Frederick Seidel and the Possibilities of Transcendence, Part I

I do not write like Frederick Seidel nor do I desire to write like Frederick Seidel. Anachronistic or reactionary as it may be I hold onto a belief that writing can (should?) possess an aesthetic grandeur, that sentences can reflect a tint of magnificence with a potential to if not redeem then at least make tolerable an ugly world more often flooded with the vomited pollution of mediocre language. The question of aesthetics hinges upon how one decides to respond to this world and what one believes poetry can do. Take Seidel’s poem “Home,” published in the newest n+1, a poem that is something of a political advertisement in its own way. It’s about New York homeless, and it’s probably best to let it speak for itself:

The homeless are popping like pimples.
They’re a little dog’s little unsheathed erection sticking out red.
It makes us passers-by sing.
Ho ho. It’s spring.

Pretty much all of Seidel is contained in these four lines. Disgust for the world. An affinity for the dainty, delicate image. The world’s tritest rhyme. Doggerel as anti-art. Two stanzas later he writes, “Uncooked hamburger / Erupts when he lowers his trousers.” It would take a while to come up with a more revolting image. When I initially read him, this sort of thing bothered me. Why write this way? It is almost as if he is not trying, but that misses the point and begs the question trying what. The more important question is how one writes about the urban homeless who are both spat upon and consciously ignored individuals deserving of pity as well as more than a little gross. I have a friend who lives at the corner of Haight and Ashbury who has found shit on his doorstep on more than one occasion, which has exhausted his patience. I’ve read other poems about the homeless that are merely sentimental. Seidel gets around this by rubbing the reader’s face in it, almost literally, but he also implicates himself and everyone else walking around upper Manhattan. “I bathe in their screams / I dress for the evening.” This is a more conventional indictment of public callousness, an act of advocacy to some degree, which is a point Seidel acknowledges by closing the poem “I paid for this ad.”

He covers multiple angles of the problem of writing about “society.” He checks off appropriate outrage, confronting the uncomfortable facts and creates a compelling aesthetic sense—rooted as it is in overpowering disgust—but he doesn’t manage to transcend the reality. This is the point at which he and I diverge, because as much as the entire idea of transcendence has been assailed as a false solution or even a bourgeois narcotic, I can’t think of any point in making art that does not attempt to make something new, something better out of the obvious repugnance that clings to the world. Seidel believes no such thing. And he could be right. But I don’t see how it’s possible to live in that world.

The Question of Political Poetry

Part of the problem confronting poets aspiring to write something politically relevant is that the scale of obvious corruption and criminality defy attempts to write something powerful in a way that does not devolve into sarcasm, ranting or the sort of one-dimensional advocacy or propaganda that would be better off as an op-ed column. What angle would one take to write about the Bush administration? Every day brings a new parody of the day before, and I need not look further than the headlines in the New York Times. A perpetual astonishment accompanies the brazenness with which the public trust -- the very idea of a public trust -- is publicly disdained. On television. At nearly any hour of the day. If writers and intellectuals have been accused of being back on their heels (and of course they have for the last eight years and longer) part of the reason is that the degree of incredible outrage rises faster than any individual can process it, and I am left spinning in place with a dizzy fury while the powers that be continue to commit crimes with impunity. What is the appropriate literary response to that? It's hard to even know where to start.

Poetry, Ecology and "Ecopoetry," Whatever That Is

I began writing poetry out of a sense that language as it is typically deployed in the United States has become deformed, words have become bent by misuse in advertising, politics and cultural hyperbole, the economy of our verbal and written interactions has become impoverished and hollowed. Much of this I think is due to the mediated quality of most of the language we consume. To find out what is happening in Afghanistan we watch TV or listen to the radio. We read articles about books, music and politics. So much of what we ingest is indirect and secondhand, the veracity of which is not easily evaluated. Most of our knowledge of the world comes not from the thing itself, we are not there, but from someone whose integrity, good faith, intelligence and beliefs in most cases we cannot know and in nearly all others we will not bother to check because who has the time for that. So much is taken on faith. And yet this creates a disconnect that is most of the time ignored. We carry on with political debates about war and cultural debates about literature, necessarily, but without regard for the fact that most of our "facts" are perhaps not so factual. This conversation possesses a life of its own, creates its own terms and mostly refers only to itself and the facts it has accepted by invisible consensus. It becomes difficult to change or introduce new facts because of its very nature as a fact-producing system. Hence the creation of "conventional wisdom" in politics and culture and the weird box that separates the so-called acceptable or responsible interventions from everything else. It goes without saying that the institutions that decide what is acceptable and not are those with the most power and money.

This is a long way of saying that one of the ways out of this trap that I've discovered in my relatively short time on Earth, one of the areas of experience yet to be entirely swallowed by the machine is the wilderness, and I've become interested in how I could connect the lived experience of being outside (in the multiple senses of out of doors or in the mountains/deserts/plains and in a place where the mental categories we grow up into are shown so obviously to be as petty as they are) to connect this experience to a critique of language along the lines of the one in the previous paragraph. And to do this in poetry. Gary Snyder is the trailblazer on this route, at least among late-20th c. Americans (of course there are others, back to Thoreau and beyond the time and shores of N. America), but there has apparently been a recent generalized interest in conceiving an "eco-poetics" that incorporates an environmental critique into an aesthetic vision. Here and here are two short posts that attempt to stake out ground for such a project. I've yet to write my own manifesto, though I do believe any ecologically-based poetry must be rooted in specific locations rather than be floating in an atmosphere of vague statements of environmental ethics.

Charles Bernstein and the Self-Righteousness of Not Making Sense

I'm unsure what critics, either real or imagined, continually hassle Charles Bernstein in his cosseted perch at Penn such that he feels it necessary to repetitively produce self-justifying monologues in smug and sneering tones like the one just published in Harper's Magazine (print only) but mostly I think he just needs to get over himself. He's not that funny. And poetry that doesn't make sense is not revolutionary; it's boring.

Reasons We Elected This Guy Include...

Poetry readings at the White House. But what's more interesting is one of the comments (by a poet) suggesting that poetry would be better off remaining "obscure." He has a point in that most of those who read at the WH would likely not be along the lines of Allen Ginsberg shouting about blowing Hell's Angels or anything similarly radical, but this attitude has the potential to fetishize poetry's very real obscurity in the context of American culture, a condition that does nothing to advance the form's political relevance -- something the commenter also seems to suggest is important.