Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism
Now available, free of charge. Read it (PDF), throw up your hands and cry out: Where’s Toscano? Saidenberg? Brady? Factory School?
Christopher Nealon’s essay starts out very promisingly, pure gangbusters, but disappointmenmt soon set in for this reader. Nealon doesn’t even make the totally elementary connection between oppression and exploitation. As a matter of fact, neither of those two words appear in the essay. That, and the absence of the poets and the organization that I have mentioned in the paragraph above, would make anybody with a clue more than a little suspicious.
I haven’t read anything else by Nealon, but I hope that other things he has written give the exploiting class a little something to worry about. In this essay, he sure doesn’t, and neither does the vast majority of our poetry. There’s a reason political activists mistrust us and think that what we do is utterly secondary. More’s the pity.
Christopher Nealon, you need to check out Roque Dalton for a little while, and then try again. We’re all rooting for you, compa.
Christopher Nealon’s essay starts out very promisingly, pure gangbusters, but disappointmenmt soon set in for this reader. Nealon doesn’t even make the totally elementary connection between oppression and exploitation. As a matter of fact, neither of those two words appear in the essay. That, and the absence of the poets and the organization that I have mentioned in the paragraph above, would make anybody with a clue more than a little suspicious.
I haven’t read anything else by Nealon, but I hope that other things he has written give the exploiting class a little something to worry about. In this essay, he sure doesn’t, and neither does the vast majority of our poetry. There’s a reason political activists mistrust us and think that what we do is utterly secondary. More’s the pity.
Christopher Nealon, you need to check out Roque Dalton for a little while, and then try again. We’re all rooting for you, compa.
posted by BN-B at 12:55 PM
2 Comments:
So, um, I'm pretty confused. It seems to me that if Chris Nealon's essay was about "The Best Political Poets Going" or "What Poetry Should Be Doing Under Capitalism," the whole "Where's X? And Y, and Z?" move would make sense. Just like, if there were an essay about the Top 10 Revolutionaries, one might "throw up your hands and cry out: Where's Che? Gramsci? Patty Hearst?"
But, well, I read the essay. It seems to me he's describing a particular, not-necessarily-intentional poetic response to particular conditions. If he doesn't mention, say, Rodrigo, it's not because Rodrigo doesn't have a swell response to oppression and exploitation; it's because he's not writing about Rodrigo's response. He's noticing this other thing that's happening, and seeing what it can name about current social relations that might be worth noticing and naming. He's certainly not writing about what poets are supposed to do, what the right relation to capitalism is, etc.
It's a description. You're either asking it describe your interests rather than its own, or you're prescribing what the right kind of analysis and the right kind of poetry are. Either way, not a useful reading practice.
Comments by me have been deleted by me. I decided to post my response on the blog, instead of in the comments box.
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