Thanks so much for this post, Alan. While few poets, I think, want to write "versified editorials" (as the Chinese poet Gu Cheng called the required mode during the Cultural Revolution), Jenny Holzer is right—and Szymborska, of course—that the political is inescapable. This is why the debate over "political poetry" is so utterly vapid. It allows "committed" poets to feel virtuously plugged in and "non-committed" poets to pretend they're engaging "transcendent values" instead of trivial quotidian concerns (producing poems that amount to "versified philosophy" or "versified psychology"). Both types of poets—as well as poets who don't see themselves as any one type—are quite capable of writing lousy poems, while great poems have been written in both modes. Henri Michaux, in Tent Posts (Green Integer Press), writes: "Think in order to escape—first from their dead-end thoughts, then from your dead-end thoughts." Surely serious readers expect poets to risk this kind of openness, whatever content it might admit into their poems.

Thanks for posting this. I hadn't heard of the piece. It's a great blend of poetry and visual art--one of the better. Although it's coming from a very different place, and the power builds in the Holzer piece by folding and/or unfolding it seems to me, it makes me think of YOUNG-HAE CHANG's piece, The Last Day of Betty Nkomo, chaotic, bombastic, and powerful.
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/winter2004/YHCHI/index.htm#

Alan,

Wondering if you heard about this: http://www.montereyherald.com/gomagazine/ci_10199404

Dj Spooky playing for a Henry Miller Library benefit.

I like this quote from Toni Morrison on the subject:

If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write), isn't about
the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am
not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my
imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams - which is
to say yes, the work must be political ....It seems to me that the best art
is political and you ought to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably
beautiful at the same time.

Dear Alan Gilbert

Many thanks for your poet; it's refreshing to find the poems given so much space.
I've written three pieces which have to do with the "Projections" which may (or may not!)—be of interest to you and readers here interested in the “Projections” and the questions you introduce of the inter-relationships (or not) of politics and the arts in the USA today.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Transformation of the Electric Chair into the Bean Bag Chair via Jenny Holzer's "Projections"
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Holzer's "Projections" and Movies & Classes Offered at Gitmo Usher in New Era
Guantanamo Detainees Offered Classes and Movies
Saturday, August 23, 2008
New Extreme Experimental & Language Poetries: "The Manchurian Candidate" is Alive and Well: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo----NY Times

(I also have them in pdfs--)
The Guantanamo/Projections is the most complete one i have done so far of a critique of the works/installation. A lot of the text is taken from reviews, blogs and statements by Holzer, and is in a “poem form” arranged among the images and ones they refer to--Star Wars, Leni Renifenstahl's Triumph of the Will among others. The corporate uses of the bean bag chairs and the brisk sales at high prices of the paintings are duly noted via quotations and images also. It is astonishing how very similar, in some cases almost word for word, are the same phrases which crop up in almost al the examples i found. These I think create that aestheticization of politics which Walter Benjamin found to be Fascist. The position of the spectator, dwarfed and inundated in the huge elongated space by the immense light projections while lounging in a bean bag chair creates a "supine" reception of the works that “mimics and parodies” that of detainees strapped down in planes and gurneys. Inspired by such a mirroring among art/poetry installations and those installations in which human beings are tortured, I've been developing my own form of "critiques" of the "new extreme experimental American poetry & arts" via a rejoining of the originary military sense of "avant-garde" with it use in the arts. For quite some time this shared term has been split in two, so that an “aesthetic distance” can justify itself as a “formal protest,” (accomplished at a formal level but not at the “material base”) while remaining “free” of the “dirtier aspects of the situation.” Restoring the “union” of the term avant-garde, one finds eerie reflections back and forth between the military and the arts. Many devices associated with one meaning of the term being used in the other, it seems necessary to reexamine the reasons for the initial separation, and why it continues to be sustained. The art work actually buttresses many aspects of the military and the State, and at the same time essays to create a distance so as to excuse the American reader/writer/viewer from any involvement or responsibility for the commission of War Crimes. Hence the passivity of the spectators before this “aesthetic display”—there is a sense that one is participating in a "good" and “dutiful” enactment of the appearance of "protest" while at the same time functioning as a “good” and “dutiful” consumer-couch potato. A great deal of the language used in describing the “installation, as well as the images shown, struck me as the distanced reenactments and reflections of the events in Iraq and especially Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib--not as critique at all so much as mirroring and copying (as the paintings are copies of what had been paintings themselves in Powell’s UN presentation) the military uses of language action and imagery. There is also the cycling of intereferentiality as Promotion in Holzer’s images being taken from the NSA, which in turn has a gallery featuring previous installations of hers, notably one in Vienna which is the layout in electrically highlighted letterings of an essay written for Foreign Policy journal by the head of the NSA. The critic’s words are turned into art by the artist whom the critic is writing about, and they share the same site, he as director, she has user of documents and the featured artist of a prominently displayed NSA gallery.
Two pieces recently went on line which are part of the “Annals” of the New Extreme Experimental American poetry and Arts:
David-Baptiste Chirot: "Waterboarding & Poetry"
Wordforword #13 Spring 2008
(also has Visual Poetry by chirot)
Poems from Guantánamo
The Detainees Speak
David Baptite ChirotNo
KAURAB Translation Site

These examine the Poems from Guantanamo and their reception in the US in terms of distances from and within language, so that the poems may be as distanced from in every way as is “humanly” and “inhumanly” possible. The effect of Holzer’s Installations, as well as a kind of uneasy mythos, tries blaming Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush et all as "aberrations" which/who will go away with their departures from office. This is sadly a misguided, wishful thinking, for these policies have been developing through time since Nixon. The frightening acceleration of the uses of torture, the talk of nuclear options, the ever growing detention centers and mistreatments of "illegals " within the US--al these things, along with the passage continually of evermore repressive laws, indicate that perhaps this is not so much the end of an era, but only one stage in a further development, which will be necessitated, as always, by ever more demands being made on "security" as the sole purpose of all the things done in its name. That security means the continuing erosion and abandonment of Civil and Human Rights in the US, and everywhere the US has been interfering abroad. So much of this, being right out in the open, becomes hidden in plain sight, and it seems that the connections which need to be made are not, because it would be to expose what one is not to think or see in order to go on seeing and thinking that “Installations” like Holzer “Projections” are a way of “consuming” “protest” as an aesthetic act in which the appearance of “ethics” is literally observed, while the actual existence of them is not.
Thanking you again for your report, and, again for the attention with poetry—
David-bc