I went to hear Harryette Mullen read to a standing-room-only crowd at Villanova the other night. She was – as she has been every single time I’ve heard her read, going back to her days as a grad student at UC Santa Cruz – brilliant. In spite of the large crowd, the only poets there whom I knew – Lisa Sewell & Joe Lucia – were ones connected professionally to the school. Just ten miles west of Philadelphia, Villanova might as well be in Ohio so far as the center city gang is concerned. Or Amish country.

 

Mullen read from her books, not exactly in chronological order, including the following piece from S*PeRM**K*T:

 

Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pinprick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our bed with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God on our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.

 

Much of S*PeRM**K*T engages the discourse of retail packaging, as does this piece, starting with the trademarked tagline of Raid, whose website is even www.killsbugsdead.com. Before Mullen expands her meditation to include the entire history of poverty & slavery, she notes that the specific literary device being deployed is redundancy.

 

What I don’t know & can’t tell from this piece is whether or not Mullen also knows of the (apocryphal, I now think) history of this tagline & it’s relationship to poetry. Somebody, perhaps Aram Saroyan, once claimed that this line was in fact first authored by none other than Lew Welch, the Beat poet who was closely associated throughout his career with his two friends from Reed College, Phil Whalen & Gary Snyder. Indeed, I’ve repeated the story myself.

 

The argument for the attribution is that Welch worked in advertising for several years and the line has many of the characteristic features of Welch’s own poetry – the use of single syllable words, especially of the consonants-on-the-outside, vowel(s)-on-the-inside variety, the use of sound symbolism – the hard stops first in the g in bugs, then the d in dead – the reiteration, which is what makes the line so memorable. If Welch didn’t write it, he certainly should have.

 

The argument against the attribution is that Welch’s career in advertising was between 1953 & ’58, when he worked for the catalog company & department store chain, Montgomery Wards, for the first four years in its Chicago office* & then in Oakland. After 1958, Welch worked as a cabbie, a longshoreman & occasionally as a teacher, until, leaving a note giving instructions with what to do with his estate, Welch walked off into the woods in 1971. His body was never found.

 

Raid first used the tag line in 1966 – eight years after Welch left Montgomery Wards – and didn’t trademark the line until 1986.** It’s conceivable that Welch may have penned it for Wards – its catalog operations generated vast amounts of hard copy & was even the site where Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first appeared, prior to the Gene Autry song – only to have the exterminator pick the line up some time later, but absent any greater documentation I think that’s a stretch. I think it’s more likely that Welch should’ve written it, than that he actually did.

 

All this was swirling through my brain because the day of Harriet’s reading was also the day in which yours truly used the phrase “brand equity” with regards to poetry & the names of poets, thereby generating the most over-the-top hyperbolic hate mail I’ve received in 19 months of doing this blog. Several people get positively obscene at the idea that their writing may have anything, anything to do with the dynamics of marketing. The milder stuff for the most part got posted to the commentary section – which has received over 75 notes, perhaps one-third of them anonymous, since this broader thread on naming began – where I was merely called a “bully” (tho I can’t figure out from that note toward whom I am supposedly being such a bully). Sigh.

 

To tell you the truth – & why not – I think I stepped over a sacred vs. profane tripwire here, sending alarums off in all directions.*** What these emails reminded me of, more than anything, was a moment that took place when I was in college at UC Berkeley during 1970, when the students simply stopped going to class after the murders at Kent & Jackson state colleges & turned UC into a giant – population 50,000 – anti-war organization for several consecutive months. As one of just three undergraduates on the Wheeler Action Steering Committee – as we called the decision-making council that literally ran the English Department during that spring – I joined some of my colleagues in suggesting that we might want to carry our work – making silkscreen posters (an operation I co-ran) for various groups that were out leafleting every community in the East Bay, making war resistance information & materials available for every draft-age male in the region, etc. – even closer to home by setting up a session to examine the class relations of the university itself, including a close look at the working class of this factory, the faculty. There was one young professor in particular – he’s still there, or was last I looked – who just turned purple at this suggestion. He wasn’t working class, he literally screamed at the top of his lungs in the Wheeler corridors. He’d gone off & gotten his Ph.D. precisely so that he wouldn’t ever have to be working class! It wasn’t so much that he had a competing class analysis, putting the professoriate into the professional class or whatever. It was that the idea that we might think otherwise – his friends, his students, his colleagues – just broke his heart. He just couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to shout back at him. I wanted to hug him & tell him it was okay to cry if he needed to.

 

Which is how I feel about a couple of the folks who sent me emails on St. Patrick’s day.

