Sartre and Adorno: Committed Literature

Committed Literature vs. Autonomous Art

An officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited the painter [Picasso] in his studio and, pointing to Guernica, asked: “Did you do that?” Picasso reputedly answered, “No, you did.”[1]

Adorno’s On Commitment was written roughly 15 years after Sartre’s treatise What Is Writing? Sartre’s ideas on writing, while revised by a number of writers over years, like Merleau-Ponty, it was not completely challenged until Adorno. The basic argument goes something like this. Sartre contends that only committed art, by which he means prose specifically, can confront power structures, can, as people are fond to saying, speak truth to power. The prose writer, Sartre contends, “is a speaker . . . [who] makes use of words to act upon the world.”[2] Writing is act that Sartre equates with speaking and acting the world. He should ask himself what would happen if everybody read what I write, with the intention the he can change the world. “The writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which thus been thus laid bare.”[3] For Adorno, he sees differences between art that it committed and art he considers to be automonous. Autonomous art is that which does not carry an overtly political message in service to an ideal, but which has one anyway. He differentiates both of these from an art that is purely for the market, a commodity, which has no political life at all and cannot even be considered art. For all others, though, committed and autonomous art, it is actually autonomous art that is preferred. The autonomous art object is not one that is apolitical at all, he argues, but is one that is not partisan and short-sighted in its approach. After all, Adorno argues, you cannot write a great novel that is anti-semitic, regardless of how well-written it is. He then goes on to talk about Brecht, of whom much is made about his own political commitment. Perhaps Brecht is important, yet it is not, Adorno contends, his most partisan political plays that are his greatest. When he is praised, it is for his non-committed, least partisan plays and the ones that involve that most “committed” in Sartre’s eyes, are the ones that must routinely be overlooked or forgiven for their commitment. His example is Brecht’s treatment of Arturio Ui. “The true horror of fascism is conjured away” Adorno informs us. “[I]t is no longer a slow end-product of the concentration of social power, but mere hazard, like an accident or crime.[4] Saint Joan or The Good Woman of Szechuan, likewise show that “the more preoccupied Brecht becomes with information, and the less he looks for images, the more he misses the essence of capitalism which the parable is supposed to present.[5]” In Sartre’s own writing, too, his “plays are vehicles for the author’s ideas, which have been left behind in the race of esthetic forms. They operate with traditional intrigues, exalted by an unshaken faith in meanings which can be transferred from art to reality.”[6]

In Sartre we are told that the writer can write only for his time and only, really for his audience. For Sartre, committed language is in its time and place. He is not writing for everyone—but for the people in his time and his place—for his people. “Whether he wants to or not” Sartre contends, “and even if he has eyes on eternal laurels, the writer is speaking to his contemporaries and brothers of his class and race.[7]” Sartre believes that writing for one’s time provides that context for work. It grounds it in its time and place. To make his point about writing for people of your own time, he gives the example of speaking to an American audience, which he believes would not get his prose as readily as a Frenchman.

“There would have to be a good deal of analysis & precaution. I would waste twenty pages in dispelling preconceptions, prejudices and legends. . . . I would have to be sure of my position at every step, I would have to look for images and symbols in American history which would enable them to understand ours. . . . If I were to write about the same subject for Frenchmen we would be entre nous.”

Thus, according to Sartre, all authors have in their mind the audience that they are writing for and thus, the story defined for its readers, is itself, defined.

In contrast, Adorno has no such audience in mind. Adorno does not give the audience as much attention as Sartre does—at least on the surface. But Sartre’s discussion of the audience is What Is Literature? seems a bit facile now. He discusses audience needs only in terms of the race and nationality of the author. He does give a more nuanced example here, talking about the doubled audience – at once the whites of good will, as he calls them—CIO members, radical left, etc.—and blacks who live in this world and understand it. He also talks about not interpolating the racist white person, who is apt to not be moved by the novel. True, he admits, some racist whites might read it and be moved. But this is a mere accident and not the audience that whites seek. But he leaves out a great number of people that are potential readers for this work. Not everyone has his mind made up on this issue as of 1947. There is a huge, uneducated audience out there who could read Wright’s novels and be moved, and Sartre does not really seem to be considering this audience. The reality is that the world is not divided into merely two, or at best three, type of readers—those who would vehemently oppose you, those who support you but lack all of the necessary information to be anything but allies, and those from where you come but who lack the political power from his base.[8] It does not take into account uneducated masses who may not have thought about the implications of blacks not having the opportunities or conditions for voting, believing that they have the law on their side, for example, so that’s all the need. It is, in fact, the exact opposite view point of the abolitionists, who believed that if only people truly understood the position of the oppressed, they would certainly come to their rescue.

Of course, Sartre is really, at bottom, viewing everything in literature through the lens of World War II, and even in that, with a very revisionist lens. First, he feels the very real anguish of a writer who has lived through World War II and who had failed, with his writing, to have stopped it. If only he and other writers had done more. If only all writers had been true to their time, to their people, instead of writing for some imagined, far off audience. It is hard not to read What Is Literature without feeling the weight of its recent history. But here again, Sartre’s beliefs get in the way. Sartre wants to believe that if only people had the facts, if only the writers had lived up to their responsibility, they could have had an impact. For Adorno, it is the uncommitted writing of a Beckett, the accomplishes more than any committed writer, for example that of Brecht, could have.

