Someone I respect recently posted that a survey of poetry blogs revealed they were dead. No exciting critical thought. All hussle. Well, the universe sent me a cop-out in the form of an off-hand Samuel Delany comment (his best comments always are) when in his 1976 “Experimental Talk,” delivered in Buffalo, he writes “there exists no economic matrix to support the criticism of science fiction on the level needed to develop at book-length that deadening, cynical form of criticism that is the book review.” And in poetry there is barely an economic matrix to support that deadening cynical form of the poetry book review, not to mention the non-compensated blog post.
But, you know, I’ll still give writing something marginally interesting a whack.
I’ll use as my touchstone a recent Current Affairs article written by Alex Skopic, who has also contributed reviews to The Cleveland Review of Books, a publication with serious critical ambitions.
Skopic reminds us broadly that poetry, institutionally, in the U.S., has a long history of depoliticizing itself. Queue the Poetry Foundations’ mealy-mouthed statement on Palestine and how ready some writers boycotting PoFo were appeased by this nothing. Search “Ada Limon,” current U.S. Poet Laureate and “Genocide.” Skopic cites Amanda Gorman has an emblem of the talented but politically tepid poet that tends to get the shine & $s.
In this situation of institutional depoliticization what self-conscious political poetry that is written largely sucks. Skopic labels this The Golden Age of the Bad Political poem. What happens when someone says they’re about to read a poem about Trump? We wince. And I’m sure just now you’re protesting, ready to fire back with a handful of poems whose politics you like, but Skopic’s attention is largely upon poetry that has been mainstreamed, not the poetry that only exists in tiny microclimates. He cites a number of opportunistic anti-Trump verse cash-ins like doggerel by John Lithgow. What I’d add to this analysis is a larger trend toward the marriage of liberal celebrity culture and poetry. Gorman cites Lin Manuel Miranda as an influence. Lithgow…is a celebrity. We might also think of the celebrification of PEN America, including hosting talks headlined by a Zionist comedian shitposting jokes about genocide under former HRC Department of State apparatchik Suzanne Nossel (a fossilized Paul Simon shares the stage with VERY SMART PERSON Malcolm Gladwell).[1] Or the Obama’s post-Whitehouse turn toward media production. Liberalism is trying to reproduce itself (& neoliberalism) at a point of crisis and its investments in NPR-concerned voice imperialism abroad, the police state at home, anti-communism, and representation without redistribution of power.
Through his survey of shit political poetry, Skopic creates a taxonomy of 3 categories: sympathetic politics/shit aesthetics, “well crafted poems expressing morally bankrupt politics”; and “poems where everything sucks” – fascist friendly neoneo(neo)neo classicism.
Skopic holds up a Jeremy Corbyn & Leon McCluskey editing global, tran-historical anthology, Poetry of the Many, as a positive example. It puts forward a global (though still Anglophone rooted) tradition of radical poetry w/a labor/working-class emphasis. Skopic is friendly to the anthology but laments its backwards gaze and tendency, as it moves forward, to pass over the more explicitly political work of poets like Langston Hughes or to simply pass over figures who welded poetry and politics like Assata Shakur. We might add many more poets to this list. Gather and holding them together—suggesting loose lineages and horizontal networks while insisting on what’s distinct abt each member—is a major task.
So the whole set-up for the essay is to identify a gaping hole in political poetry then to dramatically pivot to a younger generation of poets rising to fill this gap. Among them Cleveland’s Brendan Joyce, Noor Hindi, Darius Simpson, Kyle Carrero Lopez, poets in Palestine like Refaat Alareer & (sad trombone) me (with a hint of critique (“he slips a little too far into stream-of-consciousness”). To be clear: fuck me! But Skopic’s attempt to redefine the field and to center in this wave of poets’ output class, race, and liberation struggle is useful and sure to raise objections and useful because it is sure to raise objections.
Given the ongoing genocide Israel is committing (bombs fell on the tents of Rafah as I wrote this) and the way the resistance of the Palestinians in Gaza (and the larger Resistance Axis) has brought a world-system to a point of crisis—a crisis intensified by decades of neoliberal driven social austerity and unprecedented accumulation of wealth, climate chaos, fascist border policy, (you name it) we are due for a wiping of the board and remaking of canons in service of solidarity–relations of liberation. I feel this at least. Older debates about conceptualism, identity, trauma, the necropastoral, etc, are important but often felt like they were taking place on the largely hallucinatory terrain supplied by depoliticizing canon-making institutions.
So what should we value in political poetry, Skopic’s essay asks? It answers less with a set of principles and more specific poets, poems, and lines. That’s fine. But I’d like to turn toward principles and set some out (that I’d certainly fail).
