Comments on: Are you a poet?

By: john

john — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:50:11 +0000

Don,
I appreciate your discretion and refinement, qualities I lack.
I was struck by Michael’s belief that the group blog of the Poetry Foundation is not part of the broader public sphere. It occurred to me that, to my knowledge, I have never met anybody who comments at Harriet. I have privately e-corresponded with a handful of correspondents. And then I remembered — I’ll actually be in Chicago Friday night, passing through town to catch my old friend Mickle Maher’s play “The Strangerer,” which is being put on by Theater Oobleck, which I co-founded with Mickle and others more than 20 years ago. If you don’t know Oobleck, they’re terrific, and Mickle’s writing is brilliant.
Anyway, I would be delighted to meet you and/or Michael Robbins (if he’s still based in Chicago) before or after the play, shake hands, and buy you both the beverage of your choice.
Here’s info on Mickle’s play:
http://www.theateroobleck.com/
Don’t know if the invite would be of interest to either you or Michael (or any other Chicago-based Harriet-eer), but, in any case, best wishes with the chaise.
John

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:34:30 +0000

John, nobody needs me to stir the pot on Harriet, that’s for sure!!
(I think I’m a polka dot poet, or maybe even a polka poet, but it would be vulgar to draw attention to myself by saying any more.)
And wouldn’t you know it – I’ve been trying to figure out just how to come by a good chaise lounge for months – any suggestions? Department stores don’t seem to carry them anymore, and though there’s actually a website that sells them, I’m naturally suspicious…
Yrs. for the other, and other-wiseness,
Don

By: john

john — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:59:15 +0000

And exactly *what* are you, Mr. Share? Hmm? A pot-stirrer, sir?
More importantly, what kind of a poet are you? A red one? A blue one? Or a purple one? (My apologies if I’ve forgotten a category.)
Paging Mr. Borges. The services of your Chinese zoologist are wanted here.
“Armchair” cuts me to the quick. I’m a chaise longue dabbler!
(You’ll have to excuse my silliness. Of course categories exist, and have influence! Who ever said otherwise? Or should this have asked, what ever said otherwise?)

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:46:26 +0000

OK, my fellow armchair intellectuals, I toss into the ring something Hannah Arendt said forty years ago (in The New Yorker, of all places!):
“… no society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classificaiton is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is – as distinct from the question of who he is – which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:11:53 +0000

OK, this has been real, but every time I try to respond to you you call me a dandy or something, which is just weird. For the record, nobody said anything about denouncing individual expression, & nobody denied that people have individual aesthetic experiences. We were talking about affirming identity — which seems to me an empty exercise. In the course of doing so, I denounced the notion of affirming the individual as such. Do I need to explain the difference between expressing oneself on a blog & celebrating diversity & individualism in the broader public sphere? Or between “talking about” class experience in a totally generic way & trying to understand experience qua determined by class?
For some reason you’re terribly offended by my sarcasm, which says more about you than it does about me. As I said before, I don’t care. I feel pretty stupid having responded to your baiting as much as I have, & am finished with this pseudo-conversation. I’m afraid I don’t even have the stomach to read any response you may have to this last post, so feel free to let loose.

By: john

john — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:22:29 +0000

Correction acknowledged: You’re not telling people to efface their class experience.
You do wax sarcastic about someone talking about his.
Repeatedly invoking expressions of individual aesthetic experience and preference — “banality,” “nausea” — in a denunciation of individual expression — it seems dandyish, if it’s conscious, but I’m not sure that it is.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:00:10 +0000

n.b. that should read, of course, “if they wanted to.”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:59:10 +0000

John, people are grouped by category — primarily by social class. Society depends upon it, whether it “becomes a problem” or not. How on earth you could conclude that I’m “telling people [to] efface their class experience” is beyond me: they couldn’t do so if they wouldn’t to, as it’s what determines their experience. I’m saying, rather, that we should understand that class is such a determinant to a far greater extent than other identity-markers are. The Marxian gamble is that the economic sphere trumps & determines all the others. We don’t need to hash out that argument here.
I’m not as interested in “individual experience” as you are. It’s the fetishization of individual experience that gave us liberalism in the first place. I think the idea of people “exploring aspects of their identity” is perfectly nauseating.
For the record, I’m sure as hell not telling anyone to do anything, & were I interested in doing so, Harriet would be pretty far down on my list of appropriate forums.

By: john

john — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:23:26 +0000

Grouping people by category — whether class, race, sexual orientation, gender, religion — becomes a problem when it effaces or seeks to efface individual experience. If you’re talking about demography or statistics, that’s fine, but that’s not what we’re talking about here — which is individual experience.
Of course, Linh’s post was about class, not race. CA Conrad, a white poet, and Linh Dinh, an Asian poet, found inspiration in Etheridge Knight, a Black poet. You’re telling people they should efface their class experience.
As you know, there is a high correlation between race & class in this society. People should explore whatever aspect of their identity they want to. Including, of course, Frederick Seidel too.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:15:04 +0000

Actually, as Walter Benn Michaels, John Guillory, & others have pointed out, identity politics is a way of deflecting attention from the single most determinant form of injustice in American society, which is precisely class. If you redistribute the holders of wealth — so that, say, African-Americans hold a proportionate amount of it & are proportionally represented among the richest five percent of Americans — you still haven’t done anything about the fundamental problem of the inequality of income distribution. 5% of the population still controls 95% of the wealth, but now more of them are black. Capital loves diversity: existing social structures can accommodate racial & sexual affirmations of identity without undergoing meaningful change. The Secretary of State hasn’t been a white man for over a decade. Anti-identity politics doesn’t argue that justice has been achieved — quite the contrary, it argues that identity politics is a means of ensuring that it won’t be. We have a “black” presidential nominee, we nearly had a woman. Think we’ll ever have a poor one?
I’ll read Williams if you’ll read Guillory’s Cultural Capital or Michaels’s pop-critical The Trouble with Diversity.