“Beckett’s Ecce Homo is what human beings have become. As though with eyes drained of tears, they stare silently out of his sentences. The spell they cast, which also binds them, is lifted by being reflected in them. However, the minimal promise of happiness they contain, which refuses to be traded for comfort, cannot be had for a price less than total dislocation, to the point of worldlessness. Here every commitment to the world must be abandoned to satisfy the ideal of the committed work of art—that polemical alienation which Brecht as a theorist invented, and as an artist practiced less and less as he bound himself more tightly to the role of a friend of mankind.”[9]

For Sartre, though, the poetic is the least political of all writing. He starts right off with this premise and spends quite a lot of time on it for something he consider out of scope for consideration. He begins right away talk about other art forms which cannot be committed, among them Guernica the masterpiece. The problem with Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, says Sartre, is that among other things, is that it is both impossible to hear, yet would take too long to express adequately. You would never, he explains, expect to one to paint meaning, or put it to sound. Therefore, you cannot expect to it to be committed in the way that art is. No, “only prose discloses the world with the intention of changing it. Only prose uses language to confer meaning on objects in the real world, thereby demonstrating that to speak is indeed to act.[10]” Steven Unger says that Sartre “displaces – rather that rejects – poetry because it does not transmit . . . .clear and unambiguous meaning.[11]” In other words, it is poetry’s lack of transparency that bothers Sartre. Sartre prefers language that lays it out, that spells out what it intends to do that interests him. And, he believes, poetry does not have that function, but that prose does. In poetry, he argues, the poet serves words rather than utilizing. To a poet, words are signs, they are things to make use of, to point to other things. They are, for poets, “natural things which sprint naturally upon the earth like grass and trees.[12]” In contrast, to the writer words are things which are “tools which one gradually wears out and which one throws away when no longer serviceable.[13] Instead, it is Sartre’s utilitarian project to “consider words as instruments,” as carriers of more or less stable meaning. In fact, Sartre considers “the crisis of language, which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis,”[14] Sartre doesn’t unpack this and it is certainly not something that I have the space to do justice to here, but it might certainly have to do with the rise of semiotics, of Dadaism, and with the rise of nonrepresentational art and poetry, all of which, while certainly having precedent in the 19^th century, really came to fruition in the 20^th century. It could almost seem as though Sartre is looking for literature, prose literature, to fill in the gap that has been left by poetry.

Adorno seems to think so. Perhaps Adorno’s dictum about poetry after Auschwitz would lead one to think differently. After all, it was Adorno who said that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. But for Adorno, all of life after Auschwitz is barbaric. Poetry may be barbarism, Adorno contend, but it, and the uncommitted arts that Sartre lists, like painting and music, are what we have to express that which is inexpressible. There is even, Adorno admits, some danger of schadenfreude, that pleasure that one takes in the suffering of others, that may avoidable in something other than directly representing experience. “The so-called artistic representa¬tion of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. . . . When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder.”[15] With art that does not represent reality, but rather points to it, points us toward it without showing it back to us, there is an opportunity to see the torturer, the murder, for example, in the face of another. Sartre tells us that the “[e]ulogists of ‘relevance’ are more likely to find Sartre’s Huis Clos profound, than to listen patiently to a text whose language jolts signification and by its very distance from “meaning” revolts in advance against positivist subordination of meaning.”[16] He accuses Sartre of not understanding the unintelligible, and therefore of not engaging with it, contending that “when the social contract with reality is abandoned, and literary works no longer speak as though they were reporting fact, hairs start to bristle.”[17]

The Negritude Poets

my negritude is not a stone

nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day

my negritude is not a white speck of dead water

on the dead eye of the earth

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it plunges into the red flesh of the soil

it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky

my negritude riddles with holes

the dense affliction of its worthy patience.[18]

Interestingly enough, however, is Sartre’s willingness just a scant two years later, to consider poetic text as politically efficacious outside of Europe. In Black Orpheus, the introduction to the word of the Negritude poets, he notes that the colonial man lives in different circumstances, therefore has a different relationship to words. Because the colonial subject relates to the colonizer through language that is not his own, he must be controlled by language. But whereas the subject us France is tied to prose, the colonial subject must speak metaphorically. His very thought processes have been colonized and he must now hide his meaning, cloak it in metaphor to speak of even the most basic things. He is whole language is colonized, he must be too. In a little turn of irony, the great heroes of the Negritude Poets was that the surrealists. In What Is Literature? Sartre had pretty severely denounced the work of the surrealists, as had most European Marxists at the time (and since). He said at the time, that “by the symbolic arrangement of language by producing aberrant meanings . . . surrealism pursues the curious enterprise of realizing nothingness by too much fullness of being” and that they were after “confusion and not synthesis.”[19] So strong and so recent was this denunciation of surrealism, that when Sartre wrote Black Orpheus he had to take great pains to note that “Negritude poetry does not merely export the Surrealists spirit of revolt.”[20] Cesaire called Surrealism “another factor in the development of our consciousness” adding ironically “Negroes were made fashionable in France by Picasso, Vlaminck, Braque, etc.”[21] “Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor.”[22] He talks about it as a tool that allowed him to explode French forms of language. He describes using Surrealist approaches to summon up the forces of the unconscious, which for Cesaire was “a call to Africa.”[23] As a matter of fact, for all of his talk about commitment in literature, it is Andre Breton, and with him surrealism, that is credited with being the catalyst that set things in motion for a revolution in Haiti. In 1945, Breton travelled to Haiti, where he was “impatiently awaited by Haiti’s youth” according to the magazine Conjonction. Breton asserted that “Surrealism is allied with people of color . . . on the one hand, because it has always been on their side against every form of white imperialism and banditry . . .; on the other hand, because there are very deep affinities between so-called ‘primitive’ thought and Surrealist thought: both want to overthrow the hegemony of consciousness and daily life.”[24] The students praised Surrealism as an “enterprise of liberation” and threatened to “respond with certain means: you know which ones” to government repression and brutality.[25] Thereafter, the publication was suspended, many of its editors arrested. Breton’s speeches were cancelled. There were riots in the street and within less than two months, Haiti had a new government, officially recognized by France.

Despite these successes, Sartre still had the last word when it comes to committed art. Surrealism successes were still considered transitional, ameliorative, but just a first step in the transforming of society. For Frantz Fanon, the colonial poet uses “florid language” as a middle passage toward the “ultimate objective, a literature of clarity and command.”[26]

“[P]oetic expression becomes less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. . . . The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. . . . This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. . . . It is a literature of combat, because it moulds the national consciousness . . . it assumes responsibility.”[27]

Not surprisingly, the introduction for this book, written in 1968, six years after Adorno’s On Commitment, is written by Sartre. Despite the influence on non-linear, no less surrealist, poetry on the real politik of the colonial subject, it was not to be considered a mature tactic, but at best, an intermediate one on the way to mature politics, of which, presumably, Europe was and the Caribbean would now be able to “catch up.”

