20.2.11

Poetry, and its Discontents

To read Vernon Shetley’s “After the Death of Poetry” eighteen years after its publication is to arrive at the funeral right on time.  Shetley assumes this death as a precursory fact and he’s right to do so.  Not much has changed in the survivalist discourse of poetry since 1993 and his argument remains topical enough, but his autopsy of the subject bears insufficient consideration for the effect of consumer markets not only on poetry’s demise, but on its fledging propagation even in intellectual circles.

The argument more or less shapes up like this: Poetry died of this nasty virus called progress, which replaced it with other artistic forms more of this moment, i.e. more accommodating to today’s consumer.  This virus took a long time to act and, well, poetry isn’t actually dead in the medical sense – it’s just on this permanent life-support device in the room next to figurative painting.  The bad news is that poetry’s days of promenading down Fifth Avenue in the sun are long over.  But the good news is that, if we treat it with the most accommodating technologies available to us, poetry can still be revived and enjoyed by an increasingly small and privileged sect of humanity known as the “intellectual community,” which is itself distinct from the academic community in unclear (read: probably imagined) ways.

Shetley presents three recent poets - Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery – whom he believes offer the best templates for poetic survival in the 21st century.  He signals out several distinctive characteristics of each poet’s work and suggests that these are examples of what can make poetry compelling even after its popular death.  Bishop employs simile paradoxically to expose difference, Merrill explores with form and reference the boundary separating private and public, and Ashbery deliberately fractures his voice to save his poems from sentimentality.  These are all ways to subvert the polemical debate between hard Formalist and Language poetries (a debate which interestingly aligns itself politically), neither of which Shetley claims offers a viable way forward.

My claim is that there really isn’t a way forward - as in following the same trajectory - at least not in the way Shetley believes.  As a poet I would certainly like to believe such things, and I think Shetley is blinded by a dedication to the form that I can sympathize with but that not many others share.  This includes even the serious intellectuals Shetley imagines would be more receptive to a poetry that “combines a fundamentally lyric apprehension of experience with an intense, and intensely self-aware, skepticism about …poetic enterprise” (192).  Even if it acknowledges its diminished stature and manages to do so in the most interesting way possible, I am not convinced that this will be enough to win back anyone who wasn’t already partial to the cause in the first place.

In fact, though the demands of the audience should figure centrally in any prescription for poetry’s health, it is the poets themselves who are more in danger of extinction.  It is strange that Shetley gives extremely little thought to this, seemingly assured that serious poets with serious intellectual concerns will continue to write poetry in the conventional sense long after the thrill of living is gone.

An opinion piece entitled “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?” ran this week in NYT.  Though we here at The Cola Wars would like to distance ourselves from any fundamentally pro-capitalist claims, it’s hard to disagree with the authors’ notion that commerce fuels the development of those arts it finds most agreeable.  Exhibit A: the three-minute song – a format created explicitly for ease of consumption, whose commercial viability has proven so pervasive that even punk and other genres fashioned around the Anti-Social continue to willfully shape their contents around its form.

The forms that commerce has chosen, it has chosen for a reason. Though they may be co-opted by artists whose intents are anti-capitalist or anti-social, they are fundamentally structured to provide the type and level of discourse that do not pose a threat to the dominant ideology.  This threat is not thematic; it is existential.  If poetry is to survive in any real capacity, it must abandon Shetley’s vision of an accommodating-though-intellectually-challenging art for the niche crowd and take up in full-force the kind of radical program that is behind the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school.  I am not saying that Language poetry presents an entirely adequate program, but it does pose a more workable template than Shetley’s: Use the market’s rejection as a recruiting device as well as a philosophical tool in the restructuring of the form.  Derive potency and meaning from combat.  


The key component here is recruitment.  It is not a pipe dream to imagine that poetry can recruit new and exciting writers from the ranks of leftist, politicized intellectuals, many of whom would be enticed by the pitch of creating work as far removed from the traps and snares of capitalism as possible.  This of course alienates a potentially vast audience, but an art's pulse is not measured merely by sales and consumption.  Rather, it is measured by its vitality as a platform of ideas, whether such ideas reflect popular, dominant discourse or not. 

At a recent New York reading, the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith referred to poetry as a “gift economy,” divergent from the other arts in its inability to function as an economic as well as a creative entity.  Goldsmith asserts that poetry “is one of the last places in late hyper-capitalism that allows non-function as an attribute,” alluding specifically to modern poetry’s unconcern for a traditional value-system as the aspect which frees it from the context of the dominant capitalistic ideology of [labor = value].  Hence, if a modern poet is to go to the extreme that Goldsmith has in alienating himself from a context which even permits ideology, he might find success only due to the fact that poetry in the 21st century is the first art form ever to exist in an operative economic vacuum. 

The judgment has been passed on both sides and one thing is apparent: There is no longer a place for poetry in a capitalist economy. At least not a poetry in the conventional sense that Shetley would like to see evolve into something more compelling, tough-minded and self-referential.  That kind of poetry will always exist, but it can only be said to be of this time if we are referring to the latter 20th century.

For now, the least compromised and most compelling programs of poetry exist in opposition to Culture, intellectual or otherwise.  Poetry cannot regain traction or viability within this current culture’s framework, so it is best that it prepare itself to assume the voice and mantle of an altogether new, post-commercial ideology.  Whenever that might come.

-C.T.

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