Chris what a fantastic article. A cogent manifesto of energy, action, deliverance and damnation. This should be the quality of your poetry—though I’m having second thoughts about where you belong under this umbrella. Because of your immense literary knowledge and fierce probing of philosophy, perhaps you are mostly an essayist -/ critic with a poet’s heart. Whatever wild beast you are:
I tip my hat to you. I bow in my best seersucker suit. I curtsy in my famously white wedding gown . I throw my hand in the middle of the circle of your words and on the count of 1-2-3 shout “Poetic Terrorism!”
Wow and we’re really the only two people reading any of this (with perhaps the exception of Traci). There is a certain wonderfulness about this anyway—and perhaps because we are unheard. It musters the yet-to-fly carrion, makes us equally rapacious and meretricious, covers the skin like packing tape for us to be shipped somewhere sometime.
Imagine the package of us being delivered in a mushroom to infant revolutionaries. Oh how they fed the small cisterns of their brains with our nonsense amen. Oh how they danced in the moonlight, small papers of us spilling from their beautiful heads, the heads they would burn and chide between their asses.
There is a clear and present opening in poetry. Subtle, yes, and very close to miss, yes. I say poetry because fiction is always there. Non-fiction coupled with memoir…yawn (of course deservedly necessary) yawn…it will always have its place.
But poetry. Poetry is the only heavyweight that after losing five rounds, can rally and unanimously win the next seventeen. It's clear we've been losing. But we're in the corner, burning blood and spitting, cool wet rag on our foreheads. One stray sucker-punch might end it all. You’ve been warned by everyone that this might be the hit of your endless coma. I’ve been warned too. Stand up. The center of the ring is a bull’s eye.
Liam Rector, “Corner Man”
You took that round, Champ! You didn’t Just sit and pout:
Now get the hell Back in there And knock the fucker out.
Again, this takes from Wittgenstein's dictum "ethics and aesthetics are one."
The arrogance of the writer, of course, is obvious. The false dichotomy of me/them fails to acknowledge the possibility that someone else (most problably everyone, hence the random sample) could possibly exist outside of power structures. I believe I'll return to Bartleby the Scrivner, because I think I finally understand what Melville was driving at. "I know where I am," drives much much deeper than ephemeral acts of dominance in order to resurrect your own sense of helplessness: however, Improv Everywhere and thoughtful gorilla theatre can cicumvent the repulsion caused by the romantic "genius artist" pointing his finger and judging. Guilt should not be the primary target, neither should judgement. In poetry, we need to investigate ritual and stand invisible on the alter.
Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence. Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
this is the handful of marbles i shatter on the floor. surely some arrangement must be made of the mess. this is the glass the nurse sweeps or surely you are not: a discarded thing, must it go anywhere else but the miscarriage my girlfriend had in highschool. no, it was like that but please don't drop your jaw. yes, i was, she was, willing to go along with the accident, i broke, she said are we safe and i didn't know. the child dead less than a minute's chance to name it. as brittle and and soft as a quail. my girlfriend as erratic as the simile wailing for something better. the child was not about to unwrap the bow-tie of its throat-- it wasn't a wedding ring. it was not a wedding ring. in shock--the doctors said--she was-- stay away. so it was. and i did.
"that atrocious fanfare which Rimbaud celebrated... a most compelling prose realization of derangement thorugh social confrontation since Day of the Locust."
"..an outrage against beauty is the only blasphemy...(Rechy, CN p.65)"
The previous statement "Ethics does not treat the world, it must be a conditions of the world, like logic." "Ethics and aesthetics are one. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.421)"
Raymond Williams, the Welsh cultural theorist and late Professor of Drama at Cambridge University, famously described ‘culture’ as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1976, p. 76). That complexity is nowhere more apparent than in his own attempts to define its usage. In his first major work, Culture and Society 1780–1950, he drew attention to four important kinds of meaning that attach to the word: an individual habit of mind; the state of intellectual development of a whole society; the arts; and the whole way of life of a group or people (Williams, 1963, p. 16). In the later Keywords, only the latter three usages remained in play (Williams, 1976, p. 80). Later still, his sociology textbook, Culture, reintroduced the first usage, grouping it together with the second and third as ‘general’, and contrasting these with the fourth, more specifically ‘anthropological’ meaning (Williams, 1981, p. 11). Williams distinguished between the word’s physical and human applications; its positive and negative connotations; its use as a noun of process and as a noun of configuration; its politically radical and politically reactionary applications; and so on. He was clear, however, that these confusions and complications belonged to our ‘culture’ itself, rather than to any fault either in his analysis or in the term: ‘These variations . . . necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate’ (Williams, 1976, p. 81). The range and the overlap of meanings, the distinctions simultaneously elided and insisted upon, are all in themselves ‘significant’ (p. 80).
