibility exactly what our still very young country and culture lacks? What if instead of believing either in being a rebel or in the conventional dream of acquiring goods and money, we worked and believed in the long view, in the importance of transmitting what is best in our culture, the art form of poetry say, across generations? Here I think we can learn something from a poet such as Gary Snyder who locates himself within a 5,000-year, rather than 200-year poetic tradition. In an interview in which he talks about Williams, he echoes Ange in saying that poets cast their lot with what human and non-human beings hold dear. (On some level this is also how rebellion works; in posting Koons and Madonna, Kenneth provoked a response in us that forces us to acknowledge each other.) “He [William Carlos Williams] said art is about conviviality. I saw instantly that this goes past the idea of the solitary, romantic, lonely artist suffering for his art, which I never trusted. And the acknowledgment that artists have a role in society, which is to contribute to the community — to the heart of the community. To take Williams’ statement that people “die for lack of what is found there,” I think this means lack of open-heartedness, lack of sweetness and tenderness to each other. But then a little later I saw that meaning also as ecological, that openness not just for the human community but for the natural community; it’s for our immediate neighborhood of all the other species, all of us passing through time.” --Gary Snyder on Williams Gotta go to work. Bye, Emily

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 20:34:53 +0000

Dear Kwame,
Nice to have you back; it was getting lonely here!
Reading your thoughts on rebellion I thought of this William Carlos Williams poem:
A WOMAN IN FRONT OF A BANK
The bank is a matter of columns,
like convention,
unlike invention; but the pediments
sit there in the sun
to convince the doubting of
investments “solid
as rock”—upon which the world
stands, the world of finance,
the only world: Just there,
talking with another woman while
rocking a baby carriage
back and forth stands a woman in
a pink cotton dress, bare legged
and headed whose legs
are two columns to hold up
her face, like Lenin’s (her loosely
arranged hair profusely blond) or
Darwin’s and there you
have it:
a woman in front of a bank.
What the bank stands for and what the woman stands for are utterly contrasted. This is in a line of poetry stretching back to Sappho, who famously declared that “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, / others call a fleet the most beautiful of / sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what- / ever you love best.” It’s an assertion of the value of a relatively powerless individual against institutions of might. The finance world thinks it’s “the only world,” but to Williams the woman and her child are greater than it, and no less important than Lenin or Darwin. It’s not trying to cast the woman in the pink dress as some sort of subversive, but it’s a declaration of loyalty to what she signifies (and perhaps to feminity itself) as against what he calls “convention.”
Is this rebellious?
Because I think as poets, as children of Sappho, we’ve already cast our lot with that woman and her child. Even if you don’t start out as a cultural critic, you end up as one, because of the vast discrepancy between what you hold dear and what the rest of the world (well, America…) holds dear.
This is in large part why I don’t think Kenneth was a rebel; actually I thought he was taking great pains to point out that he is only trying to bring poetry in line with the art world, which is already in line with capitalism (what other meaning could those photos of Madonna and Koons have?). Certainly he “rebelled” against the ingrained prejudices of a navel-gazing poetry establishment, but in the larger picture he and, say, Alfred Barr—an unapologetic capitalist who would like to see poetry elevated to the same status other pure products of America enjoy—would understand each other very well.