Several people have e-mailed me recently to ask where I come across the poems and poets of social movements and organized labor that I’ve been discussing here during my interlude upon Harriet, as well as why these poems and their presumed dubious “aesthetic quality” should matter. Yesterday, as part of another project I’m working on, I revisited Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and reread (with Harriet in mind) Kelley’s fifth chapter, “‘Afric’s Sons With Banner Red’: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934.” The quote that opens his chapter title comes from J. Thompson’s poem “Exhortation,” a Claude McKay-“If We Must Die”-esque piece that Kelley discovered “buried in a barely readable microfilm edition of the Liberator.” In addition to his expansion of Marxism beyond the (white, male) figures most critics seem delimited to invoking in academic literary criticism (and readers interested in exploring further should begin with Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, though it is still unfortunately overwhelmingly masculinist), Kelley’s chapter on Black radicalism, class struggle, and poetry provides a unique and engaging overview of the social poetics and poetries of the era—much of it dug up from microfilms and archives.
One of the poems in the chapter that interested me on a variety of levels was “Southern Organizer” [Note: The periods represent indents, which I can't seem to figure out on Movabale Type]:
…….Badges gleam; they dump the sack
…….Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
…….with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
…….“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”
Kenneth Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” was published in the Daily Worker on August 10, 1935. The poem does not appear in either Patchen’s Collected or Selected. And when I emailed Patchen’s excellent biographer, Larry Smith, yesterday, even he was unaware of the poem and asked me to email him a copy. A brief internet search turned up nothing besides Kelley’s Race Rebels, which analyzes the poem in terms of how “white Communists dealing directly with race made their pleas for interracialism in a wholly masculinist discourse.”
My question to Harriet readers is to ask why Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” disappeared (almost) from literary history and the American poetry canon? What makes it a “poor” poem—too low in aesthetic quality or cultural capital? What forces cause it to (almost) utterly disappear while a poem like, say James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” becomes celebrated, canonized, and anthologized in everything from John Frederick Nims’ Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry to Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry (which oddly excludes Patchen altogether) and Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles’ Working Classics: Poems of Industrial Life? Why is it that Wright’s sexist, racist machismo (where women, rather than being absent/erased as in Patchen’s poem, “cluck like starved pullets”) trumps the anti-racist activist machismo (not that I’d choose either)? Why is one poem so lauded while the other poem has nearly disappeared?
Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, which several commentators have recently mentioned, tackles questions like these in ways that have remained productive for my own thinking over the years. Nelson pointedly asserts that “English professors should be pressed to explain why, for example, the poetry sung by striking coal miners in the 1920s is so much less important than the appearance of The Waste Land in The Dial in 1922.”
Any takers?
In his reading of the largely unknown H.L. Lewis, the “Plowboy Poet” of Missouri whose works were published here in Holt, Minnesota by farmer Ben Hagglund’s “Rebel Poet Booklets” series, Nelson argues a point that I think is useful when thinking about the Patchen/Wright juxtaposition I pose above (as well as many other similar comparisons we could analyze):
“If we have lost Lewis and others like him, it is partly because his poetry does not generally display the surface indecision and ambivalence that many critics since the 1950s have deemed a transcendent, unquestionable literary and cultural value. From that perspective, the ideal political poem is W.H. Auden’s 1937 Spain, a poem tortured by the impossibility of making a clear commitment to either side in an imperfect world. Because it reinforces the English profession’s ruling ideology of political indecision lived out in uneasy inner anguish and external inaction, Auden’s poem is often taken to be aesthetically superior.” [I was reminded of this quote, in part, when I read Daisy Fried’s excellent comment to one of my earlier posts: “It always has seemed curious to me that people who certainly seem to be a force for good in their practical actions--activist-poets like Claudia Jones--get criticized for their ideological associations, while people who *do* nothing at all, or worse, get a free pass.”]
What is it about that supposedly Marxist or liberation theological or XYZ bugaboo, “agency,” the condition of acting—of philosophers (and poets) not only interpreting the world but attempting to change it (and changing it)—that repels us as poets? And strong alliteration and sharp allegory defeat imbuing readers with the desire to act because…? Why does, to borrow Nelson’s terminology, “surface indecision and ambivalence” trump instrumentality in contemporary poetry and poetry criticism?
What is it that we are afraid might change?
I think it’s because poetry is never very instrumental, at least not in the ways of prodding our held assumptions and making a case for this change or that policy. Or, put another way, there are other media and forms that are more instrumental in achieving those ends. For whatever myriad sociological and historical reasons, we don’t often go to poetry or sings songs of protest to make claims that might unsettle people or introduce them to some new idea, but to as shows of solidarity and to make ourselves feel good about something (or feeling something about something).
Posted By: Corey on July 15, 2008 at 1:58 pmOnce you have works that are expressly Marxist, or liberation theological, or XYZ then you also have to wrestle with these as ideas in their own right–which is fine, but then they can be dismissed on grounds that aren’t directly related to aesthetics or poetry making as such. Again, I’m not sure this is an altogether bad thing, but it would explain part of the reasoning (besides status quo bias) for choosing the less straightforwardly polemical works.
Okay, this is a good question, and it’s not simply answered. When Patchen was asked to help choose the poems for the Collected Poems, he did not select his most radical ‘red’ poems. So it may be a case of self-censoring, or Patchen’s feeling that he had grown beyond his “proletariate poet” title which Random House saw to label him with in 1936 when it was fashionable. The poem certainly is deserving and tells something of a larger story of leftist poetry in America. I tried to cover this in my Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America because we cannot understand those times or our own unless we look deep into motivations…poets and publishers and merchants. My personaly feeling is that Kenneth had always sought to not ally himself with a group…Ex. The Beats, the San Francisco Poets, etc. Individualism was key to him, and he may have seen one more case of it in choosing not to give the critics that “proletarian poet” label one more time. Analogy the Beat poet who lived beyond the movement and even did a mock funeral to put the label to rest. Patchen’s voice is important in American writing and too often denied. I can tell you from his letters that he cared very much to be ‘known,’ if not accepted. He was writing for the deepest sense of public audience…and with a motive to change people through his work. That’s my take on it.
Posted By: Larry Smith on July 15, 2008 at 2:02 pmWhen you start to blame literary critics & poets for not being politically correct, one way or another, eventually everybody’s work gets watered down. This is not to say that critics themselves do not display endless examples of limited vision, etc.
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 15, 2008 at 4:06 pmHere’s an example of what I mean : when Mark reduces James Wright’s line about women (”clucked like starved pullets”) to “sexist, racist machismo”, this is an example of a supposedly tenured Egnlish professor being willfully, maliciously blind to the actual PROBLEM being addressed in Wright’s poem : which is the violence and stupidity which results from glorifying “sexist, racist machismo”.
Read the poem.
Yeah, gotta agree with Henry here: I think it’s pretty astounding to call that wonderful Wright poem sexist & racist. [Insert joke about this week's New Yorker cover here.]
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 16, 2008 at 1:02 amDear Mark,
You offer a dangerous mis-reading of James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” It is dangerous because it imposes politics on a poem without recognizing the social awareness that poem’s careful construction performs. It is exceedingly problematic to indict a poet’s work as bigotry (as you did Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” in your post) without examining the poem’s formal detail and cultural context. My comments are detailed and lengthy because I want you to know enough about my subjectivity so that you are able to understand my view.
Mark, I am empathetic to your affinity for poems about working class experiences and to your anti-racism and anti-sexism. My empathy comes from firsthand experience: I was raised poor, sometimes in foster homes, sometimes homeless, sometimes in a Section 8 housing project; and up until 3 years ago I held down menial jobs (mostly cleaning on the graveyard shift at hotels) to pay down debts and stay afloat while teaching during the day. Further still, not a week goes by when I do not experience either pronounced or low-grade bias based, presumably, on my appearance or my mannerisms, be it on the bus where just this summer I endured homophobic catcalls by macho boys who were uncomfortable with the way I held my bag across my shoulders, or at the carry-out yesterday when the proprietor raised a glass shield when I came inside because he most likely thought that I may rob him while a man with much fairer skin than mine stood already being served without the affront of the glass. Most (but definitely not all) of the poets that I know in academe do not share my experiences with poverty and survival. So it is gratifying to hear anyone speak about socio-political conflicts and their embodiment in poems.
But my empathy and my experience cannot abide a politicized mis-reading of a poem. Henry Gould is right in his comment. This mis-reading is emblematic of larger conceptual concerns that I want to isolate prior to looking at James Wright’s poem in detail.
The conceptual concerns are these:
- In your series of posts on Harriet, you have not adequately interrogated the activist politics that you hold dear, especially the failings in practice of several schools of Marixism and Socialism. The result is a kind of naiveté and romanticization of working class experiences, women’s experiences, and people of color’s experiences. This romanticization traps these experiences into saintly hagiography. It avoids the complex reality that socio-politically marginalized persons and groups struggle with fallibility despite still rampant larger structural problems of corporate greed and institutional bias. My mother would sometimes sigh a warning when we were dealing with social activists and social workers in the inner city when I was a child. Just wait until we disagree with them, she would say. The social workers wanted us to just shut up and be helped without contending with our agency and with our funkiness, the fact that we were deeply fallible even as we struggle without resources and with bias.
- Alarmingly, you implicitly accept that inclusion into a literary canon is the hallmark of progress. Yet, it seems that a truly radical view would reject the very utility of a literary canon. And you say “the American canon” but surely there are many canons from many trajectories. Thus, the very paradigm that fuels your question of why “[Kenneth] Patchen’s ‘Southern Organizer’ disappeared (almost) from literary history and the American poetry canon?” is faulty. Why implicitly endorse a canon? Kenneth Patchen’s poem didn’t “disappear” (your word) to me! I read Patchen and I read Cullen too. You seem at once to valorize a monolithic power structure (“the American canon,” as you say) while arguing against it, whatever it is. The canon you cite is a construct that begs interrogation not just for its monolithic nature but also for false credence. Better to simply examine Patchen’s poem and work on its own terms, to better reflect on the agitation propaganda formalized in its lines, and the politics of address typified in its call to awareness to the men referred to at the end of the poem. Such questions of reading are far, far more important than implicitly endorsing and longing for its inclusion in “the” canon. I dare say that worrying about canons is one of the problems operative in the always old but newly configured partisanship within American poetry: people buy so much into canons, prizes, and positions in a way that actually gives these constructs power.
