reminder from syllabus:
Kindly submit all posts to the blog by noon on Tuesday.
Thanks to Meg, Padcha, Jessea, Kristin.
(what up gender?)
A few thoughts on so far on the politics issue...
This is my story about this (sorry for its length; it seems to be working its way into an essay: When I was in graduate school in the 90s, a lot of time in graduate seminars was spent arguing about that Auden line “poetry makes nothing happen.” The truth or untruth of this line was something we debated as if our lives depended on it. And to some extent, our critical and poetic lives probably did. The truth or untruth of this line would impact our writing and how we saw other’s writing, would privilege a different set of works, would require us to direct our attention in various directions. This is why it matters to ask it.
I think many people left those seminars agreeing with Auden. I just left them confused. I left with those questions that you ask unanswered except on a personal level. I could tell a personal story about how poetry matter to me, how it had dramatically changed my thinking about things and how it had reshaped my brain in ways that I couldn’t have done on my own or even with the help of various psychoactive drugs. It was clear to me that poetry changed my life very profoundly on personal/social levels (the huge amount of poets that I count as friends) and on intellectual levels (how, say Ginsberg’s Howl blew my mind in high school starting off a whole chain of events where I realized I didn’t have to follow my peers down the path of right wing bigotry and narrow mindedness because my thinking that wasn’t the way to go had a whole literature that supported me). I was changed. My mind was changed. And both together, my friendships with writers are continuing my own intellectual development in a way my friendships with critics are not. Writers like to think about things. Thank heavens.
But back to graduate school, somehow, for reasons that I still can’t fathom, despite the intensity and urgency of these debates, poetry’s role in various political movements was never mentioned. The attention by political theorists such as Mao, Fanon, Gramsci, Guevara, Friere, Amilcar Cabral, Ngugi and others give to art and literature’s role in political education was never mentioned. Even within the field of the seminars we took—experimental contemporary American poetry—we never turned to Native American poets such as Simon Ortiz or Native Hawaiian poets such as Haunani-Kay Trask for support. We acted as if experimental excluded writing that was deeply involved in dogmatism.
I have a certain forgiveness for our narrow focus. In the 90s, the more radical discussion of canon had turned into that condescending term “identity politics.” The term, even for those of us who refused to use it for because of its reactionary connotations, was symbolic though of how we were led to believe there were a series of rules about identity to be followed and thus a series of divisions to be respected. While we acknowledged the importance of and taught from the new multicultural curriculum, some with devotion and some with resignation, we felt a certain nervousness about appropriation. And instead of thinking hard about how to get rid of this nervousness or how taking on and responding to this nervousness might shape our work and make it better, we just avoided work by people who were not in the same identity category as ourselves when we talked about things that were relevant or important to our thinking and our writing. We would not have turned to anticolonial nationalists such as Ngugi for support in these debates about the Auden line because we were generally not involved in anticolonial movements at the time and did not see our writing as having to take a stand on colonization. This was naive on our parts. No writing escapes being a part of anything. And the Mohawk Nation was right down the road. But while we respected the concerns of these communities, the form that our respect took was a refusal to belittle their goals with a claim of alliance on our part. We did not write out of anticolonial struggles. We wrote out of being white and articulate and privileged even as we tried to write against this—both as critics and as poets. But we didn’t have many good models about how to take on what it means to be white and articulate and privileged and make it part of the anticolonial struggles.
I believe our situation was somewhat unique but not totally unique. We were enrolled in one of few departments that had a PhD with a program in contemporary experimental poetry. Yet despite the uniqueness of our program, we were stuck mirroring the particulars of the profession. The particulars of the profession of contemporary writing in the academy are complicated by the institutionalization of creative writing and the resulting fights and divisions that develop between those supporting a craft-based approach (creative writers) and a critical-based approach (critics). We felt as if we were neither or both. While we had no affiliation with the craft based concerns of creative writing programs (despite the fact that many of us were publishing creative writing), we still found it hard to place contemporary poetry in the context of world events. Everything was still in motion. So our discussions about contemporary writing tended to be mainly about craft and genre. Even though the writing we were studying was chaffing against craft and genre. We tended to limit our seminar papers to a single book by a single author. etc. We often wrote papers on authors who were of a similar gender as we were. That is how narrow we were.
But the reason that we had to have this endless debate about the Auden line (and it was just that, a debate about a line; we didn’t really debate the context of the Auden line or the larger resonances of the poem) was that we weren’t sure there was an audience outside of ourselves for this work. We really couldn’t even talk to fellow graduate students outside of our seminar about these issues in contemporary writing because most of them didn’t even read it or see it as having any influence. One of the guiding assumptions of graduate school was that contemporary literature didn’t matter and if it did, it was only good for uplift of marginalized communities (the sort of argument that goes it might matter for these poor people over here but I’m so beyond that and can talk about aesthetics some more). Saying literature didn’t matter let a lot of people off from having to discuss how it might matter. It let us avoid seeing literature as being part of other structures because it was a part of culture even when the writing didn’t directly address structure. It let us not have to consider weightier issues—like who we wrote with and on and why and how that choice perhaps wasn’t only about what interested us. For once we accept literature as a crucial part of any political movement, then we also end up with a different canon and different issues to discuss. When we write things we have to ask different questions.
Several other things: Most literature is helplessly part of the system (my colleague in Hawai'i who hates literature says bourgeois). It supports the system. It is written by people who like the system. And the system likes to publish this sort of writing. Thus the proliferation of nature poems that don’t indict the U.S. on Kyoto; love poems that don’t question our government’s and culture’s regulation of sexuality; lefty political poems that say I’ve got the answers, not the only answer is the one that is reached together.
But not all of it is. There is a lot of literature that asks questions and suggests new affiliations and urges people to change their lives and preserves various cultures. And as writers, we can ask ourselves only where we want to be in this. We can’t say we don’t want to be anywhere, because not dealing with this means we are on the side of system. To say writing is apolitical is to have a deep and complicit politics.
And then one sort of therapy advice: see your writing as only part of your daily political possibility. Everything in our lives has a politics and yet having a politics about one of them doesn’t mean that the other parts don’t have it also. Write and go to the protest and plant trees. None are enough.
Ok. Lecture over.
