Preliminary Thoughts
Kent Johnson’s Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets
Chris Murray
Essentially, all poets are back-stabbing,
narcissistic, self-serving assholes.
Chris Murray, from Texas, of all places,
seems to be the one exception to this rule.
I’m in the book. Some of you are, too. The rest might as well line up.
The epigram that bears my name is very kind (there are many others equally loving in Kent’s new book — like the one above). But I read my accompaning illustration (Saint Sebastian) as being, all at once: a moving tribute to my fore-doomed quest to become omnipositionally unspecific in thought and deed; an aptly grandiose acknowledgement of my love for excess which leads me to cherish certain Latin American poets who are fascinated with Bernini’s Saints Teresa and Lorenzo, transvestism and/ or S&M (especially Néstor Perlongher, notorious for ultra-baroque miché poems and late poems of intense, hallucinatory mysticism); a very humorous allusion to the fact that I self-identify as a Trotskyist internationalist with strong anarcho-socialist leanings (unlike the majority of you, Kent really does know what that means and understands how contradictory it seems); a savagely ironic comment on my own feelings of superiority caused by the low self-esteem and self-pity that I struggle against constantly; and my ludicrous “martyrdom” to the shadowy “sacred cause” of translation, not to mention all the rest of the quasi-mystical bullshit I’ve bleated about in my day. Among other things. Get over yourselves.
•
Kent Johnson was born in Springfield, MA, and grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father was the director of the YMCA. During the years he lived in Uruguay, the Tupamaros urban guerrilla movement was at its height. The most dramatic event of the time was memorialized in Costa Gavras’s famous film “State of Siege”. I’m referring to the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Mitrione, a former police chief of Richmond, Indiana who headed the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission attached to US AID. The Mitriones and the Johnsons socialized (the US community was small), so that had quite an impact on Kent.
After Kent returned to the US, he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Worker’s Party US (which is now a shadow of it’s once active, effective and visible self, sad to say) and worked for two years as a freight car mechanic for the Milwaukee Road in the late 70’s.
Later on, Kent worked as a volunteer teacher in the Nicaraguan literacy campaign; he was in the tropical forests of northern Matagalpa in 1980. He returned to Nicaragua in 1983 and worked for nine months on a collective farm as an adult education teacher.
He was a featured protagonist in “Five Months That Changed a Nation”, a documentary on the Nicaraguan campaign that reduced illiteracy from over 50% of the population to less than 13%. The film was awarded the 1983 silver medal in the prestigious International Film and TV Festival of New York, and the Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies’ 1983 Hubert B. Herring Award for Best Film or Videotape.
Many of us know that Kent translated the working class Talleres de Poesia poems that later made up the book A Nation of Poets, which sold by the thousands back in the ‘80s; few know that when he was teaching on the collective farm in 1983, he was a member of a self-defense militia that went out on patrol and returned fire when attacked by Contra forces.
Carolyn Forche
Yes, so maybe, as you say, some of her poetry’s formulaic.
And, yes, her misty photo on The Country Between Us was
a stupid mistake. But show me an “experimental” poet who’s
walked, with a purpose, into three or four wars. Then I won’t
laugh at your pathetic, theory-curled, petite-bourgeois lip.
It’s a real pity that most of the so-called Language Poets have always been garden-variety reformists.
•
It’s been said that Kent objectifies women in his epigrams, and I suppose he does seem to do so, in places. But if cute bloggy crush lists are OK, then what can possibly be wrong with flirty epigrams? How do I know that Kent’s not making fun of the whole thing? And I mean like have you ever seen the cover of that terrific novel, Cool for You?
There are also places where Kent seems to impugn the masculinity of some of his targets and there’s one image that, for some, might seem to border on racist. But Kent’s poetry has never been racist, sexist or homophobic. In Epigramititis (and elsewhere) he trashes blatant and subtle Machismo with parody and satire.
•
With my own ears, I’ve heard certain poets object to others because their “poetics aren’t sufficiently theorized.” What mindless Yuppie puke.
The academics I know and respect struggle to make the best of a very difficult situation. I have nothing but sympathy for my friends. Let me quote one of them here. I couldn’t say it half as well!
In recent decades, tame complicity has often come packaged as high “radical” theory. Many of our most visible “avant-garde” poets and their followers have openly bought into a very convenient relationship; they’ve made a home in an institutional state apparatus while playing at being oppositional. And nearly all of them, naturally, openly support the Democratic Party.
