Inaugural poetry (on difficulty, pt. 8)
At the Huffington Post this week, John Lundberg wonders "who will be Obama's inaugural poet?" After the New York Times's weeks-long series profiling potential Obama nominees for other, more important positions, the question is still of interest. Lundberg cites names mentioned in an AP article ("Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, current poet laureate Kay Ryan, and Philip Levine"), and then argues that
Forget such bland, safe choices—anyway, none of them possesses anything close to the president-elect's verbal skills—and ignore appeals to a false sense of populism ("the working man"? I'm exhausted by the cynical uses to which this construct has been subjected by our politicians; must our poets now invoke it too?).
Instead, how about our poet who's perhaps more invested in the idea of America and American history than any other working today (Paul Metcalf, r.i.p., would have been another), and whose work continually demonstrates language's complexities and provisionalities—Susan Howe?
Lundberg's conservative notion that "tough economic circumstances" mean we should abandon linguistic flair and skill suggests that his euphemistic tough times can be neither represented by nor conveyed in any register but the plainspoken and the direct. After the simplistic rhetoric our political leaders have (ab)used in recent memory, I for one would welcome the signal that "ethereal," pretentious (by which I assume Lundberg means not immediately apprehensible by "the working man," i.e., difficult) poetry spoken ceremonially would send: first, that the government will no longer condescend to the polis, but more significantly, that a political era of binaries and absolutes is ending in favor of one engaged with the idea of complexity in all its forms—in which, as Howe writes in the poem "Thorow" (from her 1990 book Singularities), "[w]ork...traverses multiplicities," or in which, as she writes in her essay "Incloser" (from her 1993 book The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American History), "A poem can prevent onrushing light going out," and "[i]nexplicable acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and sanctification."
Levine might be the most poignant choice, given the country's current economic struggles. Raised in a blue collar family in Detroit, Levine writes poetry that champions the working man. ...If Obama is concerned about the inauguration taking on a tone that's too ethereal for these tough economic circumstances, Levine's unpretentious writing might prove an effective foil.
Forget such bland, safe choices—anyway, none of them possesses anything close to the president-elect's verbal skills—and ignore appeals to a false sense of populism ("the working man"? I'm exhausted by the cynical uses to which this construct has been subjected by our politicians; must our poets now invoke it too?).
Instead, how about our poet who's perhaps more invested in the idea of America and American history than any other working today (Paul Metcalf, r.i.p., would have been another), and whose work continually demonstrates language's complexities and provisionalities—Susan Howe?
Lundberg's conservative notion that "tough economic circumstances" mean we should abandon linguistic flair and skill suggests that his euphemistic tough times can be neither represented by nor conveyed in any register but the plainspoken and the direct. After the simplistic rhetoric our political leaders have (ab)used in recent memory, I for one would welcome the signal that "ethereal," pretentious (by which I assume Lundberg means not immediately apprehensible by "the working man," i.e., difficult) poetry spoken ceremonially would send: first, that the government will no longer condescend to the polis, but more significantly, that a political era of binaries and absolutes is ending in favor of one engaged with the idea of complexity in all its forms—in which, as Howe writes in the poem "Thorow" (from her 1990 book Singularities), "[w]ork...traverses multiplicities," or in which, as she writes in her essay "Incloser" (from her 1993 book The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American History), "A poem can prevent onrushing light going out," and "[i]nexplicable acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and sanctification."
Labels: difficulty, poetry, reading, Susan Howe
posted by Josh at 6:42 PM
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