More on Criminality and Poetry
Pleased to see the deservedly skeptical scrutiny my previous post has gotten so far. In the interest of refinement and clarification, I'll just throw out a couple of counterpoints:
1. Yes, all art that ever veers into the representational involves illusion to some degree, as Kevin points out with his observation on Renaissance uses of perspective. What I'm suggesting is that poetry, which takes a medium (language) whose function is clearly designated as having an "ordinary," "proper" application (referential communication), and gives it a "secondary," "deviant" application (one of plastic expressivity above and beyond semantic content, by virtue of its sonic, visual, and/or tangentially associative properties), is especially dubious in that it cannot even be evaluated, as can illusionist painting for example, on the basis of its adherence to a "realistic" model. It makes up its own faux rules as it goes along, encouraging its readers/listeners to accept the outcome of the game played by those rules as "fair." Well, so does dance, you may say. Yes, but the dancer does not (except perhaps in very particular cases, or by a concerted stretch of the imagination) appear on some level to be merely walking or running down the street attending to daily business. The poet seems to be talking to you, and may in fact at times be conveying actual bits of informational data of varying value in the process. It is easy to forget what poetry is, and to start to concentrate solely on what passes for the poet's "message," as opposed to the unique conditions of its presentation via sound, text, performative context, etc. Any illusionist aspects of poetry are merely discrete instances peculiar to a given rhetorical or formal strategy, like e. e. cummings' falling leaf made of words, or Milton's fallen angel Mulciber tumbling syntactically down several strophes of pentameter in Book 1 of Paradise Lost. In other words, the parts of poetry that act most like they are intended to deceive us are not deceptive at all. We see them exactly for what they are: clever devices, moving flourishes. What is deceptive is the premise (not necessarily intended by the poet, but always latently implied) that poetry can have any consistent, coherent standards by which it may be evaluated as "legitimate" or "proper." In fact, it depends on the absence of any such standards for its evolutionary survival. It depends always on the possibility of new forms it can take so as not only to inspire renewed delight, but to awaken doubt, even hostile suspicion. When it does not do this--when it believes in its own respectability, and conforms to notions of propriety borrowed from past eras--it fails to attain the level of questionability that would qualify it for the sort of "criminality" I'm imagining. It becomes merely quaint, or pathetic. It is still on the margins of polite society, but in the manner of an abject beggar, not a stealthy safecracker or confidence man.
2. It may be the case that by framing things in this way, I am "romanticizing" the poet. But part of what I'm saying is that poetry is always, by definition almost, romanticized and romanticizing. That's part of the con game--to convince the reader/listener that the poet has a special sensitivity to life or ideology at large or whatever that cannot be defined in purely rational terms. This is true whether the poet writes gushing love sonnets or complex procedural deconstructions of government memo-speak. Highly cerebral gambits that reject the notion of individual "genius" are themselves bids for genius. Humble plain speech that rejects high intellectual artifice is often only a cloaking of such artifice, like an aristocrat in beggar's garb. I'm not trying to reinforce the myth of the poet as a mysterious outlaw figure, a divinely inspired renegade who talks to spirits and therefore transcends society's narrow moral and political constraints; that myth doesn't need reinforcing, because it underlies the very concept on which poetry is based in the first place. If anything, I'm "exposing" that romantic pretext (as if it needed exposing).
Note: I started composing this before I saw Anne's comments on my last post, and I notice that we cover some of the same territory.
11 comments:
Actually I think your concept of fakery-criminality veers toward a sort of neo-puritan, rather than romantic, view of the poet.
The "verbal arts" are rooted, in a pretty fundamental and stable way, in the denotive and affective capabilities of language. Someone writes a vivid imaginative description - we "see" what the words evoke. Someone tells a moving story - we laugh or cry. These perceptual and emotional responses are based on a certain identity between words and that to which they refer.
I think that art's capacity to step back from immediate practical usage, in order to depict a situation "in the round", is socially valid and valuable. Only cynics, on the one hand, and philistines, on the other, can't seem to understand this.
Marks made on paper or other objects sometimes stand for letters. Letters stand for sounds. Letters grouped together stand for longer sounds and are sometimes known as words. Words stand for things and ideas.
