More on "Resilient Communities": a Slow Poetry Inflection

John Robb has more to say on “resilient communities”:

Resilient communities aren't built through one-off projects/efforts, good will, and lifestyle changes. Instead, they are a vibrant ecosystems of activity, that are innovative, robust, and efficient. The key to growing ecosystems that exhibit these qualities is to build platforms that span everything from electricity to food to security.

From the perspective of poetry, rhetoric, and communications, we might add that such platforms can also produce stronger communities, determine what arguments are necessary and what aren’t; they can provide personal and communal insight, space for reflection, and tools for discovery, along with methods of judgment, or, perhaps, space to defer judgments. A Slow Poetry platform can help to reassess the role of poetry in the creation of public space and private understanding in language that others take as common. Relations of commonality are as important as points of disruption.

Along these lines, Walter Jost’s Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism offers some valuable ways to see how poetry contributes to our understanding of the world. Leaning heavily on Wittgenstein and others, Jost argues for a poetics of ordinary language. His work reminds me how much of every day life is just made up, and how habituated we are to its social norms and language usages within given contexts. It reminds me too that such notions as a public are themselves constructed, provisional things, with legal and theoretical values that have little authority in the practices of every day social life. And even the private no longer seems so personal, when so many self- and state-or-city-or-federal-or-corporate regulations govern the conscious and unconscious motives in our lives. Slow Poetry can bring us all up close to these points of intersection, however, by showing us the cracks in things—the contested points.

The Slow / The Sad

David Shapiro offers a generous response to some of the questions my slow poetry thing has introduced. Actually, what he brings to this conversation is something more useful than what I’ve managed to say so far.

The slow.

The sad.

These utter embarrassments of will power and failure—what could be more necessary now? Amidst the speed, the progress, the fingertip ease of acquisition?

The slow.

The sad.

One thing I don’t hear a whole lot about regarding poetry is pace. When I think of certain poets whose work gives me centeredness, it’s the pacing of the poem (or the prose (Joan Didion, for instance), that somehow slows the reading mind down to a finer state of apprehension.

The slow.

The sad.

And just tonight, before chasing a cockroach out of the bathroom, I was reading Lorenzo Thomas’ The Bathers, absorbed in that pace he establishes with such wit and surprise. But what’s more, the sadness latent in his work, hit me. Not the hip, wise seer—but a lugubrious depth. But then, the laughter reclaims the pace—gives the sudden jolt to the kinetic system. It’s not okay, and you’ll have to live with that.

The slow.

The sad.

A poetry that cannot register the complex range of our situation gives up nothing of itself but a safe, steadied angle—a perspective of fear hidden in the glib orientation of the social. It’s a part of current threads—the fabric of what’s real—okay—but—where will it take us? What does poetry, today, compose in “us”?

The slow.

The sad.

There aren’t any easy definitions, no single approaches. We got multiple eyeballs and tongues and ears scattered across the networks and zones of hope and horror.

The slow.

The sad.

Bigfoot photos and Olympic games dominate CNN headlines. Today I read Joan Didion's "The White Album" and began to wonder about the uses of paranoia. Wasn't it Burroughs or Corso or someone like that who said, "A paranoid is someone in possession of the facts?"

*

Over at Clusterfucknation :

We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order [instead of dicking around in the southern border region of the former Soviet Union]-- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.

And:

The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of "for sale" signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don't know what's going on.

Where to from here: an essay by Amiri Baraka

FORWARD IS WHERE WE HAVE TO GO

What the young(?) people with the signs in St.Petersburg sd to Obama “You’re undermining the (Black) Revolution” is merely one more sign of how confused and misdirected too many who style themselves “revolutionary” have become. For one thing it is certain that these folk do not even understand what revolution is. I would guess they are more of the tiny throng captivated by anarchism and infantile leftism who think revolution means standing on the sidelines calling who they think are their enemies names.

If you want to stand around with signs of some significant show of political clarity, they should at least be aimed at the crypto fascist McCain. To not even be able to identify who is the main enemy at any given stage of struggle is patently non-revolutionary. To think that Obama is the principle target of our struggle is, at best, infantile left and anarchist. It could be pro McCain.

If we go back to basics, revolution is the seizure of power. The aim of revolutionaries, at most stages of struggle, is the seizure of power, to picket Obama is to move to seize power for McCain.