Posted By: JDJ on July 16, 2008 at 2:16 amYou romanticize Kenneth Patchen’s poem at the expense of a far more careful reading of James Wright’s poem, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” James Wright was a darn good poet—as good as Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Spires, Lyn Hejinian, Ben Belitt and any of the poets whose work I hold dear. Wright was a good poet because of his invention provokes complex cultural and political questions. That is more than I can say about other work. Some work has so figured it all out that there is no examination, no discovery, no questions, just propaganda, dangerously false certainty. When we fire up our politics, poems that resist agitation propaganda have the potential to turn the heat back on to ourselves. They cannot be read as simplistic political artifacts, like broadsides or slogans.
James Wright and his poems were/are no more racist than you or I; in fact, by the example of his poems, he was far less racist than one would assume a white Irish American man reared in the cauldron of mid-to-early mid-Western white racism would be. We are all complexly and entangledly biased—me especially. The depth of our country’s bigotry makes all of our participation inescable. I’d rather hear about what one is doing with one’s own biases and how one examines the complexity and evolution of one’s human understanding. Bias evolves. We ought also to examine another’s progress because, as my mother would say, “we can’t keep a mad on forever so we might as well fix our mouths and stop rolling our eyes”—people’s biases and generosities evolve just as our social relations and our institutions evolve.
In Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” the speaker comes to terms with the realities of the socio-economically depressed townfolk in Martins Ferry, Ohio on the occasion of the town’s Fall high school football game. James Wright was born and raised in Martins Ferry and his early home-life was marked by the harsh economic realities of the Depression. He didn’t go to college with the help of a trust fund but rather he attended Kenyon College in Ohio on the GI Bill. James Wright was a working-class, semi-rural-reared poet who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets; proving that a few poets who won this much contested prized were not children of socio-economic privilege. The speaker’s narration in the poem reveals the simultaneous difficulty and ease of being able to bear witness to the struggles of Martins Ferry. That Wright grew up there does not make the attempt to capture the townfolk’s subjectivity any less challenging. The poem is short so let’s read it in full and then look closely at a few of its descriptive terms.
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
By James Wright
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
Far from racist or sexist (as you say) the poem is a document of troubled witness. The faces of the Negroes in the poem probably look like mine if I worked at Benwood amongst the raging heat. That the African Americans are called Negroes is hardly an epithet. “Negro,” prior to our sixties semantic evolution to “black” and “black American” and the subsequent evolution to “African American,” was, for the most part, a complex descriptor of a people. Sure: given the apartheid of the times, it is fair to say that all descriptions of blacks are suspect but my mother would often say that she never minded being called a Negro any more than a Jewish American would mind being called a Jew or an Italian American would mind being called an Italian. In fact, “Negro” held special meaning for her because she felt removed from both Africa and America because of the reality of the enslavement of Africans and its continuation in Jim Crow regulations. The term Negro signified a problem of being at once “housed and unhoused,” and the word “unhoused” was a word I often heard my mother say. The term Negro was a lot like the descriptor “Jew” because, according to my momma, it was referenced to yet removed from a particular country, reminiscent of struggle and resilience, and reflective of a Diaspora. I once remember my mother saying, if someone wanted to call us a “prejudiced” term (I rarely heard “racist” growing up) they just say “nigger.”
I point out these things to argue that James Wright’s use of the term “Negro” in the poem can hardly be called racist as you say. On the contrary, Wright’s speaker includes African Americans within his description of the cultural life of the environment. The speaker also refers to Polacks—the working white male Polish men no doubt 1st, 2nd or even 3rd generation immigrants.
The tone of the poem is one of both empathy and lament—lament at the state of the men and women’s lives. Nothing is sexist about describing the women as hens (”pullets”) nearly chained to the homestead, waiting for their ashamed husbands to come home, “dying for love.” Nor is it sexist to say that the men are “ashamed”—they have a hard time providing for their families; that may be one of the reasons for their shame. Insofar as the lines that refer to women capture the trapped domesticity and blighted longing of the women, these lines actually comment decisively on the limited range of the women’s experiences. These are not happy hens waiting comfortably for their menfolk to come home. They are starved and dying for love; trapped in a difficult existence.
The tension and challenge of bearing witness in the poem is captured in its most revelatory descriptor, “suicidally beautiful”—because the sons of these diverse people, meeting in battle on the football field (probably one of the few integrated places in a small town) carry the burden and the hope of their working families’ struggles in this small mid-Western town’s Fall football ritual.
I haven’t commented on the construction of the poems’ twelve lines of uneven, free verse construction, or the way the line endings carry the poem to a place of simultaneous emotional irresolution and descriptive surety. There is, as always, much to say. I memorized this poem as a child when an African American librarian gave it to me to read in a little mimeographed group of papers along with some poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and a few other poets. When I recited the poem back to myself after reading your post I realized that I always left out the word “Therefore” in the fourth to the last line. I remember thinking that this word “Therefore” on its own line was terribly didactic, constituting the only flaw in the dramatization of the poem’s lines. But, today even that word does not seem to diminish the poem’s effectiveness.
Please “close read” (as academics used to call careful textual analysis) the poems referenced within your posts if you are going to indict them. Walk us through the particularity of their invention if you are going to examine them as political artifacts reflective of one side or another of a blistering cultural divide. At least then your damnation of a poem will be supported by textual analysis.
~JDJ
How many of you are the “graved faced negro”? Maybe one? How many of you are the clucking woman in the kitchen? Why is it that white men must at every instance protect their dominance? Why can’t whiteness ever see itself—ever? Even fifty years into the present? The act of embracing and then fortressing around canons, taking fire at contemporary attempts by a poet to deconstruct, or rather dismantle and thus, expose whiteness in poetics . . . I am not a graved face negro, whether covered in coal dust or not. But, whiteness, as it seeks to present contrasts and distinctions, as it seeks to differentiate so that the gaze remains outward, whiteness paints my face gray and soots it up with a black dust.
Posted By: L.N. on July 16, 2008 at 8:50 amAnd, whiteness, too, is a complex and contradictory power. It simultaneously seeks to incorporate difference and so even blackness could respond in its defense as we see here in the responses of those in the humanities. As capital imbricates with notions of whiteness and liberal universality, canons are produced—of sociology, of science, of history, of literature. And, it must protect these canons in order to ensure its survival. In fact, how could canonical (and racialized) literature exist without critique on the grounds of race and gender? Why shouldn’t it be swept under the lens of criticism? Should it not be held accountable, especially if this is the literature we choose to teach? The products of (and protectors of) canons must ensure the illustration of all subalterns as a product of some aberrant or unique or special or interesting difference. Canons, deeming themselves egalitarian twist the notion of equality. The canon states it is open to all—who meet its criteria, criteria developed by those who established the idea of “canon.” And so the canon assists capital in this way—how could capital or the canon continue its alliance with a purported rational inequality if negroes were not graved face and women were not clucking in kitchens? The canon, and thus, you folks here, need us to be these people so that you can remain the good sons; so that you can retain all the benefits and privileges the canon produces for you. If we stopped clucking, if we washed the soot off our faces and took your jobs, what would you do for a living?
As a conscious Black woman, I’m glad I have never had to have any of you as professors—I can see that as a Black woman, I’d have to be something else for you to see my ideas as valid. I’d feel lonely and isolated in your classroom, just like so many of your students of color probably do. Or maybe these students aren’t feeling this way, because your teaching and the teaching of so many like you have continued to do its historic job of silencing us or teaching us how to not even know that the subaltern can and should speak.
Mark,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 9:41 amYou asked pretty much the same question (and it’s an interesting one!) in a post of couple weeks back on Linton Kwesi Johnson, requesting feedback as you did. I wrote back with the below comment, hoping for some discussion, but alas… So I thought I’d post most of that answer again, in case you had missed it.
(And note to everyone: Here is my vote for Harriet Comment of the Year to JDJ. His long, serious meditation above deserves careful consideration–and if I may say so, his points #1 and #2 go directly to issues I have raised in response to Mark’s thought-provoking interventions–JDJ’s #1, in fact, is asked at a slightly different angle, below, in this reposting.)
Also to say, Mark, since you favorably quote a comment by Daisy Fried, which is, in turn, a direct response to a critique I had made about something related to your posts on Claudia Jones, I thought I would mention that I offer a reply to Daisy (as well as Michael Robbins), under your first post re: Jones (Left of Karl Marx: I)
OK, here is that first comment. It is quite apropos your post here:
>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, 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
I’m going to say something about the above comment by “LN” which may well get me in trouble. Maybe it will get nixed by the Harriet board.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 10:35 amBut I think it’s important to say it, and to say it without much delay.
There is a lot of emotion, obviously, invested in LN’s comment. I don’t in any way deny her right to express it.
But it is misplaced, and its particular channeling here is unfair, inasmuch as the post rather transparently implies that those who have responded to Mark are guided by racist, misogynist, or anti-working class sentiment.
The implication is over-the-top, and it would be a shame if this post had the effect of guilt-tripping anyone and closing off certain perfectly legitimate caveats or critiques offered here in response to Mark Nowak’s important posts.
Kent
L.N.,
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 16, 2008 at 11:20 amNo one has suggested, yet, that poetry, even “canonical” poetry, is above criticism. My particular argument was, however, that when poems are used as evidence for a bigger argument about society or politics, they (the poems) often get deformed in the process.
Are you saying that “whiteness” - the power of racism - simply controls all official, established or “canonized” discourse and literature? This is a reductive conspiracy theory - even granted the deep-rooted racism in US society.
As evidence for my argument, I would simply point to Wright’s poem. What you seem to be reading as a malicious form of objectification (of women, of African-Americans), I read as an act of recognition and sympathy. Here is my paraphrase of Wright’s poem :
“In autumn, at harvest time, I think of the weariness of laboring men, black and white together, oppressed not only by their conditions, but by their own humiliated sense of (masculine) pride - a pride which gets transferred, psychologically, to their sons - who act it out in a game (football) which glorifies victory through violent masculine strength. (In so doing, they also act out a symbolic image of the war going on at the same time period (Vietnam) - where the sons of the fathers are also fighting and dying, for real.)”