Post-Colonial Politics

“through Harlem smoke of beer and whiskey, I

understand the mystery of the signifying monkey

in a blue haze of inspiration I reach to the

totality of being.”[28]

In Henry Louis Gates The Signifying Monkey, he introduces the figure of Esu, which he admits, is taken from several African gods but who always indicates the same things, “individuality, satire, parody, irony, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, change, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and eruption.”[29] This list is partial, but what it does contain is all of the conditions of both a post-colonial identity and in many cases, an avant-garde sensibility. While there are some differences between the two, in many cases, they are similar, much more so that Sartre’s call for a committed, unambiguous, transparent literature.

Gates describes the “function of interpretation and language ‘above” that of ordinary language” as function of Esu. “The literature of Esu consists . . . of a direct assertion about the levels if linguistic assent that separate literal from figurative modes of language use.”[30] Just as the post-colonial subject, Esu’s own discourse “is metaphorically, double-voiced.”[31] The Yoruba language, Gates tells us, felt the need to record opposites, such as Whiteness/Africanness, writing/memorization, and cryptographic/phonetic script to explain differences between white (and moslem) cultures and African culture, most notably that of writing. So the legend goes, the African chose gold over writing, and so was doomed to be slave until they could prove the equality of their thought with white men, despite the fact that the white men’s very language was a copy of the cryptographic script employed by the Yoruba.

This is where the Signifying Monkey comes in. For if Esu the interpreter of the open-ended text, the Monkey is the figure that teaches the interpretation of orality. To build on Gates for just a moment, I would like to add that just as the post-colonial subject must speak the literal language of his or her colonizer, must know what words mean on the literal level, there is also open text that must be interpreted as well, whether in ordinary interaction or the context of meta-language, which is just as critical for the colonized. To be able to take words at their face value is a function of power. For the post-colonial subject learning to navigate a world which they did not create, this double-voicedness, this ability to learn what it is really being said alongside what is actually said, is a critical part of consciousness. Thus, the doubling of the voice here: the double-voicedness of Esu/the Monkey representing the need to speak and to write in the colonists voice, in the colonists language.

In Not the Other Avant-Garde, James Harding and John Rouse look at parallels and disconnects between the avant-garde, historically defined as white and European, and post-colonial movements. They see avant-garde art as practices that been used, mined for western art, while they were at the same time not avant-garde in their own countries, but traditional forms. So like the Signifying Monkey that Gates writes about, they come from ancient traditions like the Yoruba in Africa, or the avant-garde in Japan.

“In many respects, western avant-garde arts have recuperated cultural practices, in

particular, artistic techniques and forms that had been forgotten, abandoned, or decried in the specific history of European cultures since the Renaissance. These acts of recuperation have often built on significant similarities between premodern practices in non-western cultures and transformative cultural practices developed since the early twentiteth century.” [32]

Christopher Innes, likewise develops the theory that “the avant-garde is always a return to the primitive.”[33] Ishmael Reed has indicated that he doesn’t trust modernism and the avant-garde because he doesn’t feel that it’s terribly new. To Reed, there is a borrowing of the modernist avant-garde from a lot of places, not the least of which is the Puritan poets:

I think that avant- garde movements tend to take themselves too seriously and believe that they are originating forms which are, in fact, ancient. For example the whole Imagist manifesto of conciseness and economy in language could probably be traced to the Puritans, who had a "no frills" philosophy which influenced architecture and poetry. . . My research indicates that the women were the founders of, or formed the real foundation of the movement, like Amy Lowell and Harriet Monroe and others, who were neglected.[34]

Finally, John Conteh Morgan has noted that “[i]t is one of the ironies in transnational cultural relations that what has been considered modernist or postmodernist, avant-garde, cutting edge, in the West . . . is in fact quite simply “traditional” or “premodern.”[35]

As with Sartre and Adorno (and Breton), post-colonial theorists and artists are concerned with freedom. Some theorists however, caution against equating the two completely. Conteh-Morgan contends that the post-colonial struggle “is a political project and not the expression of existential angst. . . . a political struggle for national self-retrieval and cultural re-enfranchisement.”[36] In fact, Conteh-Morgan contends that “[t]he postcolonial francophone avant garde . . . is a movement of return to the local and the ethnic (the African) and a rejection of the foreign (Western) seen as a threat to its identity.” [37] Harding and Rouse cite a “cultural chauvinism that permeated the European avant-garde’s interest in what it appropriated under the guise of primitivism”[38] For Harry Elam, “[h]istorically the Western avant-garde art has celebrated and appropriated the ‘avant’ energy of the racial other even as it excluded the work of the racial other. Thus, it has included race by excluding it.”[39]

But in the case of the Negritude poets and at least Andre Breton, who pretty much was the public face of surrealism at the time, as well is for Sartre, there was the racialization of literature happening, as early as 1945. And even as Sartre was putting forth his own ideas about liberation, he was still incrementally flexible enough to see that his ideas would not work for Francophone poets in Martinique or Haiti, that they needed a different way. Was their way a transitional way, a middle passage, to mature cultural change, as Sartre saw it? Or was their way a rejection altogether of the way the West sees revolution? Does poetry and art, committed and uncommitted, find it’s way into the revolution, not as transparent purveyors of meaning, as Sartre saw, but as a vanguard, as a front line to communicate with everyone, educated and uneducated? The people who most insist on transparency to the poor and the uneducated seem to be the wealthy and educated. Those who write poetry and share it with the masses know that something that no one else does. There was no reason that poetry should bring about a revolution in Haiti. Or in Martinique. But it did, in part. Poetry, an uncommitted literature to Sartre, played its part so that other aspects of society could play theirs. And this is what I content poetry should do. All arts have their function, just as all social and political groups do. When they work together to what they can, each in their own way, each doing what they can, then we can make change.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. On Commitment. Trans. Francis McDonagh.

Conteh-Morgan, John. “The Other Avant-Garde: The Theatre of Radical Aesthetics and the Poetics and Politics of Performance in Contemporary Africa,” Not the Other Avant-Garde, James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Depestre, Rene. An Interview with Aimé Césaire. London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Elam, Jr., Harry. “The TDR Black Theatre Issue: Refiguring the Avant-Garde,” Not the Other Avant-Garde, James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Fiebach, Joachim. “Avant-Garde and Performance Cultures in Africa,” Not the Other Avant-Garde, James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Harding, James M. and John Rouse, eds. Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cesaire.htm Accessed May 3, 2009.

Noland, Carrie. “Red Front Black Front: Aime Cesaire and the Affaire Aragon.” Diacritics, Spring, 2006.

Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.

Sartre, John-Paul. What Is Literature and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Zamir, Shamoon. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed” Callaloo, 17:4, 1994, 1131-1157.

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[1] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 9

[2] Sartre, What Is Writing, p. 35-36

[3] Sartre, What Is Writing, p. 35-36

[4] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 5

[5] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 5

[6] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 4

[7] Sartre, What is Writing, pg. 70

[8] Sartre does talk about other groups here, mainly being those who are illiterate and thus unable to read the work, and those who are simply indifferent, such as Europeans who presumably have no understanding at all of the situation, I have decided to not these in the discussion of the work, as they are not potential readers at all.

[9] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 10

[10] Sartre, What is Writing, p. 11.

[11] Sartre, What is Writing, p. 12

[12] Sartre, What is Writing, p. 28.

[13] Sartre, What is Writing, pg, 28.

[14] Sartre, What Is Writing, p. 32

[15] Adorno, On Commitment, p, 9

[16] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 2

[17] Adorno, On Commitment, p. 3

[18] Aime Cesaire, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natural, cited on http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cesaire.htm

[19] Sartre, What Is Literature, p. 154

[20] Ungar, from What is Literature, p; 13

[21] An Interview with Aime Cesaire, p. 77

[22] An Interview with Aime Cesaire, p. 68

[23] An Interview with Aime Cesaire, p. 68

[24] Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 531

[25] Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 532

[26] Nolan, Aime Cesaire and the Affaire Aragon, p. 65

[27] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 40

[28] Neal, Malcolm X: An Autobiography, quoted in Gates, p. 1

[29] Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 6

[30] Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 6

[31] Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 8

[32] Foebach, Avant-Garde and Performance Cultures in Africa, p. 69

[33]Elam, TDR: The Black Issue, p. 43

[34] Ishmael Reed, p. 1137

[35] Conteh-Morgan, The Other Avant-Garde: The Theatre of Radical Aesthetic and the Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Africa, p. 109

[36] Conteh-Morgan, The Other Avant-Garde: The Theatre of Radical Aesthetic and the Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Africa, p. 111

[37] Conteh-Morgan, The Other Avant-Garde: The Theatre of Radical Aesthetic and the Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Africa, p. 111

[38] Harding and Rouse, Not the Other Avant-Garde, p. 4

[39] Elam, The TDR Black Theatre Issue: Rethinking the Avant Garde, p. 44

Been so long! But I'm back.

It's been a long time since I've posted here and much has happened to me, including:

• a new relationship and the subsequent rethinking of my long-term relationship
• a nervous breakdown or possibly a mini-stroke that affected my doctoral preliminary exams and left me unable to type, or even write or have a thought for a while. I spent this past summer trying to recuprate (and I am still recovering a little bit)
  
• the death of a very close friend of mine this past October, someone I had known for over 20 years, a passionate member of the Greens the whole time I knew her and a scooter enthusiast, who died of cancer, followed by
• the death of my mother just before Thanksgiving, also from cancer.
  

I may write about these in the future, but for now, I just wanted to give a heads up on why it's been a year and a half since I've written. I'm going to try to post something at least once a month here. I have SOOOOO much backlogged writing, including notes on my dissertation, papers/articles for class, and some book reivews that I'm writing for a class right now. So watch for those in the coming days and weeks. Mostly, I am just hungry to get back to writing all the time like I did before I went to graduate school and got burned out, which I may also write about. I have a lot to say, just not many words left to say it with! (Video killed the radio star. Graduate school killed the writer. Well, not the same number of syllables. I'll have to work on it. How about grad school made a slacker of me . . . that's kind of close, huh?)

Ok, kids, see you soon. I'm going to post something else right now.

Why I am now going to the RNC march on Monday and you should too

To be honest, I was not sure which RNC-related events I was going to attend and if I wanted to put myself in harm's way. I have a lecture coming up that is part of my graduate exams that I need to pass. My first day back at teaching is on Tuesday. And quite frankly, I just don't always have the stomach for dealing with Republicans. I once made eye contact with Pat Buchanan and I felt that I had been psychically slimed. Even tonight, walking around downtown Minneapolis, looking at all these grimmacing Republicans, many of whom look either angry or afraid, I felt nauseous and angry myself.

But now that the police have decided to participate in tactics of intimidation and fear with their constant raids of activist homes throughout Minneapolis (and St. Paul, but largely over here), I HAVE to go. We all do. We HAVE to stand up to this and show that we will not stay home out of fear. For every activist that is hauled off to jail with no charges filed until Tuesday or Wednesday, like the Cerebus, five more need to spring up and attend the marches. An even greater show of strength must be brought about. And besides, they can't arrest tens of thousands of us at once. I encourage anyone who was unsure before about whether or not to attend the Monday event at the Capitol, anyone who cares about free speech, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, to come to the Capitol at 11 am on Monday and say NO to intimidation and brutality.

Love and Peace

Fluffy

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

*************

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into. But I also do honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. But I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice?

In the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society. And art, culture, and society need only to “catch up” Then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.

Patricia Smith reading in Minneapolis - April, 2008

Hey all. These are my notes, ramblings, reportage and observations from a reading by Patricia Smith here in Minneapolis. I had some fantasy that I would shape this into a narrative, but shaping things into narratives just isn't my forte these days. I need to be a free spirit, I need to be wild. I want to be free . . . the butterflies are free . . . And I have two papers and 40-minute lecture to write. So um, yeah, here's my rambling notes. As always, please post your own comments, reportage, and observations . . .

xoxoxox

Patricia Smith Reading – April 8, 2008
Plymouth Congregational Church
Sponsored by the Literary Witness Program at the Church

The place is packed. Why are all of these people here? What drew them to this event? How does such a "traditional" reading structure draw in this many people, including a number of people I've never seen at any other reading event in town, as well as some of the usual suspects. The audience is skewing a bit older than a slam, lots of people in their 50s-70s. But a few young people and literary types are here. At first the audience seems to skew more white than African-American but eventually that balances out a bit more.

She calls herself a reporter and poet. An interesting combination of course, based on an idea of poetry as observation. Again, this is not a blurring of roles that I always care for or think serves the cause of poetry – which is to say, the potential of poetry, the uniqueness of it. But I like her and she has a good energy and I'm rolling with it.

