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This is what democracy looks like
It’s interesting that the posts which have generated the most discussion during the past couple months—Lucia Perillo’s “Why are poets aligned with the left?” from June 23 and Mark Nowak’s “Cannon fodder” from a few days ago—both deal with the relationship between poetry and politics. I can’t tell if this is the result of people being deeply engaged by the topic (certainly, that’s part of it), or if a rhetorically charged statement—regarding poetry and war, or the racism and sexism of a particular poem—is what in fact springs the dialogical trap in these kinds of forums. I’m guessing it may be more the latter.
I agree with Lydia Olidea’s comment to Mark’s post that the discussion has been a thought-provoking mix of close readings and larger ideological analysis. At the same time, I think a crucial component of any progressive politics is the ability to admit that one can be wrong, that one is fallible. Who knows if this might work on a national stage (e.g., how many times could Barack Obama say he was wrong about this or that before he was eaten alive by the media? twice at most?), but poetry-world politics don’t play out that grandly. It’s always shocked me (when it hasn’t bemused me) that (get ready, here comes a rhetorically charged statement) a few of the poets most committed to a poetics of indeterminacy also happen to be the most dogmatic and doctrinaire people I’ve ever met. Similarly, some poets who emphasize that readers help produce a text’s meaning in turn seek to steer a poem’s reception. Anyone remember when Frederic Jameson read Bob Perelman’s “China” as an example of a late-capitalism-induced schizophrenic mindset (not necessarily negative, in Jameson’s view), and certain of Perelman’s peers said that Jameson had got it wrong? If one of the better-educated, most astute literary critics in the United State couldn’t read this poem correctly, then who could?
In fact, Mark’s post confirms an important point raised by cultural studies-based poetics, as opposed to structural linguistics-oriented ones, which is that readers tend to interpret cultural products (from poems to television shows) according to their personal background and experiences. Thus, it’s not surprising that so many people accompanied their interpretations of Wright’s poem with personal narrations. Quite frankly, I’m fascinated by the democratic—populist, even—politics of that, and it appears many Harriet readers are as well. A poem such as Wright’s can make this politicized reading dynamic more explicit than one by, say, I dunno, Bruce Andrews—which isn’t to excuse either Wright’s poem or its readings (or to prefer one poet over the other). As I’ve written elsewhere, theories in which readers are activated by avant-garde texts oftentimes mistakenly posit an undifferentiated and de-contextualized reader free to make a play of meaning. Within this approach, the eradication of context can also simultaneously be a masking of privilege, as a few of the respondents to Mark’s post have pointed out in different ways.
Posted in Group Blog, Politics on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 by Alan Gilbert.
Comments (15)
You know what I’d like? I’d like to go through a single day in which I don’t see someone use the word “bemuse” when they mean “amuse”. That would be nice.
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Alan Gilbert said:
>In fact, Mark’s post confirms an important point raised by cultural studies-based poetics, as opposed to structural linguistics-oriented ones, which is that readers tend to interpret cultural products (from poems to television shows) according to their personal background and experiences.
Agreed. But ironically, I think the fallout from Mark’s post suggests something else, too: that reading practices fostered by “cultural-based studies poetics” can be as shallowly sectarian, righteously arrogant, and ethically dangerous as those fostered by the old but true forebear of U.S./Brit “radical” Cultural Studies: Socialist Realist dogma of the 1930s… It’s been a couple or three generations, the offspring speak in different languages, and the surnames are long different, but you can still see traces of the ancestor in the newer eyes.
For a couple decades or more, now, young, super-smart people are coming out of “cutting-edge” cultural studies and Post-colonial studies programs, clearly imbued with the conviction that their “personal backgrounds and experiences”–whether these be actual or vicarious– give them special ideological purview and evaluative power over literary works. When these readers are challenged that their assumptions may in fact be somewhat twisted by tightly wound theoretical biases with bent to intolerance, that the works they are judging may in fact be much more complex and paradoxical than their hard-edged readings allow them to see, the theory-spring snaps, and the riposte very often unwinds in vindictive and innuendo-laden discourse.