How this poem gets to be read as an evil act of literary manipulation by the white power structure, you and Mark will have to explain to me again.
As John Guillory argues in Cultural Capital (which I will plug until Harriet pries my copy from my cold dead fingers), the canon debate is an ideological obfuscation of the declining relevance of humanities programs in the university system, & is only incidentally a question about white male oppression. It is, on the other hand, very much a question of representation of the dominant economic order. The canon, like capitalism itself, is untroubled by the shifting valuation of the work of women writers & poets of color (&, as Guillory points out, the representation of blacks (say) in the canon does not have the same social effects as the representation of women). Toni Morrison can enter the canon & only right-wing ideologues who themselves misunderstand the terms of the debate emit nervous clucks. The purpose of the canon has always been to identify a body of knowledge whose appropriation indicates membership in the dominant class.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 16, 2008 at 11:21 amIt is a mistake to identify the canon as the locus of social struggle — on the one hand because the rise of what Guillory, following Barbara & John Ehrenreich, calls the professional-managerial class has displaced literary knowledge as a requisite form of cultural capital (no one cares whether CEOs can quote Gray), & on the other because to even accept the opposition of canonical vs. non-canonical works aids the right wing by reinforcing its imaginary conception of the university as a distribution center of dangerous social capital. Fetishizing the curriculum, as Mark & LN do here, leaves the distribution of capital untouched. I daresay the class of owners & managers would be perfectly happy to have intellectuals fighting about whether James Wright’s period-specific use of the word “Negro” is indicative of canonical exclusion of African-Americans, if they even took note of it, which they don’t. LN & Mark, with whose social critique I am largely in sympathy (although I’m not sure this would be conceded by either of them), misunderstand the nature of the syllabus, whose primary purpose is not (or is no longer) to reinforce social ideations, but to insure the reproduction of the social institution within which it is produced. The solution is to start asking ourselves how to ensure, not equal representation within cultural capital, but equal distribution of cultural capital.
Thanks all (esp JDJ and L.N.) for the detailed responses to my post. I admit my comment on Wright was overly brief (it wasn’t the point of my post, which was about agency and repression), but as a hero to many let me say why I’ve been less than warm to this particular poem for a very long time.
Posted By: Mark Nowak on July 16, 2008 at 11:49 am1.) First, to JDJ’s comment: “Polack” isn’t the same as “Italian,” Polish is (or Poles). Like you, my mom and dad (the former a clerical worker, the latter a Westinghouse worker in Buffalo and union VP) told me about naming and to *never* allow anyone to call me that (or to call anyone that). “Polack” is an ethnic slur, a disparaging adjective for a person of Polish descent. Its connotations are dumb, stupid, drunk, etc. Just google “polack joke” and you’ll come up with everything from “The Canonical List of Polish Jokes” to JSTOR entries on “American Numskull Tales: The Polack Joke” to contemporary versions on stupidity among the Polish troops in Iraq.
2.) As the grandson of a “Polack” steelworker who nursed his share of beers in Lackawana/Buffalo and who wasn’t “afraid” to go home to his Rosie the Riveter/Teamster wife (who dropped out of grade school to clean houses for the more well-to-do, & who you’d dare never refer to as a “pullet” or you *should* be afraid), the characterizations made by Wright continue to strike me as highly problematic. Because a poem is supposedly lyrically and representationally accurate in certain stereotypical ways doesn’t do much for me (rather than reinforcing those stereoptypes). So let me say that Wright’s poem, to me, is highly problematic in terms of its reading /representation of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. This isn’t an imposition of “political correctness”—everyone is free to read the poem as they see it; I’m simply articulating my long-standing problems with Wright’s poem.
3.) Moreso, and this ties into what was actually the main point of my comment on agency and canonicity, Wright’s poem in many ways seems to me to have become a kind of model/blueprint for five decades of working-class poetry (and I’ve already said much of this before, in my “Like a Rock?” post). To deny that canons and anthologies matter (and my sense is that the people who write these comments are often those editing and struggling to get into them—and pissed when they’re not, as we all are); that people teach them in public universities and community colleges as well as Ivy League and private schools (where at least two generations of students have been reading about Wright’s “Polacks” and “gray faces of Negroes,” and where workers are over and over and over and over portrayed, as I cited from Cary Nelson, mired and hopeless amidst “political indecision lived out in uneasy inner anguish and external inaction”—what a great way to keep working-class kids of all backgrounds in place!)…well, I don’t know what to say in response to that other than to say we’ll have to cite a difference of opinion (though I’d be curious to know where most people first read Wright’s poem if not in a classroom, library, and/or anthology—my initiation, to fully disclose, was A. Poulin’s *Contemporary American Poetry* during my senior year of college, after I switched from being an engineering major to a computer science major to an English major, each at different schools).
4.) As for “the social awareness that poem’s careful construction performs,” well, expanding on LN’s comment, I’d say that a reading of Wright’s poem together with, say, David Roediger’s *The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class* would be a useful exercise; additionally, I’d read phrases like “Their sons grow suicidally beautiful” through both Paul Willis’ *Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs* (as well as Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s critique of Willis, “Girls and Subcultures”). Again, maybe this is more work than many want to do when reading a poem—I’m simply articulating particular “social awareness[es]” that I’m bringing to a reading of Wright’s poem, and why the poem’s hegemonic hold bothers me.
5.) Finally, I can see from the ongoing commentary here that if I’m going to continue to write about left literary traditions from the 1930s-1950s up to the present, I’ll have to write even lengthier posts (these are blogs, after all, not essays, though they often feel like the latter) that flush out failings of the CPUSA, SWP, and other movements. I’m used to writing for and speaking in places where this kind of material is old, tired news, but if it’s what’s required here, well… I’m more than happy to repeat those problems here, just as I am to outline the troubles with the USAmerican labor movement, the AFL-CIO, the SEIU (particularly their actions at the recent Labor Notes conference in Detroit), the rank & file democratic union reform movements, etc. etc.
Michael Robbins nicely said:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 12:17 pm>LN & Mark, with whose social critique I am largely in sympathy (although I’m not sure this would be conceded by either of them), misunderstand the nature of the syllabus, whose primary purpose is not (or is no longer) to reinforce social ideations, but to insure the reproduction of the social institution within which it is produced. The solution is to start asking ourselves how to ensure, not equal representation within cultural capital, but equal distribution of cultural capital.
Exactly, and elegantly put. It’s precisely what I argue, as well (albeit a bit less academically) above!
Kent
So Mark, you’re saying that based on your own family history and your extended reading and experience with working-class people & history, Wright’s poem is somehow illegitimate as an expression of sympathy for a perceived reality? Are you denying the main focus of the poem, which is about how hurt masculine pride gets displaced or transferred through generations?
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 16, 2008 at 12:34 pmI think this poem walks a very fine line between sympathy and contempt. It is clearly open to attack - attacks like yours - as a patronizing poem, by a literary mandarin (about working people, about women, about sports…). Wright himself, I believe, was a child of working-class parents from this part of the country (figured in the poem). But that’s neither here nor there : the poem stands or falls on its own merits.
But I think the sympathy wins out. The undercurrent of contempt is felt mostly here as empathetic SELF-contempt - which is, again, the poem’s very THEME. So the poem resonates partly BECAUSE it walks this fine line. Wright identifies with this scene, and the sympathy - the empathy - comes across. Your taking offense at “Polack” is misplaced, because Wright is characterizing them as such only in order to BE WITH them. This is the irony of using such a term - because here, in this case, the speaker is NOT insulting them; he’s evoking a stereotype in order to move through it.
I really fear for literature if we can only say positive uplifting major-chord things about perceived victims of the power structure….. so long reality, hello socialist realism… but this poem is an elegy.
Henry,
Posted By: Mark Nowak on July 16, 2008 at 1:07 pmElegies for/on/about the working class (a lament for the deceased?) are the standard (hegemonic) fare–again, as I’m trying to imply in my post(s), why not a similar number of poems where the working class is portrayed as engaged, has agency? Why a massive flood of the former (elegy-esque) and an utter drought of the latter (agency)? I’m not proposing socialist realism; I am curious, however, as to why the working class is ever so seldom engaged in a movement toward change in so much poetry published post-HUAC. I also think your reading strategies are simply very different from mine. I simply can’t see, as you do in Wright’s poem, “laboring men, black and white together”–they are in separate lines in the poem, in separate locations (neither in the stadium is one reading of it, where the speaker is thinking of them in separate locations–”Polacks” drinking in Tiltonsville while the “gray faces of Negroes” are *in* (curious word choice) the Benwood blast furnace, & all in–I might add–southern Ohio/West Virginia during Jim Crow in the later 1950s (& prior to Kennedy’s escalation in Vietnam)). One can read racialization throughout the rest of Wright and form opinions of either his sympathies or reinscription of racialized stereotypes in poems like “I Am A Sioux Brave, He Said In Minneapolis” and “A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862″.
Mark
One point worth making in this conversation is the limitation of the archetypal image, the idea that one image can stand in for the whole experience of a class of people. That would be one problem with the Wright poem, but it would also be a problem to replace those images with any other one single image of the types of people he images, even if the replacement images were more positive. While writers sometimes do this with with wealthy or middle class white people as well (consider the concept of Babbitt), it has often been tempting to use these kinds of archetypes to represent groups of people that we don’t know, or to use such images as a way of imaging collective solidarity, as much social realism did.
Posted By: Mark Wallace on July 16, 2008 at 1:43 pmIs it still worth imaging collective solidarity in that kind of way at all? Maybe, but I’m not sure. I think symbols rather than archetypal images might be more successful simply because they don’t impose a singular human face on a complex picture, and of course more detailed and varied descriptions might work as well. On the level of the image, I think most of us realize that working class people have different personalities too (how about that for the obvious?) and so are as varied as people of any other class, although the issue of class and the notion of personality is well worth exploring. Then again, the overwhelming power of the single image (think of the image of the distressed child) sure has the power to rile people, though not always in a worthwhile way.
