Poetry And The Left: A Mistaken Aesthetics And A Mistaken Politics
By Robert Klein Engler (02/22/05)
Almost 4 years after the attacks of September 11th, it is now possible to say that those who have been mistaken in their politics have also been mistaken in their aesthetics. Liberalism has not only exhausted its political inspiration, but its poetic inspiration as well. I say this after spending months living in New Orleans and trying to read "The Best American Poetry, 2004" (Scribner Poetry, ISBN 0-7432-5757-X), edited by Lyn Hejinian.
Politics has come full circle in the South. More National Guard soldiers from Louisiana were killed in Iraq then guard members from any other state in the union. The rebels who once left the union, now give their blood to present the union's greatness to the world. What used to be uncontested territory for Democrats is now Republican territory on election day. Little wonder many southerners have no use for the poetry of the liberal academy or the Bush hating New York intellectuals.
On Inauguration Day in New Orleans, the Left held an alternative inauguration. It was a little bit Mardi Gras, a little bit jazz funeral and a great return to the 60s. The demonstration against Bush and "his war of lies" began in Armstrong Park, marched down Canal Street, past the Vieux Carre, and then into Jackson Square. Many of the demonstrators in this parade claimed to be writers and poets, like those who hangout at the Gold Mine Saloon in the French Quarter on Thursday nights. Most people ignored this ragtag mob carrying posters, dressed in costumes and wearing grim expressions. People knew this was not the krewe of Rex rolling down the street on Fat Tuesday.
Looking over the demonstrators, I realized that few ordinary people would be willing to entrust them with any business or surgery, nor did the demonstrators seem capable of managing any organization, let alone a city, state or country. I wondered how someone who spends the day protesting but does not keep his apartment or fingernails clean could be entrusted with cleaning up the environment, let alone write a halfway correct sonnet.
Many of the demonstrators at the alternative inauguration wore black, just like the sensitive undergraduates at writing workshops across the U. S. They seemed to morn the death they embraced. Some of these students will go on to become the new monks of liberalism, chanting secular songs of political correctness and creating a poetry inspired by a failed aesthetics, while believing in the mistaken politics of multiculturalism. Sadly, they will write poems the same way they parade.
Most poets in the U. S. these days say they are liberals. Art is a substitute religion for them--a secular, Orientalism that embraces the values of relativism. These poets wish to represent an international way of life that is lived in a universe gripped by the random and absurd. Often their work is antihuman, lacking technique, and mechanical, or it aspires to a purity that abolishes the self. In short, the poetry of liberalism is mostly informed by a mistaken aesthetics best describe in Proverbs 14:12, "There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death."
The mistaken politics of liberalism, a politics that creates the social problems it hopes to solve, has been rejected by most voters in the U. S. because it no longer represents the life of ordinary people. Most ordinary people have a sense of what is best. They know something of goodness, truth and beauty when they see it. Why then does the editor of "The Best American Poetry, 2004" have to struggle with what others take for granted?
Lyn Hejinian writes in her introduction to this book of so-called poems, "I don't believe in 'bestness.' I don't believe that one can dehistoricize and decontextualize cultural production and come up with anything that isn't stripped of a large measure of its liveliness." That being said, the sensibility expressed by most "poets" in this book is far removed from the lives of the ordinary people I see in Louisiana.
It is to editor Hejinian's credit, that she lives up to her beliefs. For someone who does not believe in "bestness," the alternative may be simply the worst. Such is the case with most of her 75 "poetry" selections. I don't know, therefore, why Hejinian didn't stay with her convictions regarding a title, too, and call the book honestly, "The Worst American Poetry, 2004?"
Although the editor of this anthology tries to submerge the cat of her liberal politics into a vat of rhetoric, she lets it up once in a while to breathe. Hejinian writes, "...I don't require readers to have felt the panics of frustration and fear that I have felt in face of the various nefarious policies that the American government of 2003 perpetrated." Besides distancing herself from her countrymen and those many National Guard soldiers who died in Iraq, we have to wonder what are those "nefarious policies" to which editor Hejinian refers.
I did not see Lyn Hejinian at the alternative inauguration in Jackson Square. Could it be that "the panics of frustration and fear" kept her away? Could it be that her frustration and fear comes from the realization that not only her politics but her aesthetics are mistaken? It is frustrating and fearful to realize that the poetry of New York and west coast intellectuals has seen its day. Hejinian must know that just as most U. S. voters have shrugged off liberalism, so have they shrugged off the poetry that liberals write and the academy perpetuates.
What, then, is a weary, liberal poet to do--go to Canada and write at home in the vast, white North a poem supreme addressed to emptiness? For liberal poets, the answer to this question may be ironic. After they shut the window on the sunshine and fresh air that many Americans aspire to, they will hunker down to breathe the stale mists of irony that collect in the depths of their ivory tower. Poets in New York and L. A. love the odor of that musty perfume. There they suffer in shadows the political irony that the South will rise again.
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