The Poetry Project

What I'm going to do is just talk a little bit about a few threads that I heard running through the symposium and talk a bit about some questions that they gave rise to in my mind and that I think we might pursue a little further here today. A lot of it has to do with how that title "Poetry for the Next Society" was fielded. One of the things that that title could be suggesting is a possible alliance between poetry and society in the future, a new kind of prominence or even centrality for poetry, a greater salience for poetry in the society's cultural consumption patterns. Various people played with that possibility by way of highlighting and lamenting the present situation, the marginality of poetry in our present society. In various ways we heard people speaking out of the anxiety and the impatience that have come from that marginality. Such things as Peter Lamborn Wilson suggesting ways in which poetry might get closer to the mainstream, either in an accommodating way or in an oppositional way, by making use of pornography, billboards and so forth. Clearly that's an impulse that comes out of a recognition of the peripherality of poetry to the society's concerns. Or, again, on the Television panel--the very fact that there was a Television panel is an admission that, as Miguel Algarín said, television is "the art form" today, that it does occupy that central place that many would want to see poetry occupying. This also came to light yesterday in a different way, with the Nicaragua panel. It was very clear that what the North American panelists were seeing in Nicaragua was a society in which poets and poetry were central and there was a great deal of obvious envy for that situation. I think too that the various performance-oriented readings and lectures betrayed a desire to move toward that performative mainstream. One question this raises for me is: What basis do we have for believing that poetry's marginality in this society will end in any near future? In what sense can we speak of "poetry for the next society"? My sense of it is that for quite a while poetry will continue to be against the society and we would need to talk about what kinds of changes would have to take place for that to not be the case.

Now another way in which that rubric was fielded was to take it as a question of what poetry or what kinds of poetry will matter in the future, what will become dominant or prevalent. This was mainly the kind of thing that came up in the lectures. It relates to predicting trends, fashions, tastes, and so forth. Hugh Kenner elected not to do that--very wisely, I thought. It also relates to canon-formation. These were people from the academy, one of whom is the author of a book called The Pound Era, and spoke of "major poets." Obviously that kind of vocabulary is very crucial to canon-formation, where you can decide that a whole era can be summed up in one surname. There seemed to be some attempt on the part of the other lecturers to figure out what the poetic phenomenon which would sum up or characterize the next era will be. Houston Baker put in his vote for Rap, and Marjorie Perloff seemed to think that some kind of Wittgensteinian Canadian poetry would be the poetry of the future. Allen Ginsberg spoke for a poetry of grief, which of the three is the one I'd bet on.

Also raised in those lectures was the issue of pluralism. Marjorie Perloff brought it up by way of sneering at it, and I think that given the kinds of social agendas that have been articulated at this symposium, wanting both the society and the cultural work that comes out of that society to reflect the heterogeneity of the society, the kind of challenge to and dismissal of pluralism that came from Perloff is something that we need to address. Allen Ginsberg raised the issue of pluralism in a different way, admitting to not having read Black literature, for example, until very recently, and he talked about the ways in which the various kinds of social and psychic resistances within the dominant culture make that a continuing fact.

So, the issue of heterogeneity with regard to the canon and finally the place of canon-formation in the literary industry: anthologies, the academy, etc. The kinds of moves toward cultural diversity that are going on in what's nowadays called canon-reformation--what kind of impact are they going to have on poetry? One of the things that I thought about in listening to the various talks, is the fact that poetry is increasingly marginalized within the academy. At least that's been my experience. We have a number of things that are displacing poetry, pushing it farther to the fringes in literary studies and in the humanities in general; the emphasis on narrative, for example. The formalist move in poetry that Marjorie Perloff complained about is a symptom of this in its insistence on getting back to narrative--an attempt to win back an audience lost to novels, diaries, and the like.

Also, the importance attached to theory is something that I think we need to talk about--the move away from literary studies or poetics pertaining strictly to literary texts as they were formerly defined, the move among academics and critics into what's now called culture studies, the examination of textual practices from the standpoint of an expanded sense of what qualifies as text. The former privileging of literature and, more generally, "high culture" within the humanities is now being challenged, even inverted. For example, at Santa Cruz recently, a job candidate for a position in art history came and gave a talk on hairstyles. There's now a greater interest in popular culture and, as I've said, culture studies generally. What impact will this have on poetry in the near future? Will poetry move to accommodate this, to somehow lend itself to this? Will it be further blanketed by it?

Another question that arose from the rubric under which we're laboring is: What kind of society will the next society be? There wasn't a whole lot of attention given to this question. It was implied in, say, the Nicaragua panel and I think it was also implied in the best instances of the canon-forming that went on in the lectures. I didn't get much of a sense of what kinds of social and historical developments Marjorie Perloff was basing her canonizing on, but it was very clear that Houston Baker's came out of a Black agenda, a Black neo-nationalist agenda. And very clearly Allen Ginsberg's ideas and reflections put forth a vision of the future and what society will be like in the future; entropy, largely.

So, what kind of society will the next society be? And what are the implications of that for poetics? It doesn't seem that you can answer the one question without answering or trying to answer the other. Finally, I'd like to go back to the beginning of the symposium and remind us of Reverend David Garcia's pointing out that the word ecclesiastes means a "calling out," and think about the way in which several times during the symposium we've had people lament the loss of ritual, meaning, myth and the sorts of things that can make for a collective calling out and coming to one another. We have to ask will there be a society that we can be for and, if so, what kind of society that would be. I kept thinking of Robert Duncan's line "would-be shaman of no tribe I know." I wonder what kind of tribe we're going to bring about in the next society.

Nathaniel Mackey's piece "Design for Continuing Investigation" was part of the final panel of the Poetry Project's 1989 Symposium, Poetry for the Next Society. Intended as a wrap-up of the four days of events, the panel included, in addition to Erica Hunt and Nathaniel Mackey, Roberto Bedoya, Kofi Natambu, George Tysh, and Anne Waldman. Nathaniel Mackey is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and of the anthology (with Art Lange) Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. He is the author of several books including Whatsaid Serif, Djbot Baghostus's Run, and Bedouin Hornbook.