This is the fourth invitation I’ve received in a month asking me to comment on the relationship between poetry and politics: two for print publication forums dedicated to the topic and two for symposiums revolving around the issue. As someone who’s written on the connections between poetry, art, culture, and politics for more than just a month, it got me thinking about the apparent sudden urgency to address the relationship between poetry and politics. This, in turn, caused me to consider different ways in which to conceive of the idea of the present, both as a historical category and in relation to contemporary culture, specifically, poetry and art. What became clear, at least to me, is that there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future.
(The) now is a fragile history. Barely torn from the past at the same moment it erratically staggers into the future, (the) now moves so quickly, yet obliquely, that its blur appears determined. In an information-oriented society built on speed, this is particularly true; and anyone who sits in front of a computer all day as part of her or his job knows the feeling of watching fresh headlines continually pop up on the homepages of Internet news providers. This is an experience of history—or one form of it—as whizzing by before lunchtime. As a result, (the) now often only leaves room for reaction in its small space and the short time it has left.
One of my biggest concerns when thinking about differences between (the) now and the present is that the demand for action “now” has the potential to override the demands for action “then” and in the future—demands that never disappear, even when forgotten, covered-up, or silenced. For instance, I’m heartened—perverse as the use of this word may be, given the context—that because of the threat of war on Iraq and the diminishment of civil liberties in the US, people are once again thinking about the relationship between politics and poetry. But why weren’t there just as many symposiums and print forums dedicated to this topic when the Clinton administration was dismantling social welfare programs during the go-go ’90s? And what about the writers and visual artists who had trouble publishing and exhibiting their work not so long ago because it was deemed “too political”? And what happens to this work and this dialogue we’re having today once the war in Iraq has been averted or won or lost? Or when Hillary Clinton is elected president? (The) now is sometimes quick to elide these kinds of questions, instead favoring immediate reaction.
This plays out on a grassroots level, where it can be difficult to convince people of the need to protest the impending war on Iraq when they’re more worried about their unemployment benefits running out, or when the police are perceived as more of an immediate threat than so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” or when neighborhood schools are chronically underfunded and unsafe. I want a conception of politics that can respond as much to the day-to-day politics of people just getting by as it does to the out-of-touch national politics of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to make a map connecting the bombing of Iraqi children with the failure of schools in the US, something the strategists of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to do. But I’m hesitant to define politics exclusively in terms of broad-based social movements. It’s crucial that a micro-politics of the everyday isn’t forgotten by this generation’s peace movement, or else this movement may end up being as relatively homogenous as other recent versions.
A politics of the everyday negotiations with power that take place in the present—though not always in (the) now—are extrapolations of earlier, as well as yet-to-be-articulated, aspirations for a better shared world. To use a metaphor informed by poetry, (the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming. (The) now always has the capacity for beautiful interventions—the slogans written on the walls of the Sorbonne in May of ’68, the ACT UP poster art of Gran Fury in the ’80s, the puppets and costumes at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999—but these interventions move beyond the rhetorical certainties of (the) now and into the uncertain possibilities of the present when they become articulated to larger social and ideological formations. Similarly, poetry is never inseparable from the moment of both its utterance and its reception, an utterance and reception that are socially situated, and therefore politically and ideologically inflected. It’s important to listen or read for this, especially when the ability to corrode stale rhetorics from the inside and make accepted ideologies appear unnatural are two things that poetry and art have the potential to do effectively and brilliantly.
Yet to say that all poetry and art is political negates the ability to use politics as a critical concept, just as saying that all thought is ideological diminishes ideology’s capacity for critique. This isn’t to argue that all poetry can’t be read politically and ideologically, which may be more to the point. As access to information becomes a fundamental material level in society, while the digital divide remains yet another form of wealth disparity, the ability to read critically will assume a significance on par with more traditional political concepts such as voting, union membership, etc. Pedagogy then has the potential to become a revolutionary activity, because illiteracy is also a discourse, as the reigning president has illustrated so well—all humor aside.
If power is not permanent, then politics is not a privilege. Poetry and art examine language, image, and movement at the point of production, even if this production is frequently complicit with economic, social, and institutional status quos. At these moments of complicity, the farther one gets from a poetry and art of (the) now, the closer one gets to poetry and art as imagining and invoking an alternative set of present conditions, both within poetry and art, and outside of them. The poetry renaissance that occurred in North America during the ’90s is the result of the substantial role poetry plays in marginalized communities. This can be seen most obviously in the various forms of spoken word, performance poetry, and hip hop that, in many ways, instigated this renaissance a decade or so ago. The current cycle of poetry’s relevance and political vitality—as evidenced most strikingly by First Lady Laura Bush’s canceling of a poetry symposium at the White House that poet and publisher Sam Hamill planned to turn into a political protest—has decidedly not occurred because Jorie Graham sells more books than her equivalent in the ’80s, or because Billy Collins is NPR’s darling, or because Language poetry is now taught at Iowa. In fact, it’s happened in spite of them.
The reactive possibilities of (the) now—with its frequent retreat into moral pieties and political sloganeering on both the left and the right—are a horizon away from the creative emancipations of the present, however brief, however defeated by other pasts, presents, and futures. In this sense, it’s necessary to ask why are certain stories told and others not, why are certain kinds of information known and other kinds not, why are certain situations and phenomena represented and others not. “[H]ow is it,” asks Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge, “that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” This question is as much the province of artists as it is of activists and historians, of artists as activists and historians. But it’s not simply a matter of spontaneous free expression; rather, specific statements must be understood within a larger constellation of institutions, communities, and ideologies. Without this contextual awareness, artistic, critical, and political interventions dissipate within the mystifying climate of (the) now.
All the while, it’s necessary to be realistic about what cultural workers are capable of. Thus, one strategic challenge for writers and artists—and not solely during times of crisis, because time is always in crisis—is not to try to compete with a mass media network that has rarely served to represent anything other than ruling class interests. Instead, the aim might be to foster alternative cultures, modes of representation, ideologies, and communities that the mostly false “public”—i.e., corporate-controlled—channels of communication will then be obliged to address, and with which the hegemonies they help prop up will be compelled to negotiate. This is a process different from—however tenuous the distinction—the absorption of alternatives by the mainstream . . . a process forced open by a now-informed-by-history.
St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003