I’ve seen this quite a few times, really, in different venues, and the flip from the cool/theoretical to the atavistic can be amazing!
Which can be kind of exciting and fun when it happens (as in fireworks), but it’s probably not a good thing for the free, long-term unfolding of imaginative practice.
Well, just thought I’d throw that into the discussion hopper.
Kent
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Matt, thanks for your comment, but in fact I meant bemused—however non-standard the verb form. Kent, I can understand the point you raise, which is exactly why I said that any progressive politics must be able to admit fallibility.
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Briefly, on political fetishism, for Alan Gilbert
Insightfully, you say: At the same time, I think a crucial component of any progressive politics is the ability to admit that one can be wrong, that one is fallible.
Then later in your post you also say, As I’ve written elsewhere, theories in which readers are activated by avant-garde texts oftentimes mistakenly posit an undifferentiated and de-contextualized reader free to make a play of meaning. Within this approach, the eradication of context can also simultaneously be a masking of privilege, as a few of the respondents to Mark’s post have pointed out in different ways.
These two great reflections of yours dovetail with my observations in the comment stream of Mark Nowak’s “Canon Fodder” post
Your comments continue the insight already established in one of your essays written after 9/11 (it took me hours to find again online; I hope I haven’t attributed these words to you incorrectly; if so, my sincere apologies) in which you said the following:
Yet, if one of the main challenges of various forms of cultural production is to expose contradictions in dominant ideologies, then they must also learn to expose contradictions within themselves. Without serious self-critique, art slowly loses its capacity for anything more than shallow institutional critique. For the avant-garde in particular (or what’s left of it), self-critique may allow it to step back—though not so far as to become a rearguard—and engage with the progressive cultural populism it needs in order to rejuvenate itself and again function as a radical project.
Rarely, if ever, do I hear poets reflecting on their own contradictions or examining their own biases. I especially do not hear the most vocal proponents of various lyrical/narrative poetic traditions, avant-garde poetic traditions, or political poetic traditions (be it leftist or conservative) offering this kind of self-examination.
What is produced when people don’t recognize the fallibility of poems and how we negotiate always-present bias within us, regardless of who we are?
What is produced when people promote partisanship over careful textual analysis, regardless of their politics and aesthetic?
What is produced when people turn to narrow labeling, character assassination (of our work or our assumed personalities), and in-group/out-group warring?
Fetishism is produced.
Fetishing political resistance is no more effective than fetishing staid, conservative acquiescence.
What’s so regrettable about fetishism?
Answer: When we fetishize something we worshipfully ascribe to it an infallibility that treats it as a commensurable product, rather than an inexact, fallible process. Fetishism also creates a kind of idolatry that robs the thing in question of variance and depth of discovery because fetishizing it implicitly posits that it is (or can be) wholly known, that it is a totem without error, that it can be labeled, bought, feted (and people do so buy into these awards), narrowed, and sloganeered.
I am always warring within myself against this always-present tendency to fetishize. So acute has the bias been in my life that nothing cries out more passionately within me than the need to work against racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.
But, you know what? A hard life has taught me to trust no one as perfect allies based on narrow typification.
I have learned the hard way to really, really examine what people say and do (or do not say and do not do) and how they say and do it. For me, an ethic of difficult, often-painful close reading is the only humanist politics that has viability for me.
This longing for trusted allies, like-minded followers, perfectly selected prize contests, perfect laureate-ships, infallibly culturally correct poems, and correct inclusion on the ridiculous shaft of somebody’s vaunted totem–all these errors long for a sense of trust and correctness that does not exist.
Living in the inner city and being poor taught me long ago that sometimes you can no more depend on the poor-folks around you than you can depend on the rich folks who disrespect you.
But, damnit, I can sometimes (sometimes) depend on my attempts at precise textual and cultural readings that look realistically at the polyvalent structures before me as difficult, hard-to-characterize processes.
This kind of humanism, this looking beyond the isms for entangled meanings and flawed negotiations, is the bedrock of my struggle as a reader and writer of poems.
~JDJ
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Is not all reading done in a cultural/historical/experiential context? The pretense of “structural linguistics-oriented” poetics is that it can or should eliminate or diffuse the power of that context, and is (it seems to me) no more than a pretense. All these avant/post-avant/conceptual writers, at least the ones holding forth on Harriet, are comfortably ensconced in one university department or another—that is, they are about as decontextualized as one can be in this moment in world history, which is everywhere saturated with suffering (human, not linguistic) and joy (again … etc.). Poetry that does not speak to that humanistic context is simply worthless.
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Fetishism? Okay. The only way to get around self-righteousness, another word perhaps for this fetishism, is via tragicomedy. Alas, only a few poets do tragicomedy well — Gudding, Yakich, Sparrow (at times), Goodman, Loden. And don’t gimme that Hoagland, Dean Young, et al stuff. I mean really tackle the big chops — for instance, Yakich’s “Spell to Bring Me Osama Bin Laden” or “A Brief History of Patriotism” or “Poem for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
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Posts with general, controversial political, or ethical, claims tend to generate long comment threads because people like to join large arguments, and everyone who reads poetry blogs has an opinion about such large topics as Poetry and Politics, Poetry and Class Injustice, Poetry and Commodification, Poetry and Fetishization, and so on: to have arguments about these things, you don’t even have to read, or reread, any more poems.
Not everyone has an opinion about Bernadette Mayer or Michael Field or John Clare, bceause to have an opinion about those poets, you probably have to read their poems. –As I’ve just been moved to consider rereading Yakich’s, especially the titles Elizabeth Booker gives.
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>people like to join large arguments
Also, internet discussions prompt in reader/writers the urge to make censorious righteous responses to a single line in a discussion to the exclusion of balanced analysis of the entire post. That is, the web makes everyone a cop.
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I’m happy to see Steve’s mention of Clare (and happy to see Steve!) – John Clare surely ought to come up in a discussion that includes issues of class, capitalism, and poetry. Assuming, that is, that it’s ok to bring up a poet who isn’t contemporary…
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“I Am” by John Clare is one of my favorite poems
and
“I Am . . . I Said” by Neil Diamond is one of my favorite popular songs.
However,
to say that I am because I think
is not one of my favorite ideas.
JDJ reminds me of Reginald Shepherd (bless him)
with his emphasis on the artifact.
I also accept the primacy of the artifact,
for reasons that should be obvious.
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A few thoughts for the discussion hopper:
Kent and others are attempting to impose a dogma.
The dogma consists of this:
1. Aesthetic objects are to be taken whole or not at all.
2. The only taboo is to share one’s personal and political response to the racial and sexual rhetoric of a poem without first relating the role that the rhetoric plays in the aesthetic whole.
When commenters have deviated from this dogma, they have been belittled and insulted, according to this dogma, and additionally according to the strangely related — though unreality-based — Marxist dogma that to complain of racial or sexual oppression is to support capitalism.
Here’s what I believe:
1. We’re all post-avant now, and aesthetic objects don’t get special status where their parts get exemption from direct response until they are related to the context of their wholes.
2. People are free to suspend their reactions to parts until they relate them to wholes if they so choose.
3. Language and rhetoric are unpredictable.
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John,
I’m not saying this to be difficult, and I admit that the problem may just lie with me on this particular morning, with just not being able to understand something I should be able to grasp. It happens.
But I honestly cannot figure out what on earth you mean to say above. Can you clarify a bit, at least for me, since the comment is partly aimed my way?
thanks, and sorry,
Kent
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It seems perfectly clear.
I’ll put it in narrative form.
Mark N. called a poem of Wright’s racist and macho. The poem included an ethnic slur and a sexist stereotype.
People got really upset, saying things like “dangerous” and “misreading.”
Someone got upset about people getting upset, saying, wow, I’m glad you weren’t my teachers, because your method of reading denies my experience.
That person got insulted and belittled, by you, among other people.
Your comment at the top of this thread continues to insult and belittle the practice of reacting to “poetically framed” ethnic slurs and sexist stereotypes in a personal way.
The upshot, for me, is that according to the reading practice you’re defending, it’s OK to sling racist and sexist slurs, as long as it’s framed in a poem, but it’s not OK to react to the racist and sexist slurs without first acknowledging the aesthetic frame.
My belief is, the special demarcation between art and life that your method of reading demands is unearned and unwarranted. Art is part of life, not separate from it.
Because art is not separate from life, there is no reason to expect an aesthetic frame to soften the immediate impact of an ethnic or sexist slur. And, for a lot of readers, that immediate impact can ruin the experience of the poem. Who’s to say they are wrong?
People aren’t wrong to like Wright’s poem either.
As a postscript, I would add that most poetry reviewers focus on great lines, not whole poems. If it’s OK to focus on great lines, why is it wrong to object to ugly ones? I don’t see anybody polemicizing against — hell — most of the bloggers here, who focus their posts and reviews and essays on great lines.
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Thanks for the clarification, John. (I can address you by name, right? Thanks.)
Just a couple things. I reject that my “comment at the top of this thread continues to insult and belittle” anyone. The comment I was reacting to, just to jog your memory, was a highly charged broadside full of innuendo and barely veiled accusations of racism and misogyny, launched, in very aggressive manner, at those who had calmly and responsibly criticized a position put forward by that person’s spouse. I responded by saying that the innuendo and barely veiled accusations were an overreaction that should not be allowed to intimidate anyone from responding further. I used the word “emotional” to characterize the nature of the response, and I stand by that characterization as an objective description of the rhetoric employed. And I reject any accusations that to use such description constitutes racism. (Readers can check back and make their own decisions, I guess.)
What followed were yet more accusations by the same individual, this time heavily laden with very personal charges directed at my own person, bringing up a book I was involved with that had little to do with the discussion at hand, calling my association with that work a “dastardly deed,” and yet another reason no one should “trust” anything in relation to me or my work, etc.
I responded calmly that we could discuss the topic in another thread, if the person desired. I referred to her comments in this second post as “angry.” and I stand, as well, by that characterization as an objective description of the rhetoric employed. You or others can continue to insinuate what you like, but frankly, I’ve been around the poetry world for some time, John, and seen such bullying shenanigans before. They don’t impress me in the least.
So you’re really going to have to do better than this “clarification,” I’m afraid. And I would suggest that the flame stuff that fuels your post above be kept out of this forum. I’ve said *nothing* here to deserve the kind of other-agenda personal attacks sent my way, and I resent that you continue to insinuate that I have.
Kent
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Sorry to be an Empson-quoting throwback, but he always said that the moral importance of literature is that it puts you in contact with people whose values are very different from your own. It can take a strong stomach to read certain poets and particular poems, and we each have our own lists of these. Just recently on Harriet, Major Jackson talked about Stevens in light of some very ugly remarks made at a meeting of the National Book Award committee … and Charles Bernstein has written eloquently in many places about reading Pound, which he calls “a useful, albeit sometimes distasteful, study of the unavoidable relation of poetry to politics.” He says, too, that the more important Pound’s work is seen to be, “then the more important it is to understand the disease that consumes his work, which cannot be disentangled from what is ‘good’ about it… The significance of ‘the Pound tradition’ requries that we interrogate it for what it excludes as much as what it makes possible: interrogate the assumptions of poetic lineages not just to acknowledge their effects but also to counteract their effects…” For Major, on the other hand (as he wrote recently in APR), “poets and writers… like everyone else, have the option of behaving as decent human beings, of being thoughtful and considerate, which is not a question of ‘politics’ or ‘correctness,’ or even the invisible forces that make one self-aware about one’s moral groundings or lack thereof.”
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