For the Workers

Debates about the aesthetic values of postmodernism are giving rise to an interesting array of linguistic devices. "Meta," for example, has escaped from being considered merely a prefix, and is now a descriptor in its own right, and even a budding critical category. Then, there is a range of metaphors meant to register the disgust of academics and cultural critics who are sure we've been here before: cultural necrophilia, or cannibalization among them. Beyond the first level of reference, that we're in some way "consuming" our aesthetic past, or images of past-ness, is a complicated mesh of warranted desires for a return to previous cultural moments and a despicable nostalgia for the open, uncontested sexism and racism of the past.

I wonder what makes the copycats of today any more pernicious or unscrupulous than the cultural movers of previous generations? My suspicion is that it has to do with the (perceived) difference between reaction and remixing. It's a relatively uncontested narrative that Modernism is a reaction to Romanticism, and Romanticism emerged as an aesthetic reaction to the Enlightenment, and on and on. Postmodernism, then, isn't merely a periodizing term (when it is, it refers to, roughly, the period between WWII and the present),  but also refers to an aesthetic break after which the values of the Modernist no longer obtain their cultural weight. In the Postmodern period, all potentially aesthetic productions are considered to have equal presence and merit, and any distinctions are subjective and personal: I can go to a museum and see one of Andy Warhol's screen prints hung a room over from works from Picasso's surrealist days. In that example, Picasso is reacting to the Romantic and formal painting of the 19th century, and Warhol is manipulating already extant materials (his screen print of Marilyn Monroe is made from a photograph by Eugene Korman) to create something that can't properly be called new. The problem of artistic integrity and legitimacy, then, must have something to do with creating a new sort of aesthetic product. So, here at the beginning of the 21st Century, having run out of images and materials that strike us as new, artistic production has moved into alternative mediums (film, performance, computer-based arts, so-called street art among them) and the measure of artistic integrity, creativity and originality is reserved for the assessment of the conceptual underpinnings of this or that appropriation or manipulation of "found" images and materials. I've witnessed how this often plays with the public first hand: I once went to a gallery with my father, and we stood together in front of a quilt made of squares of fabric that had been affixed over the tailpipe of the artist's car over a series of days. The stained squares were aggregated into a larger square that almost had the integrity of a single canvas. After pondering the image (or lack of an image) created by the piece for an inappropriately brief period, my dad looked at me and asked, "What the hell?"

My dad, art critic.

Interestingly, in the more popular forms of aesthetic production, film chief among them, we've seen -- rather than a similar retreat from conventional filmic images into re-appropriation and unbridled experimentation --  an unprecedented mining of previous narratives, forms, and images. I think much of the anxiety over this has a lot to do with a shortening of the temporal gap between the "original" and their reiterations: The Stephen Spielberg of E.T. revisiting the early 80's in his most recent movie, Super 8, seems like a good example. He's a great filmmaker (Jurassic Park? So good!), so why was he compelled to set this movie nearly three decades before the present day, in a period, after all, during which he was shooting original, less derivative movies? What accounts for the idealization of a time so recently passed?

Are these the marks of a cultural globalization that has temporal borders (particular decades, most often the "long" 60's or the 80's) and geographic borders (the United States in these periods)? It's not impossible to look at the 80's, especially, as a desirable past: it's often represented as both a time of financial and sexual decadence, and conversely, of innocence and exploration. The appeal is in some ways "universal" in that "everyone" can get what they want from it. In a naively optimistic way I'd like to see the phenomenon as an attempt to graft the smooth cultural/social functioning of the period's representations (and not, obviously, of its reality) onto our more precarious position now. Too, I think, it has something to do with Guy Debord's notion that the Image is, at last, a commodity -- moving on the ebbing and flowing tides of Capitalism and manipulated at every level of our societal hierarchies: the reclaimed PSA's of the G.I. Joe's available on youtube, where one might also see the ads for the militaristic, racist Transformers of Michael Bay's limited imagination (produced by Stephen Spielberg?!  Come on!).

