Cheers Tom.

But isn’t Chirot’s complaint the same Frankfurt School beef which gets rolled out over and over again? In essays like this, which appear regularly in the ‘New York Review,’ a pose is struck against ‘conformity’ in the name of Walter Benjamin, easing carefully into a sanctimonious analogy of U.S.A as Nazi Germany: orderliness and cleanliness turn us all into unthinking drones. Nazism and conformity are bad. Put on your intellectual beard and glasses mask, grab your sack-cloth wearing lover, and storm the barricades. Be hip, daddy-o.

Chirot questions Smith and Goldsmith’s political creds: they are ultimately and unknowingly working for the elitist, capitalist program in a two pronged way of ‘making file clerks happy little techno-artists and enslaving the ant colony to the anthology poem ideal.’

Not only is this nothing more than generalized chatter, but it gives Smith & Goldsmith far too much credit. First, they have no political existence. None. By using the broad brush of poltics, we err in every manner possible; we assume political significance and political connections where none exist. We water down the very idea of politics. Chirot is handing Smith and Goldsmith the gift of a political critique, allowing Smith & Goldsmith to retort that either Chirot’s brush is too broad, or Chirot’s views too severe, or that Chirot himself is lacking in political creds; Chirot is like one who complains of worms while opening up a can of them. He must like wrestling with pigs.

Chirot’s approach gives Smith and Goldsmith ammunition. The proper approach to Mssrs. Smith & Smith is to ignore them until they show a minimum of aesthetic competence. Mere talk never helps mere talk, even when mere talk features the loud (quiet) desperation of Walter Benjamin.

Thomas

Des, I love this:

“the need for an empire in order to measure greatness, at the expense of the truth and beauty…”

Yes, one really gets a sense of ‘art and empire’ at a major art museum, where this reality flashes upon you immediately as in a dream; ‘truth and beauty’ as Empire loot. I spent six hours in one yesterday drinking art until I was drunk; as a poet I’m always humbled by the painters…always amazed at the idea of how great paintings EXIST, and I don’t mean the sugary impressionists who painted the weather, but the Titians and the Copleys and the Greuzes and the Corots and the Geromes and the Tintorettos…

But great art uses empire not ‘at the expense of the truth and beauty,’ but rather it interrupts empire with truth and beauty, great art rapes empire with beauty…

Of your remark, “the need for an empire in order to measure greatness, at the expense of the truth and beauty,” I think more of Claude Monet’s silly ‘La Japonaise,’ a garish horror of Camille Monet in a Japanese costume, or those large Japanese vases manufactured for the New England rich in the late 19th century…

Thomas

cheers.

Fascinating discussion on truth, beauty, morals and good ole American poetry being stuck up and worn on the sleeve of all our knowings.

Pound is dispatched onto the baize, as the voice of worth, to bolster Goulds position of being turned on by the austere and hard to do beauty and truth, that hurt, or certainly hurt Pound – far more than Yeats – whose wit didn’t equal Oscar Wildes enough for three words be introduced, without a lay context being present for the casual bore.

I think the Roman love is present here: the need for an empire in order to measure greatness, at the expense of the truth and beauty, men – mainly – find sexy as a concept of power and controlling all in the polis by the size of the scare; the thrill of the fright that facing gods we are as they into whose eyes we seek to find on our travel intot he Word y’all Gould mon amis Harry old chum.

Thank you very much for your comments and examples from “branding”, which I would go further than yourself with in calling these poetic projects “rebrandings,” in that by tchaning the names itis hoped that no wil notice the game is stil the same.

I find it intersting that both Smiths–Mr Smith and Mr Goldsmith–are pushing the aspect of a “crisis” in order to draw thei examples for “saving poetry” as a commodity to be “intersted in invseting in,” each gentleman has decided todraw innspiration from examples outside poetry. Mr Smith seeks itin the Slow Food movement and Mr Goldsmith truns to his art education, thinking that his 100 year old andmore ideas will be “ahead of poetry,” becuase as everybdoy knows fifty years ago brion Gysin told William SBurroughs that paiting was fifty years ahead of writing.