Why is it that when a person of color, particularly African American, and women, particularly Black women respond in critique to the unmarked dominance of whiteness that people (men and white men in particular) suddenly become *sympathetic.* Empathy might be the more correct and more genuine allied response. Particularly if one was going to truly respond to a person of color who provides an honest and intellectual comment on the racialized and gendered imagery and (’a’ or) illusion in Wright’s poem. Two respondents here had “sympathy” for my comments and trivialized the critical aspects of my response. This is a stereotypical response that I’ve experienced before—it’s a response of no response, because perhaps the person doesn’t know how to. As whiteness remains unmarked, virtually nameless, it is also, then, less experienced with seeing itself and how it may offend ‘Others’ or absorb difference or, too, oppress it.
Posted By: L.N. on July 16, 2008 at 1:49 pmCertainly, Wright didn’t know that his “lines” were, indeed, condescending. He thought he was being kind, sympathetic, even, perhaps, a white ally. But, it is not sympathy that I as a woman of color want or need, and certainly not from white people. I’d take empathy because it’s more authentic and begins to demonstrate an effort to get down to the systemic portions of race. But, more importantly, I want a critical engagement with whiteness in both intellectual and social realms. What I don’t want is to be trivialized down to my “emotions”: all women are emotional, all Black women are “angry.” And you see, this is exactly what Wright’s poem elicits and perpetuates. The poem is one amongst many literary devices that permits whiteness/heteronormativity/the liberal universal to respond with impunity and a continued “dangerous” lack of critical racial and gender consciousness to *notions* of blackness (in poetry, in any discursive act)–even those containing sympathetic motives–notions that portray us as in need of pity. And the reader, then, never will, is never forced to respond to race and the unnamed quality of whiteness that lies as author and undercurrent of the poem.
We need to ask who wrote the poem, always. We need to always inquire why did they write it. We must question motives, text, layout, and we must always place the poem inside of its historical context–i.e., what was capital trying to *do* in the late ’50s? What were capital’s needs and in what ways might providing sympathetic images inside of poems of gray-faced negroes and cackling women in kitchens help capital to make sense of difference for liberal, sympathetic white folks, and as well, create labor (Black, white, Asian, Latino) to clean and cook in white folks’ kitchens, to melt their iron ore, or to build their atom bombs?
When poetry dares to discuss race or to use it as a symbol, as an image, for whatever reason or benefit, it should not do so out of pity. Poetry should respond to this racialized world as Mark Nowak has done consistently in his work and on this blog (which, by the way, has never really seen the likes of such critique in its very white realm . . . because we all must admit, the poetry world is dominated by white people. Go to a Chicago or NYC or Boston poetry event any time and see who *isn’t* present in the audience and at the podium when traditional or even “modern” white poets head the bill): by deconstructing it, exposing it, taking words and allowing students to ask questions of them. I know many conscious and political people of color and many white, working class people who read Mark Nowak’s work because they feel represented, authentically, because it is their voice that’s on the page and not some fabricated portrayal for creativity’s (or white guilt’s) sake. Can other white poets say the same of their readership? Look out at the audiences of your poetry readings. Are they mainly white? And right now I’ll stop you and let you know that the reason they are mainly white is not because people of color just don’t know your work, or couldn’t afford the bus fare to your reading, or just don’t live in your/the town, or just don’t come to “these types of events.” It’s because we fear what you might say about us or that, in fact, we might be invisible—again—or that your own whiteness may remain invisible—again. bell hooks once wrote that the reason she hated going to Hollywood movies was because she feared what they might say (or how they might portray) us. That’s what I feel when I walk into “your” poetry events, when I read “your” comments to blogs—what might they say about people like me that’ll be wrong, ignorant, that might demonstrate a continued lack of perception.
To Kent, for a moment. I must say that I have been reading your criticism, which is of just about every poet who is blogging here. I can see why you defend Wright and attack Nowak. You are the one who faked being a Japanese Holocaust survivor for creativity’s sake. Only whiteness could usurp so much power that it could do such a thing. And so, Kent, an intellectual engagement with you on race and with your sympathy is an engagement with false generosity, as Paulo Freire once wrote, and with something I can’t trust. To defend Wright and attack Nowak is to, indeed, protect your own dreaded deed perpetrated long ago. Those of my friends who are Japanese, whose family members burned in the hell the U.S. created back then detest what you did. To fake a race and one that survives a lifelong burn white people created and then to defend a poem that portrays sappy, sympathetic images of Black folks and women as though they were chickens always “wed” to a kitchen burner says something about whiteness. It has the privilege (and power) to snarl and bite and make such behavior seem normative; to take on other, “risqué” forms and be lauded for it; to use old stereotypes of women and Black people to attempt to shut them up, trivialize their words, and push them aside for the supposedly greater intellectual debates. You have implied that we’re emotional, that our truths spoken might shut down white people. And what if it did for just a moment, how would it make you “feel” if the white folks actually shut up, shut down in the face of their own whiteness for just the moment that it takes to read a blog response? What if? Would it hurt as much as those reading about a white man pretending to be of color and a “sympathetic”-of-color-character as well?
L.N.,
Posted By: Corey on July 16, 2008 at 4:04 pmI’m with you on the political (and epistemological) blindness of whiteness, taking what it sees (and how it sees) to be normative–it’s times like these that I wish Charles Mills had a blog.
But I’ve always found the explanatory power of Marxist criticism (which I’m categorizing your critique–perhaps mistakenly–as a species of) to be lacking. Capital doesn’t want anything–people influenced by cultures and stories do. The response that it is the accumulation of capital that creates a culture that espouses racist/patriarchal/heteronormative ideology doesn’t hold when you look at the varieties of culture, people, ideologies that exist in countries with their various forms of capitalism, to say nothing of the fact that more socialist countries have had the same problems. This leads me to believe that the roots of the problem lie elsewhere.
Mark,
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 16, 2008 at 4:38 pmon reading strategies - have you read much Walt Whitman? The notion of the catalogue? Or parallelism (2 lines which repeat the same idea in a different way)?
The fact that “negro” & “Polack” don’t occur together in the same lines, or the same bars, doesn’t mean they can’t represent, in this poem, the same experience -
the fact that this poem might have come from the Jim Crow era in W. Virginia doesn’t negate the point Wright is trying to make, with this parallelism -
& actually the fact that they appear in separate lines tends to EMPHASIZE, rhetorically, their kinship. Rhetorically, if not historically - that is, emotionally, if not chronologically - which is another thing poems tend to do (maybe because Historical Prose tends to overlook these rhymes) -
but you’re not interested, really, in the GOOD things in this poem -
here’s another poem by James Wright. How does this fit in with your idea of class division? I read it as an echo of the Good Samaritan story -
HOOK
I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.
I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.
Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.
Ain’t got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?
What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.
Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.
Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?
I took it.
It wasn’t the money I needed.
But I took it.
- then again, I suppose the “hook” could be critiqued as an iconic “hook” applying the ethnic
difference of the Native American on behalf of an hegemonic literary motive… hey, o.k. I grew up in Mpls. I identify with the cold & the bus stops. Here’s some lines from a poem of mine, based on an experience in the bus station in Lincoln Nebraska, when I was hitchiking around several decades ago. Wright’s poem, which I found only today, surprised me - since it seemed related to this experience :
I’M A MAN, the Sioux man said to me
in the Lincoln Nebraska bus terminal
a quarter of a century ago. Soul
shows where spirit and body
leave no shadow - noon, gnomon.
And the grain scrapes like a seed
underfoot. Drifter, water moccasin.
Part with eternity now, MY SON, MY SON.
Mark Nowak said:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 4:40 pm>Finally, I can see from the ongoing commentary here that if I’m going to continue to write about left literary traditions from the 1930s-1950s up to the present, I’ll have to write even lengthier posts (these are blogs, after all, not essays, though they often feel like the latter) that flush out failings of the CPUSA, SWP, and other movements.
No, no, Mark, it’s not that simple or easy.
Please see my comments down yonder, under your original “Left of Marx: Part I,” where I also respond to the post you quoted of Daisy Fried’s.
And remember that I am on your side…
(by the way, where are those poets so influenced, once upon a time, by Marxism, the Language poets? Wouldn’t this be a great discussion to enter and to talk about their commitments to the “Politics of Form”?)
Kent
LN,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 4:43 pmI may respond to your comments regarding Yasusada later.
For now, I wanted just to say:
1) I said nothing about James Wright.
2) I am emotional, just like you. Why you would take my reference to emotion as some kind of subtextual marker of race is beyond me. Your post was *obviously* charged with emotion. Or wasn’t it?
Kent
Just a note on LN’s very angry comments regarding Yasusada, which she refers to as a “dreaded deed.” (May I refer to your comments here as “very angry,” LN, or would that be racist, too?)
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 6:40 pmThere has been a great deal written about the Yasusada works over the years, much of it very thoughtful, and the discussion certainly continues. I frankly don’t feel that LN’s somewhat ad hominem remarks here add very much that is productive.
So I will abstain from getting into the general topic–this is not a discussion about Yasusada anyway.
I WILL say, though, in response to her comment re: her “Japanese friends who detest what you did”–and without getting into the question of the “you,” since pronouns, whether some people like it or not, are hardly settled in the Yasusada work:
I have Japanese friends, too, LN, and their reaction is not the same at all as the reaction expressed by yours. Japanese readers, it seems, tend to be as non-essentialized as any other ethnic group in their varied opinions of a work that has had a complex variety of reception over the years… In fact, the author of the Afterword essay in the second Yasusada book, Hosea Hirata, author of books on Japanese literature (since we’ve been talking about the academy so much!) from Princeton and Harvard, and Chair of Asian Languages at Tufts University, writes there movingly of his relatives from Hiroshima. And to him, Yasusada is hardly what you seem to think he is…
May I suggest a return to more measured language in this discussion?