Hank Lazer
He is the author of a two-volume critical study,
published by Northwestern University Press,
and Dean for Academic Affairs at the University
of Alabama. The title of the two-volume set is
Opposing Poetries, wherein Language writing
is shown to stand in resolute opposition to
Academic verse.
Young experimental poets, working toward your MFA or PhD, if you can afford not to work at Wal-Mart or MacBurger Nation over summer break, by all means go to Paris, that diminished ex-Center of Western Culture, but don’t kid yourself: most people, even most poets, will never even hear of you two short decades from now. The MLA or the AWP might save you from total oblivion, but the MLA and AWP are petty-bourgeois bureaucracies and you’re probably going to have to sell yourself to them at one or another of their corporate job fairs. If you can deal with it, go for it, but English Departments are pretty damn conservative, so you better play it safe. Don’t forget that while self-aggrandizement, careerism and place-seeking are essential to real success in a bureaucracy, they’re not much help in an artist’s daily struggle with the work itself.
Jennifer Moxley
First she lived in Providence,
then she lived in Paris. Recently, she
wrote an essay reflecting, solemnly,
on her status as a “leading lyric poet”.
In some ways, I suppose, she proves
Bloom’s adage that we are all still Romantics.
On the other hand, she now has tenure
at the University of Maine at Orono,
where my father was once captain of
the freshman football team and where,
after classes, he washed dishes at
Pat’s Pizza, still the one, single restaurant
in the whole, God-forsaken town.
Among other things, being radical means working to put an end to the conditions that demand bureaucratic behavior in private and public social relationships.
•
Ron Silliman’s Barney Fife gag is funny enough, but he gets it all wrong: epigramititis is obviously a disease that afflicts epigramitists! That’s an excusable lapse. But then Silliman goes on to equate Kent’s epigrams to the infamous Clark/Dorn “Gift of AIDS” and Kent himself with Jimmy “The Wallpaper” Behrle. Such unintelligent Bill O’Reilly-style reaction is unworthy of someone in Silliman’s position — I wonder if he knows any better. I think Silliman should just go ahead and pretend to ignore Kent, for it’s painfully obvious that he’s incapable of wrapping his head around anything Kent does. Maybe Kent gets to him so badly that he can’t help himself.
•
Poetry is a social relationship. I believe it should be treated as such. Spending 6 years or more learning how to be a politically aware liberal (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and a sufficiently theorized poet doesn’t necessarily result in an ability to carry out an ethical social relationship.
We should always try to remember that the audience for “experimental” poetry is culturally insignificant and always will be. We should realize that it’s no use expecting anybody to take us as seriously as we take ourselves; it’s no use expecting others to fawn over our poems or our pronouncements. The problem is, we’re mostly so fucking ideologically confused that we’ve fallen narcissistically in love with the timid, attenuated Marxism/ smarmy liberal cliché/ reactionary drivel that we more or less cunningly bedeck in once alluring pre-worn knock-offs of vanguardist unisex haute couture.
It’s long past our time to grow up. Eventually, we all have to decide who we’re writing for, and why. We really need to reconcile what we say with what we do. Some of us try our utmost to write for the future, even though our hoped-for future would likely seem impossibly utopian to most of you. That’s why I’m so proud to support my good friend, the poet Kent Johnson, whose “socially unacceptable” (but to whom and why?), nearly always parodic risk-taking fiercely mocks the safe, dehistoricized dissent of the vast majority of so-called experimental poets and their blog-o-crits here in the USA. When someone triple-gainers off one of the cliffs we’re too scared to look over, we should applaud and our critique should be serious, reasoned and, above all, systemic. Otherwise, we’re condemning ourselves to be forever a dispensable clique of terminally disappointed, reactionary Foetry Snarks who lash out indiscriminately at anyone we think is getting the attention that we feel we rightfully deserve.
Chris Murray
Essentially, all poets are back-stabbing,
narcissistic, self-serving assholes.
Chris Murray, from Texas, of all places,
seems to be the one exception to this rule.
I’m in the book. Some of you are, too. The rest might as well line up.