What is also not understood is the tortuous path of revolutionary struggle. Obama, along with quite a few other “post 60’s” developments is the product of the 60’s struggles, a direct result of the turbulent civil rights and Black Liberation movements. Whether you yet understand it or not, Without Dr. King, Montgomery, Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Rosa Parks, CORE, The Freedom Riders, The Black Panthers, SNCC, CAP, there could be no Barack Obama . Without those bloody struggles against Black national oppression, racism, discrimination, segregation, there could be no Obama candidacy, certainly not of this magnitude.

Jesse’s two runs were admirable , and yes, they were part of the sledgehammer of Black politics from the 50’s through the 80’s. And just as that force created the visible use of Powell and Condoleeza Rice as negro “buttons” within the rightwing establishment of US bourgeois politics , none of that was possible without the Black movement itself, as contradictory as that might seem . The internationally perceived racial conflict in the United States was the most glaring contradiction to US claims as the almighty white angel of world politics.

The colored Secretaries of State provided some of the cool out necessary not only to sublimate that image but to foist on this world of colored people a confusing tactic , so that when the US Secy of State hopped out of plane somewhere in this mostly colored world, friends and righteous enemies would be startled by who was carrying the message.

So that now it’s come all the way to the “top” of US government, this need for another, Yeh! Black , face to cool out the ugliness the last 20 some years have mashed upon the world. We might not agree with the intention of this playacting, but at the same time we must recognize the forces that make this necessary. Recognize those forces, because we are a large part of them. And with that recognition must come the understanding of what is the next step in this protracted struggle to ultimately eliminate imperialism and monopoly capitalism, which are the base of continuing national oppression , racism, gender oppression, anti –democratic hegemony anywhere in the world.

The very negative side of the “post racist” line that Obama runs is that the die is cast for nitwits to say that racism is done and gone and that if you still in the ghetto or still don’t have a job, it’s on you. Bah, Humbug! Obama’s best intention is that there is the making of a post racist coalition that can provide the muscle for his campaign and victory in the election. But reality, the cops, the jails, the unemployment figures puts all that down every day.

But it is a very pimpable figment. The New York Times recent cover story “Is Obama The End of Black Politics?” is a very stinking example of its pimpablity. One obvious answer to that is “Only if Obama is the End of White Politics” which we see even in the way the Clintons as well as McCain and the overwhelming racism of the media are running the primaries, is certainly not the case. One could hope that an Obama victory wd signal an incremental leap in the direction of more democratic allowance for highly skilled operatives within the system, which is what Obama certainly is. But “post racist”?..., gimme me a break.

The Times article, predictably, uses the most visible of stealth negroes , i.e. those who, while profiting by the opening in US politics provided them by the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement, and getting substantial Black support at the polls, believe that they have “made it” by virtue of their own impeccable greatness, Booker in Newark, Nutter in Phila, Fenty in DC come to mind. Booker, whom I sent a copy of Marvin X’s book How To Recover from An Addiction to White Supremacy , though more crafty than Nutter, who played gun bearer for Bonnie & Clyde during the Democratic primaries, Booker has raised Newark taxes 8% , fired 4 or 500 mostly black city hall workers, claiming to have a budget problem but hiring at the same time a half dozen non-Newark natives as“deputy mayors”, at $176,000 a piece. My son, Ras, was deputy mayor for four years and took no salary. The top 10 Police officials, including both the Police Director and the Police Chief are white. Fenty who claims his biracial parentage has made him see ”more” than merely black struggle. Booker says “I don’t want to be the person that’s turned to when CNN talks about black leaders…I’m Popeye, “ he says…”I am who I am”. Naturally these wd be the people the Times would use to give an obituary for “Black Politics”.

But certainly, these kinds of “wooden negroes” are not entirely new on the scene, they are just the most recent crop of negroes claiming they are greater (or safer) than mere black people. The struggle between Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen was essentially the same , when Langston says in The Negro Artist & The Racial Mountain (1926) “ One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet’ meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’, “meaning behind that “’I would like to be white’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself” In a recent Esquire Booker comes on like he thinks he is Will Smith in I Am Legend, a single human scientist trapped in a city full of vampires.

When Nutter says,” I never asked anybody to vote for me because I was Black”, he is missing the essential historic fact of Black life in America and trying with all his might to dismiss it. That he couldn’t even run for Mayor being Black. He might have had to run for his life, if he even said such a thing. It was Black peoples’ unity and struggle that has made even this delusion of self anointment possible.

