What is it with poets and capitalism? The two, it seems, are
like oil and water.
At the end of last year, Alice Oswald
and John Kinsella withdrew their
respective books from consideration for the T.S. Eliot Prize
because the £15,000 award was being underwritten by Aurum Fund
Management. Oswald suggested that it is unethical for a literary
prize to be sponsored by an investment firm that manages hedge
funds. As an “anti-capitalist,” he stated, “Aurum does not sit with
my personal politics and ethics.”
This is not an isolated instance. From writing against
“Reaganomics” to supporting the Occupy Wall Street protests,
contemporary poets seem generally predisposed against capitalism.
What’s going on here?
In
The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American
Century (Harvard, 2011), Christopher Nealon explains
that many 20th century poets — particularly American — have
spoken out against capitalism because of their fear that capitalism
causes cultural homogeneity and political and economic turmoil.
Nealon’s understanding of changes in the American economy in the
second half of the 20th century is overly ideological, but he is
right that the poetry of this period was (and continues to be)
preoccupied with capitalism.
No doubt many poets believe that capitalism leads to both
homogeneity and instability, and the best among them subtly
critique the consumerism and excess that one finds in all affluent
societies, America in particular. Wendell Berry’s agrarianism and
Philip Levine’s “portraits” of the working class suggest that we
have lost something of the relational aspect of work. This critique
of capitalism — or the excesses of industrialization — is worth
hearing, whether or not one agrees that capitalism itself is to
blame. It is constructive, free of shrill, and generous.
But there are two further responses to capitalism in
contemporary poetry that are less constructive and effective, both
of which are rooted in the idea that capitalism has spoiled
poetry’s audience by encouraging the objectification of all things,
including people and works of art.
One of those responses has been for poets to create poems
that rail against hierarchy and morality in an effort to free their
audience from the shackles of the great capitalistic machine. The
form of these poems is usually highly experimental, using
repetition and fragmentation, along with taboo subject matter, to
supposedly create a poem that both resists commodification and
shocks the middle-class into seeing that property ownership,
marital fidelity, proper grammar, and so forth are all constructs
that restrict personal and, importantly for poets, aesthetic
freedom.
Allen Ginsberg’s famous long poem, “Howl,” is a case in
point. In the poem, Ginsberg laments the destruction of the “best
minds of our generation” by “Moloch.” In his own annotation in the
poem, Ginsberg defines Moloch as “the Cannaanite fire god, whose
worship was marked by parents’ burning their children as
proprietary sacrifice.” The use of absurd images and obscenity is
intended to shock Ginsberg’s audience into seeing the oppression
all around them. He explained to William F. Buckley in a 1968
interview when he was asked not to use any “dirty words” on the
show why such a request presents a “moral problem”:
There’s a political function to the language of everyday use.
The language we actually speak to each other off the air. There’s a
communication that’s involved, and there a classical use of all
sorts of what we call “off color” words in art, as well as images.
So our problem here, or what I’ve been proposed with, is having in
a sense to censor my thought patterns.
For Ginsberg it is the poet’s duty to break such
censorship.
If Ginsberg’s poetry, while often obscene, is rarely if
ever vitriolic, later poets have unfortunately supplied more than
enough. Much of Amiri Baraka’s later work is one long tirade
against Jews, and June Jordan and Haunani-Kay Trask’s work is
little more than a rant against whatever (and whomever) they think
are the tools of a fictional, but nevertheless oppressive, God.
These condescendingly mock or berate the middle-class rather than
free them. And since few people willingly expose themselves to
derision, it is no surprise that these volumes are met with general
disinterest, which, for certain poets, is only further proof of the
slavery or the simple-minded boorishness of the
middle-class.
A second response has been for poets to no longer write
for a general audience but for their fellow poets and kindred
spirits alone. Paul Goodman was the first to suggest this in his
1951 article “Advance-Guard Writing.” The problem for the
avant-garde writer, Goodman states, is that he has internalized
societal conflict and re-presented it in his work, which is
rejected by his audience and sanctioned. The communal aspect of art
has been broken, and what Goodman proposes is that poets stop
writing for a general audience and reestablish a “plausible”
audience of peers.
The so-called “New York School” of poets — John Ashbery,
Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch — followed this advice, at least in
part. While O’Hara in particular established a community of readers
through his use of names and personal anecdotes that lack
sufficient context in the poems for comprehension, later poets have
turned to the jargon of critical theory as a shared vocabulary,
which, combined with the great number of poetry books published
today in order to fuel burgeoning MFA programs, has made
contemporary poetry a coterie art.
So we have two responses to what poets perceive to be
capitalism’s destruction of the poet’s relationship to his audience
that add to, or in some instances completely accomplish, that
destruction. It is an extraordinary example of wish
fulfillment.
Is the secret hope of poets that capitalism will fall and
a new order will rise in which they are valued? Czeslaw Milosz
points out in The Captive Mind, which was first published
59 years ago, that this was the proposal offered to artists in
Poland and other (now formerly) Eastern Bloc countries in return
for their support of the Kremlin. “The intellectual’s eyes
twinkle,” Milosz writes,
with delight at the persecution of the bourgeoisie, and of the
bourgeois mentality. It is a rich reward for the degradation he
felt when he had to be part of the middle class, and when there
seemed to be no way out of the cycle of birth and death…Yet he is
warm-hearted and good; he is a friend of mankind. Not mankind as it
is, but as it should be.
While the poet later suffers because he realizes that this new
order imposes painful aesthetic constraints, “the recompense for
all pain is the certainty that one belongs to the new and
conquering world, even though it is not nearly so comfortable and
joyous a world as its propaganda would have one think.”
Some American poets may nourish exactly this hope, but I
doubt most harbor such catastrophic dreams of the end of the
current economic order. The fact is capitalism coupled with
democracy, despite all the problems and potential pitfalls, offers
the poet a greater opportunity to practice his craft to connect
with his audience than most political systems of the past, and most
poets recognize this. But in order for this connection to happen,
poets must write for their audience rather than merely
against them, connecting in love, not self-serving
egotism.
John Burnside, this year’s winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize,
which was announced last month, reminds us
of the importance of a poetry that engages the world (and its
readers):
[P]oetry is important because it makes us think, it opens
us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of
language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for
reengaging with a world we take too much for granted.
