Boston Review Starts a Forum in Response to Daniel Tiffany's 'Cheap Signaling'

Now the doughnuts are in their own image! Boston Review editor B.K. Fischer has created a forum of responses devoted to Daniel Tiffany's essay on class consciousness as structured, read, and heard in contemporary poetry, "Cheap Signaling," published this summer. "Over the course of the week, we’ll present eleven essays that speak to questions that Tiffany’s essay has raised. They interpret, in a wide variety of ways—in a variety of dictions, in fact—the currents that transmit 'cheap signals' of many kinds," writes Fischer. Up as of this post are pieces from Aaron Kunin, Michael Clune, Katy Lederer, Ammiel Alcalay, Chris Nealon, Jennifer Scappetone, and Danielle Pafunda. With more to come.

Tiffany’s essay caused various online disrupt for his swift grouping of writers who he feels are illustrative in their poetic diction of “some recent vanguard poetry that fuses demotic and commodified phrasings with scraps of ‘theory,’ or academic vocabulary, in the service of political critique.” Tiffany maintained that the essays to come at Boston Review would engage and extend a critical dialogue. From Chris Nealon: "I had two responses to reading Daniel Tiffany’s 'Cheap Signaling': one was, wait, that’s not the Marx I know, and the other was, hmm, I don’t hear what he hears in the poems he’s reading." And from Kunin's "Are Words Formed Out of a Hades Sort of Delight?"

But Tiffany is really Socrates, not Ion. He discounts the value of the explicit class analysis that contemporary poetry sometimes performs, and replaces it with inspiration. Conflict between classes appears not in what poets say about it, but rather in their diction, where impersonal forces speak through them.

To the poets who say that their greatest ambition is to end the material conditions that make their work legible, Tiffany seems to say: Hold on. Not so fast. Do you really think that your work is legible?

Fortunately for the poets, Tiffany does not seem to hold legibility in high regard. He is far more interested in the value of poetic obscurity. In Infidel Poetics, his first treatment of the subject, he finds a neglected source of poetic obscurity in the cant language of the criminal underworld. Not Latin but thieves' Latin.

In My Silver Planet, he turns his attention back to elite literary language, and makes an even more surprising discovery: the heart of kitsch is the very idea of poetic diction, the modernist idea that a poem is nothing more than its list of words. Purest kitsch would be words that show up only in poems.

In "Cheap Signaling," Tiffany puts these arguments together. He borrows the phrase "cheap signaling" itself from Prageeta Sharma's great poem, to identify a trope belonging to diction whereby the occult sources of poetic obscurity, the cant language of the criminal underworld and the kitsch language of elite literature, make class conflict apparent in their convergence.

I honor "Cheap Signaling" both for the discovery of a new trope, and for the further development of Tiffany's study of poetic obscurity. My question is whether diction can be separated from style. . . .

And Scappettone: "Poetry with any stake in expressing class antagonism has to resist the discarnate forms of appearance, but also to deploy Marx’s critique against itself, to counter the abstracted patriarchal and often Eurocentric ideologies of revolution that came to dominate the discourse on class: to be divided allegiances, both/and, of fish and flesh."

Keep reading at Boston Review.