Poetry and Stupidity Part 2

My earlier post on stupidity, magic, and poetry was meant in large part as a flippant provocation, an indulgence to which I am at times lamentably prone. But like many such provocations, it lends itself to subsequent redaction. One form of said redaction occurs, inevitably, in the shape of a fourfold categorization, in this case, of types of application of language with the objective of making something come into being, or at least swim into our ken. Let's say: 1. Philosophy, 2. Poetry, 3. Religion, 4. Magic.

Philosophy has as one of its definitions a striving toward truth--the formulating of things that can be reasonably demonstrated or asserted through language. Language thus employed demands constantly its own chastening, its careful monitoring in the name of accuracy. Language is accordingly set against its own tendencies, its tendencies to profligate overdetermination and willful vagueness. Whether it ever succeeds in this goal we might debate, but that is its aim: through language, to strip away the occultations of language itself.

Poetry is an intermediate step, I want to suggest, in the transition from philosophy to religion (though, as I will elaborate, that transition is not entirely linear). But let me put the former aside for the moment and skip straight to the latter.

Religion, like philosophy, is concerned with truth--but whereas philosophy depends on the processes of rationality, religion depends on pure assertion. The Word is its own justification, its own evidence. Religious language presumes belief, and fosters that belief via mere gratification of the same. Religion is nothing but telling. Telling that everything will be all right, that things are whatever one hopes they might be. Language retains its communicative function, but jettisons the means whereby it might be challenged or questioned. Religion, like philosophy, sits uneasily in the necessary medium of language: but whereas in philosophy the uneasiness stems from an internal apprehension of language's fundamental fallibility, in religion it stems from the apprehension of others' ability to make that observation. Philosophy would purify language, rendering it free of context--dependency and arbitrariness; religion would have its subjects forget that language exists in the first place.

Magic is religion without the anxiety. In magic, there is no illusion other than the illusion itself. Everyone, except the very young and the mentally infirm, knows that magic is unreal. If it made any claim to the contrary, it would become a religion--or at least the basis for one.

So, back to poetry. Like magic, poetry makes no claims to an "authenticity" outside its own self-proclaimed parameters. Or, the authenticity it stages is always just that: staged, conditional, bracketed by artifice. And yet, like religion, poetry always solicits an irrational belief of sorts. But this is where it gets weird. Whereas religion demands that its followers forsake logic entirely in the pursuit of truth, and whereas magic sets aside the question of truth altogether, poetry wants to be understood simultaneously as fiction and, if not truth, something that draws from the same cognitive resources as truth. One might say that poetry aspires to the status of virtual truth (unlike magic, which only wants to create a falsehood whose remarkable similarity to truth is always--by necessity--recognizable and recognized).

What is this "virtual truth" to which poetry attains? Perhaps it might better be understood as a fundamentally ironic rehearsal of the conditions through which philosophy, religion, and magic all entertain the possibility of investment in some kind of truth. For even magic implies, by negative comparison, a solid truth against which its own facile machinations may be measured. And so we are revisited by the specter of stupidity: poetry deliberately invites us into dead ends of understanding and intelligibility, null spaces where the usual postures of certainty lose their power. What is this loss, this falling away of reason and faith, but a becoming-stupid, a gaping in the face of an agnostic void? Religion similarly fosters unknowing, but only as a recruitment feint, a way of coaxing the sheep into the fold. Magic too relies on its audience's ignorance, but only to the extent that ignorance is founded on an investment in an occluded but assumedly infallible system of knowledge.

Poetry's position, then, is one of radical pointlessness and aporia. Even--especially?--when it is enlisted in the service of a philosophical, religious, or magical "message," its underlying ludic structure points the way through the holes in that message to the absence of underlying ground. When philosophy encroaches upon this mode, it becomes a certain kind of self-negating deconstructive theory. When religion does it, it becomes heretical. When magic does it, it becomes absurd comedy (in a way, magic is always comedy).