The epigram that bears my name is very kind (there are many others equally loving in Kent’s new book — like the one above). But I read my accompaning illustration (Saint Sebastian) as being, all at once: a moving tribute to my fore-doomed quest to become omnipositionally unspecific in thought and deed; an aptly grandiose acknowledgement of my love for excess which leads me to cherish certain Latin American poets who are fascinated with Bernini’s Saints Teresa and Lorenzo, transvestism and/ or S&M (especially Néstor Perlongher, notorious for ultra-baroque miché poems and late poems of intense, hallucinatory mysticism); a very humorous allusion to the fact that I self-identify as a Trotskyist internationalist with strong anarcho-socialist leanings (unlike the majority of you, Kent really does know what that means and understands how contradictory it seems); a savagely ironic comment on my own feelings of superiority caused by the low self-esteem and self-pity that I struggle against constantly; and my ludicrous “martyrdom” to the shadowy “sacred cause” of translation, not to mention all the rest of the quasi-mystical bullshit I’ve bleated about in my day. Among other things. Get over yourselves.
•
Kent Johnson was born in Springfield, MA, and grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father was the director of the YMCA. During the years he lived in Uruguay, the Tupamaros urban guerrilla movement was at its height. The most dramatic event of the time was memorialized in Costa Gavras’s famous film “State of Siege”. I’m referring to the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Mitrione, a former police chief of Richmond, Indiana who headed the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission attached to US AID. The Mitriones and the Johnsons socialized (the US community was small), so that had quite an impact on Kent.
After Kent returned to the US, he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Worker’s Party US (which is now a shadow of it’s once active, effective and visible self, sad to say) and worked for two years as a freight car mechanic for the Milwaukee Road in the late 70’s.
Later on, Kent worked as a volunteer teacher in the Nicaraguan literacy campaign; he was in the tropical forests of northern Matagalpa in 1980. He returned to Nicaragua in 1983 and worked for nine months on a collective farm as an adult education teacher.
He was a featured protagonist in “Five Months That Changed a Nation”, a documentary on the Nicaraguan campaign that reduced illiteracy from over 50% of the population to less than 13%. The film was awarded the 1983 silver medal in the prestigious International Film and TV Festival of New York, and the Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies’ 1983 Hubert B. Herring Award for Best Film or Videotape.
Many of us know that Kent translated the working class Talleres de Poesia poems that later made up the book A Nation of Poets, which sold by the thousands back in the ‘80s; few know that when he was teaching on the collective farm in 1983, he was a member of a self-defense militia that went out on patrol and returned fire when attacked by Contra forces.
Carolyn Forche
Yes, so maybe, as you say, some of her poetry’s formulaic.
And, yes, her misty photo on The Country Between Us was
a stupid mistake. But show me an “experimental” poet who’s
walked, with a purpose, into three or four wars. Then I won’t
laugh at your pathetic, theory-curled, petite-bourgeois lip.
It’s a real pity that most of the so-called Language Poets have always been garden-variety reformists.
•
It’s been said that Kent objectifies women in his epigrams, and I suppose he does seem to do so, in places. But if cute bloggy crush lists are OK, then what can possibly be wrong with flirty epigrams? How do I know that Kent’s not making fun of the whole thing? And I mean like have you ever seen the cover of that terrific novel, Cool for You?
There are also places where Kent seems to impugn the masculinity of some of his targets and there’s one image that, for some, might seem to border on racist. But Kent’s poetry has never been racist, sexist or homophobic. In Epigramititis (and elsewhere) he trashes blatant and subtle Machismo with parody and satire.
•
With my own ears, I’ve heard certain poets object to others because their “poetics aren’t sufficiently theorized.” What mindless Yuppie puke.
The academics I know and respect struggle to make the best of a very difficult situation. I have nothing but sympathy for my friends. Let me quote one of them here. I couldn’t say it half as well!
There often appears to be an inverse ratio between how theorized, how theoretically mocked up and manifesto-ized, contemporary poetry is and how crappy it turns out. There are exceptions of course. One doesn’t want to be some kind of new formalist, right-wing populist, anti-intellectual blowhard, but nowadays it seems rare for there to be a meaningful, substantive relationship between intellectual ambition and poetic praxis. The blog-o-sphere appears to be absorbing all of this free-floating desire to make broad, bloated, and hopelessly dated theoretical claims do the work that poetry itself should be doing.The same person has explained to me a number of times that when a professor gets tenure, he or she automatically joins the middle class. Being a permanent cog in the corporate university system is culturally empowering, to be sure. Class-based power is infinitely more desirable than cultural power, but it’s the task of professors to exercise their cultural power for the benefit of the ruling class. When a professor bucks the system too enthusiastically, he or she generally comes under attack.
