Subversion's Dead End Poetics

A published experimental poet came in to speak for a Comparative Literature class I was taking. She bemoaned the fact that poets were no longer at the forefront of culture, no longer the "antenna of the race" as Ezra Pound put it. (The Pound reference is mine, not hers, race of course being a social construct.) She was obviously an intelligent woman, but intelligence tends to inexorably drift from honesty of intentions. If she had bluntly stated that her experimentalist poetry was designed to earn her a living, indulge her artistic aspirations and gain dates in the lesbian community, in whatever order of truth, I would have applauded. Instead she had to use the deconstructing language as political statement trope - which, as a firm proponent of reconstructing language from the ruins of both consumerist and supposedly anti-consumerist postmodern newspeak, I took issue with.

One of this woman's poems consisted entirely of a string of numbers, yet she detected no correlation between the willful obscurantism her art represented and the decline of poetry's status in the broader culture. I don't deny poets the right to be as willfully obscurantist as they want, but they cannot in good faith remain so while bemoaning the fact of their own obscurity. This woman came from the school of transgressive poetry, and the fact that it is a "school" - and we were being taught it in a school, that most bourgeois of institutions - speaks to its tragicomic confusion of purpose. If she really wanted to be transgressive, she should have taken her aspiring vanguard of the masses poetry to an institution actually representative of the masses - perhaps the military. I'm sure her strings of numbers would have gone over smashingly there.

If a poet transgresses in the woods and nobody hears it, who the fuck cares? This woman spoke of her poetry as a political act, but in typical postmodern style, the summation of this grand political statement was roughly: capitalism sucks, racism sucks, sexism sucks, the fact that the masses don't appreciate how hard I work to transgress their norms sucks. The masses don't care and why should they? Poetry has always been a bourgeois art, and the attempts of nearly every modern poet to deny this fact has done nothing to change it. Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky became the poet of the Russian revolution specifically to employ his poetic skills for the masses, and ended up writing state-sponsored advertising messages telling the proles to brush their teeth. He later committed suicide, perhaps the only transgressive statement he had left.

This contradiction extends to modern art as well. Every modern artist who attempts to transgress bourgeois norms by shitting on a bed and inserting an American flag into it (has that been done yet?) is only appealing to a substratum of that very same bourgeois elite they supposedly seek to bring down. The fact that the tax dollars of the much-ballyhooed masses often goes to support this form of modern art is a glimmer of its totalitarian heritage, exemplified by the sad career of poor idealistic Mayakovsky. Irrelevancy can be a noble position to be in, but not if the only value the irrelevant subject aspires to is relevancy. By trying to be "relevant" to the chaos of the postmodern age by adapting their form to it, poets and modern artists are not transgressing the status quo - they are reinforcing it. It is my position that clear language is the most subversive poetics of them all.