Things I want to Learn About Yoked onto a Discussion of the Poetry of Peter Davis

So, most people who know me know that I'm very much interested in poetry. My personal goals very much concern poetry. I try to write it, and I want to be a good critical reader of it. I want to be able to bring a Marxist literary perspective to the study of poetry in a productive way, and I'm currently not sure what that means. As I filled out my applications for PhD programs in English and literature, I was trying to flesh out what this project would look like. At first, I was interested in a notion of pastoralization, as developed by Raymond Williams in his The Country and the City. This book charts shifts in the social ideologies of the U.K. as expressed in their poetry. Ultimately, I think his argument hinges on the proposal he makes about the pastoral, as an aesthetic, that its idealizations "... [serve] to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of [a] time"(pg 45). This notion is carried through from medieval to Modernist poetry, and is shown with example after example to be at least "part" of what's going on in the poetry of a given time. Williams suggests that perhaps the sort of metanarrative developed is based on the Biblical account of the Fall, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave the garden due to their failure to obey the will of God. Since then, we mortals attempt a return to a garden that no longer exists as it did, and recedes in our collective rear view mirror, even as its loss is felt more strongly in our consciousness. Because this narrative is at the base of our experiences of nature and civilization, our poets evoke nature in overly romantic, idealized ways that have little to do with either the brutality of nature itself, or the capitalist mechanization of that nature represented most clearly in the orchard or dump. The lesson of his book, anyhow, is that we can't possibly assume the innately pristine-ness of nature, or even the existence of a "natural" world separate from ourselves.

The though frightened me, because I think, to a certain extent, I had idealized my own childhood lived in rural upstate New York. You know, undoubtedly that place wasn't beyond the commodification of the market place, but it certainly didn't feel like the city, or a suburb for that matter. Experience is organized in different ways away from urban centers, and those experiences leave one convinced of exactly what Williams exposes as ideology: the "purity" of the rural, the inherent impurity, decadence, and difference of the urban. In any case, interesting as all that is, it doesn't much impact the practice of poetry in the U.S. today -- though I know of poets who would consider themselves "rural," as opposed to "urban" poets -- outside of being an organizational tool for poetic anthologizing, after the collapse of the notion of unique "schools" of poetry.

So, that Marxist theory would have specific and interesting things to say about the ideological mystification necessary to create a sense of difference between geographically marked poetries isn't as interesting to me as a subject worth examining, mainly because I think that the maneuver represented there has a particular, parallel structure that is much more intriguing, and not as often considered: that is, representing labor, itself. If it's true that people tend to valorize the pristine, removed countryside, I think it's equally true that we valorize certain types of labor in the same way. If this isn't an older trope, it's at least a more fully developed trope in the American imaginary. Representation of manual and physical labor is often times run through with notions of heroism and dominance, raw power and perseverance. It's tied into our notion of the Protestant work ethic; that bit of ideology that suggests that our reward is in some next life, and the failure to toil through this one is an inherently moral failure. The moral failure represented by the lack of a strong work ethic is then manipulated by all sorts of constituencies for all sorts of ends: 99% protestors are "lazy," and simply "don't want to work," intellectual labor isn't labor to be respected (I don't think that this is the point of the novel linked to here, but I think it's the platform from which the content of the novel is -- critically -- explored), and on and on. Take with that the complaint of every generations, that kids these days, who, though raised by that previous generation, represent some failure in the perpetuation of that former generations' values.

What I'm interested in, then, is how poetry represents labor, in both senses of that word: what images and contents it utilizes, and how its practice is imagined as labor both by its public, and by its practitioners.

To that end, I'd like to mention a poet whose poems are a rare thing: honestly funny. They're funny in a way one would usually expect from a stand-up comedian. But also, his poems have a serious content at their core: how does one create art in the commodified market place? Anyone who is a maker of any sort wrestles with these questions to a greater or lesser degree. The poems, though, in Peter Davis's Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! takes that interaction between art-as-art and art-as-product to its extremes, in a sort of Shlovskian defamiliarization that challenges us in very interesting ways, at the same time that it makes us laugh our asses off. Not a bad combination.

Almost all of the poems in the collection are addressed to a super-specific constituency, in a way that mocks (or maybe takes seriously) the debates about "accessibility" that have probably always surrounded poetry. The titles usually name the addressee, as in "Poem Addressing my Past, Current and Future Students Who are Sufficiently Interested in Our Class to Check Out My Work," and "Poem Addressing People who are Reading this Underwater," and on and on. The implicit suggestion is that the poet is working on making sure his book is available for any person who could possibly have some sort of connection to it: increasing its market viability, its prospective audience, etc. The tone of the poems are consistent so that you get the sense that the speaker is the same throughout: an anxious, conflicted and plain-spoken individual concerned with how he appears, his future job prospects, and his eventual legacy as a poet. Each of the poems interacts with its title in a way dictated by the title itself: in one "addressing babies," baby-babble is employed throughout, though the speaker can only mobilize the babble to speak about how great the poem currently being read is,  for a poem addressed to a baby. The absurdity of the poems becomes the content of the collections' message, even when the idea that it has a message is lampooned:

              "... you might want to consider/ this poem and its relationship to: Melville, William Carlos Williams, Emily/ Dickinson, peace, consciousness, ego, psychology, Freud, Gertrude Stein/ hapiness, success, movement, cartoons, Raymond Queneau, Joe Wenderoth, / post-pre-post-modernism, aesthetics, surface, resurface, biography, smallness,/ George Perec.... (pg 68)"

Part of the brilliance of the work is how it capitalizes on the way language works: even though I suppose that there isn't an "intellectual" or "literary" way to link this work to that of Melville, or the idea of peace, the evocation of those people and concepts in the poem itself constitutes that link, and forces the reader to take the possibility of that connection seriously, outside of and against their own desires. In a broader sense, that's the only way these prose poems seem to function as poems at all. They make us see them as poems because they're in a book called Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, and each is titled "Poem Addressing...". The way the language evokes the "aura" of a poem challenges our notion of the ways a poem can be constructed, and how poetry is work. The collection reflects the "meta"-ness of our current cultural moment as reflected in our television shows (think Community, where there are constant winks and nods to the idea that the show is a particular construction that used to be called a "sitcom," and contrast it with historic representatives of the form, like, say The Cosby Show. We couldn't imagine that show getting away with Bill Cosby looking out at the audience, or into the camera, and winking, or for a single episode to be devoted to alternative timelines of similar events, etc, in the way that it seems completely normal to Community) our music (hip-hop sampling and appropriation is the clearest example -- the Ghost Busters theme with a bass-filled club beat under it evokes our nostalgia for the 80's, at the same time it gives us pleasure now), and on and on.

The point is, for me, at least, that this is a particular mode of expression, that must, at its base, have preconditions that make it possible, and realities that make it necessary or, at least, interesting. What those realities might be, I think, have a lot to do with our notions surrounding labor and creativity. I haven't fully fleshed this idea out yet, so let this post stand as a sketch of a longer, more well considered, more well organized, discussion to come at some later date.

Until then, I'm going to do the unforgivable and reproduce one of Davis's poems in it's entirety. I hope you like it as much as I do. It's called "Poem Addressing Fans of Celine Dion":

"I look at myself in the mirror all the time, as you might, and I just think,/ what the fuck?"(pg 90)

Do this guy a favor and buy his book! I'm sure he has a poem in there addressed to you, and that he'd really like your take on it.