In recent decades, tame complicity has often come packaged as high “radical” theory. Many of our most visible “avant-garde” poets and their followers have openly bought into a very convenient relationship; they’ve made a home in an institutional state apparatus while playing at being oppositional. And nearly all of them, naturally, openly support the Democratic Party.
Hank Lazer
He is the author of a two-volume critical study,
published by Northwestern University Press,
and Dean for Academic Affairs at the University
of Alabama. The title of the two-volume set is
Opposing Poetries, wherein Language writing
is shown to stand in resolute opposition to
Academic verse.
Young experimental poets, working toward your MFA or PhD, if you can afford not to work at Wal-Mart or MacBurger Nation over summer break, by all means go to Paris, that diminished ex-Center of Western Culture, but don’t kid yourself: most people, even most poets, will never even hear of you two short decades from now. The MLA or the AWP might save you from total oblivion, but the MLA and AWP are petty-bourgeois bureaucracies and you’re probably going to have to sell yourself to them at one or another of their corporate job fairs. If you can deal with it, go for it, but English Departments are pretty damn conservative, so you better play it safe. Don’t forget that while self-aggrandizement, careerism and place-seeking are essential to real success in a bureaucracy, they’re not much help in an artist’s daily struggle with the work itself.
Jennifer Moxley
First she lived in Providence,
then she lived in Paris. Recently, she
wrote an essay reflecting, solemnly,
on her status as a “leading lyric poet”.
In some ways, I suppose, she proves
Bloom’s adage that we are all still Romantics.
On the other hand, she now has tenure
at the University of Maine at Orono,
where my father was once captain of
the freshman football team and where,
after classes, he washed dishes at
Pat’s Pizza, still the one, single restaurant
in the whole, God-forsaken town.
Among other things, being radical means working to put an end to the conditions that demand bureaucratic behavior in private and public social relationships.
•
Ron Silliman’s Barney Fife gag is funny enough, but he gets it all wrong: epigramititis is obviously a disease that afflicts epigramitists! That’s an excusable lapse. But then Silliman goes on to equate Kent’s epigrams to the infamous Clark/Dorn “Gift of AIDS” and Kent himself with Jimmy “The Wallpaper” Behrle. Such unintelligent Bill O’Reilly-style reaction is unworthy of someone in Silliman’s position — I wonder if he knows any better. I think Silliman should just go ahead and pretend to ignore Kent, for it’s painfully obvious that he’s incapable of wrapping his head around anything Kent does. Maybe Kent gets to him so badly that he can’t help himself.
•
Poetry is a social relationship. I believe it should be treated as such. Spending 6 years or more learning how to be a politically aware liberal (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and a sufficiently theorized poet doesn’t necessarily result in an ability to carry out an ethical social relationship.
We should always try to remember that the audience for “experimental” poetry is culturally insignificant and always will be. We should realize that it’s no use expecting anybody to take us as seriously as we take ourselves; it’s no use expecting others to fawn over our poems or our pronouncements. The problem is, we’re mostly so fucking ideologically confused that we’ve fallen narcissistically in love with the timid, attenuated Marxism/ smarmy liberal cliché/ reactionary drivel that we more or less cunningly bedeck in once alluring pre-worn knock-offs of vanguardist unisex haute couture.
It’s long past our time to grow up. Eventually, we all have to decide who we’re writing for, and why. We really need to reconcile what we say with what we do. Some of us try our utmost to write for the future, even though our hoped-for future would likely seem impossibly utopian to most of you. That’s why I’m so proud to support my good friend, the poet Kent Johnson, whose “socially unacceptable” (but to whom and why?), nearly always parodic risk-taking fiercely mocks the safe, dehistoricized dissent of the vast majority of so-called experimental poets and their blog-o-crits here in the USA. When someone triple-gainers off one of the cliffs we’re too scared to look over, we should applaud and our critique should be serious, reasoned and, above all, systemic. Otherwise, we’re condemning ourselves to be forever a dispensable clique of terminally disappointed, reactionary Foetry Snarks who lash out indiscriminately at anyone we think is getting the attention that we feel we rightfully deserve.
posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One at 2:10 PM
24 Comments:
Chris, I don't know you.
