It looks as if Lucia Perillo’s post entitled “Why are poets aligned with the left?” will have generated the most extensive and heated comment stream for the month of June (provided no Harriet blogger attacks Language Poetry in the next 72 hours). Though commentators jumped on her statement that memorable war poetry is in short supply, the main concern of her post was the question, “Why do poets coalesce around leftist ideals”? A number of responders usefully delineated the wide spectrum of positions encompassed by the phrase “leftist,” and especially how liberal, leftist, and Democrat aren’t necessarily synonymous. As one respondent pointed out, Mark Nowak probably wouldn’t describe the political organizing he does as in the “liberal” tradition, even if some of the people he works with might.
And this is really the larger question: why are poetry and its communities based so much on consent? As the art form with the least to lose, I’ve always wondered why poetry doesn’t risk more, why it doesn’t dissent from itself more—its institutional forms, its modes of establishing community, its inherited schools and traditions. That’s not true. When I was younger, I believed that poetry was fundamental in constructing alternative communities and cultures. As I got older (I’m not that old), it became clear to me that the poetry world isn’t structured all that differently from the rest of the world it proposes to modify, transform, critique, or simply provide another perspective on. It perpetuates many of the same kinds of hierarchies, exclusions, sectarianisms, and obsequiousness that I think many poets would like to see at least partially dismantled in the larger society. That’s why as much as I consider myself occupying a position on the political left, it’s always difficult for me to listen to poets tell other people to get their houses in order when their own dwellings are in disarray.
There are of course very good reasons why marginalized communities, of which poetry is one, orient themselves around identity as opposed to non-identity. It’s a question of survival. At the same time, poetry is generally a privileged occupation, and a better awareness of this might make poetry worlds more self-reflective on their own power structures. An acknowledgment of complicity can be almost as liberating as one of resistance. In the art world, this practice is called institutional critique. Nevertheless, poetry does create flashes of alternative culture and communities—“temporary autonomous zones,” Hakim Bey calls them. That was my experience of Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Kimako’s Blues People gatherings I mentioned in an earlier post. The Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program, from which I’ll be blogging in another week, has less identitarian group-think and quest for institutional approval than some other poetry communities with which I’ve been involved. I’d also list the numerous political protest marches—against a couple different wars, against racism, against police brutality, for housing rights, for the preservation of public spaces, etc.—that I’ve participated in with poets and people not all that engaged in poetry.
I promised myself I wouldn’t re-enter this fray, but time future, you know. I think this is an importantly clarifying post, & helpfully delineates some discrete problems. Consent certainly seems to be the operational desideratum for contemporary poetry — note how many commenters found it simply baffling to consider that Eliot & Pound could have produced innovative poetry while holding what it is deemed unnecessary to bother arguing are ridiculously backward political values. Leftism, it’s useful to note again, developed as opposition to liberalism — at least partly because the twin fetishes of consent & tolerance are counterproductive to a tradition intent on the forcible redistribution of property. Indeed, one gets shouted down on this very forum if one’s blood pressure spikes a bit when confronting opposing views — but if the views are robust, no plea for temperance should be required. Adorno wrote of “the common consent of the positive”: “a gravitational force that pulls all downwards.” Political efficacy, in private life as in the arts or in the public sphere, depends upon the refusal to model your behavior on “the industrial bottleneck” — as Zizek says, the refusal to “get blackmailed into accepting the struggles of upper-middle-class victimization as the horizon of our political engagement.” Ideas matter, or they don’t. If they do, consent should be actively discouraged from the starting gate.
One person’s perpetuation of “the same kinds of hierarchies, exclusions, sectarianisms, and obsequiousness” is often another person’s writing the kinds of poetry she likes to read. Why is creative expression, itself inextricably bound to the unknowable of persona aesthetics, posited as some kind of zero sum game? Much less then extrapolated into and then interpreted as some kind of coherent political statement?
…why poetry doesn’t risk more, why it doesn’t dissent from itself more—its institutional forms, its modes of establishing community, its inherited schools and traditions.
I’ve wondered the same thing, particularly with the MFA — > contest — > book — > job/award superhighway.
I asked a genuine question on this blog once, as simple as “what is the ‘point’ of books like Best New Poets” & it was deleted, LOL.
