This is what democracy looks like

It’s interesting that the posts which have generated the most discussion during the past couple months—Lucia Perillo’s “Why are poets aligned with the left?” from June 23 and Mark Nowak’s “Cannon fodder” from a few days ago—both deal with the relationship between poetry and politics. I can’t tell if this is the result of people being deeply engaged by the topic (certainly, that’s part of it), or if a rhetorically charged statement—regarding poetry and war, or the racism and sexism of a particular poem—is what in fact springs the dialogical trap in these kinds of forums. I’m guessing it may be more the latter.

I agree with Lydia Olidea’s comment to Mark’s post that the discussion has been a thought-provoking mix of close readings and larger ideological analysis. At the same time, I think a crucial component of any progressive politics is the ability to admit that one can be wrong, that one is fallible. Who knows if this might work on a national stage (e.g., how many times could Barack Obama say he was wrong about this or that before he was eaten alive by the media? twice at most?), but poetry-world politics don’t play out that grandly. It’s always shocked me (when it hasn’t bemused me) that (get ready, here comes a rhetorically charged statement) a few of the poets most committed to a poetics of indeterminacy also happen to be the most dogmatic and doctrinaire people I’ve ever met. Similarly, some poets who emphasize that readers help produce a text’s meaning in turn seek to steer a poem’s reception. Anyone remember when Frederic Jameson read Bob Perelman’s “China” as an example of a late-capitalism-induced schizophrenic mindset (not necessarily negative, in Jameson’s view), and certain of Perelman’s peers said that Jameson had got it wrong? If one of the better-educated, most astute literary critics in the United State couldn’t read this poem correctly, then who could?
In fact, Mark’s post confirms an important point raised by cultural studies-based poetics, as opposed to structural linguistics-oriented ones, which is that readers tend to interpret cultural products (from poems to television shows) according to their personal background and experiences. Thus, it’s not surprising that so many people accompanied their interpretations of Wright’s poem with personal narrations. Quite frankly, I’m fascinated by the democratic—populist, even—politics of that, and it appears many Harriet readers are as well. A poem such as Wright’s can make this politicized reading dynamic more explicit than one by, say, I dunno, Bruce Andrews—which isn’t to excuse either Wright’s poem or its readings (or to prefer one poet over the other). As I’ve written elsewhere, theories in which readers are activated by avant-garde texts oftentimes mistakenly posit an undifferentiated and de-contextualized reader free to make a play of meaning. Within this approach, the eradication of context can also simultaneously be a masking of privilege, as a few of the respondents to Mark’s post have pointed out in different ways.