Section 3: The Democratic Potential of Form

SECTION III
THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF FORM

(OR, LOVE AS THE CONCEPT THAT COLLAPSES THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE POETIC AND THE POLITICAL AND RISKS LIBERATING US ALL)











NOTE:


In this section, I will shift gears a bit in order to talk about Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's new book Commonwealth, in which they attempt to lay some of the theoretical foundations for a transition out of capitalism.

First and foremost, Hardt & Negri get play here because I find many of their formulations for politics wonderfully (if implicitly) analogous to poetics, and would like to explore these connections. Most exciting of all, perhaps, is their insistence on rehabbing the word "love" as a political concept. In their Spinozan formulation, love = joy (the increase of our capacity to think and act) + the recognition of an external cause. I am interested: how would this apply to poetry? And how might this help us reformulate a distinction between the poetic and the political?

Where Hardt and Negri are at their most interesting is in their desire to think through the actual "training grounds"-- the new institutions-- that would make up this transition out of capitalism. They do not want to simply overthrow the system, only to have it be replaced by another version of its own logic. Rather, they want to painstakingly create the conditions for new subjectivities, ones that would actually be able to constitute a true democracy. So how might poetry be -- or become -- such a training ground?

Much of the work in this section has been excised, or is not yet written. Think of these pages as stars, in a constellation, in a cloudy sky.














THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF FORM

What are the formal structures with the most democratic potential?
To me it seems like meter, under the rule of Tradition, as it is less recognizable (if not less feelable) by a general public, is a less potentially successful physical mode than those of rhyme and repetition, parallelism....though I am open to argument on this** & think it would be interesting for someone to think it through, using multiple case studies, talking to readers from a wide range of backgrounds, etc. But to me it is at least intuitively clear that it is not meter as such but rhythm that absorbs readers, and that rhythms formed in tension with meter in the English (capital T) Tradition are more absorbing to certain kinds of readers (and, for this very reason, risk excluding certain others). The "common heritage" of meter, as an apology for its democratic potential, strikes me as either naive or irresponsible (though potentially well-meaning).

Equally naive or irresponsible is a kind of poetry of the (academic) left that ignores its context, ignores its duty toward (possible joy of!!) engaging more diverse readerships. This seems to me to be an analogy to authoritarian leftism, in which there are certain gatekeepers who "keep language safe" from violations/violence, creating a very insular network of understanding and losing a true contextual sense of what "violence" actually means. Now, this may be well-intentioned, and I simply point out that, as an inheritor of a (aesthetic) leftist current in poetry (which I believe has contributed both constructively and destructively to the possibilities of a more just or caring language network), I wish to preserve the constructive and single out and leave behind that which obstructs flow; namely, that many of us in the academy too often accept the condition of a small, insular (usually "liberal" and well-educated, and often predominantly white) readership, and that we would do well to imagine and create other kinds of texts and other forms of textual situate-ion.

So if meter-- as well as a kind of insular fetishizing (and consumption) of "difference" prevalent among the academic left-- represent insufficient forms of formal democratic tendencies, then what is our constructive formal innovation for the new century? What are the forms that will invent a new possibility for subjectivities, create subjectivities who would then be more capable of constituting democracy?
I think this is the major question for our generation to think (and do) through, by writing and by talking to one another and through the poetry communities we form. But I will suggest two possibilities, each of which I hope will contribute toward an eventual reconfiguration of our sense of form as such.

1. Collaborative work
2. Children's poetry

I think I have talked some about the former, and would like, actually, to focus here on the latter, as it may seem the more surprising, out-of-left-field (no pun intended) option of the two.

What is so potentially transformative about children's poetry? Well, for one, I think it links back up with this question of form very nicely. If you can think of one defining feature of the children's poem (or story, for that matter) it is its extreme formalism. Take a look at Shel Silverstein, or the limerick! Or the deliberate pace of a picture book.

Almost all children's work takes on forms that are at once immediately-able-to-be-apprehended and allow for "adult" fluctuations (inventiveness) from within. And they place yet another limit on themselves, in terms of vocabulary, and presumption--- if something exceeds a child's capability to conceptually process, it must be articulated in such a way to be intuitively accessible to the child on other levels. This is the wonderful dimension of good children's literature: it connects with the child and exceeds the child's understanding simultaneously. We could say this about good poems in general: they must both connect with us and exceed our understanding.
This seems to me an exciting form (and it is not a "form," such as meter or "sestina," but a category of form---- which is contextual----a contextual constraint placed on formal constraints----- the employment of specific and multiple formal constraints under immense contextual pressure).

Such a poem would be able to connect with the adult and child (and teen / college undergraduate!), and absorb and challenge their understanding simultaneously. It would draw its readers into new ways of thinking and perceiving in language, into new relationships with each other (ah, Harry Potter & Twilight! such potential!), and into new configurations of themselves, training them for a democracy of the future...

(This seems to me to be a totally respectable poetry to write, especially in times of political urgency!)