Patricia says that she starts all readings with the same poem as a way of rooting the reading.

I can already in the early part of the reading see and hear some aspects of slam in her reading style, but not in the usual formulaic way. The rhythm is appropriate to the lines rather than bending the work to fit a certain style.

Moreover, I can hear the roots of "testifying" in the work.

It's still very storytelling/narrative in style, progressive politics in the themes – personal and political.

"Can you teach me to remember my mama?"
Child "asks me for the words to build her mother again."
Teacher says first time she "admitted her mama died."

Some nice poetic turns of phrase in some of the work.
"full of breast music and finger songs"
"cursing the trees for their teeth"

She introduces her "persona poems" which she says are written from "bad movies"

Medusa – from "Clash of the Titans" in which Smith says that Medusa "hooked up with the wrong guy" while her body is going through the change into Medusa.
The performance of Medusa is very breathy with use of anxiety and silence at the end.

Smith says "I'm very aware of being in a pulpit" where she is reading form and says that she feels anxiety over the Medusa poem and the parallel to defiling Athena's temple.

"The Blood Sonnets"

How to be a lecherous old black man . . .

Invocation of the Blues

Lots of humor in her performance – playing to the crowd. Again, I can see in that the slam ethos, the entertainment aspect of the performance. Not bad per se and she handles it well and it doesn't feel like pandering the way it can in slams.

She does some Katrina poems that are part of the book coming out from Coffee House Press. She tells the story of reading these poems at a conference at Palm Beach, which was obviously not a good experience. She explains "never enter a poetry reading with a Bentley parked outside."

The Katrina piece she reads is in numbered sections that function like snapshots, partial pictures, a mosaic of images and emotion. The images are very powerful, I think (of course, since this is my aesthetic anyway, but nonetheless, I like to be proven right) they more powerful in their partialness, in the flash, snapshot, than if this were a coherent narrative. The performance itself is no different really or necessarily greater than in the other pieces she's done so far. But this is the one that makes my own urge to poetry start to come out, that loosens the logjam of images that can get stuck in my head.

One section is blank/silence, but still has personas, first person, the partiality, the interrupted narrative . . . perhaps a story so overwhelming that the person/a still doesn't quite know how to tell it, how to sort it out and make sense of it, only to give an image a though a moment here and there, to convey without being able to explain. If this were a visual piece, it would be collage, a Hannah Hoch piece, a Mina Loy . . . I want to cut a picture for each section and glue it together to make a new face, body, map, geography from it.

"They left us to our god but our god was mesmerized elsewhere."

34 pieces – a fragment now, it could be the title of a poem, but I believe it's the number of segments in the Katrina poem. A segment poem – all collages.

There is prescription, of course, even though I have my preferences. To write a prescription would be to reify, as dead and stiff as the slam form as become as social realism, but to keep in mind what poetry is inherently and uniquely.

Even as a narrative, there is a tear here, a rip. It does not give you the whole picture, leaves something for you to fill in. How do poems like this fit my thesis?
I have to think about it.

Interruptions.
Rips.
Tears.

"Emily whispered her gusts into 1000 skins."

Variations of the poems themselves

A litany like Kerouac of names on hurricane list

The numbered poems, collages, narratives

Soldier poem – collection of images. Could not be put into paragraphs. To do so would be a prose poem, but never a short story.

There is a notable lack of the usual I/me in the poems. Even when it's personal or clearly about her in some way, she does not move herself into the central subject position.

"Musical" poem for John Coltrane
Again, here I can see the speed/energy that would set the tone for slam aesthetic, although it shows more variation than the genre currently allows for.

She is not the most famous poet in the country. The truth is, I don't actually know how famous she is or is not outside of slam. I never know how "ordinary" people know certain poets. So I know her from slam, but I don't know how or where others know her from. But this church is half full, possibly as crowded as a Sunday service on a warm morning, maybe more attended than vespers? Certainly gives the lie to the nobody cares about poetry angle. It seems with the Literary Witness Program that this audience is as geared to the progressive/social justice angle, which goes along with my belief that we need to get the hell out of the bookstores and the literary ghetto that is the poetry reading and get to wider audiences where they live, where they congregate. This, as I know from my own work, doesn't mean that one still can't do experimental or avant garde work for these audiences. It just means that the mountain has to come to Mohammed. Smith has brought out a combination of work. Some is more "experimental" than others. Some of it, like parts of the Katrina poem or the jazz poem, might be considered experimental to an audience that only knows a certain type of poetry, but maybe not to someone like me or someone from the "literary community" if such a think can even be said to exist with a straight face. None of the work is out of the reach of the audience. But then again, I don't believe that experimental work is out of their reach. They're just taught not to understand it.

Smith's work does run a gamut of styles and voices and approaches and I respect and appreciate that.

And she has a great fantastic and generous energy and style.

The evening ends with a standing ovation.

In the Q&A Patricia jumps right into taking about her early involvement with the slams. She explains that when you're writing in that environment you're not really writing for yourself. The poetry is more "recreational" and she saw the slam then as "recreational poetics." It took a while for her to read a poem that felt like "her" poem. If even in the early days of slam it was hard to find your voice, how much more difficult could it be today, in these days of the reified slam voice and style, in this Def Poetry Jam era?

She speaks of a mistake in drawing lines between genres. There is always a story to tell, whether it's in a poem, a play, a short story. As opposed to my work which is a swirl of images, intended to elicit a feeling, Smith talks about writing poems "about" things.

Her commitment to the live aspect inherent in poetry is evident when she says it's not so much about reading as much poetry as you can, but to listen to as much as you can. There's something that happens "when the poem hits the open air." Open mics are very important to her, in particular non-poets and people who come to open mics to tell their stories. The poem is always meant to be heard "not just stuck on paper." The audience was likewise interested in the issue of orality in poetry. She traces her own interest in writing to her dad's stories and the way he used language.

She talks about shattering kids' pre-conceived notions about what poetry is. "I never knew what poetry could be." She told a story about poetry commandos, busting into classrooms and reading.

At the same time, she also talked about the importance of self-publishing and chapbooks as from the community she came from. She says that she ultimately got published because she was visible.

Patricia's persona poems, she says, allow her to explore other people's realities, to get into other people's business. Poets start out with themselves and then go out into the world and come back to themselves. Of course, this can also be the justification for a lot of bad, self-indulgent navel-gazing poetry. But that poetry fails to transcend the self, to get out of the poets' self. Smith's Katrina poem, for example, clearly transcends her and gets into other people's realities while anchoring/grounding the piece to herself, showing her ability to relate to someone outside of herself without having to make it about her. Few poets these days can do this.

I think of Kristeva and the narrative vs. the text. In narrative the patient's first elaboration/reconstruction of history comes in the form of narrative and the meaning within narrative forms such as the novel express the subject's positioning within the family structure, the first formation of identity. The "matrix of enunciation" in narrative is focused on "I" or "author" replicating paternal/patriarchal role in the family, although the I is changeable and able to take on any possible role inside or outside of the family relations. This mode, in which most poets work today, is not and cannot be revolutionary, but is rather a part of how we come to form ourselves and our identities and link to one another.

Notes from the conceptual poetics symposium

For those who might be interested, these are my notes from the Conceptual Poetics symposium in Tucson this past May. I'm not going to go into a lot of reformatting here, so hopefully this will all work out and be readable. And of course, these notes reflect my understanding, interests in, and interpretation of the weekend's events. But I post them in the hopes that they might be of interest to someone out there and that some of you might post some thoughts engendered by these discussions.

Cheers.

Notes from the conceptual poetics conference – Laura Winton fluffysingler@earthlink.net

Cole Swenson - as opposed to/against a poetry taken over by subject matter
Emphasis on the everyday at the expense of rhythm or other poetic aspects
Poetry/visual art ties
Rhythm, repetition, compositon

Craig Dworkin Reading:

Piece one:
From the 19th century grammar book How to Parse

Reading directly, very quickly, not slam, but quiet and fast, not meant to get every word, but maybe how rules and rules of grammar are absolute, rules of grammar might actually sound to student, to us as moderns, to those who throw out or reject or don’t adhere so much to traditional rules of grammar.

Piece two:
Sentences replaced with grammar elements rather than specific words.
Ex: pronoun noun comma adverb period. Etc.

Piece three:
Other piece: To publish the unpublishable week’s worth of subject lines from spam.

Piece four:
Used personality inventories to create poems. I am . . . etc. to create confessional/expressive poem

Piece five:
Using only the true/false answers and his occasional modifying comments to a quiz.
Note: I could take my Dante quiz and call it “How I Ended Up in the 8th Ring of Hell: with a nod to Craig Dworkin.”

Kenneth Goldsmith:

We shall reminisce about the time when human beings wrote poetry for other humans. (As opposed to themselves??)


Cole Swenson – Civil Disobedience/poetry
Tracie Morris:

Goffman – giving vs. giving off, in black poetics
Undermining typification
Phyllis Wheatley – negotiating neoclassical work w/ black aesthetic

Black “transgressive” speech – doubledness, double-consciousness, double-entendre

Ringshots – uttering of noises, use of codes
African linguistic traits interacting with everyday speech of American vernacular

Morphology of language
Uniquely African constructions

Standard American Vernacular is incorporating more and more of Africa and African speech patterns

Of corse, sampling = collage, per Duchamp, Hoch, etc. Found Art. Kenny Goldsmith in favor of appropriating, stealing, etc.


Missy Elliott—Minimalism, embellishment & futurism
Interesting clip from “The Rain”
Supa Dupa Fly

“bling” as a transgressive act


Saturday morning/pre-lunch roundtable

Jasper: -

Cognitive interruption
Beyond detournment, tqactics of situationists
Defamiliarization
Re-reading earlier works through the lens of conceptual poetics
Activist archivists – reframing works
Editorial aesthetics/poetics

How is the idea of poet/ry as solitary act/person complicated by new work, by conceptualism, by borrowing, pastiche, collage, found work, etc.

Conceptual Poetry as the ready-made. “It’s all already there. I just have to write it down.”

Beckett: Cascando (but also Krapp) “I turn the recorder on. I turn the recorder off.”

Irrelevance of “le mot juste”
My new style of strike out/parentheses= a hedge against “le mot juste”
Trying out/on different words, several simultaneous

Chance Operations

Duchamp – Art – Canned Chance
Cage – music
Judson /Cunningham – dance

Trying to cut out subjectivity. But there’s still a canned subjectivity – the subjectivity within the random/chance. Decisions be made. But is it subjectivity in terms of choices, or in terms of personal-ness, perspective, me-centered poems. Of course, choice is where the subject matter begins – setting up the parameters, the texts, the beginning and ending points, etc. Is there an unsubjective subjectivity?

My notes (already used??) Chance vs. emotion

Avant garde actually has a more democratic impulse than high modernism were we employ metaphors: x=y. (metaphorical mathematics). Where x and y are fixed, a cryptogram to be unlocked, footnotes to poetry, the need for cliff notes, a dictionary to be used side by side with the poem, the desire of vernacular/convessional poetry is the same as the desire of an avant garde, to put out surfaces, straightforward work of a way, but confessionalism still relies on a private set of meanings/references, but assumes that through commonality and sentiment the code can be unlocked.

Bok/Dworkin/Goldmsith –which one of them did the cryptogram poems, a parody of this idea of unlocking??

De-emphasis on meaning per se through choice/collage/found materials, etc. Attempt to unlock the cryptogram, meaning of high modernism, eliot, et al.

Charles Alexander

Social, political import of this work. Does it make it to activism?
Kenny Goldsmith: Sacred space of the poem for transgression.
Panelist: Can it be taken out from there?

Physical pleasures of poetry (see my notes from Friday night on pleasure and transgression.)

Tactile through speech act
I think it can be sexual too

Brian Reed:

Critic working on a book on visual/verbal links

Genres become confused over time
Derrida’s law of genre
My contention that genres become confused and under that weight, give birth to new genres, like the mixing of atoms that create new elements when mixed. Hydrogen and Oxygen combined make water, a new compound, rather than remaining discrete.


Christian Bok Presentation:

I. What is “intentional” in Conceptual Poetry?


Disarming literary mandate of self-expression
Anti-expression
Erase evidence of lyric style, the “normative” style
Suppression of subjective aspects

Oulipo
American Conceptualists like LeWitt

Kinds of manifestos (started to type meanifesto!), adherents, this is an avant garde, and one looking to an art-form, not simultaneous as with Dada, Beat, etc. but not merely homage or writing about, but taking up, just as Gysin said—we are not about 40 years after first burst of conceptualism, so maybe we are catching up—also in performance art, Judson Dance, etc

Poem as an art object.