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WE INTERRUPT THIS POST TO SAY NONE OF THIS MATTERS VERY MUCH AT ALL RELATIVE TO ACTUALLY GETTING TOGETHER WITH PEOPLE TO THROW SAND IN THE GEARS OF EMPIRE. THIS IS MARGINAL TO THAT. BUT EVEN IN THIS HORRID TIME THERE ARE STILL MARGINS IN WHICH WE MAKE & MAKE MEANING OF ART & ARTISTS.
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Commentary should, if it can, be curious about, account for the political activity and more largely the social relations the poet and their poems are embedded within (poems are mobile, that is their power, Amie Zimmerman recently reminded me), mindful that what the poet broadcasts online does not equal the poet (broadcasting one’s activity, influencer-like, is antithetical to some politics and actions; also, believe it or not, posting a high volume of political and or anodyne stuff online does not preclude either being involved in heavy radical shit or being alienated from any meaningful flesh-world political activity), which suggests, also, that, ideally, like if the critic got paid anything, the critic should embed themselves into the poet’s social milieu enough to know.
This is to say, the political power of a poem cannot be reduced to its semantic content but also has a lot to do with its context, specifically the social relations of its reception—the energetic social array in which the poem is experienced—and the relations between the two.
What does it mean to build contexts that politicize poetry or bring it into dialogue with the political? And here, by political, I do not mean the overdetermined and narrow field of politics as narrated by the mass media but the messy, overlapping, vortex sizzling grids of power and relations and groups and libido and pain and joy and money that constitute the actual fucking world we live in. Our chosen families, our near communities, our city’s & etc growing outward. Such a politicization would not reductively thematize a poem, though, yeah, hell yeah, it could identify the force or flop of its politics but also speculate—thick-like–on the way its discourses move, react, mutate within the different formations it is in dialogue with and in which it is received. It’d respect it’s excess, the mysterious remainder of a good poem as well as what diamond-cut clarity’s it achieves through its flow.
What does a poetics and criticism look like that takes seriously the social, political, and economic relations of the production of a poem? This too requires less distance between poet and critic. The critic needs to know the poet and the mesh they work in.
Ghassan Kanafani, for instance, is often referred to as a novelist. True. But Kanafani was also a highly consequential political thinker and actor, deeply embedded in Palestinian intellectual and political culture and movements and his fiction output can’t be separated from his political work because they were partially an extension of that work. Writers and critics should be interested and alert to the dialectic between lived life, political action, and aesthetics without reducing one to the other. For instance, we imagine art as an extension of but not reduction to a politics but we might also consider the way the work of imagining different or fictional worlds might inform a politics.
So what does a poetics and criticism look like that takes seriously the social and economic relations that account for the circulation of the poem? Who gave it movement? Why did it show up in front of you? Was it a pile of money moving a publicist? Was it the aura of accreditation, prestige of a prize, or did your union republish it? Was it in a zine at a demo? Did you friend, drunk, go on about it?
You know—what’s it mean to demystify the relations of poetry production and circulation? What’s it mean to see in the poem the fingerprint of the person who gave it to me? And the relation & orientation to the world and action it is there to affirm?
Let’s feed these back into the poets Skopic identifies, imagining the article could go on and on as long as it needed to, expanding into a book: what’s remarkable about the way Joyce arranges the particular details of shit work in relations to what defines this moment: recession, service work, the anti-state state? How Hindi situated her work, given it mobility? Al-Areer’s poems, how can we understand them alongside his own work as a professor in Gaza, his memorable statement “I’m an academic. The toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade … I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.” The conditions of his martyrdom? The library’s and student encampments named after it?
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera has said, “There are poems like solidarities.” What might that mean in this moment of U.S. sponsored genocide, when the mask has fully fallen off the ostensibly more progressive political party, to demonstrate that it is fully committed to genocide, to beating students in the U.S. to kill Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? What does the long, dynamic, and still evolving Palestinian resistance have to show us in the imperial core about what we do, where we put our artistic investments, and the relationship between the two.
I was supposed to write a post advertising my new book, People Finder, Buffalo but hey.
[1] Behold Paul Simon’s wildly faint…praise? dismissal? of our current student protest movement: “We’ve learned that the student protests that roiled campuses back in the day were morally invigorating, naive and transitory. It took years for the American public to turn against the war in Vietnam. And the backlash against the student demonstrations today portend the same attenuated timeline. Anti-semitism, like a plague of locusts, is cyclical and we may be nearing a peak of one of those cycles now.”
JOE HALL 