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The Recluse (https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/category/the-recluse/) › Issue 11

(https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/issue-11/)

Commune Editions

Dear Simone,
you asked about “a surge of interest in class (by which some people mean race)” in
current poetry and poetics, and our first thought is, yes.

Our second: for this surge of interest in class (by which some people mean race) to be
meaningful, it has to be full also of revolutionary imaginings and possibilities.

But it’s worth clarifying how we understand class (by which we don’t mean race; we tend
to see these two categories as often overlapping but also circling out on their own
trajectories, each magnetized and shaped by the other, each expressing a dynamic
neither can encompass). Much of this surge of interest in class has often formulated the
categories in ways we don’t quite recognize, from recent and beguiling propositions
regarding “the 99%” to more mysterious deployments. Often class is shrouded in ideas of
maldistribution — quantitative ideas, for which the master term is inequality.

We prefer those accounts which refer to qualitative characteristics: to the distinctions

which divide those who do not have to show up for work to stay alive from those who
do, and moreover those who are largely excluded from this dynamic, who find no work
even though they lack other resources. This latter category, surplus population, is a
miserable validation of Stuart Hall’s adage that “race is the modality through which class
is lived.” This population is distinct — the profoundly dispossessed. But it is at the same
time joined to those allowed and compelled to work. Both groups are without reserves,
the original meaning of proletarian.

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We begin with that as a useful simplification. In part because we often find the way
poets think about class
Theunusually frustrating. If there has been a surge of interest it may
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be often at the expense of analytical categories, preferring the concept as vehicle for
poets to explore their own sense of personal marginalization. It may all too often be a
way to not talk about race. We certainly don’t have a sense that the longstanding debate
that has pitted the primacy of the economic against the primacy of identity positions
(often reduced to class vs. race, or whether it is capitalism or colonialism that provides a
logic for the miserable unfurling of history) is somehow resolved; indeed, it seems
revenant.

And yet we don’t want to complain too much. Because we want there to be a surge of
poetic interest in this arrangement of the world. We want to be with you. We even see it
sometimes. There has been a lovely increase in various militancies, social antagonisms
leaning toward the total, across the globe in the last few years. And some poets have
found occasion to talk about this in their work. And the result has taken some interesting
forms: at moments a poetics against patriarchy, at other moments an unremitting
critique of antiblackness. Sometimes these have played at least as great a role as a
poetics of class. We will admit that we think the analytical — not necessarily poetical —
limit to any of these is a politics of redistribution, a set of demands over reallocation of
resources away from X and toward Y. We hope that a politics of inequality and of
representation, of the demand for seats at some table of misery, will be found
inadequate. In the most salutary moments, and here have been many, these struggles
have insisted on their own specificity not as the isolate significance of their identities
and a demand for a better position, but as absolute revolutionary demands: that the
unmaking of whiteness, or of gender, will necessarily mean as well the end of capital and
a total social emancipation. Here the master term is abolition. This is the sort of work
that we find exciting.

Some people don’t espouse these politics, and that is to be expected. Some espouse
these politics while seeking to police and denature them, to render them kitsch — the
academy specializes in this sort of concern-trolling, the sort of thing where class
struggle is reduced to questions of authentic (or not) diction and annual salaries, and
radical blackness is reduced to vernacularity. Some talk about their own previous
deprivations, their working class roots, as authenticating, as a sort of purity of their
intentions. Some indulge in accusations of hypocrisy, particularly the trivial reminder
that so and so is complicit, so and so likes to drink champagne, so and so grew up in the
suburbs, as if that renders hypocritical any sort of revolutionary demand on their part.

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Some claim that any sort of revolutionary imaginings in poetry is a form of didacticism.
Yes yes sure revolution,
Thethese complaints
Poetry Project suggest, but when the poetry is reduced to
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positions and the force of commitment, it’s really quite awful, isn’t it?

Here we come to the particular puzzle that animates this note, the tension between
political and poetic modes. This is the aesthetico-political cliché that sees a
contradiction between absolute political demand and the proper tonalities for poetry. We
see that this is the right question — about the relation between revolutionary politics
(which we take to demand a cothinking of race and class among other things) and a
poetry which threatens certainty, commitment, didacticism.

Among our responses is that some amount of didacticism is going to be necessary. Is that
some amount of proceeding as if certain, as if committed, even if our guts quiver round
the clock, is going to happen. Is that poetry is a kind of theory and theory is immanent to
struggle, so that if we are certain of our antagonism, we expect a poetry that does not
falsify this.

But are we not all complicit, none of us pure, all of us benefitting from entanglement
with the very thing from which we claim to take absolute distance? No shit. If “class” has
any analytical yield, and we think it has quite a bit, it begins with the simple fact that the
basic machine by which the class relation reproduces itself is compelled complicity: we
have to work for capital to stay alive. We have to buy capital’s bottled water when we are
thirsty. When they take out the public fountains we buy Coca-Cola which is delicious and
it is capital’s Coca-Cola and we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and
dawntime we drink you at night. To say we are complicit is to say that we breathe. We
often remark on the oddness of the idea that “communist” people and poets must have
achieved the askesis of St. Anthony if they are to hold such politics — as if communism
was a moralistic position, a practice of self-abnegation, rather than an analytical
framework through which much of the world’s odd motion becomes intelligible.

We might note that there is in fact no shortage of gnomic or unaligned or let’s-have-

politics-but-not-too-much verse in the world, if that is your cup of tea. In fact, that’s sort
of what “lyric” means. We think the idea that a deeply minoritarian revolutionist stance is
somehow oppressing the massively majorital default position of liberal open-minded
I’m-just-talking-here hey-let’s-go-sing-karaoke-tonight is an odd one to say the least.
Also we like karaoke and we would fight to keep our Thursday nights open for it during
and after the revolution. But we think we might need to jettison the idea that the

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problem is the hubris of purportedly Jacobin militants always going too far — rather
than, say, the ecocide of capital.
The We have little use for Burkean reaction, no matter how
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cloaked in progressive rhetoric.

Okay, that was not one response but one set of responses. We might also just say: Diane
Di Prima!

Now a coda. Now a reversal, a turning over of things. Consider that there may be another
way altogether to approach this problem of didacticism and vulnerable ambiguity and
their supposed opposition.

Consider the pop song.

Poetry is patient, lazy, persistent; it considers things for a really long time. Human
character changed in 1910; in 1911, if George Gershwin is to be trusted, the pop song
was transformed by “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “Everybody’s Doin’ It” and “That
Mysterious Rag,” which managed to sneak into “The Waste Land” along with “Harrigan”
and “The Cubanola Glide” and a few others. That mysterious rag, the pop song in the
poem, remains a feature of poetry’s socialities. But there have been some discussions of
late about period style, and this has something to do with the original suggestion you
made, Simone, about “a surge of interest in class (by which some people mean race).”
Said discussions often locate period style in relation to these questions, noting the
tendency to address class and race through a mix of high theory and low vernacular,
often carried by fragments of popular culture. In these discussions of period style, there
is often a suggestion that the pop song is a kind of easy identification with the working
class. They use that term. We don’t really use that term; we are more interested in
structural relations than in sociological categories invented by factory inspectors.

But we are also not sure we see the pop song that way. In truth it sounds more true
about Eliot; much has changed since then. Here’s our thought: it matters how you see the
pop song. We certainly get that, even after the supposed collapse of the hi-lo distinction,
turning your nose up at the pop song is still class-marked, a kind of upper-middlebrow
Philistinism. Still, it’s a sort of cross-class pleasure, the pop song, isn’t it? A real pleasure.
We hope you will not hear irony. We think that a great pop song, and there are a lot of
them — Top 40, sing along, solid gold — is sensually thrilling and emotionally powerful.
It is one of the finest things (still no irony) that civilization has produced.

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But not just any civilization. Its affordances are capitalism itself, its technologies, its
circuits of distribution,
TheitsPoetry
reascriptions
Projectof race, its microleisures, invention of the world
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market, the world audience. In this sense the pop song is emblematic of much human
making in the last couple-few centuries. We could speak of Hollywood, or Bollywood, or
a videochat with a distant friend, or the Hong Kong skyline. Or bicycling out on the path
alongside the Bay Bridge and sitting over the water while the birds and porpoises and
oily wakes of container ships pass underneath.

This is the thing about even the most resolute rejection of this world. We know also that
this world is in many ways an astonishing achievement of human making, with
incomparable pleasures, unevenly distributed. This knowledge is always with us, this
pleasure and maybe even wonder. It is with us even in the moments when we think of
surplus populations in Dhaka and Sao Paulo, when we think of manganese in the Pearl
River and Mike Brown’s body moldering in the street in metropolitan St. Louis. And when
we say that it has to go, we say that knowing this means forsaking all of these things.

This is a difficult knowledge. But it would be awful not to have it, to encounter the song
as purely instrumental, a signification, separate from its being as a negative delight, the
delight of the world to be abolished. But we insist on this as we insist on its vanishing.
This is ambiguity, and uncertainty, and vulnerability at the level of the world rather than
at the level of rhetoric. We are not sure it needs stating over and over. But it is always
with us, in every poem that insists that it all has to go. Every poem is built on the
awareness of this destruction, the awareness that any gain will entail catastrophic loss,
unevenly distributed. We might call this the foundational ambiguity of critique. The
foundational doubt, the sorrow of the negative. It has its joys as well.

With comradely spirit, Commune Editions

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