Conversely, poetry could be thought of as philosophy, religion, and/or magic at their most self-ironized state. All the gestures of reason, faith, wonder, etc.--made as though in front of a funhouse mirror that one knows in advance will distort and discredit one's "meaning." What a stupid thing to do.

Lest it be concluded that I am trying to dissuade my readers from their poetic pursuits, I should say that I think stupidity, like wisdom, has its place. And there are different kinds of stupidity. Here again the other three disciplines of magic, religion, and philosophy are relevant. Magic encourages a local, temporary application of stupidity to a specific, staged set of actions. This stupidity is always already recognized as contingent and insincere. It is pretend stupidity, largely harmless but also largely frivolous. Religion encourages a total or near-total investment in the most dangerous kind of stupidity: the kind which leads one to surrender wholly to whatever powerful idea or feeling is presented as necessary, and in so doing to render oneself an unthinking pawn for whoever presents that idea or feeling. Philosophy encourages, like magic, a stupidity that is temporary and contingent: a voluntary placing of oneself into certain postures of unknowing, in the interest of isolating and clarifying those truths that are (hypothetically) knowable. Poetry uses all these strategies, but strips them of their practical applications. In poetry, we engage stupidity almost in the spirit of confession or ecstatic ritual. We stare it in the face and acknowledge it. We admit it as a fact, and don't try to control it. We simply experience it, like absurd laughter, or a surge of morphine through the veins. We own it in the hope that it won't own us.

Poetry and Stupidity

I think a certain amount of stupidity is necessary to cultivate an appreciation for poetry. A certain amount, as in not too much and not too little. Too much, and one is not able to appreciate much of anything worthwhile. Too little, and one will bypass poetry's sleights of mind entirely, going on to industrial engineering or nuclear medicine or hotel management.

The susceptible stand before poetry like gullible five-year-olds before uncles who pull coins from behind their ears. Initially, it's very impressive--and being impressed in that way is a true pleasure--but if they are capable of learning, eventually they develop some savvy and learn to see the uncle as a schmuck unless he can come up with some more impressive tricks. Depending on the strength of the savvy, at some point no trick, no matter how spectacular, will make any impression, because even if one doesn't know how the trick was done, one knows it was a trick. This is why only children and idiots like magic acts. Or other magicians, who are always looking for new techniques to use on their own idiots.

One thing you don't see much of in the magic business, I'm guessing, is magicians who fall for their own tricks. That wouldn't just be stupidity; it would be psychosis. In poetry, however, it's fairly common. Draw your own conclusions.

Let's grant, however, that there are some important differences between poetry and stage magic. For one thing, poetry often comes with an entire apparatus of histories and contexts with which not only its practitioners but its readers--depending on the poetic tradition--are encouraged to become familiar. There is, as I said earlier, a limit to the amount of requisite stupidity. One must be stupid in some ways and not in others, and the ways in which one is not stupid must be carefully monitored so as not to counteract the ways in which one is stupid. Accordingly, one learns things about the lives of individual poets, the development of movements, the applications of specialized theories to given poetics, and so on; but, in any event, this learning must not be allowed to impinge on the maintenance of certain crucial blind spots. For instance, there is the blind spot that allows one to entertain the notion that placing words in a certain order, making them sound a certain way, etc., will result in some kind of transformative state of awareness or spiritual (or pseudo-spiritual) receptivity.

Visualize Emily Dickinson's famous quote about good poetry being that which takes the top of your head off. We're basically talking about a lobotomy here, or a shotgun accident. Note that she never says anything about putting the top back on.

Obviously I'm included in this equation, as I continue energetically to pursue the writing, reading, and teaching of poetry. So what's my deal, besides clearly being stupid? I could come up with all kinds of justificatory apologiae, as many of us could. In fact, that's one answer: the elaborate self-justifications poetry forces us to devise are in themselves amusing distractions at worst, and mind-sharpening exercises at best. I also think of the process by which we move, if our imaginations are at all flexible and dynamic, from poets who engage us initially and even for long stretches to those we can eventually still tolerate. My theory here is that there are some poets who are especially valuable for their ability to interest us over long stretches of time, even though we ultimately (if we are not too stupid) learn to see through their crap. Ezra Pound, for instance. I think anyone who is serious about modernist and postmodernist poetry in the Western tradition should read Pound, and tackle his various difficulties (though not, perhaps, to the extent Pound himself insisted we should tackle them, seeing how short life is and all). I even think it's useful to spend a considerable chunk of one's poetry-reading life under the Poundian spell, as long as one doesn't also adopt his hideous political and social ideology.

