Abstract
The relation between poetry and poems is an old problem. It involves more than a relation between concept and instance, but even in the most abstract or metaphorical contexts, when poetry seems to shake off the shackles of mere poems, a need for instances persists. In this essay, I consider how this relation is involved specifically, for some theorists and critics, in the historical situation of late capitalism. I then reflect on why that relation should be an urgent concern, not only in writing about poetry and poems, but in poems themselves, and particularly in poems which, in the face of that situation, think about its end.
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Notes
- 1.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 16–17; Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 23–4. Hereafter abbreviated as BE, with references to the English translation cited first, references to the French edition cited second.
- 2.
Badiou represents Plato’s judgement in two ways. In Handbook of Inaesthetics, at the beginning of a chapter on “Art and Philosophy”, Plato is said to ostracize “poetry, theater, and music”. But in Conditions Badiou writes that Plato “sends the poem into exile and promotes the matheme”. In Being and Event, too, it is specifically “the poets” who are exiled (BE 54/67). Putting aside the fact that the Greek poiesis is not the modern poésie or poetry, the complexities of the modern concept of poetry are indicated by poetry’s dual function as mere instance and as the very category in question. See Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1; Alain Badiou, Petit manuel d’inesthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 1. Hereafter abbreviated as HI, with references to the English translation cited first, references to the French edition cited second. See, also, Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 100; Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 165.
- 3.
Badiou, Conditions [English], 42; Badiou, Conditions [French], 100.
- 4.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 3. This licenses Lecercle to refer to Badiou, a novelist and a playwright as well as a philosopher, as a technician of “poetic language” (105).
- 5.
Badiou , Conditions [English], 50–51; Badiou, Conditions [French], 110. These prose translations, of Mallarmé’s “A la nue accablante tu” and “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx”, appeared earlier in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 75, 100–101.
- 6.
See, for instance, Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), 34. Hereafter abbreviated as AP. Cf. Badiou’s meditations on Mallarmé and Hölderlin in Being and Event, which make some reference to metaphor without making it fundamental to the poems’ thinking (BE 191-8, 255-61/213-20, 283-9).
- 7.
For further discussion of Badiou’s investment, in Theory of the Subject, in each poem’s univocal meaning, and in making that meaning explicit through prose translation and philosophical analysis, see Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, 97–8.
- 8.
Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 350–77.
- 9.
See David Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: A New Reconstruction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 199.
- 10.
“Mathematical language is characterized by deductive fidelity. […] We could thus say that the unnameable proper to the matheme is the consistency of language, while the one proper to poetry is the power of language” (HI 24-6/43-5).
- 11.
Justin Clemens notes the contradiction between Badiou’s explicit refusal of evaluation and the apparent evaluation which characterizes his choice of poems and his descriptions of poems. See Justin Clemens, “Eternity is Coming”, review of Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets (2014), in Sydney Review of Books, 19 February 2015, http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/age-of-poets-alain-badiou/
- 12.
See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 57–8, 155.
- 13.
Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 9. Hereafter abbreviated as HP.
- 14.
Lerner is thus as far from Adorno as Badiou. “The elements defined by the cliché of the gulf between intention and achievement do not point to an aesthetic inadequacy”, Adorno cautions, “but to the inadequacy of the aesthetic itself.” Poetry is not impossible, Adorno might say to Lerner; poetry fails poems. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Mahler”, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 88.
- 15.
“Lerner often talks about ‘poetry’”, notes David Orr, “when what he really means is ‘a very particular kind of poem.’” See David Orr, “Do People Hate Poetry? According to Ben Lerner, Yes”, New York Times, 26 August 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/books/review/ben-lerner-hatred-of-poetry.html?mcubz=2&_r=0
- 16.
Michael Clune, “The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner”, Paris Review, 30 June 2016, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/30/the-hatred-of-poetry-an-interview-with-ben-lerner/. Ken Chen argues that Lerner’s argument nevertheless serves to separate art from “the pollution of politics”: “Lerner constantly invokes politics, only to suppress actual political content”. See Ken Chen, “What’s the Matter with Poetry?”, New Republic, 23 June 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/134504/whats-matter-poetry
- 17.
See, for example, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, “Two Poets on Politics”, Poetry Society of America, https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/joshua_clover_juliana_spahr_1/
- 18.
Jos Charles, interview with Juliana Spahr, Entropy, 11 December 2015, https://entropymag.org/interview-with-juliana-spahr/
- 19.
For a brief account of this argument’s history and its persistence today, see Robert Archambeau, “The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics”, in The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World (Akron: The University of Akron Press, 2013), 40–63.
- 20.
Chris Nealon, Heteronomy (Washington: Edge Books, 2014), 62–3.
- 21.
Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 88.
- 22.
Fred Moten, “it’s not that I want to say”, in The Service Porch (Tucson: Letter Machine Editions, 2016), 98.
- 23.
“And it is here that we would try to ask ourselves the question of what we could or might possibly someday do as humans who write poetry and also go to work and care for children and drink with friends and find ourselves and our beloveds at moments in the plaza and at other moments in the jail and in need of lawyers and a bail fund” (Clover and Spahr, “Two Poets on Politics”).
- 24.
Ben Lerner, “A Year in Reading: Ben Lerner”, The Millions, 8 December 2014, http://www.themillions.com/2014/12/a-year-in-reading-ben-lerner.html
- 25.
Christopher Nealon, “The Poetic Case”, Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 865–86 (880, n. 18).
- 26.
Amy De’Ath, from Caribou (Bad Press, 2011), reprinted in Emily Critchley, ed., Out of Everywhere 2 (Hastings: Reality Street, 2015), 22.
- 27.
“Press Daily Briefing by Press Secretary Sean Spicer — #48”, 15 May 2017: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/05/15/press-daily-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-48
- 28.
BHP Billiton, 2016 Annual Report, 3: http://www.bhpbilliton.com/-/media/bhp/documents/investors/annual-reports/2016/bhpbillitonannualreport2016_interactive.pdf
- 29.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia advertisement: https://d1pet9gxylz2tx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2017/03/CommBank-CAN.jpg
- 30.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 167.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to Justin Clemens and Christian Gelder for their help with this essay.
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Pryor, S. (2019). The Relation Between Poetry and Poems Is Political, Sometimes. In: Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (eds) Communism and Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_3
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