Kent
On second thought, no. L.N., this discussion isn’t about Kent Johnson and your comments weren’t cool. I think it’s great that Mark’s posts always generate lots of discussion which, frankly, you can’t find too many other places online, at least not at this level. But not fully embracing deconstructionism and radical marxism is not the same a rejection of the same race/class/gender goals you want for the world. It’d be nice if liberal cosmopolitanism became the operating ideology for much of the world, but I don’t think it’s going to happen (nor realistic). But that doesn’t make Kwame Anthony Appiah some sort of apologist for racism or other failings of the current order.
Posted By: Corey on July 16, 2008 at 10:10 pmEh, whatever, not going to hijack this thread and turn it into a different discussion. Just felt something should be said.
Kent,
Posted By: john on July 17, 2008 at 12:40 amThere’s a history in Western thought of opposing emotion to reason and of conferring upon white males an alleged monopoly on reason, relegating men of color and all women (and children) to the emotional; so, when a man points out that a woman is “being emotional,” the historical echo is, “and therefore unreasonable”; it’s a rhetorical tactic meant to discount the testimony of men of color and all women beforehand. As I recall, you haven’t bothered to point out the emotionality of others’ comments in these parts; for example, Henry’s anger at Mark’s different reading of the Wright poem.
Mark Nowak and LN have made a persuasive case that racism and sexism mar Wright’s poem.
p.s. For me, your non-denial of the Yasusada authorship settles the question for good.
LN,
Posted By: Farid Matuk on July 17, 2008 at 1:00 amNo doubt that “whiteness” extends beyond racist ideologies and practice (wouldn’t it be great if that’s all we had to deal with?!). But I want to complicate the idea that “the political (and epistemological) blindness of whiteness, taking what it sees (and how it sees) to be normative,” (Corey’s formulation) is the whole story.
You may already know Eric Lott’s study *Love & Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.* Lott details the messy inter-dependencies of class, racial, and ethnic formulations that occurred both onstage and in the audience of 19th-century minstrel shows. More importantly, he leans on Zizek to suggest ways these performances served various nationalist agendas: “‘The basic paradox’ of people’s attachment to a nation, writes Slavoj Zizek, is that it is ‘conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it’” (Lott 97).
I wonder if replacing Zizek’s “nation” with “race” might not help you think through your critique of the Yasusada project. Beyond reasoning that whiteness is racism or racist appropriations of authentic subject positions, it seems to me that whiteness is race as such. Wouldn’t it be the darkest of tragedies if in inhabiting/performing/defending our own racialized subject positions we were in fact not only butressing whiteness (such would be the old po-mo critique of multi-culturalism, and it doesn’t fully wash with me, not least of which because too often othered bodies do not get to choose their own performances) but also instantiating whiteness in our very bodies? Perhaps by your own understanding of whiteness as a will-toward-appropriation you can begin to ask, When is a white man most white if not while engaging in a minstrel performance? And herein lies what to me has been the very valuable critique offered by the (on-going) Yasusada project: that all of its elaborations and feints can be reduced to a single assertion: it is a white text representing whiteness for a (largely) white audience. As both performance and critique, it is the single most astute body of work to have taken whitness to task in the preceding decades outside perhaps the work of the conceptual artist Daniel J. Martinez. In fact, Martinez is famous, or infamous, for his work with the old Diogenese quote, “In the rich man’s house the only place to spit, is in his face.” The Yasusada project is the mirror to whiteness that directs that spit toward a maddeningly and necessaryly self-reflexive trajectory.
Re-reading LN’s comments to me, I only now noticed this:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 17, 2008 at 9:22 am>To Kent, for a moment. I must say that I have been reading your criticism, which is of just about every poet who is blogging here.
If I may be allowed to respond to the rather personal charge:
The statement is utterly false.
Kent
Just have to disagree with you, John. I don’t think Mark or LN have presented persuasive arguments that Wright’s poem exhibits “sexist, racist machismo”. The problem addressed by the poem is, indeed, machismo; but neither the characterization of the unloved women (unloved because of the men’s entrapment in male shame/pride) nor the image of the “gray faces of Negroes” are examples of racism or sexism. Unless are going to rule out any less-than-positive imagery of people based on their race, class, gender, ethnicity. Context & intention are very important, obviously, in making such judgements. I read Wright’s intention as both sympathetic and empathetic, not derogatory. JDJ, above, put this better than I have.
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 17, 2008 at 10:21 amI understand this debate is a deflection from Mark’s principal question, which has to do with the KINDS of characterizations of working-class people which are prevalent and canonized in poetry. It is the contrast between Patchen’s & Wright’s poem that Mark is pointing out in this regard. But in the course of making his point, I think he misjudged the quality of Wright’s poem.
The comments stream following Mark’s compelling post has amplified extraordinarily into (I hope) a useful discussion of race and ideology. Farid’s response to L. N.’s unfair and ad hominem rejection of the Yasusada project offers insightful ways to understand that project–helping me see even more clearly something I’ve always been in sympathy with. The unfortunate thing, however, is that L. N.’s comments seem to deny any points of adherence with perspectives that challenge her own. Without some adherence to shared possibilities–and here I do see sympathy utterly at stake–nothing can be accomplished.
Posted By: Dale Smith on July 17, 2008 at 10:38 amAnd to shift the topic somewhat back to Mark’s good post:
“[Cary] Nelson,” he writes, “pointedly asserts that ‘English professors should be pressed to explain why, for example, the poetry sung by striking coal miners in the 1920s is so much less important than the appearance of The Waste Land in The Dial in 1922.’
Any takers?”
Actually, many English professors do ask these kinds of questions. The field is large and diverse at this point. People I work with at the University of Texas look at non-canonical work, almost exclusively–particularly in disciplines like American Literature; Ethnic and Third-World Literature; Women, Gender, and Literature; Popular Culture/Cultural Studies/Folklore; and Rhetorical Studies. Perhaps the nature of English Studies was somewhat different when Nelson was writing. I’m not saying that it’s perfect now, but The Waste Land is taught more frequently now in relation to other non-canonical works because many people—particularly younger professors and grad students—are hip to the complex situations in which works are written and performed.
But to take on the question more directly, songs by striking coal miners address a particular audience (striking miners and their cap bosses). Their situation is embedded in a struggle for better wages and safety, etc. Their songs, from our perspective, are studied as part of the rich rhetorical context of that particular event. The rhetorical context of the Waste Land is, uh, more ambiguous and fluid: it casts a big cultural net because it claims to in some way address the spiritual condition of the West at a particular moment in its history. Both situations are interesting to look at—the striking miners and their cultural and social obligations to their cause—and Eliot/Pound, addressing the more privileged readers of The Dial. There may even be some overlap in those audiences—and that could be interesting to consider rhetorically. New Criticism seems to have invented itself to deal with a literary production of meaning, and it developed ways of casting its own large net over texts that helped justify certain literary occupations.
I think the problem that Nelson identifies has to do with the history of English Studies and its ongoing transformation. The university is a conservative institution and it takes a long time for people working in it to adapt other perspectives. There are class issues at stake here, certainly. But that’s not the whole story, either. Part of it is a failure of imagination and of the labor required to read the points of adherence and conflict in largely rhetorically constructed situations.
I’m going to stay out of this one now it’s got so emotional, but I want to say that if empathy is the desideratum, one need look no further than Yasusada’s fine work.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 17, 2008 at 11:42 amOn L.N., Kent, anger, etc. :
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 17, 2008 at 12:03 pmLN made a serious argument, about the effects of cultural hegemony, & Kent’s scolding her about anger was unnecessary. But LN’s personal attack on Kent, in response, was pretty ugly. If you want to deal with the “Yasusada” issue, it will take more than this kind of condemnatory ad hominem trashing.
As far as LN’s argument, about the unholy alliance of whiteness, capital, universalism, etc. : I think the essentializing of “whiteness” as some kind of metaphysical, determinative causal category, is a form of racism itself.
The history of unequal, violent and oppressive power relations between races and ethnic groups in the US, with white Americans holding the upper hand, is obviously there for everyone to see. But to argue, as a consequence, that there is a monolithic, malignant, hegemonic ideology which continues to enforce this “rule”, is something else again. Unfortunately, at this time in the world, humanity suffers from oppressions of many kinds and conditions. Instead of brotherhood or sisterhood or neighborliness, we have racial hatred, bigotry and chauvinism. And these evils are not restricted to one race or another. To posit a special “whiteness” and single it out for condemnation is, I repeat, racism.
Of course it is not the place of a white person to lecture an African-American about correct thinking and behavior. The history is too long and bitter, the divisiveness too deep, the injustice flows almost completely one way. These kinds of debates often just increase the misunderstanding & bitterness, unfortunately. “Why can’t they see things the way I do?” is everyone’s cry.
I respect L.N.’s evidence for the way literature in the US, historically, has almost automatically been tilted and distorted by mono-racial dominance. Call it racial chauvinism; call it simply racism; call it indifference; call it ignorance; call it complacency; call it malice, even. But when you use the term “whiteness” to define this phenomenon, you are arguing that the effects of racial dominance flow directly from whiteness itself - and as if the good moral qualities of “subaltern” peoples stemmed simply from their “Blackness” (or “otherness”). This is racialist thinking; it doesn’t work toward the breaking-down of racial barriers & inequalities & stereotypes, rather it strengthens them. We are ultimately “defined” by our humanity - nothing more, nothing less.
I feel like I’m re-arguing debates which filled the 1990s, and doing it with faulty and imperfect weapons and certainly limited viewpoint. I apologize for that… nobody has the whole story when it comes to race relations in the US, that is one thing for sure.
Henry,
Posted By: john on July 17, 2008 at 12:05 pmI am sympathetic to your P.O.V. as well, that Wright intended sympathy. These issues are complex as well as emotionally fraught.
To my view, racism (”Polack”) and sexism (”pullet”) mar Wright’s sympathetic imagination (which, I agree with you, is there as well). Literary history is rich with the well-meaning condescension of social reformers and humanistic sympathizers. What is wrong with people to whom the well-meaningness is directed objecting to the condescension? Or are they just supposed to . . . what? Take it? Make allowances for the moral failings of the member of the dominant class? (The poor dear meant well, after all.) (This applies to the Yasusada case as well; not that “the Yasusada author” intended racism, but an objection to the [probably?] satirically intended Orientalized English is valid too. And the spectacle of provocateurs or their defenders whining about it when they succeed in provoking people is . . . what? An extension of the satire into the expropriation of victimization? Is it part of the performance? I happen to find it annoying. What does a provocateur expect?)