So, with so much "standing-for" i.e. fakeness in language--a fakeness that runs through and through it from the moment the baby makes a connection that this sound stands for that thing--with so much fakeness, why is poetry any more fake than everyday speech? I think that poetry is an attempt to break through or work out or smash or come to terms with or (fill in whatever other action resonates with you) the fakeness (your word) or limitations (my word) of language & everything that human language does to & for humans.
I don't know. There's something defensive & guarded in looking at it the way you are describing, in using words like "fake" (again, your word) or "conniving" (Anne's word).
One possible sourcebook on criminality and poetry: Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers:
"Our Lady of the Flowers here makes his solemn entrance through the door of crime, a secret door, that opens on to a dark but elegant stairway ... His faraway birth, his dancing at night, his crime, were elements which enveloped him in poetry...."
But Kasey, you're teetering on the edge of (what I think is) an even more provocative topic: the one you cheerfully tossed, like a Molotov cocktail, into the very end of our Dangerfield Conundrum in Jacket 33, at the moment when (as we all knew) conversation had to stop.
I'm talking about poetry and cruelty, rather than criminality. Here's part of what you said in your last post: "In my case, I have been if anything more firmly persuaded that humor is a form of cruelty. A necessary form, and one that we use sometimes to forestall more severe forms of cruelty, though of course it may also be used as an intensifier, a way of making cruelty even more cruel."
I've been puzzling over this ever since you said it -- a puzzlement not too different really from the one that launched the Dangerfield conversation in the first place, sparked (as it was) by Ron Silliman's statement that "humor doesn't travel well in poetry."
I took a first run at the topic in my post Comedy, Cruelty, and Control at wordstrumpet. But I'm up against the fact that you didn't spin out your thoughts in much detail, and that's making it a challenge to proceed with my own ruminations and meanderings. You didn't give any examples, for instance, and those would help a lot in demonstrating how humor (especially in a poem) might make cruelty even more cruel.
I'm certainly not suggesting that we relaunch the Dangerfield conversation; heaven forfend. But I'd be very grateful if you'd address all this a bit more, because it's too central to everything we dealt with to be banished entirely from my mind.
So I'm just catching up with the posts here.
Isn't a flip side of this whole discussion the idea that poetry is the performance of criminality by exactly people who don't consider themselves "low"? (Or, who might be by others but have the courage to resist it?)
Poetry -- at least, what gets in to the Norton Anthologies -- has generally been written by those either convinced of their own social worth, or doing their best to cover up a lack of it. The "Outlaw" book of American poetry seems to be as much Outlaw as an actor in a headdress is a Navajo.
lime-tree (16th century edition): aren't we all shepherdesses and swains? I mean, only in as much as we can stop whenever we like!
The whole book-theft discussion -- I knew of enough Harvard kids (at least on the son of a prof) who would steal from Grolier's and the Harvard Bookstore -- seems exactly to the point. Nobody's relating stealing canned goods to poetry -- just a kind of arrogance of intellect that expresses itself somewhat anti-socially.
Bourdieu is all over this shit. You should just post a link to Bourdieu at Wikipedia.
What's irksome tho here Kasey is that it's not just that all "poets are fakes," as you say. But that all of literature, and especially those areas of it most governed by a need to be symbolically autonomous, like poetry (because it can't be economically autonomous very easily), is a den of fakery. It's an illusion. An "illusio" in which poets conspire stupidly with anyone who might join them.
As long as you wanna expose "the romantic pretext" that is the poet, you may as well just lay open the larger field constructing the actuality/idea of "poet." Stopping yr thesis of illusion at the poet's level is itself a romantic move. It just reinforces the myth of the inherent dynamism of the poet. He alone in the field is the raging trickster: and now he alone is the self-aware meta-trickster in a field of meretricious mendacity.
Go further. Bust it out. The entire enterprise is about the manufacture of belief in the efficacy of literature. Bourdieu says it so well, ""There is a specific economy of literary and artistic field, based on a particular form of belief....both the unbelievers and iconoclasts and also the believers, assert the possibility and necessity of understanding the work in its reality as a fetish."