I think something of the reiterative nature of our culture explains the appointment of Phillip Levine to the postion of Poet Laureate of the United States in August of last year. As our financial situation has worsened, and as we've looked to assuage our pain by fetishizing past moments of relative wealth and decadence, we've had, also, to face the realities of that past. The 80's saw great devastation to Union strength, and to the wage earners, generally. Not surprising then, to see a poet whose concerns have often been the workers of the US getting attention, and moving into a position of (relative) prominence. In the last few years, stories, movies, and poems about working and working culture have steadily gained traction in popular culture. Consider movies like Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses: in these comedies (often the place of social critique...) economic disparity, a poor economy and job security are central to the plots. Likewise, there is a real pondering about the interstices of economics and art in Matthew Zapruder's poem, "Pocket":

...Today the unemployment rate/ is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried/ to think about it harder for a while. Then/ tried standing in an actual stance of mystery /and not knowing towards the world.

In the five lines, Zapruder grapples with a reality that interposes itself into poetry whether or not he wants it to be there. He, like many of us, pushes back against that reality, trying to stand "in an actual stance of mystery," as regards that reality, hoping for a transcendence and lyricism that seems like it's no longer available to us. The speaker's attempt to think the reality is marked in the poem and invoked in a way that lets us feel this process as work: the poem continues, "Which is my job." Poets after Romanticism are not merely aware of their crafting of poems as something that stands outside of the real world, yet bears a relation to it, but want to assert that what they do is some sort of work on that real world. Frank Bidart's incredible works attest to this fact, with a plethora of references to the creation of poems as making. His brief couplet, "Homo Faber" (which can be alternately translated as "man the creator," or "man the maker," or even "man the thinker") concerns itself with the work of being human beyond our local market concerns:

Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within
me as I die dies with me.

This isn't merely the anxiety of a poet or a creative worker, but the anxiety of full generations and nations. Most of us share a confidence that we have something to offer the world, and many of us, especially in hard economic times, are worried that the energy we want to dedicate to that pursuit of that something within ourselves is being diverted towards the bland material realties of life: we must eat, we must rest, we must seek shelter. Robert Hass says as much, when he writes in 20th Century Pleasures that, "The first impulse towards any art is, no doubt to make something, to act on the world (emphasis mine)." Our acting on the world is, often, a matter out of our hands; we pick up garbage, we use tools to fix an engine, we shovel sidewalks, or serve food. In any of those cases, I think, the individual puts something of herself into the work, wants something outside of the monetary in return. What she seeks is recognition of her part in a tapestry of human society.

So when we consider the conceptual work of contemporary artists, and poems about the work life of people in the United States, or comedies about the financially downtrodden as equally part of a nostalgia for a time that, perhaps, never was, I think we start to see what's so unsettling about the nostalgia of our age: if our nostalgia is for a past that we've mainly invented, it might as well be nostalgia for a past that never was. I think that the concern isn't really that the pop songs of 2012 are sad reiterations of the pop songs of 1985: it's that the pop songs of 2012 are markers of a creative nostalgia that imagines what it might be like to look back on a world that should have been. And as soon as you have a culture looking back at what should have been, it can't be too long before that culture looks forward to what should be. I think so far the consensus seems to be that 2012 should look like the 1985 we imagine Lean on Me to indicate, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or any of the sappy feel-good movies where guys and girls get what they want, thwart the grown-ups and are confident everything will be alright.

I think that what we want, rather than getting back to the future, is for our future to come back to us. Wherever we are. Maybe the real break with Modernism is somewhere in this: that we've, for the most part, suspended Pound's edict that we "make it new," while we are forced to focus more on just making it. That's what I think for now, anyhow.

* A friend of mine made a few important corrections that I think should be noted: Spielberg produced Super 8, but didn't direct it, and Spielberg's latest directorial work are both period films from before the 1980's... Tin Tin, and Warhorse. I'm not sure if this changes the content of my argument... but it does reveal that I'm a poor  researcher!