And now, by trying to play the fair-minded arbiter, I may have condescended to everybody. If so, my apologies.
Of course, LN already made the same points about condescension and the rhetorical tactic of discounting non-white-male people as “emotional.” I don’t find her “attack” on Kent to be ad hominem; it’s a response to work that he does not deny having done.
Posted By: john on July 17, 2008 at 12:32 pmHer point of normativity is exactly right. Wright’s poem, and the Yasusada work, imagine a white male reader — the generalized reader to whom the majority of Western literature has historically been addressed. I’m certain that Kent has Japanese friends sympathetic to his work, and that people of all stripes have found it of value. But that does not discount the undeniably privileged position from which he made the work, nor the volatility of the materials he handled. Literary ventriloquism has angered people when handling much less volatile material. I don’t blame people for feeling burned.
John,
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 17, 2008 at 1:34 pmhas it occurred to you that you might be condescending to Wright? The poem’s speaker is situated in the football field of the poet’s own home town. Wright’s own family was Irish working-class, his father frequently laid off from the glass factory during the Depression. I’m sure between the Irish & the Polish workers, there were a lot of ethnic nicknames slung back & forth, both in malice and affection.
You’d like to paint Wright as a member of some elite writerdom, condescending to ordinary folk. I say, simply read his work as a whole. His poems are focused on the down-&-out, the outcast, with whom he consistently identified.
In this particular poem, it’s not the poet, it’s the MEN in the poem, who have turned their wives into starved “pullets”. That’s his point : he’s not writing a poem about women in general, good or bad; he’s not even writing about working-class people in general, as Mark insists he must. As I pointed out before, Wright is making a very particular observation about one way that the consequences of humiliation & despair play out.
This gets me back to my original argument. When poems are marshalled as evidence for larger arguments about justice, society, politics, etc., often the poem itself gets watered-down : its particular dramatic or expressive purposes are dismissed : the work is tarred as morally repugnant, etc.
What I’m saying is that the emotional effect toward which this poem is shaped - an elegiac sympathy for a world where people channel pain & violence into aesthetic forms of consolation - draws all its elements into this one effect. And it’s powerful, because the poem itself replicates the process enacted by the football game. It’s not for nothing that the speaker is actually situated in the football stands. He is one with the “Polacks, Negroes, pullets”, & “beautiful” sons - because he’s creating, just like the football team, an aesthetically beautiful object out of pain.
Come on, Henry, do you want, like, total vindication and agreement? (I know I always do!) I already *agreed* with you that the poem has imaginative sympathy.
Posted By: john on July 17, 2008 at 1:59 pmHowever! “Pullet” means “hen.” “Hen” is a cliche sexist animalization of women. Metaphors have emotional consequence. The beat-down men can’t *turn* “their” wives into animals. I find Wright’s signifier disgusting, even as the signified wins my sympathy.
So, the poem works for you. Its implication in historically sexist and racist jargon ruins it for other people. I’m sorry that that upsets you, but I don’t know what to do about it.
TO JOHN:
Posted By: L.N. on July 17, 2008 at 2:11 pmYes. Finally. Thank you so much.
Well, OK, since the topic has been raised, and since various people have weighed in with comments of different kind (some very interesting!), I thought I’d offer this link to the video of a talk I gave on the Yasusada controversies at Walker Arts Center, April 10, in Minneapolis, an event co-sponsored by Rain Taxi Magazine. A very late ice storm raged outside.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 17, 2008 at 2:16 pmThe video lasts about an hour, including Q&A. In it, I directly address a paper on Yasusada that Charles Bernstein has twice delivered, once at the MLA and most recently (a couple months ago) in the UK. As you will see, if you view the video, I find his somewhat misinformed and, well, emotional arguments pretty weak and disappointing. (I’ve directly challenged Bernstein on a few occasions to a public exchange on Yasusada, where the issues can be carefully worked out, but have never had courtesy of reply from him–but one learns to accept, with a smile, certain things in this Literary Field.)
If you go here, you will find a link with my name on the list, which will take you to the talk. Somewhat hilariously, if you had tried to view the video the first few days it was on offer, you would have been taken to a talk given by the wonderful Isabella Rossellini, speaking quite dramatically about acting, with my name running in red beneath… I’ve had a crush on her ever since Blue Velvet.
http://channel.walkerart.org/archive.wac
A written version of the talk will be appearing in a collection of essays on Yasusada, by various poets and critics, to be published next year in England.
Kent
i wish i could give every reader of Johnson’s Yasusada a copy of
Posted By: bill knott on July 17, 2008 at 3:04 pmPoetry of Postwar Japan, edited by Kijima Hajime, published by Iowa U.
in 1975 . . .
but i suspect most of them aren’t interested in reading authentic post-Hiroshima
Japanese poets,
because they prefer “projects” over actual poems . . .
Appropriation seems to be the crux question, whether it’s Wright or Johnson
co-opting the Other for their poetic purposes (see Montale
characterizing Eliot and Pound as “barbarians”) . . .
I never thought that Wright poem was all that good to begin with, and
every comment here makes me disesteem it more . . .
nobody’s responded to Nowak’s point about anthologists preferring to
print this particular poem . . . why select this piece of Wright’s
rather than his “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco”? . . .
. . . at least Wright occasionally TRIED to write political poems
Posted By: bill knott on July 17, 2008 at 4:09 pmsuch as “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco,”
(whether he succeeded is another question),
which is more than the fantabulous New York School of Poets
ever did——
if O’Hara really gave a damn about Billie Holiday, shouldn’t
he have tried to write a docupoem savaging the
racist sexist socioeconomic oppressions that led to her being
suicided-by-society (Artaud’s phrase re Van Gogh) . . .
rather than co-opting her into his normpoem monodrama
narcissistic diarisme . . .
first name Logodaedalus i once heard . . .
Bill Knott said:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 17, 2008 at 6:09 pm>i wish i could give every reader of Johnson’s Yasusada a copy of Poetry of Postwar Japan, edited by Kijima Hajime, published by Iowa U.
Hey Bill, you sound, as they used to say at Stanford, ca. 1989, “angry.” But that’s OK, I wish you could give every reader that, too. I’ve spoken about this and other post-War Japanese and hibakusha poetry many times in different venues. That video I gave link to would be just one.
On Frank O’Hara, I hope you won’t mind if I use your mention of him to point people to a discussion that seems to be attracting a good bit of interest in past couple weeks: It’s currently centered around something I wrote in reply to Tony Towle, wherein I propose, based on a published essay by Tosa Motokiyu, that “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” one of “O’Hara’s” most famous poems, may actually have been written, as radical homage, by Kenneth Koch… Don Share, for one, has linked to the most recent pieces in the discussion on his great (relatively new) blog, Squandermania http://donshare.blogspot.com/ (in these links to posts of past couple days, David Shapiro writes a brilliant and thrilling riposte to me; in my latest, right after David’s, I reveal a previously almost-unknown piece of fascinating material in the O’Hara archives). But if you go to Silliman’s blog in his list of links from, I think, three days ago, you will get other links to comments from Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, the fine O’Hara scholar Andrew Epstein, and yours truly in the discussion. Well, I thought I would mention it since O’Hara has been so much in the news, with our own Daisy Fried giving William Logan a swift kick in the pantaloons over there at the NY Times Book Review!
Anyway, more is to come. But in the meantime, take a deep breath there, Bill, because we all love you!
Kent
My family never had a problem with the word Polack & use the p word the same way some African Americans use the n word.
Posted By: Jilly Zimba/Zhemba-Dybka from Dearborn MI on July 17, 2008 at 7:31 pmBill, don’t be shy, tell us what you really think
Yowza.
Posted By: Matt on July 17, 2008 at 7:33 pmYou and William Logan should get together and go bowling.
(Note to Harriet gatekeepers: that wasn’t a personal comment, that was a pop culture reference. They’re all the rage these days.)
John said: “However! “Pullet” means “hen.” “Hen” is a cliche sexist animalization of women.”
Posted By: Daisy on July 18, 2008 at 8:40 amJohn–
Sometimes women look like pullets. I hate it when men get all needlessly respectful and stuff.
Signed,
A Feminist
And this has been so interesting. Especially as there had been a discussion which seemed to get both at social/political Big Ides, and deal with the particulars of poems; a real Harriet highlight, I thought. But then…
Posted By: Lydia Olidea on July 18, 2008 at 11:59 amI wonder if Harriet could have a policy where anyone was free to post an emoticon– is there one that looks like Kent? — that indicates, “I’ve thought a lot about matters sorta related to this discussion, and if you’d like access to the wealth of my thoughts — and others’ thoughts on my thoughts — and links to people linking to my thoughts — and so on — feel free to email me.” And we could avoid discussion-killing self-promotion parades passing themselves off as thoughtful conversation?
Wait, someone used the internet for self-promotion?!
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 18, 2008 at 12:07 pmA totally irrelevant aside :
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 18, 2008 at 12:55 pmwhen my mother told my grandmother she was going to name me “Henry”, she advised against it. Her uncle was named Henry, and everybody called him “Hen.”
My mother went ahead anyway. Now (but only among close friends & family) I am a cliche sexist animalization of women, along with everything else…
Henrietta
Little Chicken
“but names can never hurt me…”
I’m just going to let this passage of Zizek’s stand for my response to this entire silly argument about James Wright’s fine poem & the cliche (sic) animalization of women:
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 18, 2008 at 2:59 pmTo be slightly cynical, if you read cultural studies texts you would think that sexual harassment, homophobic remarks and so on are the big problems of today. But in reality these are the problems of the American upper-middle classes. So I think we should take a risk and break with what is a contemporary taboo and state clearly that none of these struggles - against harassment, for multiculturalism, gay liberation, cultural tolerance, and so on - is our problem. We shouldn’t get blackmailed into accepting these struggles of upper-middle-class victimization as the horizon of our political engagement. One should simply take this risk and break the taboo - even if one gets criticized for being racist, chauvinist, or whatever. . . . To avoid any misunderstanding, I am not opposed to multiculturalism as such; what I am opposed to is the idea that it constitutes the fundamental struggle of today. . . . [The problem with these struggles] is that either they endorse capitalism or they ignore it as a central problem.
