By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:00:32 +0000

Mark Nowak asks:
>How, and to whom, might the Linton Kwesi Johnson poem (and the George Lindo case) speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, Raworth or Mayer or W. S. Merwin, for that matter? Which potential communities of readers might each of these poets attract? Repel? Intrigue? Disperse? Why does this matter? What is to be done?
Mark, if you keep asking questions like the last one, rumors of your CP fellow-traveling will only spread. As a former ten-year member of the Socialist Workers Party, once mugged by a gang of three Stalinist fellow-rail workers while I sold The Militant outside the Milwaukee Road yard, I do indeed hope these are just rumors!
Then again, back in the late 80s, when you and I used to get together to drink cheap beer, talk about poetry, and listen to Brian Eno as grad students in Bowling Green, Ohio, you weren’t, as I recall, all that interested in politics (which is no criticism, whatsoever), and I doubt you would have joined the CP shortly after the whole world suddenly changed, so likely the rumors are specious, to take your defense.
On your questions above, at least on one level: I believe the second question you ask answers the first one, frankly. There are, obviously, different reading formations, and aesthetic/social value is crucially contingent on axiological dynamics and tensions operating within and between them, no? What speaks “more powerfully” is not something that inheres in a poem’s language or form (as the “post-avant” tends to teleologically believe, and as a number of its leading figures shamefully demonstrated in the build-up to the Iraq war): What speaks “more powerfully” is ultimately a matter of conjuncture and the playing out of individual and collective positions in the overall cultural field.
Nothing exciting or original there, but that said, your suggestion that working class poems like Linton Kwesi Johnson’s are undervalued in the literary world at large and should be seen as more intrinsically “powerful” or consequential (you *are* suggesting this, correct?) vis-a-vis the poetry of mainstream or avant formations seems suspiciously premised on assumptions that working class poetry should, or can, be in some way reckoned by standards of the high-art poetry economy, that there is some kind of negotiating to be done, for a seat more towards the head of the table.
Such comparative anxiety, granted, is hard for us academics, whatever our stripes, to get away from. But why fret over how working class poetry might be granted more cultural capital in the teeny market of belles-lettres? Isn’t the real, ultimate question how such poetry might lead to deeper and sustaining forms of autonomous solidarity and class identity, regardless of what other literary types might think? How the poetry might deepen connections to its real, vital audience, its needs, its ideological independence, without concern for what academics, or prestigious publishers, or government foundations might think about it, or do for it? Why does it matter, after all, if Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry is as “powerful” to professors at Orono as Barrett Watten’s power-pointing pop-tarts about Late Capitalism? As much as they talk about Badiou, after all, What is to be done is not going to be done by the high-art poetry communities. Especially as they prattle on about being the radical opposition while swooning for the hipper of the two parties of big business…
Come to think of it, with a view to the precipitous domestication of Language Poetry and its professionalized progeny, WHY on earth would you want trade-union poetry to have ANY connection to the academic order of things?
I’ve been a dues-paying member of the AFT for seventeen years now, and my poetry teaching is almost completely to working class and farm kids, so asking all this in solidarity!
Kent

By: Jasper

Jasper — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:53:53 +0000

Hi Mark,
I’ve been enjoying your posts. Since you’ve mentioned Harvey a couple of times, I thought I’d point out that one can watch videos of his lectures on Capital Vol. 1 (13 2-hour lectures) here: http://davidharvey.org.
Jasper

Comments on: The 1970s, (Dub) Identity, and Working-class Poetries

By: Kent Johnson

By: Jasper