As Clover put it to me, “The presupposition that all ideas must serve ‘poetry’ and indeed may have been contrived so as to make the ‘poetry’ work seems odd to me.” He counters that “commitments might come first, and that ‘poetry’ might be a particular way to work through” these commitments.
Aesthetic life is a sphere of self-directed activity whose external ramifications, despite periodic utopian exuberances, are minimal at best. Clover imagines the poem not as a direct intervention in history but as a site for working through commitments, questions, problems.
Like Clover, his labelmate Juliana Spahr, in her collection That Winter the Wolf Came, lights up what’s going on—which, whether you face it or not, is going on. For me, at this moment, she and Clover best represent how art confronts its own quixotism and extravagance. The concrete situation out of which their poems, and everything else in the world, arise is that capital is killing us. These are poems about and for the riots goin’ on, the riots yet to come. They are hopeful-skeptical, sorry-grateful.
The Occupy Oakland movement is figured in Spahr’s work as a lover named “Non-Revolution”—“such a minor uprising,” it did not issue in Revolution, “an entirely different lover, one I was not sure I was ready for and yet longed for so much”—within whose remembered arms these verse essays connect the fluctuations of Brent crude to the flight paths of brent geese; breast milk to a Whitmanian catalog of “brominated fire retardants of Koppers Ind.” and “water/oil repellent paper coating of 3M”; nature to second nature; police kettling to texted heart emoticons; NSA to FTP; the beginning of a song to “the singer crying on the bathroom floor”; “what is being lost” to “I begin walking, determined, head down.”
The last poem in the book, “Turnt,” says yes to no, to occupation and riot; says yes to the velocities of change in “the depths of friends”:
I was at the poetry reading and Mia didn’t go. She was supposed to read too but she didn’t. She said she wanted to see what happens. Then she texts I love you and I know then that Trader Joe’s has been looted. All the wines out in the street.
Such sweet elixir, FOMO.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The march continues on, Nathan continues on, turns left a block away and then when Nathan texts me back I know the Whole Foods is looted and they are all drinking champagne, dancing. All of them will get a cold later.
Riot champagne becomes a term among us that winter.
I wasn’t there but I was there too. My germs were there.
I too had that cold.
We have heard this syntax before:
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was, I knew was of my body, and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.
Whitman’s democratic ode to the East River ferry passengers is transplanted to the opposite coast and “turnt” into “a movement poem” by Spahr. Whitman opens at sunset—“Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face”—while Spahr marches at “rosy fingered dusk.” The epithet reminds me that Allen Grossman called Whitman’s “face to face” a Homeric “signifier of heroic encounter.” “Is this poem too heroic?” Spahr asks. “I worry it is. / Or I know it is.” Whitman’s “crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes” take on a different charge as Spahr’s anti-capitalist demonstrators, who don masks to prevent identification by the police and to protect themselves from tear gas: “At first we didn’t mask up. We were poets. / Then slowly one by one we did.”
“We were poets”—therefore harmless, our private and ineffectual activity cordoned off from the realm where things go down, where heads get busted. But poets have often worn masks, from the Greek chorus to Pessoa, to Whitman himself, concealing “the real me,” “the me myself,” behind his “arrogant poems.”
Both poems eulogize the loss of individuation a mask enables, the slipping out of the self into something larger, into the crowd, the current, into the mystic:
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
The waves of “Turnt” are metaphorical, and the ties between Spahr and others are more explicit, ties of political dedication, danger, and drive:
At that moment, I melted my body into it and it embraced me.
Rosy fingered dusk and all that.
Come here, it sang, listen.
And then I was borne along by the waves all night and the whirlpool, the fig tree, and I was the bat, hanging on patiently.
“It” is the march, the demonstration, the uprising, the movement, which Spahr tropes as a living thing, with its own voice, its own nervous system. It is both Charybdis and the fig tree Odysseus clings to like a bat, monster and lifeline. Spahr is in love with “it,” she tallies its glories strung along her sight and hearing. Melting her body into it, she receives identity.I
So much FOMO, that sweet elixir, Spahr’s poems give me.
Because above all else Spahr’s experience of this non-revolution, this movement, this it—is one of joy. “You can hear it sometimes. It often has a soundtrack. Sometimes it has drums and brass. Sometimes just joy. . . . A group of women walk by the car and stop to take photographs. So much joy they have. They are laughing with such triumph. Selfies and all. Turnt.”
I think of Craig Finn’s introduction to “Killer Parties” on the Hold Steady’s live album A Positive Rage: “There is so much joy in what we do up here! I want to thank you for being here to share that joy with us.”
