My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch PDF
Preview My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
My Silver Planet Hopkins Studies in Modernism Douglas Mao, Series Editor My Silver Planet A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch Daniel Tiffany This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, University of Southern California. © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2014 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tiffany, Daniel. My silver planet : a secret history of poetry and kitsch / Daniel Tiffany. pages cm.— (Hopkins Studies in Modernism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-42141145-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN-13: 978-1- 4214-1146-0 (electronic)—ISBN-10: 1-4214-1145-8 (hardcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN-10: 1-4214-1146-6 (electronic) 1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Kitsch—In literature. 3. Banality (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. PN1126.T55 2013 809.1—dc23 2013010184 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post- consumer waste, whenever possible. Contents 1 Arresting Poetry: Kitsch, Totality, Expression Unpopular Pop Missing Verses Bogus Twice Made Mass Ornament 2 Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch Dreams, Mottos, Gossip Chatter and Virtuosity Phraseology Morbid Animation 3 Miscreant: Dialectics and the Persistence of the Commonplace Doppelgänger Synthetic Vernaculars Poetry vs. Literature Commonplace Lyric Fatality Thieves’ Latin 4 The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature Balladry and the Burden of Popular Culture Exploded Beings and After-Poets Live Burial 5 Illiterature Refrain Lullaby Logic The Cult of Simplicity Pets, Trifles, Toys Gothic Verse and Melodrama Silver Proxy 6 Queer Idylls: Imposture, Inversion, Unknowing Topologies of Privacy Reliques Poetaster Kitsch, Camp, and Homo-fascism 1800 Words Poison 7 Kitsching the Cantos: Totality, Fascism, and les Paradis Artificiels Vortex and Cream Puff Contraband The Kitsch of Apocalypse Epic, Rhapsody, Seizure Bad Infinity Ethnofascist Souvenirs 8 Junk: A Shopper’s Guide to Poetic Language (and the New York School) Thermofax: Warhol, Malanga, and the Art of Suicide Dada Kitsch After After-Poets: Collaboration and Collective Writing Coterie and Melodrama The Metaphysics of Kitsch 9 Inventing Clichés: The Lost Legacy of Baudelaire’s Muddy Halo Plastic Poetry Liar, Liar Afterword In the Poisonous Candy Factory Counterfeit Capital Notes Index My Silver Planet 1 Arresting Poetry Kitsch, Totality, Expression Unpopular Pop Once upon a time, long before it had been reduced to a synonym for mediocrity in the arts, the term “kitsch” functioned as a lightning rod in debates about mass culture and the fate of modernism confronting the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. For a word now applied quite casually to trivial and spurious things, “kitsch” has a surprising history of provoking alarm and extreme reactions: Hermann Broch called kitsch “the element of evil in the value system of art.”1 Theodor Adorno refers to kitsch as “poison” and, drawing upon the German etymology of the term, as “artistic trash.”2 Clement Greenberg later refers to the “looting” and “traps” associated with kitsch, to its criminal aspect.3 In these same essays, the “evil” of kitsch acquires an array of sinister qualities: it is said to be at once parasitic, mechanical, and pornographic; a “decorative cult” and a “parody of catharsis.”4 These attributions—always linked to a presumption of complicit, indulgent pleasure—acquire specific and sometimes contradictory historical contours in Broch’s and Greenberg’s
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