Hostile reflections on the ideologies of the “poet’s essay.”
Odette Wong
Essays, edited by Dorothea Lasky. October 2023 – March 2024
I smell the wetlands around Del Mar, the rock reefs off northern San Diego County coast. A slim paperback with some familiar names on the front cover has just arrived in the mail, messing up the warm, feel-good chill of a California October.
Edited by Columbia professor-poet Dorothea Lasky, Essays is a collection of writings that aspires to poeticize a genre harking back to Montaigne, but one now more often associated with online hot takes. Addressing a variety of topics, these pieces are gathered under the rubric of what Lasky calls “the poet’s essay,” the theme of a 2018 Columbia symposium. The term refers straightforwardly to the essays written by the poets or at least the ones in attendance but also to the form of their writing that calls attention to its own creative process, its turbulent “holy space.” The poetic moments of writing where language hangs loose liberate the essay from the stringency of argument. The poet’s essay is held to open up hidden dimensions of various topics by evading the telos of conceptuality. Poets “get messy” and “brave,” they “go on a quest for new knowledge,” one “with no end in sight.” Rather than being a distinct form of writing, the poet’s essay results from unleashing the expressive potential of other forms: memoir, literary discourse, prose poetry, performance transcription, short story, etc. While the poet’s essay is meant to avoid the tedious fixity of a point of view, the pieces assembled share an identifiable moral-political structure of feeling that the authors understand to be a poetics of being in the world.
The outpourings of this sensibility are hard to distinguish from the talking points of progressive ideology. I turn to the contents of this conference papers anthology, and all the buzzwords of this world shout out at you: gender and race, check, saving the environment from capitalism, check, indigenism, stateless precarity, internment camps, check, check, check. This folio comprises a series of what its editor once referred to as “project explanations” whose categorical imperative is “centering the marginalized.” The reason why these essays offer no arguments has nothing to do with poetry. They can avoid it because they all spout one ideology whose truth is seen as self-evident. Though we were promised nonlinear, fulgurant inspiration, it turns out that Essays will do nothing but rehearse eye-wateringly familiar nostrums from burnt out left-liberal poetry academia. I get a text from one of the editors of the African Mercury: “Hello, my dear, how’s the review coming?’
Winter. I’m going to do this. I take heart from a passage from Wyndham Lewis’s Doom of Youth a friend just sent me: in the study of culture as with nature the lowliest things are as significant as the loftiest. He noted the problem with culture is that those who are capable of such clear-eyed analysis of such phenomena are ordinarily too squeamish for the task and content themselves with tiresome denunciations from a safe distance. Criticism like natural science analyzes what the highly cultured layman might regard as disgusting. In other words, keep the hate pure, and just be value-free.
I begin again with Ariel Goldberg’s “Just Captions.” Captions for photos protect against the loss of meaning, with historical context found in “trans and queer images” from photographer Joan Biren. Of late, as everyone knows, institutions like MOMA have begun exhibiting works of trans and queer photographers. Goldberg points to this delayed canonization as proof of a tenacious institutional opposition from an “art world deeply rooted in white supremacy and heterosexism.” An absence of names in these uncaptioned photos is a form of trans and queer “dehumanization.” In the humanities no one has time for the boring old human, the whitish cis-male of the animal world, but no one’s for dehumanization either. We humanists cling to our hateful, all-too-human selves. It occurred to me this talk was given a couple years before the canonization of black trans lives by crowds of masked activists during that confusing summer of pandemic and riots that signaled the downfall of Trump I. Like many documents of the recent past, its pathos seems faded, evocative of a historicity of very short time frames.
On the heels of Goldberg, come the poet-critics Ken Chen and Wayne Kostenbaum. Chen’s essay-poem stanzas the activist-academic, decolonial worldview. Recalling a child’s manual, sections begin “What is a beginning?” which recurs as section title while “What is the West?” appears singly. An opening allusion to Genesis elicits a soft groan, good lord, no. “Races” of the world, mythic Christian potentate of the Orient, Prester John, one reference after another to that cultural studies talk from 1997—Columbus’s Diary, The Tempest, Tin Tin, and H. Rider Haggard, etc. Elegy for the father, obligatory POC homage to the wise parent. The poem concludes with a lament for former colonial nations trapped in the inferno of historical catastrophe. Next. Wayne Kostenbaum’s short story bears only the faintest resemblance to an essay. A sex party tale from polyamorous New York begins with the entry of our stylish heroine who catches wind of a blowjob. Suspense ensues, as our protagonist is promised a life-transforming event. The writer sees his tale as musical poetics, as steady, flexible pulsation. He seems to grasp this little world as tragic, a species of “ruin.”