Kent, I consider a friend, but he and I have never met. I've befriended him because of his poetry and the quality of his pursuits.
It is nearly impossible not to think about ambition in American poetry when I pick up every newly published book of poems or travel about the blogosphere. I always admire ambition to write a great poem. But, I feel it's shifted in poets from having the ambition to write great poetry to having the ambition to be considered "great" poets. In my mind, these two drives are mutually exclusive, and the drive to be a famous poet can only harm one's poetry.
I have always thought that Kent's pursuit has been to vociferously point out the absurd irony of our culture industry and to find fine writing among the detritus.
Just today I was looking at Peter Green's new Ovid exile poems today, and I too felt simultaneously exiled from American poetry, or what's accepted as American poetry culture. Kent's tweaking our culture can only cause negative reaction. It's so hard to revive a corpse.
Kent's work brings me entertainment and engagement. He makes me feel less alienated from it all. I find rapport with it.
Good to "meet" you. I have read many of your fine translations, but have never reached out. And, a good night to you, too.
anastasios, thank you very much!
i don't pretend to be a theoretician or even a simple critic, but these things need to be spoken about in public, over and over again
i've just come back from your blog - my relation to art is also pretty dumb: theory goes away when it's time to do the work and all i have left are my beliefs and convictions, which are always changing and developing - for the better, i hope!!!
so your comment means an awful lot to me and it's good to meet you, too!
yours,
chris
Chris,
This makes me feel ashamed of my own review of Kent's book on MiPOesias.
Cheers,
Francois
hi, francois -
i read your review - you make a lot of really good, valuable points that give folks a way into a really tricky thing - your review helped me finish my polemic, so i'm grateful
yours,
chris
Chris,
You say: "It’s been said that Kent objectifies women in his epigrams, and I suppose he does seem to do so, in places. But if cute bloggy crush lists are OK, then what can possibly be wrong with flirty epigrams?"
Who said bloggy crush lists are okay? At least in one case, the crush list is frequently used to sexualize/minimize the women with whom the blogger is having disagreements: men get cartoons, women get "crushed". I've been on the other end of this phenomenon: definitely not okay and symptomatic, like the epigrams, of a stubborn, old-skool sexism entrenched in the post-avant (a post-avant, btw, which Johnson is fully a part of).
Also, pretty stunning that as you lay out a case for a more sophisticated leftism among poets, you say things "What can possibly be wrong with flirty epigrams?" I spit out my coffee! Wow! This mix of investment in a labor movement which is historically as dominated by masculinist tendencies as the "avant garde" poetry movement combined with this dismissal of sexism as "flirty" is hard to take -- I mean, I know both worlds, I've been involved in some levels with both, and gender and race are weakspots/ sinkholes/ the place where everything collapses. I'm definitely watching all this from the outside, but what I've noticed watching Johnson work on the inside of poetry is that in his formation of poetic communities, women barely exist -- the epigrams show, of course, that women do exist, as "sexy", I guess, (or in the case of the "parody" of Mlinko in that one book -- a woman exists as an "airy poetess", symbolic of frivolity while men -- Johnson -- take on the SERIOUS issues).
"How do I know that Kent’s not making fun of the whole thing?" If so, he has done a terrible job: I read these -- the sexist ones did not seem like sophisticated parodies of sexism -- they are just sexist.
"And I mean like have you ever seen the cover of that terrific novel, Cool for You?" This comparison, I just don't get.
best,
Anne
Anne,
This is a good comment. I'd like to offer a couple thoughts.
First, so far as I know, I was the first person to publicly challenge in a developed way the rather creepy, stalking sexism of the "crush lists" (and other quasi-predatory displays) at Jim Behrle's blog. This was a post appearing maybe close to two years ago now, at the Possum Pouch. I pointed out there how bizarre it was that the openly pornographic and brazenly libelous nature of Behrle's space was given encouragement by so many men and women post-avantists. A number still do so (witness Jordan Davis, Gabe Gudding, and Jonathan Mayhew, for example). This post of mine was later taken down at Behrle's request, wherein he offered to delete certain things on his blog in return. Of course, after this was done, he then went right back to his clearly pathological behaviors (most recently exposing himself in blog comments boxes), cheered on, as usual, by a fairly definable clique within the blogging community. Watch what happens after this reply to you is noticed...