 

There is an impression some people have that marketing is nothing but the professional manipulation of people’s emotions & subconsciousness in order to sell products that are bad to & for them. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, I would argue. Rather, marketing is the discourse of connotation & association within a capitalist economy – which I would note further, is the only economy in the world today, subsuming whatever modest alternatives might persist in Cuba, Korea or the social democratic countries of Europe. As a discourse, it has a longer history & a lot more intellectual effort behind it than, say, post-structuralism. You can learn at least as much about your work from Kottler’s volumes on advertising as you can from reading Roland Barthes on the death of the author. And I say that as a serious fan of Roland Barthes.

 

One of the great failings of western Marxism and theory in general has been its inability to fully integrate the dynamics of the market into its very critique of same. The reasons for this, not unlike the protestations of this professor at Berkeley 34 years ago, are not intellectual, but emotional. We might even call them religious. The consequences, however, have been devastating.

 

Let me point to what I think is the irrefutable instance. In 1989 & thereabouts, we saw the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” first with the bloody repression of the regime in the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square, then with the “velvet revolution” throughout Eastern Europe, culminating first with the fall of the Berlin Wall &, a short while later, the collapse of the USSR, in which the Soviet Army proved unable to stand up to the mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, an alcoholic bureaucrat who was willing to confront the tanks with little more than a vodka and a nyet & the support of a lot of young people.

 

In theory, this should have been the dawn of a glorious period for Western Marxism, which had argued against the depredations & perversions of Stalinoid state capitalism for decades, and which had constantly had to deal with the right’s (often conscious) muddling of Stalinism with other progressive political tendencies in the West. The dissipation of the great anchor that had so long weighed down the left should have been a moment of terrific promise.

 

Instead, the western left shrank like so much cotton candy that somebody had dropped to the pavement & then puked over.

 

To say that this was at first startling, puzzling & disappointing to many is an understatement.

 

In fact, it should not have been a surprise. If those of us on the left had paid attention to the fact that Marxism was not simply a theory of social history (some, but not all, of whose versions also including something akin to a plan of action) but also a brand, we would have been far better prepared for everything that came next.

 

In the 1970s, a progressive community bookstore such as Modern Times in San Francisco made a steady income from the sale of its most popular high-priced items, such as the Collected Works of Lenin. Those sales came to a virtual halt, going from a few per week to one every several months, as tho a toggle switch had been triggered, during the second week of November, 1980, a good nine years before Tiananmen Square. What happened in that month in 1980 may have had no bearing on the validity of any Marxist theory, but it had a direct connection on how people felt about such theory – the election of Ronald Reagan as president & the ouster, during that same election, of many high-visibility progressives from the U.S. Senate. Marxism didn’t change when Reagan became president, but Marxism’s brand did.

 

Indeed, theory in the 1970s & theory in the 1980s were fairly different animals, as comic figures like Baudrillard came very much to the fore while the likes of Althusser – who murdered his wife during that same cursed November – receded into the background. Yet even as the work of Baudrillard – and some of his Situationist precursors – can be read as a recognition of the importance of a domain of marketing within theory, its resolute depoliticization during that decade kept it from being understood & looked at in precisely the terms the left needed. Thus setting Western Marxism up for an even greater shock & awe experience at the impacts it felt from the collapse of regimes whose demise it also had been looking forward to for decades.

 

® is not only the name of one of my books & the registered trademark symbol, but also, literally, a brand that I’ve seen on the side of cattle, there being a ranch by that name on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth that I visited once for a “corporate rodeo” – now there is a social form – put on by Compaq. The concept of branding shows up in my poetry in a variety of places. As in

 

Becoming identified with an inaccurate but provocative name enabled the Language Poets to rapidly deepen market penetration and increase market share

 

which appears in Paradise. That line always gets a laugh when I read from that work to groups, an index at once both of recognition & discomfort. Obviously I’m being ironic, but at another level I’m not. That double edge never quite goes away.

 

One of the things I like best about Jim Behrle’s blog – this is not a goofy segue – is that his cartoons are very often about exactly this dimension – the marketing dynamics of poetry. He has found a humorous, but very real, method for discussing how poetry intersects not only with individual lives but with the economy, both in terms of social practice & as a series of messages – associations & connotations. But Jim must say it so much nicer than I do. Or else he’s just not sharing his hate mail.

 

 

 

* In the very same building on top of which Mary Margaret Sloan now has a loftspace-condo.

 

** One might infer a counterargument out of the fact that Raid didn’t trademark the line until after Montgomery Wards shut down its catalog operations in 1985. But, again, absent contrary documentation, I think that’s a stretch.

 

*** I’m hardly alone in tripping such a wire. Can-po, the Canadian poetics listserv, this past weekend has been engaged in a similarly heated – if somewhat more civil – discussion over the question of poetry, audience & markets.