II. What is expressible in conceptual poetics?

The I with a colon atop instead of a dot.
William tell, a novel. – the apple(s) on the head
Minimalist and conceptual. A world in an image. A story in a letter.


Contrasting to contemporary literary ctitics
The genius of the self
Convincingness of the poem, the lyric, the imagery
Poet’s mastery of self

Against criticism
Against workshop criteria

Death of the Author
Poetic despot
Trial of comprehension
Overthrow the unjust tyrant
In Barthes birth of the reader occasioned by death of the author

III. What is conceivable in conceptual literature?

Tyrant Writer
Victor Reader
Savior Letter

Lyrical style – cognitive aesthetics
Self-conscious and self-assertive simultaneously


Concepts of writing possible – according to Bok

Cognitive

+Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Autobiographic investigations
Author adopts Subjective Persona
Confessional
“Authentic” voice

Mannerist

+Intentionality
- Expressiveness
-
Self-conscious but not self-assertive

Ex: Oulipo
Automatic

- Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Still some self-assertion
Unwilled self-exhibit
Surrealistic – Schwitters to Breton to Ginsberg
Self speaking to self without thinking about self
Ir/nonrational
Aleatory

- Intentionality
- Expressiveness

Authors forfeit control
Dadaist – Tzara, Cage, Maclow


Poetics of a traffice report, its own internal grammar, poetics, lyric?


Bernstein: Saturday, 5/31

“Foolishness is its own reward” – line from poem
“from there to there is enough to blow up in anyone’s face.”

“Attack of the difficult poems”
“The answer is not in our technology but in our poetics.

Benjamin and the uncanny – Arcades project made up entirely of citations

Bernstein’s “Recantation” on poetry page
After Galileo
Therefore, is it forced?
Is it sincere?

Several mentions (typos = almost emotions, emanations, emntions . . . ) by Bernstein & Bok of “detourning” poems. J

Platonic idea – meaning as an ideal that exists outside of the social
Puritan ideal – that meaning should be available, accessible in the poem

“My quest has been to be a normal person, a self-help project toward normalcy. . . . When I become normal I will be a poet in the (normal) world.”

“Theory of Flawed Design”
--Lookup

Dea%r Fr~ien%d

Performed with all sounds, symbols, stops, & verbal struggles

“Poems (themselves) are less important than what they allow us to do in the pereceptual world.”

Progressivist model of replacement is flawed – go back and read things in a different way. How poetry exists within social space that it is written in.

“Singing/chanting ot newscasters to self.”
Poems/operas

“A pixilated man”



Panel discussion: (Friday evening???)

Dworkin:

Intellect rather than emotion
Is Conceptual Poetry the New American Poetry?
Having a “urinal” moment”
What constitutes such a speech act/provocation in this “post”-everything era?
Does Conceptual Poetry have a spiritual resonance?

Charles Bernstein:

Showed conceptual poem and talk (not reading poem) simultaneously
Seems somewhat similar to the Performance Writing people

Christian Bok:

Problem of “lethal” seriousness of the avant garde. The pleasure, play, jouissance is reserved for the poet rather than the reader/audience.

“post” = a gesture to newness in the avant garde, parallel to neo, which
is actually retro, revisiting of the old
Post = our impatience for transcendence
“More of the same, only worse”
Work is good when it creates provocation, more ideas, etc.

Tracie Morris:

Perloff: normativity of language experimentation
Meaning of sonic performance as a script
Replacing idea of consistent speaking position of an “I”

Bok:

Enigmatic bewilderment
Raise issues for as rather than reinforce what we already know – is this my comment or his???

Bernstein:

Difficulty
Invention
Innovation

Social/Cultural difficulty
Textures, ambiance (vs. the difficult of “high modernism”)
One person’s difficulty is another person’s pleasure


Final Panel – 5/31/08

Barbara Cole, Editor, Open Letter

Wystan Curnow:
Forms & History

Bernadette Myer

Gracia Capinha

Epistemicides
Who owns (the) language – paraphrase of moral/story in “official”languages
Poetry and art does matter
The fear of governments and dictatorships toward art proves that it matters, that it has power, can be dangerous
There is no language unless the emotional part of your brain works, according to neuroscience
Modernist project – enlargement of consciousness, non approved, yet to be proven, yet to be known, discovered

Thingness – object = repetition of market

Stephen Fredman

Appropriation in music, sampling
The mix
Creativity rests in how you recontextualize the work of others
Language poetry and its emphasis on discourse cut poetry’s ties to othr art forms
Subjectivity vs. emotion

Vanessa Place

Words as things
“transparent”
Words = what fills up mainstream boxes
Barthes & the evacuation of language/meaning
But language is also procedural
Responding to poems created by machines
“robopoems for a robofuture”
“bankruptcy of image & text”


Final & most heated conversation (did not document who started it, but was the final panelist) – why only 2 women writers in the Ubu Anthology of Conceptual Poetry???

Presented by someone who had done an informal survey of 50 women before the conference regarding their ideas/opinions/questions regarding conceptual poetics/

Some questioned her own “methodology”

Marjorie Perloff – impatient, suggested that not everyone needed to be included in every movement, that then we’d have to worry about why not enough latinos or African-americans, etc. and then having to weigh and watch every single thing.

Batted back and forth – why are we still asking this question in 2008 and why do we have to still ask this question in 2008

Some of the better and less combative comments included a suggestion that sometimes inclusion is a matter of definition. How you define something determines who is included.

My private note—interesting that the conference was at least ½ women and the presenters at least ½ women. Some noted this as a defense or corrective, rather than criticism, of the lack of women in the anthology. See how many of us are here now???

Another good discussion --- nature of something like Conceptual Poetics to grow out of small groups of people who form affinities, begin to define themselves and give name to what they’re doing. Indicated that Goldsmith/Bok/Dworkin constituted such a grouping.

Dworkin himself said that the online version was not meant to be “official” and representative (although some questioned that, given the “The” aspect of the title out on Ubuweb.) He said that there is a print edition planned that will likely be much more inclusive.