Black politics will only disappear when the Black majority disappears. And even the wish fulfillment of New York Times “liberals”can never achieve this, nor the creepy self hatred of those incognegroes the Times wants to anoint as post black negroes. Still the question of Obama’s candidacy is a quite different consideration. As I have said , in print and in the flesh at many forums, no matter what is said by whoever thinks to deny this, or even what Obama says himself, the foundation of Obama’s successful candidacy is the 90% support by the Afro-American people. A fact that I’m sure he understands. Obama also understands that it is the rest of the American people he must reach out to, no matter how attempts he makes to do this are questioned, even by Black people. Even 90% of 12% is not enough to win the presidency.

So that for the so called militants, black or white left not to understand that the logic and strength of Obama’s candidacy is the 21st century manifestation of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, impossible without it. Jesse Jackson’s two impressive candidacy’s were also part of that motion, not to accept both these phenomena as positive aspects and results of our collective struggle is to lack “True Self Consciousness".

The real question now is what is the next step, what is the key link in that chain of progressive struggle that if grasped will hoist the whole of us incrementally to the next level of unity and struggle. For those forces so duped by their erroneous understanding of what constitutes revolutionary movement. The consistent idealism of those who wd waste their vote on people whose most positive contribution would be to point out even more foricibly the link between McCain and a swifter fascist future for the US and critically support Obama’s outright liberalism, but issuing a critical list of planks for a more progressive Obama campaign.

There are even some utterly backward cultural nationalist negroes who say “Obama is their enemy” because he is not demanding that black people stop speaking English and speak their mother tongue (my mother tongue is Afro American) or that he blame the Jews for the world’s ills. My God!, You couldn’t win on those planks even if the election was for the NAACP or the Black Panther Party Or the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee.

We cannot go backward or even contemplate it. A revolutionary must first find out what it is the people want, what they need. Unfortunately for some, the definition of revolution is to construct some elitist cultural nationalist, religious or infantile leftist, position, the “further out” the better, so they may claim, since few others will get down with that, that they must be the most revolutionary of all. Too often this is just a means of hiding out from the real work of educating and organizing and settling for being the hippest chump in the closet.

What we must be aiming for at the present level of US politics is a Peoples or Popular Democracy, rather than the tongue constructed false democracy real dictatorship (of wealth) that exists today. That must include the replacing of the monopoly capitalist-imperialist domination of US politics at every level with a United Front , which shd be led by the working class in alliance with farmers, the progressive petty bourgeoisie, oppressed nationalities and progressive national bourgeoisie. The loose Obama coalition, as it exists now.

For the Afro American people a National United Front , Democratic Assembly, would be a huge step in the right direction, as what was attempted by the Convention Movement of the 19th Century, the National Negro Congress in the 1940’s and the Gary Convention in the 1972. It is this kind of organized force that would be powerful enough to maintain the correct orientation of any National Coalition of multinational forces to win this election and help steer the ship of state.

The fiercest opponents to such a victorious coalition , the first steps toward moving toward a United front US government, rather than one dominated by corporate Imperialism is the racist right and the juvenile delinquent left (some of whom are quite rightist and even some quite racist..e.g., how can Nader put Obama down for “sounding white” ..what does “white” sound like? And how come Nader don’t sound like that?)

Ultimately this political period will be characterized by what kind of political force Blacks and progressive Americans can put together to secure Obama’s election and push him ever to the Left. What is even clearer and a piercing denial of the NYTimes distortion is Hubert Harrison , the Black Socialist, writing in the New York Call ca: 1911 “Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it…True democracy and equality implies a revolution …startling even to think of “ ( quoted from Jeffrey Perry’s recent volume Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism 1883-1918 )

So the question of “Black Politics” must be inextricably bound to progressive politics in this country and just as we fought as Black people and with progressive allies of many nationalities even to vote, or for that matter drink out of public drinking fountains or ride anywhere in a bus, so it is this same “Black Politics” clearly broadened by Obama to include a progressive coalition in the most ambitious attempt to show that Black Politics in its most progressive meaning is the struggle for a Peoples Democracy here in the US. This is what the Obama campaign asserts boldly. We must see that it continues to do so right into the Oval office and beyond.

The following are a few exploratory planks of a document that shd be added to by the willing and serve as a basis for a mass supported document to present to Obama.

Progressive Agenda for Obama

1. End Iraq War, cancel preparations for Iran War. Re-establish that it is Congress that declares war

a. End so called “National Security Government: Close Guantanamo, end Homeland Security\domination of US political and social life.

2. Make racism a criminal offense assault 1

3. Use of the N Word (by anyone) assault 2

4. Use of the B Word (by anyone) assault 2

5. Begin to push for change in Political Culture of US**

A. End the Electoral College System B. End Winner Take All System C. Initiate One Person One Vote D. Abolition of US Senate -replace with Unicameral system (one House of Representatives based on One Person One Vote).

E. Parliamentary System= As many parties as represent ideological groups, as in Europe, so that Coalition politics emerge F. Ban on private monies in elections G. Restoration of Voting Rights to Ex Felons

6. Review of National Debt by National Forum

7. Executive Support for Reparations- Establishment of National Citizens Committee

8. General Investigation & Review of Criminal Justice System

9. Appointment of Progressive Supreme Court & Other Judges

10. Review Diplomatic Relations with all Nations. By National Panel with recommendations

a. Haiti b. Cuba. c. Venezuela d. Saudi Arabia e. Iran f. Israel

b. Strengthen Committee on Africa, investigate relations

11. Investigate Need for Cabinet level Office of Afro American Affairs

12. Review Affirmative Actions statutes, reverse negative trends

13. Housing: “Everyone must have a place to live” bill

14. Education- Reaffirm support with action for Public Education. Veto attempts to weaken PE budget

15. Minimum Wage

16. Investigate Bush-Cheney years, including their election, with National Forum, Recommendations

17. National investigation of 911

18. Review FDA- Reverse Bush’ Rule eliminations

19. Review Environmental Protection Agency –role- laws

20. International treaties review Oslo, Nuclear, Ballistic missile, Trade

21. Plan for direct monitoring and supervision of Voting Apparatus Nationally. Stop “suppression of the Black & Latino vote”

22. Executive intervention for National Health Care plan

23. Presentation of Progressive National Immigration Bill

24. New initiative for National Cultural & Arts Support

25. New Public Works Program to put US back to work

26. Push programs for Regulation of Capitalism, Stop excessive outsourcing , end big capital’s abandoning of factories, cities, industries

People who keep saying,”The president can’t do anything” shd review FDR’s “First Hundred Days” aimed at ending the great Depression. “On his first day in office , Mar 4, 1933, FDR called Congress into a special session. He then proceeded to drive a series of bills through Congress that reformed the US banking industry, saved American agriculture and allowed for industrial recovery. At the same time wielded the executive order creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration (WPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority. These projects put tens of thousands of Americans back to work building dams, bridges, highways and much needed public utility systems.” (About.com) What was called “The New Deal”.

What we need from Obama is a Newer New Deal. What we need from ourselves is the political clarity and will to ensure Obama’s election!

Amiri Baraka
8/14/08

New Bookslut August Issue

My August Bookslut column--"Slow Down"-- discusses Slow Poetry--along with new work by Judith Roitman.

Other poetry reviews look at the work of Kenneth Patchen, Justin Sirois, and Carl Martin.

Barret Watten's Orono Presentation and the Uses of Literature

Barret Watten's delivery at Orono earlier this summer—“The Expanded Object of the Poetic Field; Or, What is a Poet/Critic?”-- argues for an expanded understanding of literature and the relation between the poet/critic in its production.

Of course, poetry existed before the invention of belles lettres in the eighteenth century and before literature's institutional inception during the nineteenth. Milton didn't write literature, he wrote sonnets, masques, epics, tracts, etc. And it is true, as Watten argues, that the thing many practice today called literature is morphing into something else. Literature is a powerful construct--it provides at its best ways for people in diverse disciplines to reflect on the practice of writing in different historical periods. But for practicing poets or poet/critics other terms are increasingly needed (and I don’t hide the fact that rhetorical theory provides useful terms for this). Watten, by working largely within the vocabulary of literature, resorts to terms like "productions of meaning," "social comprehension," "aesthetic possibility," and undefined notions of audience or publics. Despite Watten's identification of "a faultline [that] exists between the poem seen as a normative mediation between presumed universals and subsumed particulars (Wimsatt), and Olson's notion of "the poem as an agonistic, unfolding, open field of entities that are simultaneously objective and subjective," he addresses his own practice as a poet/critic in a similar literary discourse that promotes subjectivity via the psychic dislocation of the poet whose intent haunts the poem. He writes:

There are three entailments of this scene of instruction: first, there is a necessarily unstable relationship between particular and universal in the lyric poem, due to a psychic economy that cannot produce content and confirm meaning simultaneously without violent transgression. Second, such instability of the lyric is not a site for any form of ‘unity’ but functions as a scene of its reproduction in another (a.k.a. the reader) and is thus social. Third, the dissociation of the language of the poem from its formal reproduction (of the objects organized by the poem, in Olson’s sense, against the poem itself as object) opens the autonomy of form to the historical contexts that the poem as form cannot contain and regulate. Theory and historicism enter as dissociation of the object, taking their revenge on the psychic economy of originary exclusion that motivated their deployment.

