Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: poetry and real politics

208 Pages·2015·1.362 MB·English

by  Baraka, Amiri, Hickman, Ben, Olson, Charles, Rukeyser, Muriel, Zukofsky, Louis

Crisis and the US Avant-Garde

Crisis and the US
Avant-Garde
Poetry and Real Politics
Ben Hickman
© Ben Hickman, 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis
Zukofsky 16
2 ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war 43
3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history 66
4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against
the Vietnam War 91
5 ‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka’s attitudes,
1974–80 115
6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the
avant-garde 140
Notes 160
Bibliography 185
Index 198
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to David Herd, without whose mentoring and
support I would never have written it. My grateful thanks also to those
who read parts of the study: Sara Lyons, Michael Heller, Ralph Maud,
Kat Peddie, Paul March-Russell, Ian Brinton and especially Richard
Parker.
All Louis Zukofsky material copyright © Paul Zukofsky; the mate-
rial may not reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever
without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder.
Extracts from Muriel Rukeyser copyright © William L. Rukeyser, and
used with permission of International Creative Management. Charles
Olson poems copyright © University of California Press, 1997, and
quoted with permission. Works by Charles Olson published during his
lifetime are held by the Estate of Charles Olson. Previously unpublished
works by Charles Olson are copyright of the University of Connecticut
Libraries. Figure 1 used with permission. ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ by
Allen Ginsberg copyright © Allen Ginsberg, 1996, used by permission
of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Introduction
In 2012, the Californian poet Joshua Clover, recipient of the Walt
Whitman Award, professor of English at University of California Davis
and regular contributor to The New York Times and The Nation, had
this to say about the politics of poetry:
I think that for a while now, many of us poets have been telling ourselves
lies about the political force of poetry. Many of these we know by heart.
Speaking truth to power. Finding the form which might both reveal and
persuade. Preserving the space of critique. Preserving the feel of some undo-
mesticated common zone. Giving voice to the voiceless. Laying bare the
truth of the ineluctably immiserating mechanism in which we live. We have
been aided in this set of justifications by that peculiar historical develop-
ment known as capital-T Theory, and particularly by ideas based around the
primacy of discourse and ‘the materiality of the signifier’—ideas which allow
activities at the level of language to claim the same material force as a thrown
brick. Both constitute the world.
But it’s such bullshit, isn’t it?1
Clover was arrested in 2009 for his participation in student protests at
his workplace and has been one of the most involved activists in and
sensitive commentators on social movements flourishing in the wake of
the 2008 global recession. His conclusion – that recent theoretical politi-
cisations of poetry be dismissed as ‘bullshit’ – is likely not, then, the bluff
refusal of the reactionary, rejecting any political force falling outside the
status quo. The targets of Clover’s engaged statement, those particular
Theory-based and language-centred conceptions of the poetic, are more
carefully addressed than the sweep of his list would seem to imply. As
Clover has put it elsewhere, ‘Certain things will have to be actively
destroyed on the side of capital . . . And they will not be destroyed with
language.’2 The one-word critique of the grand potencies of poetry we
have come to learn ‘by heart’ is a response to a tradition, active since
2 Crisis and the US Avant-Garde
Romanticism, that treats the political efficacy of poetry as an already
existing fact. For any political poetics put forward today, seeing this
for the uncritical assumption it is may be a good place to start. Rather
than presuming that all the world’s important political energies inhere
in poetry at all times, this study examines what poems historically have
and have not been able to do – to affect, effect, articulate – within and
against the structures of the avant-garde.
1 Crisis and the avant-garde
For the last forty years, experimental American poetry has concerned
itself programmatically with its own political functions. Poets and
critics, influenced by French theory and the Language writing that most
successfully imported it into an American poetic context, have succeeded
in theoretically inscribing issues of poetic technique within the broadest
historical processes: the production of meaning, commodification, and
the rule of capital itself. The aim here has been directive rather than
descriptive: Language writing and its descendants today continue to seek
a poetry that will directly intervene in the fight against capital – that will,
in the words of Ron Silliman, ‘carry the class struggle for consciousness
to the level of consciousness’ through poems that, in their very form,
challenge commodity fetishism and surplus value.3 This ambitious sense
of literary force has necessarily been long on speculative theories of poet-
ry’s politics and short on analysis of the context and affect of individual
political poems. From such speculation Silliman’s project has fostered an
environment in which experimental poetry becomes the most important
political activity of our times. Likewise, the particular energies of poetry
are impoverished by pressing them into a direct assault on the economic
base of capitalism they are ill-equipped to make.
This study rejects such literalisations of the poem and its alleged formal
correspondences with economic processes.4 It investigates instead how
moments of political crisis can sharpen our sense of the historical force
of poetry, and how American poems have sought to intervene in specific
political upheavals. Such an investigation is not, however, an attempt to
return to historicist models of literary meaning. The concept of crisis, in
its specific and increasingly urgent sense today, can illuminate poetry’s