How Do We Communicate?

I'm currently in my fifth month of unemployment. The challenges and the stress of that unemployment are manifesting themselves in increasingly ugly ways. One manifestation has been an experience I think I probably share with a lot of people: knots of anxious frustration with no obvious outlet are incorporated into myself as anger and combativeness. In the moments I'm least proud of, this combativeness has been pointed at my partner of nearly a decade, (a wonderful, beautiful person and a fantastic photographer), Stephanie. Frustration about my personal circumstances become useless argument in which I externalize my issues with inferiority by claiming that the degrading thoughts I have about myself are actually the thoughts she has about me. Certainly that's problematic in itself. It's sort of tangential to what I want to talk about, here. The other phenomenon that is quite real, and quite apparent when I start my useless sparing, is that she and I speak at different levels, or utilizing differing value systems. (So, terms like "unprepared," or "want" or "need" are weighted differently depending on which of us is using the term, and what the larger context is).

At risk of revealing personality flaws in myself, I'll acknowledge that this happens to me in another, less complicated, sphere: on the internet! I argue, as I've mentioned here before, with Aunts and Uncles, friends, and the friends of friends, or completely anonymous people. Don't pretend you're immune. Or, if you are, please, for my sake, don't let me know how annoying I've become. Many of the arguments are political, and are more or less in the tone of most of the political debates that happen in the United States: "Neo Fascist!" "Socialist!" "See you at Thanksgiving."

Being outside of an academic setting, I'm out of practice in the cool, measured format of (most) of those conversations, and I'm thrown back into the fray, as it were. I'm making a concerted effort to change that, to attempt to convince through the reasonable presentation of understood (or misunderstood) facts when available, and (ideally) appealing to shared principles when they're not. I probably wouldn't be, if I hadn't seen this exchange on youtube a while back:




What you witness here is astounding in two ways: 1) It shows exactly how degraded media coverage is in this country (oops! This was on CBC - Canadian TV... the general sentiment still stands, though), especially as other networks pick up on and employ fox-style "reporting" tactics (as if Glenn Beck pretending to douse someone with gasoline is reporting, rather than psuedo-pornographic fear mongering ) and 2) Therein, you observe an impressive intellect disregarding the clearly unnecessary personal attacks as Hedges drives through to get his point across with absolute aplomb.

It got me thinking about communication, and the problems of communication in life and (of course) in poetry. I think that, in a lot of ways, all anyone wants if to be effectively communicative. The different systems I was talking about, above, are equally at play in our art and poetry. That's why, I think, in the work of many writers and poets, a reader can sense worry about communication and dialogue. Poets, particularly, are always worried about their own obscurity and the lack of attention paid to their work. It's not a modern problem, though. Roy Harvey Pearce, in a book that really shows its age, particularly in its deployment of gender pronouns, talks about poetry's relationship to communication in the United States:

"For the achievement of American poetry is a good measure of the ahcievement of American culture as a whole. The poet's particlar relation to his culture -- his self-imposed obligation to make the best possible use of the language he is given -- is such as to put him at the center of the web of communications which give his culture its characteristic style and spirit (pg 3)."

But, later, in The Continuity of American Poetry, in an example of the absolute worst of poetic "culture," states his "rule" for the production of good poetry:

"The rule is this: that the poet who would reach the great audiece had, willy-nilly, to cut himself down to its size. Such a cutting down does not imply only a falling below the standards of high art; it implies also the production of an art in some respects different in kind from high art, and to be judged and valued accordingly (pg 246)."

Pearce is playing fast and loose with the poetic tradition, trying to show that it's both central to American life and communication, and isolated from that life by, in its proper form, remaining a "high art," that would need to be "cut down to size" to become popular. All of this, too, in defense of the necessary obscurity of poetic culture, which, Pearce feels, is where it thrives. How poetry envisions itself as communication is in part due to its recognition of itself as an obscure art, and partly due to the sensibilities of individual poets. This is  Li-young Lee, (the best pessimist in the US) in his poem, "Sweet Peace in Time:"

                               "I said, 'We should give up/ trying to be understood./ It's too late in the world for dialogue (pg 31)."