Not too far in and already some bold generalizations are taking shape. 1. Capitalism is killing off the high cultural forms of its earlier eras. 2. And it’s the disappearance of poetry, the highest of these forms according to Hegel, that explains the poets’ turn to prose, here in these essays and more generally, in the current hegemony of the prose poem. 3. This death of the absolute Spirit, or more materialistically put, the withering away of its once imposing superstructures, is the reason why the poet’s essay, poetics today, can hardly be distinguished from the AI-assisted internet essay of which the academic variant is a definite type. 4. The society of prose poetry deserves to go down like Atlantis.
Tracie Morris’s essay “Poetry, the Body, Manifesto” introduces her Who Do With Words, a collection of prose riffs on J.L. Austin’s philosophy. For Austin, according to Morris, speech acts always fail and unhappily. This point supposedly encapsulates the empty intellectualism of academic discourse. Sound poetry is, by contrast, visceral, bodily, anti-cerebral, sensuous. Anybody who has been to an animal studies talk (where I once hear the speaker neigh like a horse, and a few minutes later cluck like a chicken to make “their” point) will have experienced a pure species of this kind of poetry. This rhetoric of the body, of boundary-crossing fluxes and materialities, itself knows no boundaries and can be mechanically applied to everything the contemporary humanist chooses to opine about. All cats are gray in this prose poetic theory discourse. Morris’s concerns about the overly intellectualized speech acts of the university are misplaced, to say the least, for at today’s American University the chaste mind cowers before the transgressive body. But she speaks from the privileged vantage point of the underprivileged, for black poets, including Iowa Writers’ Workshop poetry faculty, who are by this account also “marginalized people.”
Anaïs Duplan’s innocuously titled “A Poet’s Essay Is a Conversation” posits a blog post bricolage of thinkers or anecdotes. The central quotation shows poet and academic Nathaniel Mackey’s interpretation of Amiri Baraka’s famous dictum “to find the self and then kill it.” Blacks had to throw off the image of themselves white society transmitted to them. The subjective impetus of the rebellion Mackey describes found expression in bold programmatic statements around which countless groupuscules took shape. This seems a far cry from Duplan’s aesthetic of racial abjection whose ideal, we are told, is the “cessation of thought.” Contradiction unnoted, check.
Raquel Salas Rivera’s essay on the recent history of Puerto Rican protests against the depredations of austerity attempts to establish a genealogy of the poet’s essay going back to José Martí or Octavio Paz. But I was unable to discern in what sense these writers might have influenced her account of the political scene, or inspired her involvement in it. In lieu of the old themes of national literature and civilization, her piece ends with a call for a committed anti-aesthetic of “malas palabras,” essentially, a formulaic denunciation of sanitizing coloniality. So, okay, against that—but for what? The piece seems to testify to the disappearance of any struggle for national political-cultural hegemony. Post nationalist Puerto Rico could have provided a fitting subject for a poet’s essay on recent protest movements but as always decolonial language ends up washing away any trace of the historically concrete.
Halfway through winter. Flipping through my poisonous marginal commentary, I’m clearly getting some grim satisfaction from this. Hatred of the poet’s essay is my new holy space.
Onward to Brandon Shimoda’s “Four Short and Unfinished Essays (with Poems) from the Ruins of Japanese American Incarceration.” These days it’s hard to think of Japanese Americans, the blandest of model minorities, as ever having experienced the kind of bare life one used to hear so much about. The liberal of yesteryear comforted himself with an uplifting civic tale to be told, the overcoming of a great injustice. Nope. Shimoda denounces the 1988 Civil Liberties Act as “an act of control” despite acknowledging his family felt “redeemed” by it. Contemporary progressive ideology forever suspects the reality of progress.
Fragments. Vignette of “camp” girl fearing desert snapping turtles. Whites are “potato-faced.” In Arizona internees both work for and refuse work for local cotton farmers during the labor-shortage of the war. A museum in San Jose recreates a camp barracks. He visits the museum with a former detainee, who recalls how on Sundays, whites would drive out to picnic there and “watch the Japanese through the fences.” In an absurd finale, he recalls sleeping with a photograph of his grandfather. Forlorn, he wishes to merge with grandfather in the photo of his incarceration.