I agree with Alan Gilbert’s points. I make very similar ones, actually, in a conversation with the poet John Bradley, published recently in Plantarchy, a conversation focusing on satire and the paucity of it in our current climes– I mean that august tradition of satire that targets poetry and poets…
Poets poking fun at and heaping scorn upon other poets would be one mode of the institutional critique Gilbert is talking about here, I think. But it’s so verboten to do this today.
Didn’t used to be that way, of course. And too bad, since poets roasting one another a bit more openly would be a healthy thing, lots of fun, and likely get us more readers. I wonder why things are so different now, from the good old days?
Well, actually, I think I do have some notion as to why…
Kent
Jilly, I can’t believe your questions was deleted – are you sure about that???
Anyway, let’s ask again: what’s the point of books like Best New Poets?
I got the screen where it said your comment will be approved or whatever by the blog owner.
No biggie.
“It perpetuates many of the same kinds of hierarchies, exclusions, sectarianisms, and obsequiousness that I think many poets would like to see at least partially dismantled in the larger society”
I’m thinking that the blog-world breaks down heirarchies–anyone can post–although there is the dichotomy of the “official” bloggers and the rest.
But from my baptism by fire (my entry into blogging) it seems that once you remove the heirarchy, we descend lord-of-the-flies-wise. Reminds me of a movie I saw in college of ducks subjected to crowded conditions (internet space is unlimited, yet the viability of posts is indeed limited by time, which in turn makes me think of how I never understood how time could be the fourth dimension, or what Hawking calls “the one way arrow of time.” But perhaps we have built a model for demonstating it!)
back to the ducks (a normally docile species): they began attacking each other and showing gender-related abberant behaviors, like raping a female to death. No doubt this all has to do with resource allocation (think of the resource allocation of the blog).
Then the professor made a joke he couldn’t make these days (because institutions have decided they must “protect” women.)
That’s the report from the ducks.
As far as poets poking fun at, heaping scorn upon, and roasting one another (duck-style, on a spit over the open blaze): well, we’ll always have Jim Behrle.
UN,
I meant satire in poetic mode: epigrams, mock odes, and so forth.
Behrle’s comics are lots of fun, though. Some of his funniest have been about me!
Kent
I don’t think poetry-writing per se is a privileged occupation. Some poets can make a profession out of it, and others may view that as expression of privilege or some other form of social elitism. But poetry-writing per se is a kind of work as well as play. There’s nothing inherently privileged about creative activity. Seems rather puritanical to think so.
The US poetry scene does seem to have its share of confusion… but perhaps that’s in the eye of (this) beholder. Perhaps the problem is not so much with the poetry scene(s) as with the climate & methods of critical and aesthetic judgement.
My own feeling today, & I hope to write something more substantial about this, is that the US focus on groups and schools – and also the mode of vision we have inherited from the 20th century, which analyzes art in minute and pedantic detail solely in terms of progressive changes in technique and style, developed in turn to keep up with rapid transformations of history in general – that these two standard approaches to critical judgement are missing something essential.
Reginald Shepherd has picked apart some of these problems, by carefully reviewing some of the history. But I think maybe we need to have a fundamental change in the way we exercise aesthetic judgement and critique. There are a couple of basic categories which the critic or commentator applies : classification and evaluation. And for the most part, contemporary reviewers seem to apply a method we might call “non-judgemental classification”. It’s enough to outline for the reader what school or tradition the contemporary poet represents, and then enthuse over what seem to be the clever high points of the technique applied within that specific genre or style.
I think we need to get back to evaluation of quality per se, rather than generic/historical classification. When you start to consider aesthetic quality, the first characteristic which jumps to the fore is the poetry’s distinctiveness, its originality, its uniqueness. The “new” here is not a function of clever application of supposedly new techniques; it’s the synthesis of original and previously-unseen aesthetic wholes. It’s the successful poetic expression of new problems and new subject-matter. This phenomenon always requires that the individual poet outgrow, SURPASS the tradition or school from which he or she proceeds. And in fact I think the most effective means of achieving such a level of style is by outgrowing one’s parochial beginnings, into the broader, global tradition of poetry, going back to ancient times. & IF THIS IS THE CASE – this fact has serious implications for notions of “progressive” changes in aesthetic styles; because it means that in order for a poet to reach a certain level of quality, he or she has to grasp & apply techniques and modes of address which HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED.
Thus there is a paradigmatically ANACHRONISTIC aspect to aesthetic quality. & I would say that a critical approach that forcuses on the evaluation of individual quality, rather than genetic classification, would be a possible element of a future climate of rfeception for poetry in the US – something I wouldn’t want to call either neo-classical or neo-formalist, because these imply a far too narrow set of styles – but maybe “new classicism”. (cf. Osip Mandelstam, again, for his similar notion of a sort of “classicism of the future”.)
p.s. I guess “neo-classicism” and “new classicism”: are pretty much the same thing…. what’s a better term? Perennialism? Permanent poetry? Recapitulationism? Antidisestablishmentarianism? ??
Sometimes we behave as if we lived in a tiny community, when instead we live on a planet, in a universe. It reminds me of La Bruyère’s famous description of the tiny little town ca. 1687, after which he remarks:
“There is something which has never been seen yet, and which, to all appearances, never will be, and that is a little town which isn’t divided into cliques, where the families are united, and the cousins trust each other; where a marriage doesn’t start a civil war, and where quarrels about precedence don’t arise every time that a service, a ceremony, a procession or a funeral are held; where gossip and lying and malice have been outlawed,” etc.
But I don’t mean this to sound dour, dispirited, or disengaged. It’s just an introjection… Carry on!
It’s the right day, & this seems the right thread to note that I wrote a poem on a dog biscuit & yr dog refused to look at it.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1bmcs_galaxie-500-4th-of-july_music
Henry, is the word you’re looking for aestheticism? (A dirty word to many people but not to me. Walter Pater rules.)
Kent, I wrote a quasi-poetic quasi-dialog in quasi-prose satirizing Ron Silliman (and Adorno) a few months ago. Warning: it’s over 3700 words long, and it mixes satire with sincerity, a mixture that a lot of people hate. I happen to think it’s entertaining and insightful:
http://utopianturtletop.blogspot.com/2008/02/beer-bongs-with-adorno-is-stand-up.html
YMMV, as the recent ‘net parlance has it.
John,
“Aestheticism” probably carries too much polemical & lit-historical baggage. “Art for art’s sake” as a program tried to draw the magic circle around aesthetic experience – but the magic should be left to the art itself. The magic only happens, in any case, when the border between art & life is porous, ambiguous, etc.
I would think that criticism, also, has to reflect the same balancing act. Edmund Wilson in “Axel’s Castle” has a lot to say about all this. You can’t put art in a special box when the very terms of experience and its reflection are being resolved in a new way in the work itself.
However, I do think U.S. poetry could use a focus on some kind of General Criticism, some general principles which put the logic of aesthetic and critical response on a stronger, mutual footing. It seems to me that the “logic” which presently divides the so-called poetic schools and tendencies is only a kind of pretend-logic, tendentious and polemical.
Is it true that one of the distinctive characteristics of U.S. poetry & poetics USED TO BE, anyway, a suspicion of theory, in fact a suspicion of the whole classical-academic tradiiton inherited from Europe? Doesn’t American literature display a striking UNEASINESS about writing per se? The poet stuck in a jam between native wilderness (and Native languages), and Puritan strictures on art, and overbearing Mother Country (England)? Isn’t the subsequent keynote of American poetry this very colonial awkwardness, uneasiness, a DISLIKE for scribbling & inaction?
The Moderns & their late-20th cent. heirs would like us to believe that the key characteristic of American literature is invention and renovation; hence the high value accorded “experiment”, avant-garde, etc. But the deeper character of US poetry is rooted in this wilderness unease and alienation, this native awkwardness.
Look again at Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Steven Crane, Hart Crane……….. central to all of them is the whole issue of imitation, of how the US poet grows into or relates to the inheritance of the past, and thus grows as an artist – this is, I repeat, not the business of some simplified 20th-cent. “progress in the arts”. It’s a deeply anachronistic situation on many levels.
Henry, you’re right, the A-word has a lot of art-historical baggage; FWIW, I wasn’t trying to advocate for a return to Wilde-ishness as a poetic, but Paterianism as a critical beacon — the primacy of individual experience of an aesthetic event. “Individualism”? Would have that stout American echo, but the baggage would again be too freighty — over the weight limit.
Your schema of American poetic history intrigues. O’Hara’s poem existing “at last between two persons instead of two pages” would be in that trad.
Thnx.
Re Henry’s point about invention and renovation, it’s amusing to see that Coleridge noticed in his notebooks two hundred years ago (!) that “Modern poetry [is] characterized by the Poets’ anxiety to be always striking.”
(Emphasis STC’s.)