capacity for simultaneous response and intervention in a way occluded
by both the speculative preoccupation with poetry’s relation to the com-
modity and historicism’s immovable ‘context’. There are three simple
but important implications the concept of crisis holds for the reading
of twentieth-century poetry: (1) it is a single and concrete political
Introduction 3
moment; (2) it signifies a turning point, the potential for this moment to
result in revolutionary change; and (3) as such, it invokes the agency of
individuals. All three meanings are at the centre of contemporary philo-
sophical discussions of crisis and, as I shall outline, collectively harness
the major characteristics of the American avant-garde, whether in its
responsiveness to political events as opposed to the historical European
avant-garde’s vocation as initiator of anarchy, its tendency to recon-
struction over destruction, or its search for lyric subjectivity through
political change. My aim is not to suggest that the only legitimate poetry
is that which engages crisis, or even that all political poetry is the poetry
of crisis. Neither, though, do I want to propose art and politics as sites
of accidental and temporary overlap, carnivalesque moments which
are ends in themselves – a move typified by the ‘transversal’ model of
Gerald Raunig’s otherwise excellent Art and Revolution.5 Rather, crisis
stands in this study as something throwing into relief dynamics at work
in poetry at all times, since all times relate themselves in one way or
another to crisis, whether in preparation for it, in the grip of its moment,
or in its wake.
Following events like September 11, the Iraq war and the global
recession after 2008, the word crisis has become ubiquitous in the
Anglophone world. From politicians only too willing to invoke it as an
excuse for a whole range of extra-ordinary measures to its commodifica-
tion in the media trade of alienated Schadenfreude, the multiple uses of
the term show a concept itself in crisis, threatened with meaninglessness.
The significance of crisis can, however, be wrested from its approxi-
mations. The key distinction for this study is between a sense of crisis
as permanent chaos and crisis understood as an essentially punctual
phenomenon. The former is often based on a certain reading of Marx,
proposing that capitalism is always in crisis, which it exploits and finds
perpetually necessary for its existence.6 Capitalism clearly does thrive on
its destructive tendencies, endlessly adapting to its own excesses, but this
is not the same as saying that capitalism’s permanent condition is one
of crisis. Such permanence too easily slips into determinist reductions of
Marx’s theory of capitalist development, in the conviction either that
capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or
that it is simply indestructible. Marx himself, obviously the most total
theorist of economic crisis, insists that the chronic tendency of capitalism
to crisis is not the same as a state of chronic crisis – as he unambiguously
states in the Theory of Surplus Value, ‘Permanent crises do not exist.’7
The lesson for art is that capital will always periodically open itself up to
crisis, that it will repeatedly leave itself vulnerable at certain moments,
but that it equally holds in such moments the capacity to wrest victory
4 Crisis and the US Avant-Garde
from the jaws of its apparently imminent failure. In its etymological
root, which I will return to in a moment, a crisis cannot be prolonged
or delayed, let alone made permanent: krisis is the moment of decision,
krinein, the turning point at which, in ancient pathology, a patient will
either recover or die. It is this double urgency of political turning points
that Wallace Stevens invoked when he wrote of the inescapable ‘fact’ of
war pressing upon us the equally urgent and unavoidable moment of our
decision: ‘in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want
it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming’.8
In concrete terms the distinction between crisis as a process and crisis
as a multitude of moments helps to separate economic dynamics from
the political sphere, a separation central to contemporary conceptions
of crisis. Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a legitimation crisis, for example,
holds that political crisis occurs when any government ‘lags behind pro-
grammatic demands that it has placed on itself’ to manage capitalism’s
economic contradictions, but his more pertinent contention for this study
is what the State’s increasing success means for other political agents. As
governments better manage economic crises, according to Habermas, so
the systemic problems of capitalism are transferred to the shoulders of
government planning, creating an increased sense of social power over
forces previously conceived as natural and insuperable. Structurally the
argument is not dissimilar to Lenin’s in Imperialism: The Highest Stage
of Capitalism: as anarchy is more and more removed from the economy,
so human agency accrues more and more responsibility, a responsibility
currently invested in elites but increasingly seen as transferrable to the
majority of the population. Agency-through-crisis is equally palpable for
Habermas culturally where, likewise, traditions lose their ‘natural’ char-
acter as they are enrolled in the emergency defence of state legitimacy,
and thereby become called upon to ‘decide’: ‘The stirring up of cultural
affairs that are taken for granted thus furthers the politicisation of areas
of life previously assigned to the private sphere.’9 Returning to the ety-
mology of the word, we can see legitimation crises as prompting nor-
mally dispossessed agents to take decisions in response to the sickness
of their regulating system.10 Twentieth-century crisis management tends,
then, to call upon agents to act or decide, jolting them out of the general
despondency at supposedly capricious and natural economic processes.
Giorgio Agamben reaches a similar conclusion in his account of crisis
dynamics, State of Exception, where the increasingly unexceptional use
of the state of exception, or the suspension of the law in order to defend
it, shows less the fraudulence of so-called emergency powers than the
possibility for society of doing away with the law entirely: