I’ve always heard it said that Americans have to be fairly satisfied with their lot in general before they support the fine arts, especially dance and poetry. When economic times are particularly rough (think WPA), the presumably suffering artist suffers all the more. As Wall Street currently quakes, and the banking and mortgage giants tumble, it’s a highly speculative sport to avoid being taken down in the collapse or being blackened with dust. Is this a residual of 9/11? Oddly occurring on the eve of the event? Is poetry and art doomed to irrelevance at moments like this (think Katrina-Rita)? Readings on the responses of artists and writers to Hiroshima-Nagasaki, as the true doomsday mechanism was announced, come to mind (think mass destruction). If a culture can be buoyed up by its artists, is it truly saved? I’m prompted to ask following an irksome incident that occurred last week when appearances by Ralph Angel and me, on behalf of the Poetry Society of America, were canceled suddenly by a SoCal radio station known for its strident support of the arts. We were iced in deference to ongoing urgent coverage of the housing and mortgage loan crises.
Thank you for this, and all of your other posts. Your poems are a constant source of vision.
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on September 24, 2008 at 10:27 amAs for the post above, after 9/11 Billy Collins made a comment about the outpouring of 9/11 poetry saying that it is hard to capture in verse a feeling we are still in the middle of feeling. And it is still going. Simply not enough time has elapsed. Al Gore does an excellent job of describing this in his book The Assault on Reason where he discusses the politics of fear … with both neurobiological and historical detail. If as a nation we are acting from a place fight/flight we are in the animal mind and will be unresponsive to poetry or anything for that matter. Food will just be fuel and so on. It would be a great act of heroism to actually stop and actually smell the flowers. And with a little hope, flowers you planted yourself.
I have no doubt that essentially all that we have witnessed since 9/11 has been a kind of rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic waltz. The arts have been put to their greatest test to human date to express, convey, depict, disquiet, disarm, joke, lament … take your pick of emotional and/or intellectual trajectory.
An email from my Mom:
Hi Pooh,
Yesterday in our exchange you made a comment about people in grocery stores and not knowing where our food came from and the corporations owning America etc.
Anyway, we have these contractors at the house for weeks now remodeling our bathroom, and since I had the day off yesterday, and it being a Monday, I decided to make my famous Mighty High Apple Muffins for them.
The house smelled wonderful with the aromas of brown sugar, cinnamon and apples.
So Dad made a pot of coffee for them, and we brought the muffins and coffee upstairs to them in the work area.
Later that day, the youngest of the workmen, maybe in his thirties, raved about them and then asked:
“were those made with REAL apples?”
Oh my God!! Do we eat so much stuff sold in boxes with dried prepared ingredients? I was amazed and politely responded: why yes, and real flour, real eggs and real sugar. I made them from scratch!!
Wow were they impressed!!!
How times change
Love,
Mom
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“Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” — Stephen King
Posted By: Ian on September 24, 2008 at 11:07 amThe idea that art takes a backseat to disasters is a fundamental misunderstanding of how art gets us through these times.
>>Is poetry and art doomed to irrelevance at moments like this (think Katrina-Rita)?>I’m prompted to ask following an irksome incident that occurred last week when appearances by Ralph Angel and me, on behalf of the Poetry Society of America, were canceled suddenly by a SoCal radio station known for its strident support of the arts. We were iced in deference to ongoing urgent coverage of the housing and mortgage loan crises.<
You cannot blame people for not wanting to hear poetry at the moment they are loosing their jobs and livelihoods. However, I understand what you are saying.
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Dear Wanda:
Posted By: david-baptiste chirot on September 24, 2008 at 11:33 amOne of the weirder paradoxes of American cultural and political history is that under Richard Nixon, funding for the NEA and the arts in general reached their highest point ever in the history of the USA. At the same time, Nixon was the most openly repressive of Presidents “on the homefront” in decades, killing students at Jackson State and Kent state, declaring basically urban warfare on the Black Panthers, mounting the huge assault against Wounded Knee’s occupiers etc etc as well as the Watergate burgleries and the massive spying-on-citizens programs he ran.
Despite his own surly demise and later “resurrection,” Nixon’s policies of repression I think had quite an effect in the arts, in the sense that post-Nixon, many of the “radical” “forms” of poetry and other arts have rejected “open confrontations” and actions in favor of the transgressions of syntax and the like. Perhpas the “pacification” and “academization” of the arts has contributed in a way to their being less funded by the government than before, and like everything else, ever more privatized? And, being controlled by by privatized interests with varying agendas and interests, subject to an ever more “behind the scenes” form of censorship that is just enough the side of the law not to be accused directly as such? (Being perhaps more what Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall I belieive it was, called a “structure of feeling.”)
A very frightening development, on top of the immense number of anti-Civil Rights and anti-Human Rights legislations that have been passed without a whsiper of protest, is the announcement yesterday that a very large group of American soldiers is being redeployed–to the USA! Here they can join the already large Security Contractors contingents at work throughout the country in being of use to subdue an unruly population in times of unrest–such a a fincial meltdown, a postponed election, or anything else being dreamed up behind the scenes by this the most secretive of all US governments in history.
Not surprisingly, this fella in charge of the proposed bail out got his start under Nixon, as an assistant to John Erlichman. If the bail out goes through, it will be the biggest victory yet of the private sphere over that of the public. and effectively establish a form of regime in American life, a new form of control and “legalized” robbery with complete impunity.
Now more than ever is a time for poetry–Walt Whitman writes of this in Democratic vistas–that the poet is to be the major figure in creating “democratic vistas”–one of the sad truly sad aspects of American poetry for quite some long time has been that it has often abandoned, a good deal of it, a sense of the “materiality” of actuality for the “materiality of the word.”
Perhaps the “materiality of the word” has turned into a form of fetishization, a substitution, as well as an abstraction trying not to reveal itself as a reification, in which increasingly there is an ever greater and greater acceleration of the speeds with which the distances from the “mud” “below” is established, in order for there to reign a kind of ultra elitism befiting a soceity in which the distances between the rich and poor grow by the moment, and the number of the poor increases exponentially. Torture, uncharged unlimited detentions, illegal workplaces for illegal workers whose employers pay no penalties when the workers are carted off in irons–the world’s largest prison population–the collapse on all sides economically, educationally, militarily, politically–all these things paving the way for a fascism which has been quietly advancing for decades, with ever less challenge being made. A Black man runs for president–and has to support Apartheid in israel–the USA brings “democracy” to the world when its last two elections were anything but “democartic.” The “war on terror” gives blanket permission for the manufacture of every sort of lie and faked evidence to justify attacks, invasions, occupations, genocides, ethnic cleansings, tortures, rendtion flights, secret prisons, illegal arms deals, total immunity given to private Contractors fighting along side government troops who are supposed to be held accountable to laws their fellows close by can ignore at will. The Fourth Amendment, one of the cornerstones of the founding of the USA, is now just a wilted and dying old weed in the fast fossilizing garden of overgrown debris known as the ‘Constitution.”
What better time for poetry!!
(note at my blog there is a call for works Mail Art/Visual Poetry/inter-media, documents, fotos, writinmgs re “Cracking Walls and Codes Concrete and Virtual”
Gaza-Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib-The Globe
and one will be starting also for Bolivia-Peru–Democracy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(the USA is not a signee of this international document–)
all my best, david-bc
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com
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Hey Ms. Coleman. Big fan.
Posted By: Rich Villar on September 24, 2008 at 11:47 amIn my former life before writing and literature, I was a prelaw student and political science major. Almost went to grad school for it. I am always fascinated when the two loves of my intellectual life converge.
I have to trust–because what else can I do?–that the immediate panic surrounding this housing and mortgage and Wall Street and post-9/11 economic jitterdom, must take its place in the normal course of conversation. That is, in every crisis I’ve encountered in my relatively short life, the language of coping is almost the same: panicked chatter, followed by reasoned discourse. What we’re hearing now is the panicked chatter. Art, I must hope, should be part of the reasoned discourse to follow.
What scares me, Ms. Coleman, and what makes me balk at my own reassurance, is that we live in a time when panicked chatter is heightened and commodified daily by those pesky 24-hour news outlets, eager to fill the air with long-term crises. In that sort of atmosphere, in this consumerist culture, who will commodify reasoned discourse (art)? If the answer is no one, then how do we as artists respond to that? Should we be ushering in the era of panicked art?? Art as immediate as CNN? That’s partially a joke, but I hope you see my point.
Anyway. Glad to see you here.
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For some of us, poetry is how we survive–it’s not optional. I am newly teaching poetry therapy and I don’t know how I could have gotten through difficult situations in my life without the way I use poetry to make sense out of life. Does our art depend on having money? Has it ever??? Have we ever had enough support? And now the thought of losing what we’ve gained is becoming apparent–and I’ve just learned a writer’s conference in my community may be canceled–so I know the threat is real.
Posted By: Laurel at Ninth Elegy on September 27, 2008 at 2:35 pmMy new business may fail because of this crisis–but in my heart my poetry is still relevant, and whatever work I manage to do with it will continue to be relevant. If our country’s economic excesses and materialism come crashing down, maybe we can hope for a reconsideration of what is valued in the world. I’ve heard lots of talk recently about creative people being the source of solutions…I don’t know what that sort of spin is about, but I maybe it’s a glimmer of something. What is that “thing with feathers” again?
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