Right, it’s corny. But when Spahr writes, in a prose poem, of falling for Non-Revolution in the “certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others”—
I had no control. When I wondered it, wondered how it could be like this for me at this moment, I blamed it on the art. For all the art I have ever loved has been for whatever it is that Non-Revolution was suggesting it could possibly be. For the river running backwards. For the wind and the rain. And I am someone who loves art, who has always loved art, despite. Despite its institutions and its patronages and its nationalisms and its capitalisms. All the art that has had a crowd scene in it in which the crowd has been loved, I have loved.
—I see the big rooms pop music happens in night after night, in which the crowd is loved, in which love is big and crowded and possible, despite. And then Spahr, recounting a conversation with a friend who took part in an earlier non-revolutionary uprising, makes the connection explicit: “She knows something, how this being with can be easily described with the private emotions of love and desire, the same emotions that are pillaged and packaged in popular music.”
Non-Revolution, like pop, points beyond itself. What Spahr loves art “for” is whatever Non-Revolution was suggesting it could be—revolution, surely. But a revolution that sounds a lot like a poem: the river running backwards recalls the opening of the ninth book of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth records his ambivalent response to the French Revolution.
But “eventually Non-Revolution and me were over,” and Spahr recollects her ex in non-tranquility, emotion pouring from her like a jukebox. She stands “on the corner for a few minutes feeling lost,
with a funny almost choking expression on my face.” (The dark threw its patches down upon Whitman also.)
My friend looks at me and she says what is wrong with you? and I say nothing, I’m just confused. And then she says I was worried you were choking; you had a funny expression. It’s like that. A sort of choking. A staring off into space that often precedes a coughing-choking. The it of it’s all fucked; it’s all good. The depression that follows after the most mundane of uprisings is over. Life feels less. And might for a long time. It might be years before a day will go by that I do not think about Non-Revolution.
Jilted by her lover, Spahr, like her friend, turns to pop’s packaged emotions. Behind these lines I hear pop stars from Everett Sloane to Burt Bacharach to Stephen Sondheim to Pablo Neruda to Carole King to Naked Eyes to Frank Ocean. And you start to think, if a failed revolution can be a lover, can a poem be a pop song?
Critics writing about poetry usually assume, without thinking about it, that the poem has priority. Izenberg has challenged this assumption: “The a priori conviction that all poetic projects imagine the crucial relation to poetry to be a relation to an object—an object of labor, of perception, of interpretation—is an unwarranted assumption, even a sort of fetishism.” He insists that “what the poet intends by means of poetry is not always the poem.” Commitments might come first—political, as in Clover’s and Spahr’s cases, or ontological, or what have you.
I’m interested in the markers of this priority. I take it that a kind of naïveté, whether actual or imputed—one reviewer writes that she “wondered if [Clover is] for real”—can be one such sign. Keston Sutherland calls this naïveté “the indigenous stupidity of poets” who “want more than can be intelligently wanted”; for Izenberg, such poets are “outscale desirers,” articulating “forms of wanting or willing unbound from ordinary calculations of plausibility or even possibility.”
Spahr and Clover are aware that their projects (which, politically and poetically, I admire and support) will strike some as desperate attempts to recapture l’esprit de soixante-huit: “There will be a revolution or there will not,” Clover writes. “If the latter these poems were nothing but entertainments. If the former it will succeed or fail. If the latter these poems were better than nothing.”
Poetry like this—in its outscale desire, its extravagant want, its implausible or impossible will—thus risks the embarrassment of overshooting the target, aiming for the negation of the social order and hitting “better than nothing,” the very lesser-evil reformist logic it riotously rejects.
I find these embarrassments isomorphic with the more familiar extravagances of pop musicII—big, throbbing, teenage emotions. Both are utopian (the latter in spite of itself), charged with an excess that throws into relief the “insufficiently meaningful world” (Guy Debord). Swim out past the breakers, watch the world die.
* * *
I’ve been suggesting that this is how all poetry works. So that explicitly commitment-first poetry is merely a special case that lights the dark of a generally implicit utopianism. Thus, as long as we fall back to this world, all poetry is bathos—the fine art of sinking.III
“Can a poem be a pop song?” is my dumbed-down version of Allen Grossman’s bewilderment before the mystery of what poetry “can now mean in the context of the actual human task. What obligations ‘poetry’ requires. What benefit to the human world the obligation, privilege, or competence named ‘poetry’—the vocation to ‘poetic work’—implies or promises.”103
* * *
Clover suggests a riot can be pop music:
Once fire is the form of the spectacle the problem
becomes how to set fire to fire.
Some friends were prepared to help with this which
Michael Jackson having died and then Whitney Houston
was the new pop music.
