Working between the poles: commentary on articles by Miles Merril and Dan Disney
Published 5 Bells 14.3 2007-8
A great strength of the Poets Union is the diversity of its membership. In the last five bells (vol 14:2, Autumn 07), there were two articles that particularly illustrated the broad spectrum of contemporary poetry making and thinking. This response works its way between the two.
Miles Merill is a spoken-word poet who defends the art form in ‘Spoken Schmoken’, and mentions in passing the well-trodden opposition between Academic poetry and performance poetry. His notion of poetry is very recent in terms of poetry’s history, a shift the Romantics made to express self and feelings and immediacy. And his article points to an important feature of his style, ‘the bleeding obvious’ but not always noted – the embodied performativity. For Miles, performance is key and performance is a world of its own (linked to cabaret) with its own idiosyncrasies; he writes, ‘you can cry, laugh, scream, and vomit.’ This reminded me of Al Jolson, from eyewitness accounts one of the greatest performers ever, the first superstar and billed throughout his life as ‘the World's Greatest Entertainer’. He held his audience bound and gagged – such demonstrations take effort and he developed his own techniques. Before a performance he would employ a prostitute to go down on him and afterwards, in the wings, would throw up into a special bucket.
When I’m on stage (without any preliminaries), I am there for the poem; not for me, not for the performance, not even for the audience, nor for venting frustration (Christopher Beach suggests poetry slams are concerned with ‘venting social and political frustrations.’[1]) This is one reason why many people would prefer to see Miles read than me, but the entertainment factor is only one element. From my experience of poetry readings, the charge from the poem can be as powerful as from the performance as such.
Most of the poetry I write investigates the world and talks about the world; we can’t let scientists, academics and politicians do it all. This is a different approach to many spoken-word poets, who focus on personal experiences, and lyric poets who write well-made poems often on epiphanal notes (what has been termed the workshop tradition, ‘The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University.’ Donald Hall complained).[2] A poem for me ‘reports back’, a poor phrase, perhaps Dan Disney puts it better as a ‘disclosure’, reached I’d argue, by the energy form the poet, the artefact and the audience, all working together.
Disney, in a dense but rewarding article called ‘Poetcognosis’, defends poetry against Plato via Wallace Stevens and Harold Bloom. My main criticism of Plato is that he shows no understanding of what poetry actually is and what it does, and I don’t think Bloom helps here. Bloom is a very a conservative influence wrapped up with notions of power and genius (e.g. Anxiety of Influence), and he appears much more interested in the world of literature than in the world. I’d have thought the practicing poet who would be better off viewing poetry as a set of practices opening up the possibilities of reading / writing, rather than a reductive fixed history (Bloom’s Canon).[3]
Disney’s theme of gnosis, and the critics he quotes, are not that far from Plato, whose metaphysical objection to poetry - that it cannot contribute to knowledge - should be weighed against his own contributions to knowledge (as opposed to literary dramatic dialogue). In Protagoras, Socrates complains of poets’ resistance to questioning and of their mystery, but it seems to me that Disney, in his defence of poetry, accepts Plato’s argument here. Poets have used obfuscation cheerfully before, from the Symbolists to avant-garde hard-line formalists, but the danger of mystifying poetry is that this approach distances the art from our everyday - from language, concepts, hopes and daily life. It is an elitist approach summed up by Mallarmé: ‘The educational bases of the multitude need not include art; that is, a miracle accessible only to the very few.’ [4]
In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates warns against elenchus, the danger of argument is that it can be used anywhere and everywhere by anyone and everyone, rather than seeking truth (which makes people happy and virtuous!). Recent defences of poetry by Mark Edmundsen (1995) and Paul Fry (1995) ignore broader issues and findings from other discourses and disciplines (Edmundsen’s manages to ignore both poems and poetry as well). Coleridge said that everyone was born either Platonist or Aristotelian, but both philosophers are to blame for our misguided supposition that thinking is contemplative as opposed to thinking through the body (skilled practice) was ‘making action’ or poietike. Plato attacked poets on this basis in the dialogue Ion, long before he developed his theory of Forms and wrote the Republic. It is not on grounds of metaphysics that we should defend poetry from Plato, but in the areas of pedagogy and politics. When Danto talks of the struggle being political, it was also about education.
It should be realised that Plato’s fantasy of transcending embodiment is dangerous. It was used as an argument against the arts, and it’s an idea that has remained popular with various discourses: Idealism, religion, and techno-optimistic cyber-culture - all reductive and deterministic ideologies.[5] Spoken-word poets understands the importance of the body (99.9% of poetry has been oral), but not always (I am guessing) how the power of language lies not just in its attention grabbing power through speech acts, nor in its iconic power alone, but also its vast symbolic reach.
Richard Rorty came to see the term ‘philosopher’ as ‘the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture.’[6] I believe that poets, working with an interdisciplinary will have better tools to undertake such an imaginative, experiential and empirical project, remapping culture to the ground of our existence. Though Eric Havelock warned that poetry in a literate society is not necessarily richer than before: ‘because literacy by entrusting the storage function to documented prose, has gradually stripped poetry and the poetic experience of their dominant position in the culture and emptied them of their complexity.’[7] In oral cultures, poems were cultivated as tools and techniques of memory; bards were valued as archivists, priests, propagandists, and entertainers. We have division of labour now (In Republic Book II, Socrates introduces the principle of specialisation), but we still need poets to investigate the fascinating, fragile, dynamic, endangered world we inhabit. We are after all, language animals, poetry is embedded in language, in its very breath, rhythm, use of metaphor, imagery and narrative – I think it’s that simple.
Through this continuous reinvention of language, the Poets are inviting us to take up again the task of questioning and reconstructing the World and of the horizon of the entities in which we calmly and continuously thought we lived, without anxieties, without reservations, without any further reappearance . . . of curious facts that cannot be ascribed to laws.
Umberto Eco[8]
[1] Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution, Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Illinois, 1999, p132.
[2] Donald Hall essay ‘Poetry and Ambition’ Kenyon Review, n.s., 5, no. 4 (1983) was followed by Greg Kuzma's ‘The Catastrophe of Creative Writing’ (1986); Charles Bernstein's ‘The Academy in Peril’ (1986); Joseph Epstein's ‘Who Killed Poetry’ (1988); Dana Gioia's ‘Can Poetry Matter?’ (1991); and Mary Kinzie's The Cure for Poetry in an Age of Prose (1993) among others.
[3] Just as Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1903-08) is not a useful manual for poets.
[4] “Let man be democratic; the artist must separate and remain an aristocrat.” And, “Oh, poets, you have always been proud; now be more than proud, be scornful!” Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Art for All’ (1862), in The Modern Tradition, Ed., Ellman and Feidelson, p207-8.
[5] Johanna Drucker points out that, ‘The notion that the body is ‘obsolete’ has inexplicably become particularly fashionable in cybercultural circles. This desire to transcend the body via the technology of the day is to my mind not only peculiar, but much less futuristic than contemporary adherents would imagine. The privileging of ‘mind’ over ‘body’, the abstract over the concrete, is a strong continuous thread in western philosophy, from Christian Neo-Platonism to Descartes and beyond.’ Johanna Drucker, ‘The Virtualisation of Art Practice: Body Knowledge and the Engineering World View,’, Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology, Guest Editor Johanna Drucker. CAA Art Journal, Fall 1997.
[6] Richard Rorty “. . . who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among large areas of human activity.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin Books, 1999.
[7] Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write - Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, Yale U P 1986, p120.
[8] Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, Vintage, 1999, p35.