Anyway, just briefly, I'd like to remark on the following comment you make regarding the Ange Mlinko poem in Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, which you cite as example of a questionable tinge to my work:
"...(or in the case of the "parody" of Mlinko in that one book -- a woman exists as an "airy poetess", symbolic of frivolity while men -- Johnson -- take on the SERIOUS issues)."
Here I honestly think you miss some things. One of them is that it isn't Milinko in this poem who is turned into an airy poetess, but me! Please read it again. There is simply nothing there that would support this particular interpretation of yours. And this poem is representative of other pieces in that book (as it is of the epigrams book), where I openly bracket and undermine various features of my own "poetic authority," not least my (admittedly) ingrained desire to project my masculinity.
Yes, there are a few poems in the epigrams that remark on the "attractiveness" or personality of women poets. But there are also a number of epigrams that remark on the attractiveness and personality of various men poets as well. In fact, there is probably more flirtatious commentary on males in that book than there is on women! So I think this issue of "objectification" you mention needs to be considered in the context of the book as a whole and in terms of the conceptual nature of the bigger intervention into the "field" that it wishes to make. The book is, indeed, very much about objectification: that is, it's partly about the ways poets today, avant and mainstream (if there is a qualitative difference anymore), theatrically offer themselves and their work to be objectified. This is a big issue with many facets, but the epigrams might be more fruitfully considered from this perspective, rather than as individual "poems."
OK, that's enough from me for now. But I wanted to offer a few thoughts in response.
Kent
Anne,
Thanks for the comment: one of the reasons I started to blog was so that I could work some things out in public, seriously and to the best of my ability. At first, I hoped that others would comment, join in, contribute in a serious way to what I'm trying to do. I want to learn. That didn't really happen, up till now, with your post.
I'm not going to revise it. I could do that, of course. Then, I could also remove your comment, and Kent's, in order to protect myself, as others have done in the past on their blogs. Or I could ignore you completely, wallowing in shame the while.
Kent's book is one thing, and he addresses your objection very well. My review is another thing all together.
I'm a middle-aged white male. I've been subject to 50 years of pressure to conform to our society's grotesque notions of masculinity. This is one of the hardest things for all men to break free of.
I'm not trying to excuse myself. That I was making fun of something I hate in no way lets me off the ideological hook. I should have been more careful, taken more time to think things through. I do know better, Anne. I acknowledge my incompetence.
Please accept my apology for being a lame white guy in regards to something so important.
Yours,
Chris
Oh, why not. Here's another old benighted white fuddy-duddy, blundering into the fray.
I am aware of, & deplore, the very insidious aspects of the objectification of women - and the commodifaction of sexuality - in our culture.
I am also aware that both men & women are sometimes sexy and flirtatious, in both their physical appearance and their behavior.
I fear for poetry (& for culture), if the latter is excommunicated & abhorred because of the former.
Life is complicated. Do we have to trade exploitation for judgemental puritanism?
This is not a rhetorical question, just a humble question.
Like I said above, Henry, a book of poems is one thing and a review is quite another.
I realize you probably think my politics are starry-eyed and hopelessly uptopian, but I should have taken the time and effort demanded by the matter at hand. I failed to do so. Anne was right to call me on it and my apology recognizes her intelligence and her humanity.
Yours,
Chris
No, I can see Anne's point too - important to say that. But I also find that it raises the question I posed.
Your politics? I'm a utopian myself, & would never call utopianism hopeless!! I have much respect for your politics, from the little I can grasp of it, from a cursory skim of your blog. I disagree with it, that's all - feel that my own idealism is situated on a somewhat different basis.
Fair enough, Henry.
The exploitation of women is one of the cornerstones of capitalism. Women have every right to be royally pissed off about it. Hell, women have the right to be pissed off about me "granting" them that right!
I welcome Anne's anger. I know I'm a cranky old white guy. I'd rather hear a woman speak about these things, to tell the truth! Women are the ones most able to speak about their own expolitation and oppression.
The thing is, no one knows what a society that's not based on the exploitation of human beings would be like, given our level of technology. No one knows what will become "sexy" or "attractive" in a society in which physical attractiveness is no longer exploited and all human relationships are lowered to the level of monetary exchange. No one knows what will become of family relationships, whether or not the monogamous nuclear family will survive, etc.
I hope that goes a little way toward answering your question.