BIOPOLITICS AND/OR REFORM(AL)ISM

For H&N's clarification of Foucault's notion of biopolitics (the ability of bodies to resist from within biopower (bodies "under the influence" of—controlled and constituted by—the state/multi-national corporation)), we can analogize a poetry that resists ideological formations of language (both its own and that of the associate language network it triggers/exists within) through insisting on the power of bodies. How does this happen, in a poem? One way I think of immediately is music: rhythm in the breath and the chest; sound in the mouth

which may be one reason to remain skeptical of -- tho not reactionary to -- a poetry that foregrounds the visual at the expense of music. This "at the expense of" is huge----because there is no reason music needs to be lost, and it in no way has to be opposed to the visual.

Similarly, we would have to rethink our notions of the visual as non-bodily. Because bodies of words/text are felt visually, as well -- in the eye but also in the viscera of the reader--- as well as constituting the "bodily" dimension of language on the page (as opposed to heard--- which only happens when text passes into the auditory realm).

Poetry, then, has the potential to exist bodily in each realm. There is no reason our resistance from within form cannot be both visually bodily (when on the page) and auditorially bodily (a potential inscripted into the page, as well, but also channeled during readings and performance).

But I do think it is important to ask: of these realms, which is more neglected today? Which is privileged? And does poetry has an obligation to its own neglected realms? (And to resist privilege---

The other way I see biopolitics being relevant is through H&N's reformulation of identity politics as a politics of singularity. The end goal, here, is not to reaffirm but abolish identity as a category. At the same time, H&N are also careful to recognize that identity remains an important mobilizing tool for oppressed groups. A poetry that is biopolitical, then, would have to steer through and out of identity rather than around it. [If H&N urge us, eventually, to become "monsters"--singularities without identity--- poems seem like a pretty great ground for monster-testing!]

But more important, in a biopolitical respect, than any zany formulations I come up with here is the simple statement that poetry is not apart from, but participates in and can help change, structures of power that subordinate some bodies to others on the basis of the racism, classism, sexism, etc.

To participate in this change through poetry is not an oppressive constraint on language (as some poets might fear), but rather a fertile, joyful one!



















TOWARD AN ALTERNATE CONCEPTION OF "FORM"

"We have frequently printed the word Democracy....It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history remains to be enacted."
(Whitman, Democratic Vistas)

When I say “the democratic potential of form,” I am also pointing to the democratic potential for form itself as a concept. What if "form" were liberated from its purely textual formulation, and extended to mean the shape language takes (and the shape language makes) within larger bodies of discourse (itself) and subjectivities (person-bodies). A poem, as such, would be any imaginative (loving) intervention/reconfiguration within this social-linguistic body.

Deleuze: " If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.... Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move."

What if Whitman's famous quote became inverted-----and we had to write democracy before it could, in fact, become?

"Democracy... remains to be enacted, because it has yet to be written."

Adorno: "Language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject's own voice"

Perhaps we are still waiting to speak








BIOFORMALISM

Thinking form without context (what I'll call "unsituated form") preserves the opposition between the poetic/aesthetic and the social/political. What I am suggesting is not a subordination of poetic activity to the political (or vice versa), but rather a reconfiguration of our notion of "form" so as to situate poems within language-social matrices, and think their imaginative interventions (insurrections?) from within this as the exact degree to which they are "poetic"---or rather, the degree to which they love. Love, here, in the Spinozian sense-- as joy (the increase in our ability to think and act), externally oriented-- supplants "the poetic" and "the political" as the category of primary interest.

This, I hope, deepens Adorno's conception of poetry as counter-ideology, in that it recognizes how "counter-ideology" has become a recognizable mode of poetry today, and thus risks being absorbed right back into ideology. Poetry should resist its current familiar self, and not be "counter-ideological" but, borrowing again from Hardt & Negri, alter-ideological. That is, it should not simply unmask the ideological but find ways to actually reinvent it---i.e. create language-sites which have a pull that is even more absorptive than ideology , in which diverse subjectivities can actually become-different (rather than simply have their position of knowing dissent confirmed).
This is, probably, the hardest thing ever.

And that's why as poets we need to be bodies of love---or, in other words (to come full circle), healthy.

Love is imagination moving structures. For that to happen-- for poems, bodily, to empower us (as singularities and as "institutions" in H&N's sense)--- the new poem will have to recognize---wake up to---more and more, its situated dimension----how, and who, it engages as readers. The good news is that this does not mean losing any of the intelligence and nuance we have invested in traditional conceptions of form. It will be, rather, an increase in intelligence--- an emotional intelligence, newly rising. This emotional intelligence begins in our lives, in our everyday practices with one another, and, most of all, in our bodies. We also create it through the bodies of our texts. This is an immense responsibility--but an immense joy, too! Because, even if we fail to remember it, poetic practice is in proximity to love.
Remember?

This is the most trivial essay you have ever read.














"...it was just impossible at that time to imagine that anything would come out of it. And that was wrong, a lot came out of it--not out of what I did, but out of what lots and lots of people were doing all over the country. A lot came out of it. So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope" was much too pessimistic..." (Chomsky, 181)






















o people people that I know
I sniff your footprints in the snow
sometimes you're buried like a rag
or carried like consumer tag

I'm part of that, I'm like a dad!
of world of world the falling snow
but purer still, the infidel
who loves and loves to overthrow

the tiny dogs within my heart
who teach and ruff! and make small art
you've got a helluva a leash, mister
to bind and bound, and take part


























If you go on further and turn your body about, no place is left where you are not the master. But even so, tell me, how will you go on further from the top of a hundred-foot pole? Eh?
















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