Short February days. Cecelia Vicuña’s essay transcribes a tepid performance. She gestures to a Latin American tradition of the poet’s essay but like Salas Rivera she doesn’t fill out the literary historical connection to this past. In any event, she prefers the essays of these predecessors to their poetry. In their essays one could “see, feel” the poet’s thoughts more clearly than in their poetry. Conflating language and power, she regards herself as “doubly colonized” by Spanish and English, whose tongues, nevertheless, contain “weavers” of ancient, primordial notions. Older than any other poet here by a generation, Vicuña’s early life included the years of electoral victory and coup defeat in Allende’s Chile. Politically she moved off the parliamentary road to socialism to the primeval landscapes of post-Marxist indigenism. She now speaks of a mythic Sumerian Nammu, female prime mover in cosmogony, asserting the feminine oceanic principle over the male principle of terrestrial colonization and empire.
Next up, the star of the show: Fred Moten. Moten puns, alliterates, murmurs. To read a word of this writer, I must be in a generous mood. At a glance, the theme of the piece seems a racialized version of Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Moten starts with legal scholar Cheryl Harris’s Harvard Law Review article “Whiteness as Property.” Following Harris, he holds that whiteness is property’s “essence” while blackness is the “critique” of property in the form of “the celebration of dispossession.” The white poet represents “a time-killing presence” while blackness posits “more + less than that, too.” Whiteness is the linear time of the value form, while blackness is its subversion. Whiteness is “the transcendental aesthetic,” while blackness is “aesthetic immanence and imminence,” impurely refusing “bipolarity.” The prose poetry of black studies is Lasky’s model for “there is no ontological, aesthetic, political, metaphysical, or physical fundament whose rest black study does not disturb.”
Echoing Max Stirner, Moten holds that the racialized categories of property and sovereignty inhere in the metaphysics of ordinary language. Is it possible to escape this prison house of categories? Claim sovereignty and you are caught in “the taking up or on of whiteness.” For Moten the state is white, a violent settler-colonial imposition, so there’s no use trying to reform it or replace it with a non-racial state. Would blacks claiming reparations get caught up in the essential whiteness of property? That doesn’t seem right—maybe just forget sovereignty but get some property—or at least some of the goods by applying pressure on the liberal white world, threatening it with periodic riots and local acts of dispossession. Saintly Moten proposes an anarcho-theological riot politics to upend “racial-sexual capitalism’s ge(n)ocide machine.” In these end times, black thinkers uphold the possibility of a “What about me?” poetics. The most radical writing today mimics the jazzy spoken word of the eternal rebel, the Einzige pondering his Eigentum.
What other categories reek of decaying whiteness? Moten chastises the poet Claudia Rankine for employing the category “citizen” in her book by that title. Her attachment to this subject of politics is “an application for admission” to an inherently racialized polis. Rejecting the civic space, Moten concludes against Rankine that poetry “says nothing, in praise of nothing”. Nonsense, errancy, non-representation—poetry opens the portal to what lies beyond the Aristotelian life of the political and rational animal. But this flouting of civic norms is not one in the name of any higher values but only as means to bemoan endlessly the failure of the state to tackle the opposition of “privilege and precarity.” Blackness, like the poor, will apparently always be with us.
Without a leg to stand on, poets espouse all the approved causes. The poetic essay is the fitting name of all those memoirs, soft political analyses, and acritical or intersectional books reviews embellished with poetaster flourishes. Poetry having only a century ago reached its very heights is thus thrown into the abyss of pop cultural studies. Pop culture suffuses the published work and online postings of Sandra “Taylor-Swift-in-a-time-of-war” Simonds, Claudia “Serena-Williams-is-so-excellent” Rankine, Myriam “middlebrow-fiction-denouncer” Gurba, Cathy “what-to-stream-this-weekend” Park Hong, Joshua “Swiftie-Diva-OG” Clover. Pop sass deviates ever so slightly from the compulsions of the algorithm, the god of prose poets. In a recent Harper’s Ben Lerner has the algorithm write the end of the story-essay for him. As if all this weren’t enough, there exist now poet-essayist influencers, acritical Instagram girls like Granta and New York Review’s Anahid Nersessian, whose elaborate progressive book hype appears at regular intervals. Her major topic is the highest good of the sanctioned ones: love and sex, erotic poetry.
Adorno once noted that the essay form is distinguished from other literary arts by its unity of conceptuality with the subjective. If there was a poet’s essay of reasonable significance in the past, it was the critical essay, the careful examination of a poem or poetry collection, which concedes nothing to science or mathematics in terms of rationality or vigorous argument. We need a return to the interlinear analyses of poetry capped with sharp critical judgements, and free from all servile opinion. This restored pure prose of criticism will be an antidote to the bad poetry of precarity narratives with all its effete hand wringing over whiteness and maleness. It will be closer to poetry by not resembling it at all.