The Privatization of Poetry

Juliana Spahr posted a talk she wrote for “The Future of Writing” conference, about what she calls the “privatization” of poetry. By this she seems to mean a shift from the production of poetic work (not necessarily poetry itself—most of her talk focuses on degree programs, readings and magazines) that could speak for and in a community, to the production of poetic work that remains private—i.e. for friends who share a “psychosocialsexual” bond:

I used to argue against the relentless charges of elitism that are so regularly lobbed at any small group defined by certain ways of thinking together, that the psychosocialsexual poetry scene I consider myself a part of was closed but permeable. By which I meant that it was partial to a certain way of thinking but anyone was welcome to show up and think that way. I’m now wondering how true this “permeable” part is. And this talk is about how I have found it increasingly confusing to figure out what is a private-ing gesture and what is a community-ing gesture in the psychosocialsexual poetry scenes in which I participate.

Spahr’s argument is, as always, provocative and beautifully written, but one can’t help but wonder about the complete disregard for any discussion of form and politics. Does the question of their intersection seem dated? Have we moved on to larger discussions of the function of institutions? Anyway, there is one moment where Spahr makes her argument in terms of form, and it’s the most convincing and powerful moment. She points out that Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzáles’ poem “I am Joaquin” did not articulate the position of a particular speaker, but of an entire activist community. But today, poems written to articulate minority positions are often too easily subsumed by what she calls “institutional individualism,” which is divorced from community politics:

I keep thinking here of how the “I am…” poem mutates from the inclusive and activist drive of “I am Joaquin” in the early days to something like Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got that Name” which begins “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin” and is all about Chin, not all about “the people” or a specific group of people within “the people.” This observation of institutional individualism has been made as dismissive accusation many times before. Often to dismiss the possibility of there ever having been a moment of a culturally activist and aligned art. But my desire here is to suggest that it would be insistently ahistorical to read a poem as “I am Joaquin” as merely individualist and at the same time, to read a poem such as Marilyn Chin’s as an organizing tool would be just as ahistorical. The “I am…” differences here are yet another example of a closeness between poetry and cultural activism that was so present in the 70s that is no longer so by the end of the century. The “I am…” poem has become, in short, privatized.

The problems Spahr raises are real ones, and even better, she raises them as genuine questions, and does not pose as if she held all the answers. However, the whole conversation (not only Spahr’s, but the general conversation about institutions and scenes) needs to be turned upside-down, or “put back on its feet.” There’s a reason (to take up Spahr’s argument on her own Marxist terms) that Capital starts with the form of the commodity and only then moves to the circulation of money. Marx’s critique of the classical economists before him is precisely that they begin ass-backwards, with the circulation of money, and thus are never able to discover the secret of the commodity. In the same way, starting with the social formation and circulation of (cultural) capital in the poetry world evades the whole question of poetry itself, and therefore abstracts all poetry into a single homogeneous commodity, which is given meaning only by the institutional and social positions of its authors and readers.

In short, what’s lacking is an aesthetic. Without the attempt to create and theorize new forms, this debate will remain so much academic hand-wringing, because, precisely like the “institutional individualism” that Spahr critiques, it will lack any universal address, or, in other words, any notion that the address of an artwork reaches beyond the immediate present.