So, because of the pervasive complicity of the actors -- from the audience to the poets to the reviewers, bloggers, librarians, journalists -- I'd disagree w/ yr criminality metaphor. It's an enterprise of complicity and obedience. The poet is just as obedient to the illusion as the reader. "These people are so obedient!" sd Tom Clark to Ginsberg.
Addiction, fetish: these metaphors seem more consonant with all the weird features of this very trippy field. Criminality is such a 1970s metaphor. Very Starsky & Hutch, Kasey. It's so Bernstein.
We all read to read some sociology.
Come away!
Gabriel, was that supposed to be a response to my previous post? Because it seems to me like I more or less address much of what you say in this comment in the post you affixed it to.
Still, I guess I didn't express myself very well. Maybe criminality is indeed the wrong trope. I'm not interested in the cliche of the poet (or artist in general) as "trickster" or "outlaw" per se. As I look back over these posts, I can see that they really lead me back to my old hobbyhorse, evaluation. I'm trying to get my thoughts together about the way poetry oscillates historically between periods of establishedness in which criteria for evaluation are built into the practice of composition, and periods of reflexive dissociation in which such criteria are (more or less systematically) stripped away. Maybe criminality came into it via the idea of "operating without a (poetic) license." But of course it's more complicated than that, since it often has to be the "right kind" of licenselessness, amounting to just another form of license.
But but, Kasey, you don't seem, no, to have addressed what I'm talking about. Sorry to not have been clear. You pt to it by conceding that in framing things this way you're might seem to be romanticizing the poet -- by, in your metaphor, making the poet a con man and the reader a mark. In fact the reader is invested in the illusio too. As I reread yr post I still see that in there, but I'm not always a generous reader.
EG when you say that "depends on the absence of any such standards for its evolutionary survival," I have to wonder if this isn't just a furthering of the old metaphor of "lawlessness" -- the Wild West (wind) of the Poetry World.
Where you speak of "absence of standards" I see you furthering the illusio. I'd say the field (not the poem, now, but the field) has its own "fuzzy logic" rules. Where you might be speaking of standards of judgment/consecration (and hence composition of poems), what I mean are generalizable and somewhat predictable power relations as laid out, say, by Bourdieu in "The Production of Belief: Contribution to the Economy of Symbolic Goods."
So, when you write that the poet is part of a "con game" that s/he's part of a larger field of production that is operating by illusion? If so, good.
PB notes that this field operates via a denial of these tactics/strategies. "These practices ... can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing." But he's not just talking about the practices of the poet, but of gestalt of all the players and interests.
Sorry, brother, if I misread you again.
Any case, I also have an interest in the idea of the poet as "outlaw" "trickster" "shaman" -- or as I put it in a syllabus recently --"the charismatic male genius shaman" and the "autonomous hero author ghoul" -- thinking of CB's _My Way_ and Oppenheimer's _Don't Touch the Poet_ or any number of blurbs. The gendered nature of the field is a big deal here -- both Rachel Blau DuPlessis's & Michael Davidson's work (esp the latter cuz it's a whole book) important to me.
I hope i caught your pt. If not, my apologies in advance. I'm rushing thru my morning and probably botched the clarity of my response. If so, send cruis emissile to illinois. Just noticed that "illinois" is partial anagram of "illusio."
Poetry is for people who prefer to buy their belief retail.
All belief is retail.
We should all carry swords. That'd put all this jibba-jabba in perspective.
There are many people out there that either read or write poetry, that dislike criminals. There are variety of applications and approaches to the mediums. Maybe some of them are into the crime pose, yet others would dislike any of that.
Why are the lit. profs paid as much as the science department? Is it that ability to apprehend the data from the works, along with the application to social dyanmics is an equal ability and value to our society? Is that a scam or is it a necessary step with a screening process in the organization of our society?
Some are good, some might go bad. That happens.
To some, as oppossed to merely being an x in an algebra equation where one hunts for a solution, poetry might simply be a mode of expression...sorry for the grammar here...within whatever jobs or ways of being they have, it's one of the modes for expression within the pilgrim time where humans interact or express their given modes, or comment on our society.
