This next-to-last question for the Poetry & Empire retreat is unique in that it has literary implications:

 

Do genre models (lyric, pastoral) and other established modes of practice need to be re-articulated in light of changing modes of dissemination and the new dynamics of global/transpersonal culture and economy?

I mentioned yesterday that the dramatic monolog – one of the three innovations of 19^th century poetry, alongside the prose poem & free verse – was generated in a world that lacked both electricity & indoor plumbing. Generally speaking, I think you can hear that in all three. The shift towards a poetics of polyvocality & palimpsest, which in the 20^th century can be found in Pound, Joyce, Williams, Stein, & so many others, itself becomes widely used as a writing strategy in a world in which the so-called Great War is in everybody’s mind. Even the new sentence can be traced back to the days of the Carter administration, back when the only personal computer you could buy was the Heath Kit build-it-yourself system sold in the back pages of journals like Popular Mechanics. In popular music, the historic equivalent of William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All is Bing Crosby, whose great technical innovation was the recognition that if you had a mike, you didn’t need to sing at the top of your lungs. The New American poets were adamant about their love of bebop. And it’s hardly an accident that language poetry arose a decade after the transformation of pop music by Dylan, the Beatles, Stones & the so-called San Francisco Sound demonstrated how an institution such as Tin Pan Alley could be overthrown.*

 

So where is the poetics of the Justin Timberlake generation?

 

I know that’s cruel, but the point I want to use it to make is that certain parallel cultural institutions may well be in far worse shape than contemporary poetry when it comes to their ability to comment on & intervene in the real world. Capital concentrates & art forms that depend on it have generally seen that consolidating effect. Poetry to some degree has been buffered precisely by its economic marginality. That remains an important asset which we would all be advised to preserve.

 

Having said that, I want to be clear that as a poet my interests are linguistic. Those poets whose solution to literary development is to shift away from the terrain of poetry altogether, whether to intermedia, vizpo, flash programming and the like seem to me not to be addressing the issue, but rather sidestepping it altogether. That really seems no different from poets picking up electric guitars thirty years ago – thank you Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Jessica Hagedorn, David Meltzer et al – or perhaps somebody a generation earlier reading aloud to a saxophone or keyboards. It’s not an attempt to innovate through language, but alongside language, using language as a supplement to whatever. When Lewis LaCook asks, in his interview this week with Nick Piombino in the new sidereality, “Will Ron Silliman write code?” he might as well ask, Will Ron Silliman take up trombone? They strike me as equivalently pertinent. Code may be a language in the sense that algebra might be one – it is a functional system – but hardly in the sense of langue & parole. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the more one mucks around with all the available toys, the less likely it is one will in fact address the problem directly, which is in the form of the poem itself.

 

Actually, Nick & Lewis entertain the idea that blogging itself may represent such an innovation of form, that the blog has at least the potential to function as a genre. Obviously, betwixt, say, I and Jim Behrle, there is a lot of room for variety. My own sense is that blogging comes closer to some of the social aspects of the reading than it does to the poem – at least the reading as it exists in some scenes some of the time (I’m think explicitly of The Grand Piano as I write that), a circumstance in which people can collectively & intensely explore issues of mutual interest. The blog does a better job of creating this aspect than does the listserv. It is certainly the case that one can pursue a serious intellectual project, such as Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson or even something less formal (tho no less serious), like Jonathan Mayhew’s reading of A Test of Poetry. But there is also a lot of room in the process for just chitchat, which is also an integral part of poetry’s infrastructure.

 

More serious examples of the kinds of change we need to heed & explore further, it would seem, would be genres like flarf – the deliberately disposable poem, written to identify an intuitive sense of badness – and devices like Google sculpting (Magee’s project is exemplary). Why these developments now is an important question. And if I were teaching writing, I’d probably focus more on these than on, say, the villanelle. I’ll go further and argue that were I a student, I would distrust a teacher who didn’t include them on the syllabus.** This doesn’t mean necessarily that I want to use either myself for my own poetry – tho it also doesn’t preclude it -- but I do think I need to operate in a world that recognizes their implications both for poetry & for history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Even more to the point, language poetry could never have occurred without the war in Viet Nam & the draft in the United States, which is why in good part so-called language poetry from the U.K. or Canada never quite fits.

 

** Students should always distrust their teachers.