Ars poetica

It seems that, since the advent of mass literacy and increased leisure time, poetry has become a lifestyle accoutrement, because, in its printed, widely distributed, form, it finds itself in a riotous market of many genres that have in common being committed to paper and bound between covers. Its been a long-held belief of mine that poetry, freed from the formal constraints necessary for mnemonic facility (rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.) once the printed text became its predominant medium, was able to evolve to its present form of "difficulty"; the text has been made static for the reader to regard at length. It’s a two-edged sword, however, because the "thing-ness" of a book helps literature a long way down the path of reification. In his recent Slate article, poet Robert Pinsky seems to insist on some sort of ahistorical aura around poetry that has continued undiminished since Hesiod, or earlier, but this petitio principii obscures the more fundamental consideration of how poetry ever came to achieve that aura in the first place.

I’m basically parroting Benjamin here when I say that I think Pinsky’s twist is that he’s attempting to argue poetry’s characteristic aura as being more a matter of technical than mystical accomplishments, but this seems to play right into the hands of latter-day technocrats for whom the pleasure of the text is always a matter of increased complexity—a measure of technological advance—than perhaps more familiar aesthetic categories. Its simply one aspect of the same mentality in which the fact that a German car with GPS, a Bose sound system and highly precise climate control commands a higher price than it would if its signal engineering feat was that it could go 100K miles without an oil change or a tune-up."

In other words, I imagine poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs., or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone ("It’s a cell phone and mp3 player ... and so much more!). I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalizations and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. I guess one could always take the Bakhtinian line that the lexicon is a priori a neutral site of ideological contest fought by how signs are inflected or voiced that makes the difference. But this also seems a too-facile resolution to a complex problem.

And, after all, maybe our engagements with poetry and ad-copy are fundamentally not so different. Each involves a complex tangle of knowingness, naïveté, envy and attraction, among other things. This sounds like some limpid New-Critical insight, I know, but perhaps its in the unique configuration and intensities of the encounter between a particular poem and a particular reader that constitute authentic experience, which is characterized by multiplicities as opposed to monads, immanence as opposed to transcendence. Authenticity resides in the event of reading the poem, not in how we digest and monologize it into the poem for our own purposes or for the edification of others.