Self promotion on the net. I’m shocked.
Posted By: Rich Villar on July 18, 2008 at 5:30 pmI’d post a link to where I further explain my shocked…um…ness….but I’m too shocked. That, and plus I already linked it on my signature. Shockingly.
Based on this quote, Michael, it seems to me that Zizek has no clue about American history, no clue whatsoever.
Posted By: Henry Gould on July 18, 2008 at 8:18 pmI thought that I had nothing more to add to this discussion. I entered early and attempted to respond with a fullness befitting the challenges that Mark Nowak rightly places before us as we confront the social and political realities of poems.
Posted By: JDJ on July 18, 2008 at 9:30 pmBut as this week has progressed, as the comments have mushroomed I found that I really should add a few more things and take advantage of one of the beauties that this forum affords us.
One of the beauties of this forum on Harriet is that it provides persons like me who have no standing or position within poetry institutions the opportunity to both listen and respond from the hopes of our own reading.
(1)
When our posts and comments veer too far from careful, detailed analysis of the poems themselves we lose our integrity, and sometimes even our dignity, as poets and thinkers about poetry. But, it is not only that we “close read” poems before we indict them; we must also approach the task of reading with great generosity and precision. Rather than careful, direct, extended textual analyses of the poems themselves (line-by-line if need be), our sharing is often fails to take account of the interdependence of form, diction, structure, tone, style, and all the formal elements at work in the best of poems.
In his original indictment of James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” as racist and sexist and his subsequent explanation, Mark justifies his reading of the poem by reacting to his experience of its diction (or word choice), particularly one descriptor above others, “Polack.”
Unfortunately, indicting the poem as racist or sexist for one isolated and de-contextualized facet of its invention reduces it to hagiography. I submit that the poem demands a fuller and more precise reading that considers a variety of its elements in relation to one another. Examining the use of the term “Polack” or “Negro” in isolation from other formal work greatly distorts the poems social awareness and cultural problem. This kind of misreading gerrypicks a few elements out of the context of the whole invention.
Recognizing this misreading is particularly important when we consider Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” because it is a poem whose effect depends on its multi-layered irresolution and capacity for multi-directional interpretation. It’s a poem that figures a scene of conflict—-the scene of the autumn football game in the working class town within which James Wright was raised. As a poem whose central image is of conflict, its uneven lineation (or arrangement in lines), its mixture of cultural personages, and its both “high” and “low” diction transforms its witnessing of the football into a difficult, crisscrossing, and uncomfortable characterization which embodies, and not just comments on, the problem.
Using the descriptors “Negro,” “Polack,” and “pullets” exposes the fault lines of the cultural conflicts within the town in a way that other diction may not. These terms’ very cultural baggage—from hurt to banal description—allow the speaker of the poem to address the experience from the vantage point of simultaneous empathy and great privilege. The point is that the speaker is caught irrevocably within these conflicts and the poem dramatizes this difficulty.
As I noted in a different way in my earlier comment, just because James Wright hails from the town, just because he understood the post-Great Depression pain of its diverse citizens, none of these facts makes his poetic remove as a commentator about the football game any more difficult. That his diction throws us powerfully into the divisive heat of racial and sexual characterizations is part of the very necessary challenge of the poem.
In other words, the poem is not didactic propaganda. The poem does something much more important: it figures the fallibility of the townsfolk, the women’s constrained living as housewives before WWII, the shame of the men (”All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home”). The terms “Negro” and “Polack” were living parts of the cultural landscape of the town. And they remain extremely difficult to hear. That is why they are necessary in the poem: hearing them as part of the speaker’s attempt at empathy shows us that the on-the-ground cultural reality of the town.
The poem is neither political perfection nor cultural creed. It contains both the error and the elegance of Wright’s own position as a white working class-reared man privileged in several poetry institutions who writes about pre-WWII poor experiences. Not understanding the poem with the measure of this kind of reading is reactionary without full textual support.
(2)
But not considering the way that the poems’ seemingly discrete elements combine to create effects is not the only problematic ramification of veering too far away from truly competitive readings of poems. The other problematic ramification is even more important; indeed, it is a problem posed at the very divides that we think exist between us as we contemplate our citizenship in a political world (and this is how I once heard the truly great poet Eleanor Wilner characterize discussions of “political poetry”–as reflections about our artistic “citizenship.”)
Throughout Mark’s original post (and the some of the subsequent comments) there is a terribly deceptive idea that poems can somehow be perfect political artifacts, or politically or aesthetically faultless products.
This faulty notion is always at odds with a far more real-politic notion of poems as necessarily imperfect processes bound entirely by the careful readings that we bring to them and the cultural histories that crisscross around, through, and despite them.
Behind the condemnations of James Wright’s poem; behind the accusations against some white male poets here as bigoted; behind the characterization of L.N. (who proudly affirmed her black womanhood) as overly emotional and given personalized attack; behind all these often jejune approaches is this flawed notion that any one poem or any one person can be a perfect political model.
But no truly gift-bearing poem or person can be so perfect.
Our very fallibility as artists demands that we speak to how our poems negotiate always-present imperfections and biases.
My skin is as dark as the seeds tucked inside the core of apples; my rearing was often as poor as any socio-economically disadvantaged person in the country could be; but my commitment to deep reading demands that I never prostitute my own disadvantage as some vaunted calling card of political expedience. Just as whiteness is a vexed political construct, so is blackness, so is yellowness, so maleness, and femaleness, so is is canon-ness, so is any position that veers us away from the fallibility and the particurity of the texts themselves as we carefully read them.
Lastly, anyone who has spent time on the streets in devastating situations of poverty can probably spot shameful tricks and gimmicks. In his classic Forms of Fiction the terrific novelist John Gardner called these aesthetic tricks and gimmicks, intellectual and emotional dishonesty. This kind of dishonesty is predicated on affect rather than substance, propaganda rather than polyvalence, deception rather than transparency, stance rather than process. I would like to think that working against intellectual and emotional dishonesty always makes us unpopular because we cannot easily be narrowed into one isolated political or cultural tableau. Being unhoused in this manner is, for me, the only way to be a reader or poems.
responding to these condescending words of Smith’s,——
Posted By: bill knott on July 19, 2008 at 9:48 amHey Bill, you sound, as they used to say at Stanford, ca. 1989, “angry.” . . .
take a deep breath there, Bill, ——
i can only reiterate that i agree with L.N.’s assessment of
his spurious “project” . . .
it stumps me why anyone would rather waste time on the
insipid pastiches of “Yasusada”
instead of reading valid translations of
authentic great poets like Tanikawa Shuntaro
and Shiraishi Kuzuko or Tamura Ryuichi
and other superb Japanese poets whose work can be found
in anthols . . .
*
responding to “Matt”——
bowling with William Logan? um, i don’t remember Logan urging
poets to try to write political poems, or encouraging anthologists to
select political poems . . . isn’t Logan in your camp on this issue?
doesn’t he agree with you on this matter?
you and Logan are one when it comes to the question
of the poet pledging to write political poetry . . . you’re both
against it, aren’t you?
*
responding to Robbins——
” this entire silly argument about James Wright’s fine poem ” ——
gee, i guess you win the argument . . . how could i a lowly poet
possilbly refute the words of Zizek or any other
philospher you sortes the garble of . . .
or how could i disagree with your calling Nowak and L.N. “silly”
because they find flaws in Wright’s “fine poem” . . . ——
call me silly too because i think it’s a mediocre poem at best—
and you and most of the commenters here have not addressed
Nowak’s original query as to why this poem, this particular
poem, appears in so many anthologies: why has it been
so ubiquitously canonically recognized . . .
(and my additional point —why are Wright’s attempts at political
verse like “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco” not selected
instead?)
*
OK, I’d given my vote above to JDJ (whoever he or she is) for “Best Comment of the Year” at Harriet.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 19, 2008 at 10:10 amBut this one is even better!
Kent
How can one overcome capitalism without imagining an alternative? Zizek’s answer relies on his extension of Lacanian clinical principles into social analysis. For Zizek, every social system contains a Symbolic (social institutions, law, etc.), an Imaginary (the ideologies, fantasies and “pseudo-concrete images” which sustain this system), and a Real, a group which is “extimate” to (intimately present in, but necessarily external to) the system, a “part of no part” which must be repressed or disavowed for the system to function. Zizek identifies this group with the symptom in psychoanalysis, terming it the “social symptom”. Just as a patient in psychoanalysis should identify with his or her symptom to cure neuroses, so political radicals should identify with the social symptom to achieve radical change. This involves a “statement of solidarity” which takes the form “We are all them”, the excluded non-part — for instance, “we are all Sarajevans” or “we are all illegal immigrants”. By identifying with the symptom, one becomes for Zizek a “proletarian”, and therefore “touched by Grace”. Thus even academics like Zizek can perform an authentic Act while retaining their accustomed lifestyles simply by identifying with anathemas thrown at them by others. Since the social symptom is the embodiment of the “inherent impossibility” of society, identification with it allows one, paradoxically, to recover a radical politics which is rendered unthinkable and impossible by the present socio-symbolic system. Identification with the symptom is not an external act of solidarity.
