Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik

I had thought I should begin my stint here at Harriet with a kind of introductory blog, one that would discuss, what else, my ideas and me. But I’ve changed my mind.
Three days ago Kenneth Goldsmith’s post took up a question which, in a word, begs the question. It has already received over sixty comments, which makes it a kind of overnight sensation.

His premise is that “avantists”, as he classifies himself and brethren, have a hard time of it all the time, no matter what the state of the Union, and he couches that “state” in economic terms: boom or bust.
He starts out by quoting Brecht: “I shrugged and quoting Brecht, stated that it’s always [a] bad time for poetry. In the United States, it was lousy during the boom and promises to be lousy during the bust. It was crappy to be a poet during the Bush years and will most certainly remain crappy under Obama.”
At this point I guessed he might go on to take up the subject of Obama’s choice for inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander, not to mention his choice of Pastor Rick Warren as God’s envoy. But he didn’t go there, a responsibility disappointingly shirked.
Instead, he gives us a sketchy account of the depression years (the analogy to our present predicament is implicit) and how they drove the avant-garde to ground (Cummings trounced by MacLeish, etc.). He goes on to conclude, with a tip of the hat to Ahmadinejad, that they “wiped innovation off the map.” They “pretty much derailed the avant-garde in the United States for two-and-a-half decades.”
And yet this is simply not true. Just to take a few examples, Both Elliot Carter and Joseph Cornell thrived during this period. And Louis Zukovsky was actively at work on “A”, which he started in 1927. American poets and novelists abroad, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Stein, were rigorously funneling the news back to America. Rothko, Barnett Newman, Milton Avery were on the verge of creating the most radical movement painting has ever known. Crane’s White Buildings was published in 1926 and The Bridge in 1930. Laura Riding’s first collection The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926. And The Partisan Review was founded in 1934. All of these artists came into their own during the years of the Great Depression and the war years to follow. Not only that, exiled musicians, writers and other artists struggled to reach America, both during the war and afterwards, as Europe was left decimated by its own great depression and the German occupation of most of its nation-states.
Simply stated, trying to link the productivity and the health of artists, as Goldsmith does, to the societal conditions they find themselves in, smacks of Arnoldian “sweetness and light”. Hart Crane was not silenced by the Great Depression, but by his own depression, and his battle with alcoholism, in spite of which he managed to leave us with the poetry he did.
What if Kenneth Goldsmith had found himself in Mandelstam’s shoes? That certainly wouldn’t have been a good time for poetry.
Curious as well is his reliance upon Brecht as a kind of moral anchor. Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik (A Bad Time for Lyric Poetry) was written, as gorgeous and as forthright a poem as it is, in seriously bad times.
There is a war inside me.
Between my excitement at the blossoming apple-tree
And my revulsion at the speeches of the Dauber…
The “Dauber” is, of course, the failed artist, Hitler.
Is Kenneth Goldsmith sure that he wants to draw an analogy between his own situation and Brecht’s right before he fled to Denmark in the winter of 1933 from a newly Nazified Germany? That seems not only seriously strained, in terms of one poet’s historical imagination, but also verging on self-pity, self-pity of an instrumental kind, a tactical self-pity. There is a kind of fundamentalism in his attitude that refuses perspective, misreads history and seems unfamiliar with irony. As Peter Thompson reminds us in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (pg. 210) that “for all the seriousness of the situation, an element of tongue-in-cheek” is in these poems, and that behind “the political writer’s proud conviction that only when it is political is literature worthwhile,” behind his “aesthetic ‘self-denial’” lie “formal structure and rhetorical sophistication.” Good poems written in bad times.
As well, and paradoxically, Brecht, too, finally fled to America, fearing Stalin’s ruthless unpredictability in Moscow, where he had ended up after continually attempting to sidestep the advance of the Wehrmacht as it trundled across Western Europe. Of course the poetic America of Brecht’s imagination that had so sustained him during the 1920s did not live up to the real America of the 1940s. He suffered the neglect of the film industry, abuse from the House Un-American Activities Committee and the ire of his fellow émigrés, Thomas Mann, W.H Auden and Theodor Adorno among them. It is common knowledge that, as with Beethoven, Brecht’s talent was in proportion to his nastiness as human being. But, of course, what matters most is the art, and not the circumstance in which it was made, or the man who made it. That he kept plugging away at his work, even while being sheltered in the States from certain imprisonment and death in a war-torn, fascist controlled Europe, speaks volumes, not about Brecht, necessarily, but about poetry, theatre, translation and how they pretty much thrive in all conditions. Art saves the artist, not the other way around.
I would suggest that Kenneth Goldsmith consult that old Nazi, Heidegger.
“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night.”
Goldsmith assumes that our “time” is destitute as well. It is, perhaps, for bankers and the like, and for people who have to make a living in small businesses and gas stations and Walmarts. It is, tragically, for the victims of war, and the citizens of failed states. But for American poets who have nice jobs at universities? Heidegger’s destitution is quite specific and has little to do with outward circumstances, or the quotidian, however bad they might be. The poet’s destitution is directly connected to what he calls “the default of God”.
“The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it.”
In Heidegger’s view, Hölderlin as the poet who most emblematically suffers this “default”, is a maker in constant shock, ever steeped in a colloquy with an absent God. The destitution of his time has nothing to do with the circumstances of his time and everything to do with the philosophical, religious and functional heritage that poets work from and rely on. The shock, for Hölderlin, is the result of talking to a wall, when his conversation is still deserving of the godly audience, when his emotional world is dependent on godly succor.
Whether or not we have gotten over Hölderlin’s destitution is the more appropriate question. What kinds of grants we are getting, which teaching positions we hold, or what variation of democracy we are, as citizens, subjected to, while important in many ways, has nothing to do with real poetic destitution.