More recently, Geoffrey Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, has observed that culture is ‘an inflammatory word’, which in some circumstances can even kindle ‘actual wars’ (Hartman, 1997, p. 14). Culture is a good thing, then, but also a dangerous thing. Hartman notes the same complexity that Williams observed, and the way the word’s use proliferates—‘camera culture, gun culture, service culture, museum culture, deaf culture, football culture’—so that it becomes a kind of ‘linguistic weed’ (p. 30).
Both Williams and Hartman attempted to trace the intellectual history of the concept. In its earliest meanings, in English and in French, it had referred to the tending of natural growth, either in animals or in plants. Williams dated the word’s extension to include human development from the early sixteenth century in English usage; and its earliest use as an independent noun, to refer to an abstract process, from the mid-seventeenth century (Williams, 1976, pp. 77–8). His version of this history remained overwhelmingly English in focus, leading to Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Orwell and, by implication, himself. Hartman’s version (which includes Williams) is more cosmopolitan and leads to Spengler, Benda, Nazism and Heiner Müller. For Williams, the idea of culture held out the promise of emancipation; for Hartman, ‘the fateful question’ as to whether a truly ‘generous’ idea of culture is possible remains only ‘precariously’ open (Williams, 1963, pp. 322–3; Hartman, 1997, pp. 192–3).
For Hartman, the most crucial of the various distinctions in the term’s meaning is that between ‘culture’ as a general ideal, ‘a “republic of letters” in which ideas can be freely exchanged’, and ‘a culture’ as ‘a specific form of embodiment or solidarity’; he believes there is a crucial need to protect the former against the latter (Hartman, 1997, pp. 36, 41). For Williams, the most crucial distinction was that between the term’s use in the humanities and in the social sciences. The concept of ‘culture’, he explained:
became a noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed agencies in ‘intellectual life’ and ‘the arts’. It became also a noun of general process, specialized to its presumed configurations in ‘whole ways of life’. It played a crucial role in definitions of ‘the arts’ and ‘the humanities’, from the first sense. It played an equally crucial role in definitions of the ‘human sciences’ and the ‘social sciences’, in the second sense (Williams, 1977, p. 17).
Culture, then, may be counterposed to society, as ‘art’; but the two words may also be defined nearly coextensively, as everything that is left over after politics and economics. There is a clear parallel between Hartman and Williams here, since ‘culture’ is to ‘a culture’ as ‘arts’ is to ‘a whole way of life’. But where for Hartman the key distinction runs between a generality and a particular, a general public sphere and a singular subculture, for Williams it ran between two generalities, the arts and the whole way of life. Note the wider significance of this: while for Williams society still remained a generality, or a commonality, for Hartman it has already become a multicultural plurality of particulars. We shall return to the competing claims of what Williams termed the ‘common culture’ and politico-social multiculturalism in the chapters that follow. For the moment, however, suffice it to note that this is an issue of quite fundamental significance, not simply for academic cultural studies, but also for the future of our society and our culture.
Every time I had met her during the fifteen years of our — well, I fail to find the precise term for our kind of relationship — she had not seemed to recognize me at once; and this time too she remained quite still for a moment, on the opposite sidewalk, half turning towards me in sympathetic incertitude mixed with curiosity, only her yellow scarf already on the move like those dogs that recognize you before their owners do — and then she uttered a cry, her hands up, all her ten fingers dancing, and in the middle of the street, with merely the frank impulsiveness of an old friendship (just as she would rapidly make the sign of the cross over me every time we parted), she kissed me thrice with more mouth than meaning, and then walked beside me, hanging on to me, adjusting her stride to mine, hampered by her narrow brown skirt perfunctorily slit down the side. - Nabokov, Spring in Fialta