In this poem, from his 2008 book, Behind My Eyes, Lee imagines a speaker relating to us (and thus forcing us to consider that even the speaker's reporting might be skewed by his own perspective) a conversation between his self and a woman only identified as "she." The mournful tone of the poem will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lee, before. This stanza, though, I read as a challenge, not merely to other writers and poets, but to all people. It says you have to figure out a way to be communicative. It dovetails neatly with my earlier evocation of Zizek's Living in the End Times in its nod to the idea that catastrophic, apocalyptic, things are happening in the world. For my own part, moments of overlap (between art and life) like these are exactly what I love so much about literature, poetry, photography: these are means of communication that can approach something like the "universal." It comes as no surprise to any lover of books that recent studies show that a good relationship with literature helps develop the human ability for empathy.

It may be imperfect, but it may also be all we have. I don't pretend that poetry will save the world, especially because the language of poetry is often seen to be so specialized and outside of the purview of ones life. In the rural town I grew up in, it's very unlikely that I'd be able to talk about US conflicts by invoking The Wasteland, or Wilfred Owen's incredible war poetry. Too much cultural pressure, too much fear that poetry is somehow feminine, that one risks their masculinity in reading it (even the sentence I've written just now is rife with some of the assumptions that would need to be made to maintain this tortured logic... maybe another post...). But, just because people aren't generally attendent to their poets, doesn't mean their poets aren't attendent to them. In 20th Century Pleasures, Robert Hass argues the rhythms and stresses of a poetic line metaphorically invoke the content of that line, so that he is able to say of a Gary Snyder poem about two friends parting ways on a mountain trail:

"The variation comes in the one three-stress phrase and in the set of three two-stress phrases. The paired phrases with a pause inbetween insist on twoness, on the separateness of the two friends (pg 129)."

The central line he's discussing looks like this (with Hass' emphases added): "HIKED up the MOUNtainside     a MILE in the AIR". So, there is, he argues, a metaphoricity in the rhythmic system of the Snyder poem: that stresses are so consistently paired, and then, later, deployed differently, suggests the pairing of the friends, and then their separation, adding emphasis to the content of the poem. I'm not sure I find the position persuasive, but it's certainly intriguing. It also illustrates something about what I'm saying, here: with all of the various systems of communication simultaneously in play, how does communication happen? Maybe something like the collapse of one communicative system into another really does happen, as Hass suggests. I've mentioned him before, because of my admiration of the way he sees the political and the real situations of the world at work in poetry:

"I have it in mind that, during the Vietnam war, one of the inventions of American technology was a small antipersonnel bomb that contained sharp fragments of plastic which, having torn through the flesh and lodged in the body, could not be found by an X-ray. Often I just think about the fact that some person created it. At other times I have thought about the fact that the bomb works on people just the way the rhythms of poetry do (133)."

Either way, it seems to me that our responsibility is to resist the speaker in Lee's poem, to resist giving up on dialogue, and to investigate how we communicate the way Hass does: with earnestness, with honesty, and with an ear for how what we communicate communicates. I want to continue thinking about what poetry means as a type of communication, and how it means. The examples I've used here are interesting, I hope, to people interested in poetry and in communication. The three thinkers/poets I've quoted (Hass, Lee, Pearce) each write to communicate to the reader something about poetry and its place in their respective lives. The variatious and multifaceted ways each of them evokes poetry to their own ends speaks to me about communication, generally. If Pearce is right about the central role of poetry in American cultural life, and Hass is right about the many levels on which poetry speaks to us, I hope Lee's lines find their place: they frustrate and challenge us, and make us contemplate the dire circumstances under which any dialogue happens, now.

 Here's hoping we communicate better in the new year.

... To that end, have I ever told you about the poetry vlog I'm part of? Project videobard? We put videos up on youtube every day of the week. Check it out!