Comparing Experimental Poetry and the Language of the Right

Poetry and politics join hands, kind of, in a couple of essays this week. One is a Frank Bruni column for The New York Times, and the other is a piece by David Micah Greenberg in the July/August issue of The Boston Review. Greenberg explores the uses of comparison in both poetry and politics:

Both [poetry and politics] understand the limits of comparison, but the first treats these deferentially, as part of a strategy to bring to mind differences among forms of experience. The second develops self-consciously false, totalizing comparisons among dissimilar things, even as it decries inappropriate comparisons when employed by antagonists. Ironically, both the U.S. political right and some leftist poets at times employ the second strategy, although for opposite goals. The Tea Party’s success in claiming the national midterm debate relied in part on this world-obliterating rhetoric. But it might be the first that better supports action by the left, not because it is tentative but because it imagines that readers may set down the poem and see.

Greenberg continues on to look at political speech rhetoric, Shakespeare, comparisons involving trauma, Obama's use of chiasmus, and the extremist comparisons utilized by the right, i.e., Glenn Beck and other media. Greenberg's piece then moves from this analysis to thoughts on how comparison is used in experimental poetics and political poetry, particularly that of Charles Bernstein and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko:

There are other modes experimental writing uses to develop relationships among spheres of existence—of consciousness, sensory observation, and the political. Dragomoshchenko, a St. Petersburg poet and frequent collaborator of the U.S. poet Lyn Hejinian, is limitedly available in English. One of his poems, “Possible Symptoms,” translated by Genya Turovskaya, is emblematic of a different type of comparison. The poem starts with the most inanimate and insensible of objects, stones, and asks whether it is possible to see them for what they are, without relying upon comparison.

He then excerpts the poem, but for fear we'd screw up the line breaks, please read that one at the BR site.

Greenberg continues:

In the same way that stones present the material world at its least translatable—suggested by the phrase “to comprehend the stoneness of stone”—war and violence also bring to mind the limits and the power of language, as the suffering they create is fundamentally incomprehensible. For Dragomoshchenko the refusal to compare is also the refusal to “add” to “conquest.” Instead the poet intends to honor suffering by leaving it untouched. But the mind also cannot help but interpret and develop images of comparison between these stones and different spheres: “thunder”; “the reverie of wasps in liquid solutions”; “the pupils of Heraclites,” that philosopher who saw opposites as they define each other. Images of violence also emerge as separate embodiments of these original, untranslatable states of being: the war in heaven (falling angels) and more contemporary aerial assault, “burning in the air, as hair burning from a bridge.”

He then considers how the left's vocabulary serves its interests. Such a comparison between Tea Party language strategies and experimental poetry is certain to prompt some objections, and Greenberg addresses this as well:

Nor is the Tea Party comparable to the experimental left. But I do compare their strategies, and both to Obama’s best rhetoric, the rhetoric so often contradicted by the substance of his actions. Obama is a better writer than most because, like Lincoln, he challenges audiences to create space for experiences different from their own. The left’s poetry is not always positioned to do so, to present or at least evoke the feeling of the differential texture of social experience, in order to counter those who would obliterate reality and human life when they do not serve them.

A question for the left is whether it has developed a critical vocabulary that can fully differentiate between work that generically “stands” for politics and work that makes room to address the political spheres: literature that can expose suffering and make it seem possible to act against it, possible to see what needs to be done while expanding the possibility of seeing.

Read the entire piece here.