Section 2: Engage! (Poetry and Power)

SECTION II
ENGAGE!

(POETRY AND POWER)















"I mean, I do something basically less important-- it is, in fact....it's extremely important for people with power not to let anybody understand this, to make them think there are big leaders around who somehow get things going, and then what everybody else has to do is follow them. That's one of the ways of demeaning people, and degrading them, and making them passive. I don't know how to overcome this exactly, but it's really something people ought to work on." (Chomsky, 321-322)



one of the principal | big big | tasks of a poet today, as I see it | is to not demean people
now | there are many ways of not demeaning | of "activating" | and I think one way that the contemporary poetry community succeeds very well is on a purely textual level | i.e. there are many really interesting texts that are just fundamentally concerned with activating language | keeping it from closing down. This is a huge kind of activity
but then the question becomes | how can we more often (& deeply) pair this with a willingness to engage with (be engaging to!) different readerships | i.e. what if this kind of language-activation was more broadly and multiply situated | now | this is a problem of community as much as it is one of text | but as writers & readers & people | in the poetry community | we can approach the problem from all angles
and I think people are (rightly) afraid of writing something absorbing precisely because it would risk making its readers passive | and here's a sort of big paradox we run into | which is how can something be absorbing | i.e. completely grab the reader | and also make them active
I think it's an easy opposition to re-enforce | which is exactly what's happened | i.e. I'll either write dense complicated language that forces its reader to be active | or I'll give in and write something "entertaining" or (worse) "reductive" | but there are ways of becoming absorbed in the process of disruption (c.f. Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption). Now that's exactly what we're looking for
but I think we're in a different time now, and more is actually possible. Because I think poets are pretty absorbed in a particular rhetorical form of absorption in disruption right now, and there is quite a large counter-mainstream that I think has its foundations in exactly that procedure--- quite a few sub camps and styles, as well as all sorts of stuff that doesn't fit at all -- but what's missing, I think, is a really compelling call to write in a way that's more widely (and multiply) legibly complex ---- to ---- carefully, joyously, interestingly --- expand and rethink poetry audience & place within the community ---- and that requires a different kind of focus on these terms "absorption" & "disruption"

we might call this "disrupting (self)absorption in disruption by being absorbingly disruptive"
!!
or just -- engaging



"Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you're helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it's the wave that matters" (324, Chomsky)




there are all kinds of possibilities that poetry simply all-the-time has its blinders on to
and it moves sluggishly (who can see that quickly????)
through what-it-is, to what else it could be...

all of us have to contend with that from within our own body of work
lest we become cliches of ourselves
it sounds easy
but it's of course immensely difficult (as you know!)
because as we try to carve out these spaces within language that DO feel new and true
we grasp what is new and true about them
and de-activate it (by immediately trying to replicate our success)

this is just completely how power works
and so poetic language provides a crucial analog for political work
in terms of how to keep power from consolidating

& what the specific obstacles are to that
which is the point
they're always specific
they're rotational
even now they get away
(take back over)

okay?
"that is just completely how power works"

so at the moment of the poem giving up power
(Spicer)

it gets it back but as the power of a wave rather than the rider





"Or take a look at the intellectual left, the people who ought to be involved in the kinds of things we're doing here. If you look at the academic left, say, it's mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people involved in it--but it's really good for careers and that sort of thing. That again pulls a ton of energy into activities which have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they're very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with." (Chomsky, 328)







making something strange
& legible

legibly strange


rather than elaborately cloaked and "interesting"

"your interesting friend isn't interesting"


complex thinking and feeling in simple strange language

:

language strange and complex and simple




easily apprehensible / felt
difficultly thought

unknown





"Incidentally, I should say that my own political writing is often denounced from both the left and the right for being non-theoretical--and that's completely correct. But it's exactly as theoretical as anyone else's, I just don't call it "theoretical," I call it "trivial"--which is in fact what it is. I mean, it's not that some of these people whose stuff is considered "deep theory" and so on don't have some interesting things to say. Often they have very interesting things to say. But it's nothing you couldn't say at the level of a high school student, or that a high school student couldn't figure out if they had the time and support and a little bit of training.
I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren't transparent--because the fact of the matter is that in most areas of life, we just don't understand anything very much." (Chomsky, 229)




Be very skeptical of my poetry.








[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]