Poetry and pop music and riots produce the same upswelling, the “certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others,” enrolling us with allies who will share the burdens with us, a crowd that is loved.
But only the last of these might conceivably produce a change in the structure of things, which would perforce put an end to the first two. At least as we know them.
* * *
I. Michael Clune helpfully suggested to me that Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power might ground Spahr’s implication that crowds can legitimize, through collective experience, a celebration of emotion that might otherwise be stigmatized as bourgeois. More germane for my purposes is E. P. Thompson’s magnificent essay “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.”
II. I owe this formulation to Anahid Nersessian.
III. I owe this Popean formulation to Oren Izenberg.
PLAYLIST
Paige Ackerson-Kiely
“Misery Trail” (2012)
Someone posted this, without attribution, on Facebook, and I thought it was the saddest poem I’d ever read. A woman is walking in a field where deer graze; it could be any American poem of the last forty years. Then:
And never in the river the same water over a rock.
To be lonely like your own hand. To be so
goddamn lonely with just a little information.
Everything flows. I have read this poem dozens of times, and its author has become a close friend, but the final lines retain a mystery I don’t ever want to find my way out of:
At certain times of day a field can blind you.
So I walked, uncharacteristically slow.
You couldn’t know how slow I walked.
Alphaville
“Forever Young” (1984)
Like “1999” and “99 Luftballons,” a soundtrack for growing up caught between two different sick lies about freedom.
Yehuda Amichai
“A Letter” (1976)
For this verse, on its own as desolate and true as any poem ever written:
To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to finish the harbor
long after the ship has gone down.
Anonymous
“In those days, in those far-off days” (c. 1800 BCE)
A poem about Bilgames, the Sumerian name for Gilgamesh, in which even life after death is characterized by the repetition that structures the verses:
after he had set sail, after he had set sail,
after the father had set sail for the Netherworld,
after the god Enki had set sail for the Netherworld,
on the lord the small ones poured down,
on Enki the big ones poured down—
The warrior Bilgames has defeated some evil spirits that lived in a blown-down willow tree the goddess Inanna found on the bank of the Euphrates after a storm (“a solitary tree, a solitary willow, a solitary tree”). With the wood he fashions two toys—scholars don’t agree on what kind—and plays with them all day until the girls bringing him water complain to the gods, who cause the toys to fall through a hole into the Netherworld, as toys will. Bilgames weeps over their loss until his servant Enkidu volunteers to go and fetch them, a prototype of Odysseus, Orpheus, Dante pilgrim. At the end of the poem he reports what he has seen to his master: “ ‘If I am to [tell] you the way things are ordered in the Netherworld, / O sit you down and weep!’ ‘Then let me sit down and weep!’ ” The final lines pronounce the fate of souls who die by fire: “ ‘Did you see the man who was burnt to death?’ ‘I did not see him. . . . / His ghost was not there, his smoke went up to the heavens.’ ” And the poem seems to blow through the millennia to Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” in which those who died in the ovens dig a grave in the clouds.
Anonymous
[Westron wynde when wylle thow blow] (c. 16th century?)
Westron wynde when wylle thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed A gayne
Along with its fellow Norton Anthology mainstay “Nou got
h sonne under wode,” this poem was my introduction to the medieval lyric. It first shows up in an early sixteenth-century manuscript, set to music, but it feels older to me. I could note the windy alliteration and assonance of the first line, the rain-like repetition of the second, with its driving iambs. That’s all fine, but it’s the sort of junk that kills poetry for undergraduates. I love the poem because it is a perfect condensation of loneliness—a kind of pop song.
Matsuo Bashō
[“Even in Kyoto”] (c. 1689)
Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto
Bashō nails in three lines an emotional complex for which Wordsworth needed one hundred sixty. (Everyone should read Makoto Ueda’s magnificent Bashō and His Interpreters—did you know the Japanese hold moon-viewing parties?)
Beastie Boys
“(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” (1986)
This song hit my junior high with the force of a bomb, leaving the entire student body divided—for or against. A novelty song with the gusto of “Yakety Yak,” which is to say: novel, but not (only) a joke.
Beyoncé
Beyoncé (2013) and “Formation” (2016)
If the most vital artist of a given historical period is the one who most tantalizingly embodies that period’s contradictions, look no further than a zillionaire who cops Black Lives Matter brio and Panthers optics while appearing to stand for nothing so much as the spectacle of money (“The spectacle is money for contemplation only”—Guy Debord). The music, though—beats that skitter like the insects Hollywood thinks aliens look like then drop booms that shudder city blocks—the music has its own ideas.
Big Black
Songs About Fucking (1987)
Equipment for Living Page 15