[New-Poetry] The Body Po(e)litic

Fri Jul 10 05:52:33 EDT 2009

"In thinking about Schmall's essay, what I most want say about poetry,=2
0and the world of commodification, is that poetry, being based on one
of humankind's oldest & simplest of tools: language, will always be
outside (athwart) commodification, because it is so old and so simple, based
on just words, spoken or written, printed or pixilated, it's just organized
signs we agree to make sense of (and in poetry's case, often we agree not to
make certain sense of). If the whole world was a smoldering post-apocalyptic
heap of rubble, people would still have poetry, because it's mouth and mind
made, passed forward to ear and to eye, ever as it was and ever as it will
be."

A quite reassuring statement. Derrida might not fully agree with Finnegan -
nor Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and the entire post-French-species, but I
tend to hope Finnegan is right especially thanks to the fact that we are
consciously fighting with all available means to keep our eyes open and our
ears clean.

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 4:34 AM, <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:

> I like some of what Schmall is saying...though he could have crafted a
> better argument.
> Here are few quotes with my comments in parentheses...
>
> Dean Young put it during a poetry reading in Chicago last February,
> “[Poets] are not a market, we’re a tribe.”
> [A tribe is not a good model for free minded and socially flexible
> individual.]
>
> The truly great promise of poetry—today, right now—is as a functioning site
> of resistance to globalization; and to be very clear, I don’t mean that
> poetry should be explicitly political, or anti- or pro-anything.
> Sloganeering is best left to pamphlets.
> [Pamphlets?...what century did we slip into?]
>
> I challenge anyone to read Noelle Kocot’s apocalyptic 33-page elegy, “Poem
> for the End of Time,” and not come away from the experience utterly
> astonished as she weaves the political (”America your skull-shattered
> martyrs / Are fucked into God-symbols of music / Are fucked into Emerging
> Markets / Are fucked into frontiers slouching toward the rough beast / of
> Bloomberg”), with an intensely personal redefining of herself and
> “neighborhood” following her husband’s death:
> [This is not 'explicitly political' poetry. I must not know what political
> poetry is. I should say that I'm for explicitly political poetry as much as
> I'm for any form of political speech, including overt agit-prop.]
>
> In thinking about Schmall's essay, what I most want say about poetry,=2
> 0and the world of commodification, is that poetry, being based on one
> of humankind's oldest & simplest of tools: language, will always be
> outside (athwart) commodification, because it is so old and so simple, based
> on just words, spoken or written, printed or pixilated, it's just organized
> signs we agree to make sense of (and in poetry's case, often we agree not to
> make certain sense of). If the whole world was a smoldering post-apocalyptic
> heap of rubble, people would still have poetry, because it's mouth and mind
> made, passed forward to ear and to eye, ever as it was and ever as it will
> be.
> Finnegan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Newberry <jeff.newberry at gmail.com>
> To: NewPoetry <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Wed, Jul 8, 2009 9:23 am
> Subject: [New-Poetry] The Body Po(e)litic
>
>
>  Poetry, as it exists today, is a spontaneous, self-organizing and utterly
> unprofitable source of culture that exists in the gap between production and
> capitalist appropriation; it is precisely in that gap where it can do the
> most harm to the larger project of globalization, which must continually
> expand both its productive and consumptive capabilities toward a receding
> horizon. Anything that has the power to interrupt the pervasive manipulation
> of globalization—that can flick us off autopilot and force us to really
> think and use our imaginations—re-grounds us within our ess ential humanity.
> After all, we are a soft-skinned, flat-toothed, no-clawed tribe whose very
> existence demands the full engagement of active, truly imaginative thinkers.
> Engaged and imaginative individuals—the very kind who make up the tight-knit
> poetry world—potentially form a truly resistant body politic.
>
>
>             —Jeremy Schmall at HTML Giant <http://htmlgiant.com/?p=10726>
>
> This is from a larger essay (http://htmlgiant.com/?p=10726).  I am not
> sure exactly how Schmall is defining "globalism."  He sees globalism,
> however, as anathema to local culture, and thus to poetry as well because
> globalism is linked to capitalism, which is concerned with commodity and
> sales.
>
> I'm thinking about this issue because I'm working on a larger piece about
> the way that production affects art.  If poetry is the opposite of
> capitalism, if poetry does not "sell" because it's not supposed to, then one
> can freely think about and produce poetry without worrying about selling it,
> right?  Or maybe not right.  I am not one of those people who hate MFA
> programs or who think that making a living off of writing (even poetry)
> somehow "hurts" a poet or makes that poet disingenuous.
>
> Still, there's something to be said for the freedom poets have to write
> outside of the boundaries of commodity.  I realize that books establish
> reputations an d make lucrative teaching careers attainable.  At the same
> time, however, poetry is a relatively small player in the larger publication
> world.
>
> Clearly, my feelings are mixed about this issue (which is?  I'm not sure).
> I wonder why one never hears discussion of this kind of thing--production
> and value--in discussions of, say, classical music (or is the term "chamber
> music?").  Does studying the french horn at a respected university with a
> master teacher hurt the french horn player?  Does her college degree make
> her "inauthentic"?  The same question could be asked of a visual artist.
>
> As I've said, I don't teach in an MFA program.  Nor do I have a national
> reputation.  I write poetry because I'm compelled to do so.
> And that compulsion has everything to do with something unquantifiable,
> something inner, something I might call "spiritual."  That compulsion has
> *nothing* to do with money.
>
> Best,
> Jeff Newberry
>
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> --
> You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and
> that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and
> experience, from which each according to his own immediate and peculiar
> needs may draw his own conclusion. --W.H. Auden
>
>  _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing listNew-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.eduhttp://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Stay cool with this summer's hottest movies. Moviefone brings you
> trailers, celebrities, movie showtimes and tickets<http://www.moviefone.com/summer-movies?ncid=emlweusmovi00000004>
> !
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>

-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090710/4502a3fa/attachment.html