The Center Cannot Hold:
Slam, Academia & the Battle for America's Bourgeoisie
“Do I Contradict myself?
Very Well, Then I Contradict myself.
I am Large; I Contain Multitudes.”
--Walt Whitman
BLOOM COUNTRY
The obvious symbolisms are the ones most easily overlooked. Take, for instance, the Death card in the tarot deck, which, as has been pointed out repeatedly in popular culture, symbolizes not “death” per se, but rather “change.” This idea feeds into the popular notion that as people get older they get set in their ways. They, to speak on the razor wire between metaphor and reality, “fear Death.”
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the obvious symbolisms. . . |
Poets aren’t any better than anyone else in this regard, subjecting ourselves to the same vicious cycles of generationalism as the rest of mankind, caught in the same tumult of conservatism and liberalism as the rest of society.
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. . . most easily overlooked |
Therefore, it’s perhaps not a complete surprise when the iconoclastic poetic figure Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one minute praising poetry slam veterans Beth Lisick, Justin Chin and Tarin Towers in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the next, proclaiming to a French film crew that “slam kills poetry.”
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vicious cycles of generationalism |
Ferlinghetti’s plaint was soon echoed by acclaimed critic Harold Bloom in the pages of The Paris Review. Says Bloom, “I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.”
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“the death of poetry” |
Isn’t “the death of poetry” a bit of a heavy onus to place on any one organization or set of individuals? I’d be quicker to blame the insipid TV show Dawson’s Creek for the death of art than Slam founder Marc Smith -- but perhaps that’s the reason Bloom is a world-regarded literary critic: his propensity to make sweeping, reactionary statements that frighten “the establishment” into rallying behind him. These same tactics get used by hate-mongering political figures such as bitter, defeated ex-Congressman Bob Dornan and the homophobia-pandering Reverend Phelps. Whereas Phelps and Dornan play to white Middle America’s latent fears regarding race and sexuality, hiding behind the curtain of “religion” and “morality,” Bloom buries his bigotry beneath the shield of “aesthetics,” insisting that the art form not be debased by concerns of race and politics. The irony -- an even bigger irony than finding Bloom and Ferlinghetti on anything resembling the same page -- is that denying these issues validity in the poetic canon is, essentially, a political position, one undeniably born of class and privilege.
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debased by concerns of race and politics? |
In his 1994 book, Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry (Asylum Arts), caustic West Coast poetry critic Robert Peters noted, “most currently fashionable poetry evokes upper-middle class cravings, achievements and preoccupations. Proletarian poets [such as] Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Michelle Clinton? Wanda Coleman, Fred Voss? and Phillip Levine.”
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any poetics that emerges. . . |
Peters points to the conservatism of the poets dominating such institutions as the American Academy -- the poets who routinely award each other grants and prizes. That this elite, centered as they are in writing programs and universities, is reluctant to embrace poems that challenge their sense of security is nothing new. Denise Levertov complained bitterly of the reluctance of her academic peers to support her protesting of the Vietnam War. What then to think, when a conservative government -- Democrats and Republicans now sharing a narrow bandwidth, devils dancing on the head of a pin, as it were -- grumbles over the relatively paltry government dollars filtering to poets through NEA grants, dollars which they’re poised to receive.
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. . . independent of the establishment |
Could then any poetics that emerges independent of the establishment be regarded as the “death” of poetry, by some interpretation?
Read on: Say You Want a Revolution?
