Laura Elrick On the Quid Debate

[Laura Elrick sent me the following which she asked me to post. It was originally part of an exchange on the subpoetics list, of which I myself am not a member so I can't contextualize it. I will mention, for those of you following this entirely through FSC, that Andrea Brady posted a comment this morning which can be accessed through my comments sidebar. Keston Sutherland's comments appear below. These offerings of Andrea's and Laura's seem to have been written unaware of the other; yes, the lack of causal chains may make it more confusing than "The Hours," and without the period-era costumes, but alas worth reading.]

I would like to add my two cents to the discussion, somewhat belated perhaps, on Quid 11 and Carol’s response to Andrea’s essay, apologies to those who wish it to be over. First of all… of course it is great to put together an issue such as the one Keston has done, and of course I appreciate it and felt gratitude to be invited to participate. I know Carol felt and still feels the same. Yet that should not inhibit any one of us from taking critical positions on what was in the essays or introduction at all. It is also true that it is Andrea’s right to evaluative opinions—I don’t think anyone would claim otherwise.

That said, I find to be slightly disingenuous the idea that I should be “grateful” to be introduced to British readers as a poet whose “poetry doesn’t suggest a particularly fine grasp of the elements and use of prosody.” Suggestions aside…besides that being a rather conservative way of talking about poetics, it is not, in the main, what I find disagreeable about the issue (even if you think that such “evaluations” are “true”).

Keston, in your intro to Q11 you claim that pluralism or rather “a plurality of voices” (human diversity, esp. in NY) acts as a kind of cultural template for US Imperialism—in fact, the work in Quid 11 is indirectly indicted, as if everything “produced” in the US not only “expresses” the US government’s imperialist designs, but is also guilty of actually deploying the same logic whether it means to or not. Though you don’t state so directly, I assume you meant such a critique (if one can call it that, since your tone is one of a magician astounded at the power of his brew) to resonate with Andrea Brady’s reading of my work, particularly the part about the “questionable invocation” of multiply arrayed “voices.” I also get labeled a “mimetic” “formalist,” as if the old divide were as relevant now as in the twenties—(can’t we talk about forms of content?) But though I disagree with Andrea on these points (I’ll touch on why below)—my main issue is with the conception of politics you propose, both in the intro and in your response to Carol.

While I do agree that neo-liberal uses of pluralism quash fundamental transformation of institutional/structural power, I fundamentally disagree with your assessment that subversive poetry and politics in the US is therefore necessarily politically still-born.

For starters—your statement that the European left “has long given up” on the US left is terribly out of touch. Which “left” are you talking about? The one that engages in struggles over space and power in the form of labor disputes, direct action, etc. (indeed it gets pretty messy both materially and ideologically), or the one that insists on ideological purity and is therefore relegated to standing outside the arenas selling those “more-radical-than-now” newspapers (“What do we want? Communism! When do we want it? Now!”) Even if that is the demand, and on the utopian plane I agree with it, proclaiming it won’t make it so. Funny—such maximalism is often in direct reverse proportion to the degree of actual political work that gets done. I too was annoyed by Silliman’s pronouncements after 9-11, but frankly, his broad-brush denouncement of “the left” strikes me as similar to yours, at least in tone. I haven’t heard such gloomy pronouncements since the cold war when, admittedly, the AFL-CIO was taking direct orders from the State Department (after two decades of being red-baited and rounded up by McCarthy-ites, I might add). That is clearly no longer the case, at least for now. And the labor left is getting increasingly interpolated into other struggles—green movements, civil rights, etc.

What about: The US (west coast, ILWU) and British (Liverpool /Merseyside) dock workers who successfully implemented a cross-border refusal to empty cargo in the Neptune Jade incident (Oakland / Seattle coordinated actions) when the English dock-workers were locked out, or the International environmental activists who have blocked drilling projects, or those U.S. worker-organizations who are collaborating with Maquilladora strikes in Mexico with increasing success, or the Global activist networks that are organizing some of the biggest demonstrations in decades?

I don’t mean to over-state the case, mind you. I would certainly agree that we need dialog to sharpen our critique, to clarify alternatives to the current configuration of this “democracy”-which-is-not-one. And those of us in the US who are committed to such change on such fundamental levels expect that our comrades abroad will not hold us (cryptically-“aesthetically”) individually responsible for the actions of our government, but will critically-support organizing against such actions in all the myriad forms that might take. No to collective punishment, in Iraq, in Palestine, right? I would be interested to hear you discuss why it is we are getting our asses kicked over here—domestically (Patriot Act, Presidential invocation of Taft-Hartley, corporate media domination, deployment of policing squads, mass round-ups). To me, these are not moral-aesthetic issues, to be handily marked-up as poetical-political platitudes.

As regards my poetry, I think it a regressive reading practice to drop-kick the word “voices” and thereby implicate my project with the pluralist dogma of neo and traditional liberalism. That’s too easy. I think Taylor does a good job of beginning the search for a new way to discuss this. I am clearly not “representing” “different” “voices” in my work—and I am certainly not corralling “them.” On the contrary, the soundings act more like dramatic readings of (the ventriloquy of) the social—where the residue of institutional ideologies are most likely to be concentrated—how people use and get used and, yes, as Carol says, the dense fabric of power relations in urban locales. I think Carol rightfully insists that the political-economic complexities of local and global inter-relationships is vital to an understanding of any text. The fabric of relations in any locale is rife with struggle and contradiction, no?

But I suppose it is the sweep of this whole thing as it has gone down (from Quid 11’s conceptual-political inception, all the way to the current commentaries and well-intentioned efforts to reconstruct this ‘debate’ on the subpo) that I’ve tried to respond to here. If I didn’t jump in, then it’s Carol there mainly on the hot-seat.

At the risk of causing another stir (and my question is—to what end),

Laura

Posted by Brian Stefans at January 24, 2003 11:25 AM