My private note: replication of Corso and others’ discussions of why women ignored in Beat anthologies and histories for 40 years (except for a couple who were unignorable like DiPrima). Aren’t all of these always the arguments? Question of definition seems the most pertinent. How you define the “movement”, the “artistic moment” without watering it down to include, but making sure the feelers are out to embrace those whose work does fit in, does have an affinity, etc.

Found/cut Up poem

From lines heard and misheard and contemplated at Kenneth Goldsmith's reading at the conceptual poetics conference on Friday night, May 30, 2008.

High Grade Geranium

High grade geranium
useless for making bombs
useless for making poems
on the floor in a glass jar
wrapped in plastic
Geranium-235
enough to make a small atom bomb
shark attack
arsenic strict standards
drinking water suspended(suspected)
September 10, 2001.
How much (morning) television can one nation watch.

Poetry and liberation

I'm at the conceptual poetics conference in Tucson right now and fled the panel discussion to type up the notes I've been accumulating all day, set off by work by Tracie Morris this morning. These will be more organized I think later, and I have some quotes to look up but I really wanted to put this out there for you all now.

Thoughts on Poetry and Liberation

I.

Thinking about African Americans and avant garde work, about the use of language in hip hop, which influences and infiltrates poetry slam, while at the same time poetry slam is my example of a highly reified form of performance poetry. Is African-american poetry inherently avant garde and experimental? The work has had a way of becoming normative but just as avant gardists themselves make their way into broader culture and no longer remain marginal, that is, not irrelevant, but a set of margin notes, corrections, editorials, on the mainstream, on what is "inside the box" or margins. The way that marginal work gets taken up in the mainstream is criticized as co-option, but the reality is that avant gardes are often about bringing about changes -- in consciousness, in acceptable art practices, in language, etc. So is it truly that the avant garde, and by extensino, that subcultures must constantly change to "stay ahead of" or outside of mainstream culture? to be sure, the danger of the mainstream in capitalist culture is that the mainstream carries with it commodification. And the mainstream also carries with it a tendency to reify, to take the new that it has found, and make it normative. Thus the danger here is that the freedom that the subculture has sought becomes lost and so the constant shifty or need to shift is the attempt of a subculture, avant garde, etc. to be constantly searching for freedom, for the ground of greedom, to maintain a stance, a space carved out.

It is not, as is often charged then, elitism, but rather the desire to stay outside the boundaries, under the radar, where freedom can be tried on, tried out. I believe that those on the margins, once they feel their own liberation, develop the best intentions and want to pioneer a freedom that can be shared with all, passed on to the masses. Breton believed that the liberation of the imagination, for example, was not merely for the poet, but for all, for actual social and revolutionary liberation. As Comte Lautremonte wrote--poetry must be made by all.

II.

John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols said in The Filth and the Fury "I was never very good at violence. Words are my weapon." Richard Schechner once wrote about the fact that if the actual revolution he and others from the 60s spoke of, were to come, he, as a white academic, would be the first under attack and it would completely disrupt his life. Gil Scott-Heron wrote that "niggers are scared of revolution." The truth is that most of us are. most of us in the west have much to lose, even many of the poor and the working class have been led to believe and do believe that they have much to lose. In fact, they have the most to gain and to lose as they will be the front line, they will be the avant garde of suffering, of foreclosures, job losses, food on the table, money for basic pleasures like theatre and books and movies and cable television and a night out at a restaurant. Perhaps the Marxists who attacked surrealism were right in a way and that poets are armchair revolutionaries, comfortable revolutionaries, not willing to risk.

III.

But I don't think so.

IV.

We could argue, as Breton might suggest, that poets are truly the avant in the avant garde of society, the first line of the revolution, those who pave the way, create the consciousness, create the restlessness, the vision outside of the safety of the known, the mystical vision, if you will, that brought the Jews through the desert that makes the mystic survive the extreme asceticism needed to get to the next stage of their existence. Not to ask the ordinary person to sacrifice unnecessarily, but to create the consciousness that will allow them to move from away the devil that they at least know and toward something unknown of which we have given them a glimpse. How do we create this space for all outside/before reification/commodification. Perhaps we do not bring the avant garde, the margins to the center, but move everyone out of the center, where, as in Richard Schechner's Rasa Boxes acting technique, the center box remains largely empty, Shanta, which he says is both all and nothing. Moreover, maybe the center doesn't need to shift so much as we need to take everyone out of the center, to the margins where feeling exists where imagination flourishes.

V.

The avant garde has a democratic impulse, as opposed to what we call the High Modernism of Eliot et al, where we are taught that metaphors are virtually mathematical, constant, we only need to learn the language of poetry, which functions as a kind of cryptogram where one word or letter = another, an inside secret language of the educated, the need for cliff notes, cheat sheets, crib notes, a dictionary side by side with the poem. The desire of the vernaculr in poetry comes out in several ways. First in confessional poetry, which has a similar desire as the avant grade, to put things out on surfaces, present itself in a straightforward manner. But confessionalism still relies on private meanings, but assumes that through commonality and sentiment that the masses will be able to decode the work without their crib notes.

VI.

Kenneth Goldsmith here has talked about stealing/borrowing/appropriating in work and this of course, does give the lie to the idea of originality and newness that is so fetishized in the avant garde. Of course ready-mades and collages are not original or new per se. It is in the concept, in the re-vision that newness comes out. It is in the criminality/thievery that the newness of the avant garde can exist. If the tired old saw from Plato has any truth whatsoever that every poet is a thief, is every thief a(n) (avant garde) poet? Do we dare romanticize criminality in this day in this point in time? Yet do we note de facto romanticize the pirate, the renegade, the robin hood who liberates materials from the rich, the bourgeois, the masters, for those who need it or even just plain desire it? Is a ready made, a collage, a found poem, a "liberation" of materials for those who need it--materially, creatively--and for those who desire it, with the desire for liberation of all things at its core.

VII.

Why does stealing matter? Because things matter? I think it's because of the breakdown of relationships and trust. The center will always protect itself and its property. more police. more cameras. But we borrow, we try to stay out of the vision of the lens, we try to appropriate and liberate what will set us free--the machines that will open the chains, break down the fences, keep the margin safe.

VIII.

Probably more to come.

IX.

Please comment.