Posted By: CDC on July 19, 2008 at 11:11 amZizek does not accept a division between individual and social psychology, so he believes identifying with the social symptom also disrupts one’s own psychological structure. This identification involves neither the self-emancipation of this group nor a struggle in support of its specific demands, but rather, a personal act from the standpoint of this group, which substitutes for it and even goes against its particular demands in pursuit of its ascribed Truth. Thus Zizek mercilessly rejects the present state of the world. On the one hand, he is very aware of problems of great significance for the left: the privatisation of everything from telecommunications to genes, the invisible exploitation of workers in sweatshops, the growing ecological crisis, and the weight of the forces lined up to make these attacks, and the crisis they generate, seem “normal”. And yet on the other, he launches conservative attacks on liberalism and reflexivity, bemoaning the lack of a Master, denouncing campaigns against sexual violence, railing against “permissiveness” and “decadence” and calling for a conformist “normal mature subject” prepared to submit to authority on trust and to identify authentically with social roles. -Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey
Kent: You say, “..I’d given my vote above to JDJ (whoever he or she is)”…I’m a very real person. JDJ are my legal initials. I am actually very open about myself. My initials, “JDJ,” have been hyperlinked to my online home at the end of each of my posts. I’m working on empty so my apologies for the typos in my last response. I haven’t joined this conversation anonymously or pseudonymously at all. ~JDJ
Posted By: JDJ on July 19, 2008 at 12:06 pmJDJ (Jonathan),
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 19, 2008 at 3:56 pmOK, now I see–though just to say I didn’t think of your postings as “anonymous/pseudonymous,” unlike those of some others posting here.
Anyway, as I said, I feel the posts from you in this discussion have been the real highlight, tremendously rich and challenging–and others, also, have shared that same opinion with me, so thank you for taking the time to offer those pieces.
…
And Bill!
A jolly good Saturday night to you, too.
Kent
I would very much like to know specifically who, when & where the word “project” was used in referring to the Yasusada poems. Was it you, Kent? or someone else? In Conjunctions? or where?
Posted By: Lbehrendt on July 20, 2008 at 10:08 am…….Badges gleam; they dump the sack
Posted By: Desiree Dawn on July 21, 2008 at 11:00 am…….Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
…….with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
…….“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”
Ok to look at this …. this is what I see…………………….
War,,,,,,a since of attack………….peace and truth…………………….
deceivedness… “Mississippi word”"”"” conivedness “Another Mississippi I made it up word’
Cockyness false assuredy “Is that a word”? Im kind of dyslexic … I can write just cant spell……lol
next I see team work fall myrtre … ism so I have not read enough in my life I just write and sing … so this is interesting to me because it is quite deep….. not a real melodic groove
more story…ish however in my creative chaotic mind… yep thats the way I see the story told by the words that came to mind with each little bit I read… Desiree Dawn songwriter songwryter
LB,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 21, 2008 at 11:06 amWrite me back channel, if you’d like, on this or any other question in general relation:
kent.johnson@highland.edu
Kent
I just want to weigh in on Wright–one of my favorite poets–though I think Mark’s right about his use of (somewhat stale) stererotypes–the noble savage, the sex-starved housewife, whom we also see in Philip Levine’s “Not this Pig” (Levine being another favorite of mine.) I chalk it up to Wright’s being of his time, which damages his work a little in that it steers it a wee bit toward the sentimental.
Posted By: Lucia on July 21, 2008 at 1:13 pmBUT…People should read the late Wright/NYC/”Gamela” poems to see what was a radical swerve in his work toward the end of his life. An investigation and apologia of sorts. If he hadn’t died I think he would have kept working in the direction of “Many of our Waters: Variations on a poem by a Black Child”–which should be canonized alongside “Martin’s Ferry”.
OK, Daisy, no need to be needlessly respectful here. If needless respect arouses your hate, well, I don’t respect that. There, does that make you feel better?
Posted By: john on July 22, 2008 at 2:27 am“Hen” is a cliche (sic — that’s for you, Michael! — I still haven’t learned the code for the accent mark [sic?], and I’m not even sure that “accent mark” is the academically correct term!), and it’s meant disrespectfully more often than not.
I have hens. I’ve never met a woman who looks like any of them. But, maybe I don’t get around enough.
Zizek (sic!) gets paid really well to diss *other* people’s struggles — nice work if you can get it! Well, the idea that sexism, homophobia, and racism are confined to capitalist regimes and upper middle class milieus is magnificently counter-factual. Is Zizek (sic!) really that ignorant, or is he just a provocateur?
And the way he attempts to claim victimhood for himself! Poor Zizek (sic!), that poor victim of blackmail!
Whatever, dude.
Nobody around here (that I’ve seen) is claiming that racial or sexual justice trumps economic justice. Seems to me that most people see them as *connected*.
I don’t know how to make the diacritical marks for Zizek’s name, but that’s not what the “sic” was for. “Cliché” is a noun; the adjective is “clichéd.”
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 22, 2008 at 11:44 amactually, I’m wrong. mea culpa. lesson: consult the OED before getting all pedantic on Harriet (of course, then we’d be here all day).
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 22, 2008 at 12:00 pmDictionary says, the noun form is acceptable as an adjective. With no disparaging “informal” or “slang” or “sic” or “whatever.”
Posted By: john on July 22, 2008 at 12:21 pmhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cliche
I hereby sic a “sic” upon your “sic,” sir!
Posted my retort before your mea culpa had appeared . . .
Posted By: john on July 22, 2008 at 12:33 pmHey, I just realized no one’s asked the important question: even if Wright’s poem is racist & sexist — SO WHAT?
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 22, 2008 at 10:52 pmAnyone can come up with a wearisome personal canon of their favorite racist, sexist, capitalist, warmongering, fascist, &c. poems — poems of power & beauty &c. Right? Or do we insist that our art be pure & blameless, goosestepping humorlessly with our precious liberal values?
Gee Michael,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 23, 2008 at 10:35 amThanks for asking that. I’ve been thinking kinda the same thing.
In fact, I’ve been thinking about how righteously retro this whole attack on Wright’s poem is– as if culled from instructions in some papyrus fragment unearthed from a time capsule buried in 1988 behind the Student Union at Stanford.
Well, not papyrus, obviously, that’s silly. And the cute anachronism is unfair, really, to latest developments in post-Tel Quel Maoist-inflected theory… Thank the gods the Alexandria library got burned down. Who knows *how* many pollacks and pullets were rolled up in those backward tube books?
What is to be done now is rid the radical canon of that fake cuddles-bear WCW, once and for all. Remember how he snickered to his pal Pound (I think it was Pound–Weinberger has the quote somewhere in an old Sulfur) about Hiroshima? “Those poor Japs, they’ll never know what hit ‘em.” Something like that. Damn…
And what the hell is Poetry Magazine doing publishing this special portfolio of the anti-Semite Spicer?
Well, I’ve got a number at the NEH, and I’m going to call it.
Kent
Michael,
Posted By: john on July 23, 2008 at 1:24 pm“goosestepping . . . liberal values” — Hey, if all else fails, imply that your interlocutor is a Nazi!
(Although, I have to say, I’ve never seen the connection between geese and marching. I’ve seen a lot of geese, and I’ve never seen a Nazi that looked like any of them.)
Loathe as I am to respond to John’s continued schoolyard tactics, I will note only that der Stechschritt is not unique to the Wehrmacht, & that the poems are the ones doing the goosestepping in the analogy, not my interlocutors.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 23, 2008 at 2:50 pmI saw The Dark Knight yesterday, & quite enjoyed most of it. But my favorite part of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was always Clark Kent’s recollection of Bruce Wayne’s testimony before the congressional committee convened to address the superhero menace: “Of course we’re criminals. We’ve always been criminals.” (It’s been some time since I was fourteen, so I might be misremembering that slightly.) Although the new movie retains Batman’s vigilantism, it forces a heavy dose of obvious moralism down the viewer’s throat: a growly Christian Bale responds to corpsepainted Heath Ledger’s cookie-cutter Nietzscheanism à la Leopold & Loeb with cookie-cutter sentiments about “the good” & the need for heroes. Tendentiousness is one thing; to be lectured at by caricatures about caricatures is a higher order of intellectual tedium. A comic-book version of reality, to be sure.
Michael,
Posted By: john on July 23, 2008 at 3:58 pmSchoolyard tactics? You mean debating?
You mean pointing out the nastiness of your rhetoric? (Your defense of your analogy is pure weasel-ism. To argue no connection between the poem and person is ridiculous; likewise to say that you intended no Nazi allusion. Language doesn’t work that way; astounding to see a poet arguing for a limitation on the allusive and suggestive power of language, especially when the allusion is a cliche used in the stereotyped manner.)
You mean condemning Zizek (sic!) for having a poor grasp of social conditions as people actually live them? “sexual harassment, homophobic remarks . . . are the problems of the American upper middle classes.” That’s an astoundingly ignorant remark. You put it out there. Defend it if you can; or, you can keep dropping insults and whining about it when you get called on it. I’m good with it either way.
Kent,
Is this atavistic enough for you?
“Hey, if all else fails, imply that your interlocutor is a Nazi!” If that’s what you call “debating,” then I can only roll my eyes.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 23, 2008 at 4:28 pmAs for Zizek, I don’t know what you want me to do: I think he’s right, & his arguments are spelled out for all to see. You claim his views are “astoundingly ignorant.” Congratulations on thinking that — you’ve definitively refuted him, as far as I can tell.
Not sure what “insults” you think I’ve been dropping; what you seem to object to is my tone, which is sarcastic, to be sure. That seems to get under your skin — I guess I’m sorry you’re so upset, but if it’s insults you’re interested in, I’d check out the thread that all but accuses me & Kent of being agents of white suprematism.
I’ve said more than once that I’m finished responding to your baiting, but I keep coming back for more. If you’d like to do more than imply that you have an argument to make while accusing others of not having arguments, perhaps we could have, um, a debate. If not, not.
Michael,
Posted By: john on July 23, 2008 at 5:04 pmOK, to cases. You’ve claimed that “goosestepping” was not an allusion to Naziism. I refuted your claim. You rolled your eyes. Not really a rebuttal, but I don’t suppose you have one.
Zizek (sic!). I honestly thought you knew that homophobic remarks (and homophobic murders) and sexual harassment occurred in lower class milieus and non-capitalist regimes as well. The literature on this is ubiquitous, deep, and irrefutable. I find it hard to believe that you live such a sheltered life where you might not be aware of this, but some white cultural workers really are that sheltered, I suppose.
I can find sources for you on homophobia and sexual harassment in non-capitalist regimes and lower class milieus if you really are that removed from social conditions. Please let me know.
Your condescending tone is really misplaced. But if it’s all you got, you better go with it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings, though, so don’t worry — I think it’s funny!