There are other approaches to medium, a way of approaching paradigm within the limitations of our jobs and finances, that is fun.
As oppossed to rooting on the criminals, or accidentally pretending to be the cops, during certain tender years, the poets, that work around the theme of crime, might be interesting in representing, either as a warning or as survey as their take on existing in the contemporary ways,
the nature of our society. Representing the paradigms where crime exists, is other than saying one agrees with it.
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2/4/08 9:38 AM
cold soup said...
Pardon a slight breach of web graces with another post (seemed relevant and had only just thought of it)...
There probably are as many approaches to poetic medium and motif as there are variations in the range of human personality and variations in the amount of sounds and shades one finds in nature. Some of them think of it as "dreaming" and wonder what it (the poem) is about themselves? Some of them are scientific and analytical about the form and have a definite procudure they would be willing to define. Some have an understanding of what they themselves are thinking, yet decline to comment.
In the History of the poetic medium, there have been poets that-- one might resist guessing as to whether or not they were bucking the stereotype of the image of the poet as "deviant that had been defined in some previous schools-- have had jobs and social roles that would be considered respectable. There have been Doctors (Williams) and Insurance Salesmen (Stevens) and Civil Servants (De Andre). One might wonder as to whether or not they were a "quirky" variation on the type, yet they were respected professionals.
With the temperature these days and whatever pressures the youth might feel toward tatoos with whatever some of the development synergy going, one might bypass going into the "poets used to wear suits" rants a beat type might have when losing popularity and suddenly trying on a different team go to being conservative, yet one might note the various phases where poetry was considered to be a fairly respected task, for the men and ladies of Letters.
Even some of the goofball poets, the clowns, have that element to them at times.
At the same time, there have been poets that really were criminals, though. It was less frequent in america up until the beats. Basically to some it's a simular stereotype as the poet as a "suicide." They are probably wrong about it as Hart Crane had already happened, yet some would note the word was fairly infrequent up until the translations by Bishop etc. Was focusing on that aespect of the latin poets, along with, integrating yet sort of the flawed version of the culture to being with? There were some respectable other than going for hazed ectomorphs ..there are plenty of good poets about else than the manipulative variation on the "romantic" though. And there are romantics being other than manipulative. Is that really what the romantics where thinking? Now maybe it's wrong to smear social types or cause imbalances socially with suspicion and paranoia based on a guess. That's one type of poet though, and sometimes it's fun to wonder.
When poets do take on the theme of crime? Do they all like it? Is it fair to lump the ones that work with the theme yet dislike it, in with the wrong party? One might qualify then? Then again, does that cause supsicion for the ones that would like to be at that party, and really are into crime?
Those are the issues one has to work through with delving into this topic. Some lit. majors are actually sensitive and intelligent people far from the social type you would normally expect to engange in a life of crime. Some times, with the conditioning to being able to handle a rape, the psychology gets a bit loopy and the develop a fascination for the type and really go that way.
In some cases though, the poetic medium, as oppossed to glorifying anything, might be an associative jargon with an interesting fun way of thinking of what might otherwise be an essay on "social types." Should that type end up in some awful low end job where they have to work with people with a rap sheet, they might understand the social type, the way it thinks, what their view of the system is and so on, from the poems that examine the psychology.
One might still disagree with mob psychology, however, should they go onto being social workers or just employees that didn't quite make it to the big gig, the poetry years might in a weird way help them get to understanding the subculture's view that, part of their flippance is thinking that the social positioning that led to their actions was unfair. Of course, that migtht have been other than what had ever happened to them, yet it does help explain things with understanding that they think that's what happened to them.
Going from poetry to music, some of the weird bands probably are working with expressing what it's like to experience life in modern society while still listening to the breeze.....so it's unfair to lump them in with this other way of approaching medium.. yet in regards to the strange distance between their social type and the aesthetic some of them might be saying that they think of certain moves as unfair and insane. They might personify that, whilst being rational themselves. Opinions vary on the amount of alpha display and personality assertion you have going with that, though. And as to whether or not there's a sad yearning about reaching out to the other social types without them being there in a way that, depending on the levels, might lapse into being "deviant."
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