On Shelley's Birthday

Today is Percy Bysshe Shelley's birthday. It seems somewhat appropriate that it is also Barack Obama's. Though a direct comparison between these two men seems a bit of a stretch, there are certain characteristics shared between them. Both Shelley and Obama offer visions of change, of a world refurbished by liberal sentiment, ethos and praxis. With Shelley, the liberal impulse was etherealized, put into delicate poems that referenced Greek mythology and decried the political waste and laissez faire brutality of the Industrial Revolution in England. Obama is an American president, who is attempting to transform the political landscape to conform to a vision of a more equitable America. Jerome McGann saw in Shelley an ideology of hope, that many of his greatest poems were displaced out of present moments into a golden, shining future which was inaccessible to Shelley. An ideology of hope is exactly what delivered Obama the presidency, though the current brass tacks reality demonstrates in no uncertain terms how incommensurate the ideology is with actually moving American political machinery. Just as Shelley felt a keen, stinging sense of isolation, I am beginning to see Obama, also, as an isolated figure. Health insurance and health care is where this seems to be manifested most strikingly. We are, supposedly, the land of the free and the home of the brave, but there is no freedom without health and 50 million people (the population of Philly times 50) remain uninsured. In all the debates, amidst all the rancor, am I the only that has noticed that no one seems to care about the 50 million uninsured people? Everyone is defending their narrow interests, and Obama is left (alone) carrying the 50 million on his back. It is pathetic and disillusioning to watch, especially when you consider how hard Republicans are fighting not to make any real health care reforms and how many of the 50 million happen to be their constituents.

What long-term visions are haunting the poetic unconscious in 2009? This weekend, I was in New York to do a reading in Brooklyn, and I got my first chance to talk in depth to a member of the Flarf Collective. It was a stimulating conversation, but my opinion remains unchanged- I do not think flarf makes for the creation of memorable poems, and I fail to see how it adds to the Duchamp paradigm (of the "ready-made") that was put into place one-hundred years ago. The problem with adopting this stance (as I found out, in the course of this conversation) was that it leads straight into a New Critical abyss. So I will admit that opposing flarf is potentially as risky as supporting it. How retrograde is it to want to produce things that will last? Most manifestations of a post-modern sensibility encourage a sense of ephemerality, transience, "positive obsolescence." Post-modernists often tend to adopt the opinion that any other mode of perception is backwards. But, whether or not this puts me back in the New Critical era theoretically, I really do care if what I write will last. So I cannot find much to admire in flarf, other than the fact that it is relatively new and many people are starting to take notice of it. I will say that nothing is going to turn me into a novelty freak, because this kind of trend-hopping is anathema to the very slow development of real poetry history. It is sad but certain- most real changes in poetry are only visible in retrospect.

I am left with the feeling that there are certain advantages to a non-theoretical approach to poetry- what you might call the just do it ethos. If you write without using theoretical apparatuses to find your bearing, you can write as a mode of "play" and thus find a natural joy in what you are doing again. Healthy spontaneity may result. It also means that you can follow affect wherever it leads, without restraining yourself based on a conceptual standard or letting a computer do your work for you. When emotion becomes stylized, it turns hokey. No one is going to have a problem with raw emotion, if it is presented with savvy and taste. We must wrestle, at some point, with the notion of the trans-historical, where people and poetry are concerned. New Historians believe that subjectivity is unstable, and that very little is trans-historical. However, if literally nothing were trans-historical, there would be no reason to read Shelley anymore, and there are valid reasons to read Shelley. It is not merely his emotion that remains compelling, it is the emotions produced by the textual enactments of his ideology. In other words, how his politics made him feel. This is a key that is important to us, if we want to document 2009 effectively, and it is something that flarf cannot do: to take an honest look at our consciousness, make conscious the ideologies that determine our thoughts and actions, and see what affect lies within this process. This is complex terrain. It also makes our activity a useful adjunct to what Barack Obama is doing; we are giving voice in art to the impulses he is enacting as a political figurehead. We participate with him in trying to change national consciousness. We can do our little part to make America more cohesive, and in so doing we create templates that will bear fruit in years to come.