However, if on is turning to ideas at least a hundred years old to pretend to be fifty years ahead of poetry/writing, then writing is back in the age of Bartleby the Scrivener, who says “I prefer not to” to the activities which Mr Goldsmith endorses–copying, filing, moving data about, as though one’s existence by being suddenly viewed as that of an aetheticized “representation” of a copy clerk wil make one feel happier in the work place, and so bring pleasure also to the dayof the bosses who will observe with pleasure (aesthetic pleasure, to be sure, nice & distanced)– the aesthetics of their drones busy as ants working in the ant farm run by themselves. By being conscious of their statues as “poets” instead of file clerks,workers whil feel grateful and so not rebel or think or question at all the directives of the bosses, who think of themselves now as Artists of Production, Showmen of Industriousness, while Mr Smith’s poets concern themselves with the art of consumption, healthy and nutritious consumption, slowly masticated, which enables them, too, to turnout the products that need to be produced to keep those slow jaws working and reciting aloud slow poetry classics (the interval between the work being seen as turning from ugly to beautiful, from the laughed at to the classic, as Gertrude Stein observes in “Composition as Explanation,” grows ever smaller, until there is barely an intant at all–and voila! the Instant Classic aspect of these new meals and models of poems!) –and al of this to be audio taped digitally for the listening pleasure of the drones busily filing and copying away in Mr Goldsmith’s white collar version of a sweatshop. As Walter Benjamin noted in writing about the Neue Sachlicheit Photogrpahy of late 20’s early 30s Germany, the aestheticization of the public sphere as though it were the private, creates an aestheticization of the politics of representation, in which fascism turns existence into a nice clean image which distances the viewer from the actuality of the scene, and instead makes room for the artificiality of the presence of a populace no longer “free to think and act on their own,” but one turned into anonymous actors in a mass movement parading through carefully manipulated and constructed sites and “scenes.”
Both gentlemen argue for the Utility the Use Value and the Gallery/Market value of Poetry,in an effort to pronounce the works “good for you” rather than just “empty words/calories” and so rebrand the continual rebranding of the Puritan Ethic in American life and culture.

Something else which strikes me is that the word “populsim” comes up–as i recall “in these very pages”–i.e. this blog– Mr Goldmsith lambasting the idea of a revival of the WPA for poets and artists, the invocation here of the very uncouth louts formerly given the boot from the hallowed halls of Art and Poetry seems to be the case of the usual Elitist position, in that the populace are banned one moment from being present in the presence of the Mysteries, and welcomed the next to demonstrate how loved the priests of the mysteries are by their obedient followers. A kind of demagoguery raises its head to tower above crowd and start barking orders, while at the same time conducting a staged conversation with the Agricultural Representative of the State Arts brigades and drones. The mood of a threat to security, of a crisis so necessary to keep the Sate running cleanly and the drones and gardeners humming at their tasks, is exactlythat situation which since 9/11 had continually been presented as “change” which now needs to be “changed” some more, al the while moving steadily backwards into ever safer ever more “tried and true” gimmicks in order to hide the fact that the language itself in the USA has become absolultely so riddled with compromise, hypocrisy, ‘denial” and self absorbed skirmishes for attention that
has nothing to offer other than an adherence to the kind of conformity propagated by Jacques Ellul’s “technological Society.” Itis the confromity of the “business of America is business” being marketd as “the new digital apolyptic change” as something “new and exceiting” insteadof being one of the greatest tools there is for the porudction not only of conformity but a fascism thatis going unnoticed while al are self pre-occupied in sparring over the watermelon rinds of ideas long ago moved along from, andnow being rebranded as the laatest thing–the newest version of the Whole Earth Catalogue and thelatest paen to turning persons into drones for the benefit of the clever few who think they “are realy on to something” at least in terms of profit, profit being one’s name up thereinlights as one of the technicains of the new Sate Detention centers for those, according to the Obama adminsitration, need not be charged for crimes they have not comitted yet might in the future for them to be detained indefintiely and held without trial, lawyers or ny visitors . . .
While persons begin to vnish, the Bread and Citcuses of poetic “movements” and “concerns” wil keep the drones to busy to notice . . .
just as the new administration rebrands its continuations and goings-further than the previous one, so these rebrandings operate to make one think that “change” is on its way–
“ceci n’est pas une pipe”–
david-bc

“99% of what is submitted is not accepted. But that’s why it’s so good. The bar is set very high according to Ubu’s standards, which are quite rigorous.”

Yet, I wonder what criteria are brought into play when deciding what is the best of “anything should go”, or arbitrarily collaged texts etc. I suppose, there isn’t one, and that it is all personal taste.

but yea…click to show…I like it…

Go on…click to show…you know you want to…

‘Click to Show’ is even HOTTER than ‘click to read…’