Yours,
Chris
PS - Good to meet you. I've long admired your intelligence and your skill. From one old crank to another!
Sorry - that should have read:
No one knows what will become "sexy" or "attractive" in a society in which physical attractiveness is no longer exploited and all human relationships are no longer lowered to the level of monetary exchange.
Chris,
Thank you for the thoughtful response -- this was very good to read -- refreshing, even.
a youngish-crank,
Anne
My guess is, so long as there is sex, men & women will be sexy & flirtatious.
I expect there to be sex under most forms of socio-political organization (or disorganization) in times to come.
I haven't experienced any sex myself in the last 45 years, but then (perhaps fortunately) I'm not representative of the race as a whole.
No doubt, Henry. There will always be sex, as long as people fall in love, get horny, simply like each other, etc. Humans have always loved to fuck and I assume we always will.
But, really, who can predict what sexiness and flirtatiousness will look like in a society in which queer sex is no longer considered queer at all, but perfectly natural?
Who can imagine what falling in love will be like in a society in which someone might choose to have a different sexual partner every day for 50 years, one partner for life or never have sex at all and all of it considered perfectly healthy?
How to we get to such a society?
The roots of oppression are in exploitation and capitalism cannot exist without expoitation. An end to capitalism doesn't necessarily mean chaos. I don't have any answers, just a million questions.
Yours,
C
A beginning of socialism doesn't necessarily mean equality either. Tell that to the 20 million.
Yes, you're right there. That's a big problem, no intelligent commie will deny it.
But you also have to ask the billions and billions who live in abject poverty what they'd like, too, you know? Unless you think that the vast majority of humans on this planet don't really matter.
Oh no, I'm not asking to be misinterpreted here. Just that it is the reponsibility of Edna St. Vincent Milay's "homo called sapiens" to question both outcomes. Personally, I'd cast my vote alongside the recent shift in Latin America to the left.
In brief, you're preaching to the choir.
ryan
Ryan, I cast my vote alongside Latin Americans, too, politically and poetically.
"Question both outcomes"? Only an idiot would deny that imperative. That "both" is a little troubling, though. It's more like "all possible".
Are you trying to red-bait me? That's a simple question, not an accusation.
In brief, I suspect we're on the same side.
Yours,
Chris
No red bait.
And yes, "all possible."
-rd
thanks, ryan: red-baiters usually start by mentioning the purges, so i was wondering...
it's good to meet you
C
Good to meet you as well.
re the purges, I think that Martin Amis has a good book on that topic. (I've always found it trying and telling that more don't consider alternate possibilities in the political sphere...as if there were just that capital/communal divide...). But perhaps I'm getting off topic.
Great work on this blog, by the way.
-rd
Thank you, Ryan! I do my best...
I'll look for that Amis book.
Oh, no, not "off topic" at all!It's way too easy to say everything sucks, look how smart I am to notice, end of story. That's the usual thing. You read people doing that all the time, poets, critics, academics, theorists.
The hardest thing to do is figure out how to replace the current system with something that'll actually work.
There are some people who are trying to do that. Over at ZNET, Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel and these guiys are trying to come up with an economic structure to replace capitalism. They call it Parecon.
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
The most difficult thing to deal with is realizing that's it's gonna take years to work things out, generations... and then the awful truth hits home: the ruling class isn't going to give up without a fight and they're the ones with all the big guns and all the cash to buy more. That's when so many radicals fold.
It's not easy now, and it never will be. But we have to imagine and hope and work for an emancipated future for all. We just have to.
Like I said, I'm not pretending to have any answers. I'm an artist who occasionally gets riled up about something and can't help but write about it!
Sometimes I get confused and attack from the right, like I did in the review. I'm glad Anne took me to task so brutally. I deserved it.
The only difference with me and certain other blogging poets is that I'm not very interested in being correct or perceived as intelligent all the time. If you care too much about being correct, you'll never allow yourself to make the mistakes you need to make in order to learn. I want to keep learning for as long as I live. I never want to stop learning how to be a truly decent, ethical human being. That's the real struggle for all of us; and as long as we don't struggle together, things will only keep changing for the worse.
Take care, compa -
Chris
Within a week or two an immortal podcast of Kent reading from just this work will be broadcast here
http://thejeunessedoree.libsyn.com/
wherwe there are many other works of freedom and beauty.
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