Losing the thread for the weave

I’ve been a loyal reader of Bookforum for almost a decade, though my enthusiasm for it has waxed and waned and waxed again. In the late ’90s (during my favorite incarnation of it), Bookforum was full of smart and clever (but not too clever), frequently younger writers (among my favorites was Matthew DeBord; whatever happened to him? . . . I just Googled him, and he appears to write about wine these days—that’s too bad), who together formed, consciously or not, a kind of literary journalism wing of cultural studies—just the synthesis of popular(-ish) criticism and academic theory (no thank you, Lingua Franca) I sought to read and write as a recent PhD grad who didn’t apply for teaching jobs but instead moved to New York City to work as an independent scholar and critic, as well as immerse myself as a poet in the world of contemporary visual art (I don’t have many, or even any, heroes; but if I did, Baudelaire might be one of them).

Bookforum then went through what I considered a real dry spell, as it appeared to aim at being a book-review supplement to the New York Review of Books. A staid respectability set in, which I assume increased circulation figures, but led to a series of cover features on well-well modernists such as Ezra Pound, Italo Calvino, and of course the obligatory nod to Susan Sontag. But Bookforum evolved again, and while some have expressed concern about its recent editorial reshuffling and accompanying decision to allocate a percentage of its pages to current affairs (seemingly further replicating the New York Review of Books), I’m optimistic, and recent issues have been quite good (poets [and non-poets], take note of Rick Perlstein’s dexterous historiographical method in Nixonland, a part of which was excerpted in the April/May issue of Bookforum). Besides, the magazine is a rare mainstream-type venue that’s given good attention to non-mainstream poetry—thanks primarily to editor Albert Mobilio who did the same thing as a critic for the New York Times and Village Voice years ago.
Raised on deconstruction, I have trouble defining things. I’m bewildered by questions—personal or abstract—that aren’t specific. I’m downright hostile to categories of almost any sort. As a result, I’ve tended to come at poetry from other disciplines and media. All of this may be a long-winded way of saying that the current issue of Bookforum has an interesting section on “Fiction and Politics" that may in turn relate to the ongoing Harriet discussion concerning poetry and politics. In his essay "Fiction and Political Fact," Morris Dickstein writes that “postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981) insist that the genre [i.e., political fiction] has no meaning, since ‘everything is “in the last analysis" political.’ To suggest that some works are political while others are not, Jameson says, is ‘a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life." Dickstein then proceeds to outline a mostly standard history of the political novel (spoiler alert: he upholds E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel as a model), stopping to mention “how hard it is for novelists to relate ordinary lives to the larger movements of history" without reducing the depth and range of either or both. I think that much the same challenge faces poets.
Following Dickstein’s essay are brief yet insightful musings by a dozen writers on the relationship between fiction and politics. But perhaps the best part of the whole feature is a portfolio of socially engaged art, including a couple favorite examples of mine: one of a Philip Guston “hood" painting, and an image from the setting for Paul Chan’s recent staging of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. Artists are too cool.