As an extension of this, it's useful to check out what later poets like Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky and Allen Ginsberg did with their own immersion in Pound's poetics. But it's also useful, as one becomes more and more familiar with all of this, to leave oneself open to the realization that Pound was basically an idiot. So was Olson. Learned, creative idiots, to be sure, but just plain dumb all the same, in the sense that those who will not bother to wash themselves or realize that rabbits' feet don't work are dumb. For that matter, Ginsberg and even Zukofsky had some serious stupidity issues in some areas.

I say "even" Zukofsky because for me, he is the one of those I've mentioned who continues to interest me the most as a poet, who still offers what I consider the most intriguing strategies for both the enjoyment and production of poetry. To a lesser extent, Ginsberg still does this as well, though he has largely moved into the category of poets I am glad to have at one point had available as a formative model. It's difficult (though not impossible) to imagine an occasion in the foreseeable future when I will suddenly feel like sitting down and reading him again. I feel too much like I know how he does his quarter-behind-the-ears trick.

Even as I write, however, I feel compunctions: I would hate for anyone impressionable to read this and decide, well, that's probably right, Mohammad seems like a reliable voice, I won't bother reading Ginsberg (or Pound, or Olson--well, I guess I don't care if they don't read Olson). Don't take my word for anything. Don't be stupid.

Issue 1/Flarf Poll

Lots of people seem to think that the Issue 1 pdf has something to do with Flarf. Are you one of them? Take the quick and easy poll to the right [poll now removed]!

The Issue 1 PDF Thing

I think there are three different basic kinds of irritation being generated by the Issue 1 PDF thing at for godot, on the evidence of the comment boxes at Harriet, Ron's blog, the for godot site itself, and elsewhere.

1. The simplest kind: outrage that a) one's name has been used without one's permission, and b) that the work attributed to one is not really one's own. Many, though not all, of the people who respond in this way appear oblivious to the fact that the project was clearly intended, at least in part, to provoke just such a response. These are the people who will try to start a lawsuit, or at least bluster about it for a long time. They are, in essence, the butt of the joke.

2. Generic reactionary resistance to the stuntishness of the hoax, and its typification of a certain "conceptualist," or more broadly "avant-garde" trickster mentality perceived as frivolous and contemptible. This response is not limited, moreover, to "mainstream" types; many so-called "experimental" poets are every bit as reactive in this regard, if not more so. One aspect of this response can be seen in a charitable light: as a protest of the way in which the experiment seems meant to produce the first kind of irritation, making the people who object on that level look foolish. The implied objection here is that it's just not very nice. In its most bullying form, this response plays a larger social-conscience card: "How can these idiots waste so much time on such a stupid, pointless joke when the nation/globe is in a dire state of crisis?" This criticism could be leveled just as intelligibly at poetry in general, of course, or for that matter at things like going to movies, eating ice cream, having sex, vacuuming the carpet, or playing with one's cat.

3. The anxiety induced by the pressure of worrying over whether one's response to the project will be perceived as naive, kneejerk, banal, or otherwise uncool. This blogpost could be taken as a case in point: notice how I have avoided, and will continue to avoid throughout the remainder of the post, any direct statement concerning my own individual feelings about the project. Notice too how I am attempting the preemptive social maneuver of formulating an inclusive social theory of the hoax that anticipates and defuses as many other responses as I can imagine. Undoubtedly, someone else will come along and trump me in some way, under much the same pressure. I take this to be a characteristic pathology of artistic/intellectual community on the web: the constant panic over whether one is presenting oneself in the most sophisticated and even-handed light, and whether someone else has outdone one in this regard.