Where Wimsatt's "presumed universals" and "subsumed particulars" create a "normative mediation," Watten updates this conundrum (largely via Olson and Lacan/Kristeva) to bring awareness to "the psychic economy of originary exclusion that motivated their deployment." Thus far universals and particulars remain, but they are approached through an awareness of operations by a subjective unconscious. This brings Watten, a bit later, to say:

Two routes to the social reproduction of poetry are thus implied: one through the object itself—change the object, change the paradigm—and the other through the subject, with the language-centred self-reflexivity of the avant-garde. A critic like Charles Altieri importantly identifies such self-reflexiveness with the object itself, but this still yields circular results: only poets available to the aesthetic traditions of German idealism or English romanticism provide proper models for the identity between form and self-reflexivity. The second route, which I explore, sees reflexivity as not containable within poetic form, and reads the formal construction of the work in relation to external, social logics.

Okay, of course: reflexivity is not "containable within poetic form." In rhetorical terms, the epideictic, which include poetic forms, is a piece of writing or speech that an audience reads or listens to. Judgment is suspended, for they are not encouraged to act, but to think, reflect upon their capacities and to increase them, potentially, for future public or social engagements. This is classic rhetorical theory from Aristotle to Cicero. The emphasis in rhetorical terms, however, is on the complete situation of discourse--the site of language production and consumption--it is not focused on the text itself.

Watten is looking for ways to move the conversation away from the literary preference for the text as the site of reflexive activity, but he is limited by his definitional paradigm of literary theory and Kantian-based notions of subject/object distinctions worked out in the word site of the poem. The ongoing war with New Criticism just seems weird when its influence has vanished markedly from most valuable sites of poetic production and consumption. I keep thinking in this talk that Watten is trying to say something that could be more easily addressed through communications studies (see Josh Gunn’s discussion of “agency” in a link I posted a few days ago). But then, he wouldn't have access to a claims of his work contributing to new literary forms in a postmodern context. Instead, all he could say about himself is that rhetorically he has adapted his poetry to social and historical conditions he sees operative in the world around him. From there he could go on to develop a more vigorous theory of an audience. Rather than providing "meaning" for them he could explore a shared world (or habitus if you want to sound theory-fied). Instead we have this deadlock of form, aesthetics, subject, object, universals, etc. There are other ways to describe what we do that are much easier to understand, though Watten would have to renounce claims of the "new," to which he goes to great lengths to justify in the jargon of literary studies.

He tries also to get around this problem by talking about the "social logic" of the assembly line. "In refusing the autonomous horizon of ‘literariness’ that is at times identified as ‘language’ in the Language school of poetry,” he writes, “‘The Bride of the Assembly Line’ interprets Gertrude Stein’s abstract principle of ‘composition as explanation’ as social production through her admiration of automobiles and Henry Ford. Stein’s Fordism, of course, was suggested by and demanded an account of the larger mode of production I live in, the ensemble of productive relations in Detroit, as a site of form-making activity that is indissociable from its historical context."

Yes, but: form and historical contexts assume people actively listening through the environments they inhabit for some purpose, whether it's to improve the market for their product, or to more fully reflect upon their subjective relations to each other, the work they perform, the pleasures they receive based, perhaps, on miseries far beyond them, in other parts of the world where minerals are mined to fill the molds that stamp out the Detroit engines.

Although Watten claims that "the poet/critic refunctions the mode of production of meaning and value that once went under the name of literature but which has, of necessity, taken new forms," he doesn't go far enough in his pychodynamic critique of the bogey of New Crit and New American poetics to make an argument that shows how this can be done--particularly in poetries produced by others than himself. A sense of community seems almost alien to his thinking about the poem, which is the Watten poem, a site of intensive subjective struggle in the jaws of Wimsatt and Olson, the devouring agents of his tethering literary streams (forgive the metaphor, I’m on the clock and it’s ticking).

Ultimately, a sense of violence drives through this work--a decisive formal gap opens that refuses community, insisting on sides and claims for sure footing on either side of that open pit (an abyss? the jaws of hell?) His, like Wimsatt’s or Olson’s, is a program for the willing. It’s a smart project--one that sops up the gravy of lit to make claims for its expansion culturally into other forms. But we are still stuck with forms, aesthetics, universals, etc rather than with the details of the environments we inhabit and how, intersubjectively, texts operate to reveal all we know and feel this side of a whack in the head by very concrete stuff.

From Today's NY Times

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization