And on the lighter side of verse, mzbarbielicious – no, seriously, that’s Mz. Barbielicious (and her uno el friendo) – tells us how to write a poem “from the heart”. I just love how she uses your in place of you’re. Makes me think she’s a member of that elite group called the Language Poets.

And On The Not-So-Funny Side

The Poetry Project upcoming calendar.

Liz Henry wages war on the Republican Party.

Mark Strand does George Herbert, class of 1633.

What’s the real debate about?

Then there’s …

Ron Silliman On Sarah Palin

Ron Silliman discusses the election. He’s almost brilliant. He does, in fact, understand electoral politics and his analysis of the electoral landscape is fair and stark. But he totally misses the point on Palin’s selection as VP. It was meant to mend the broken relations between John McCain and the Religious Right. Yes, there are gender politics going on there, but the conservative religious voters who follow Pat Robertson and James Dobson needed someone to cling to because it wasn’t McCain. If he didn’t pick a strong evangelical – and by strong I don’t mean politically, I mean religiously dogmatically – then he was going to ensure that a good number of evangelical voters in key states were going to stay home on election day. As it is, they may not stay home, but I’m not sure that John McCain and the Republican operatives are aware of just how many of their evangelical base are upset with Bush and the Republican Party over the war in Iraq and lost opportunities in other areas of importance to them. They do not necessarily see Obama as their political savior, but in a land of ‘lesser of two evils’ he is looking a lot less like Lucifer than the other guy. Palin just takes one of McCain’s horns away.

“I think it is important to remember why we are here,”

The implication here is that the war in Iraq is somehow to defend the nation. Here it is again, in the words of his poem, titled “Allegiance to the Same”:

Today we’ll stand and be counted (sic) We’re crossing the line in the sand (sic) Regardless that (our) days may be numbered, we’ll fight and defend our great land

I’ve got no problem with poetry that honors fallen soldiers. Fallen heroes have always been a subject of literature and I suspect they always will be. But a poem must at least be honest about what it stands for and it should communicate something meaningful about the experience. To refer to the Iraq War as a defense of “our great land” is nonsense. “Why we are here” has nothing to do with national defense; it has everything to do with ignorance, hubris, and fear peddling.

When I reviewed Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, I was pretty critical. I am, I admit, a rather harsh critic. If so then it’s because I love great literature and when I find it I don’t mind jumping in the air, clicking my heels together and looking like an idiot. I challenge soldier-poets to make me do that. But even Turner’s poetry is somewhat poetic and well written, and he doesn’t sugarcoat the shit with ear-tickling party-line business.

Why Supporting The War In Iraq Is A Sin
As a soldier who served in Iraq myself, I realize that fellow soldiers deserve the respect and commitment of those with whom they served. Fallen soldiers should be given their credit and those who serve well, theirs. But the purpose, the raison d’etre, of the war itself is a different thing altogether. And from what is public knowledge concerning the events that lead up to it, the justifications given by the decision-makers who are responsible for putting us there, and the reasons why we are still there have nothing to do with honoring the fallen or injured soldiers who may or may not necessarily be “heroes” in the strict definition of the word. In other words, to refer to this war in any way as a “defense of our great land” is just plain nonsense.

To further elucidate the sinfulness of the position that this soldier has taken, as a Christian he should be standing up for the truth of something and not the popular myth, nor in participating in the national pride that has bandied about our flag in the name of the Lord (which I consider the greatest sin of our age). Rather, he should seek to understand the nature of justice and encourage the decision-makers who represent him in Washington to use his service in the military for that purpose and for no other.

The only justification for the War in Iraq that even comes close to that end is the argument that unseating Saddam Hussein in the manner that was done was an act of retributive justice for the acts of ethnic cleansing he perpetrated upon the Kurds, but even that argument falls in shallow water when you consider how many years went by that nothing was done about it. But that wasn’t even an asserted justification until after the fact when it became common knowledge that the stated justifications were all bogus.

My Hope As A Soldier-Poet
One of the reasons I have not submitted the manuscript of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox to any publishers to date is because I still have this nagging feeling that somehow it isn’t ready even though I’m emotionally ready to give it up. I have made the mistake of publishing too soon and I don’t want to make that mistake again.

In my mind, war poetry must first and foremost be poetic and not merely an emotional appeal to pride based on shallow sentiment. Poems like “War is Kind” with its ironic simplicity, “Dulce et Decorum Est” and its bold insistence that dying for one’s country is the greatest glory is an old, old lie, and “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” do that. These are poems that are first poems and if anything else then only secondarily. That’s the kind of poetry, as a poet who has served in combat, that I hope to write.

Silliman’s back (unlike AC/DC) in black and white.

Enjoy The Second Coming. It’s been Finnished.

And yet, another Amazon boycott.

The Jewish geniuses a la Andy Warhol.

Meet President Iambic Dimeter with a pyrrhic dangler.

Capitalist poetry. Solicitation anyone?

Time to prepare a submission. Later.

If we can say that the poet laureate position is a reflection of the soul of the nation then it begs the question: Why Kay Ryan? Why? Why? Why?

Who Appoints The Poet Laureate Anyway?
Billy Collins said the question he answered the most when he served as poet laureate was who appointed him. I think he actually said that he cleared up the notion that the president is the Appointer. Well, he may be the decider, but he doesn’t decide who is appointed to the poet laureate position. That honor is reserved for the Librarian of Congress.

But what difference does it matter who appoints the poet laureate? I think it matters a great deal because whoever does the appointing will undoubtedly bring to the table their own set of preferences and prejudices. I can’t imagine who the poet laureate might be if George W. Bush were president. Dr. Seuss? Dick Cheney’s cousin? That Greek guy, what’s his name?

Facetiousness aside, the current Librarian of Congress is Dr. James H. Billington. He was sworn in to that position in 1987. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he went on to graduate valedictorian of the 1960 Princeton graduating class. He received his doctorate from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at both Princeton and Harvard and was the director, for a time, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In addition to all of that, he has served on the editorial advisory boards for both Foreign Affairs and Theology Today. He is also currently on the Board of the Center for Theological Inquiry and is a member in good standing of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a word, he’s no intellectual lightweight.

All of these positions, past and present, serve to inform Dr. Billington on his poetic preferences as well as his obligated appointments. But who appoints him? Well, that would be the president of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate. And to answer your question before you ask it, No, G.W. had nothing to do with. Since Dr. Billington was appointed in 1987, it would have been the Gipper, Ronald “Trickle Down” Reagan.

While there is no term length established for the position by law, it is tradition that the position be held by life, so there is no real pressure to lean in any direction politically. But you can be assured that tradition and history play a big role in the duties and decisions of the office, which of course, tend to be on the conservative side. No one in a traditional role in U.S. life would dare to stray too far from an honored tradition. That would be anathema to the sensibilities of the public spirit.

Poets Laureate Since 1987

Ron Silliman likes to point out that there has only been one poet laureate who wasn’t a member of Silliman’s pejoratively-monikered “School of Quietude” – the hero of postmodern poetics, William Carlos Williams. If I believed in the SofQ, I’d agree with him. Tradition and history seems to be the primary relation to almost all of the poets who have served in that capacity. I think we can count Amiri Baraka and Sharon Olds out of the running.

When Dr. Billington took over as Librarian of Congress, Robert Penn Warren was the poet laureate of the U.S. He was the first person to serve under that title, which had previously been called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He was appointed in 1986 and served through 1987. That would mean Dr. Billington’s first appointment would have been Richard Wilbur. He served for one year and was replaced by Howard Nemerov, who served from 1988-1990. Both poets are firmly entrenched in the New Formalism school of poetics popularized by the current head of the NEA Dana Gioia and a few others. You can’t really get any more conservative than that.

Dr. Billington also appointed another New Formalist poet in 1992 by the name of Mona Van Duyn. After that, during the Clinton years, came a string of more liberal poets, but none of them were so liberal as to break completely with recognized traditions. Their politics may have been liberal, but their poetic philosophies were entrenched in historical traditions as recognized broadly by academics who would know.

In 2001, though, something happened. Dr. Billington began appointing a different type of poet to the position of poet laureate. The shift wasn’t a major shift. It wasn’t a shift in poetics per se, but a shift in focus. The first poet laureate to serve after the World Trade Center attack was Billy Collins, who has been likened to Robert Frost so many times you would think he was Frost’s only son. Collins was the first recipient of the Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry and has been an inspiration to thousands of other poets who aspire to be the Jerry Seinfeld of poetics. Collins was an uncanny instigator of a movement. Reading Collins’ poems is like sail boating with Bozo the Clown and his satirical other.

Following Collins, we have quite a slate of light verse operators who don’t really write in a strict, traditional “light verse”, but who tend to write in a witty style that is admired by people who don’t much care for the “heavier” topics like death, sexuality, and violence. Here are Collins’ successors:

• Louise Gluck – 2003-2004
• Ted Kooser – 2004-2006
• Donald Hall – 2006-2007
• Charles Simic – 2006-2007

I’m not sure if this trend has more to do with who our current president is or if it has more to do with the tragic consequence of our Federal government allowing a grab bag full of lunatics through the immigration loopholes. Maybe Dr. Billington just thought it was time for a laugh or maybe he chooses his poets laureate on the basis of some odd sort of reflection of the current presidential administration and the mood of the country. But each of these poets, except for Collins and Simic, and many of the previous ones, represent one of two subcultures within the macro-culture of America. They represent either the Ivy League set or the rural heartland. One of these cultures, the Ivy League, represents the part of America that is beyond reach of most Americans, but that also represents a shiny veneer of traditional values. The other represents that part of America that is accessible, but is raw and dirt-filled. Charles Simic is neither, but he has another problem.

When he was appointed to the poet laureate position, Charles Simic said that he didn’t need to promote poetry. Nevermind that is the chief responsibility of the poet laureate position. He felt it wasn’t necessary because he had attended a poetry reading with 740 attendees. Evidently, that was a large gathering for him. I recently read an interview with Sam Hamill who said he reads to audiences of 3,000 people. Maybe we should appoint him to be the poet laureate.

All of that aside, however, there is a strain of commonality among the poets selected for the poet laureate position: They have all been winners of either the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship or a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and most of them have won both. Ryan also is the recipient of both fellowships. It’s almost as if these awards are precursors to the laureateship position, which would exclude many poets on the basis of style alone.

Simic may have been the most successful of all the poet laureates poets laureate. He sought to do nothing in that position and he accomplished his goal. The only thing that could have made him more representative of our presidential culture is for him to have worked extra hard to screw something up. But if the poet laureate position isn’t a reflection of who is in the highest office in the land then it at least is a reflection of the people who elect the highest ranking lawbreaker. The poet laureate may not be our soul, but he represents it like the flag represents freedom, only maybe more truthfully.

These Are Times That Try Men’s Souls – Not!

We live in a Billy Collins culture. There is a war going on, but in the heartland you wouldn’t know it. I read an article in my local newspaper a couple of weeks ago that said our president has taken more vacation days than any other president in history. The Great Decider, war hero, liberator of unappreciative sheepherders, Dick Gepetto’s wooden boy. And the rest of the country is smoking and joking, playing golf on Fridays, channel surfing in their underwear, and generally oblivious to anything going on outside of their living rooms. At least, they were until the beginning of this year when fuel prices started going up. Now, suddenly, they realize that it’s time to sell the SUV.

This it folks: America, land of the free and the brave. Only the brave believe that war anywhere and everywhere is necessary as long as someone else foots the bill and breaks a sweat. Who, me? Oh, no, I’m too good and important.

They may not be saying it, but they are thinking it and their actions reflect it. And this is the Simic mentality. We don’t need to promote poetry. Even if that’s what I’m supposed to do. It’ll promote itself. And the war will win itself. Just ask John McCain.

For all practical purposes, I don’t see the appointment of Kay Ryan being too far different from that of Billy Collins and Charles Simic. The string of soft poets known for their wit and traditional poetics that have followed on the heels of Collins, who is really a bit of a parody of himself much the same way that G.W. is. And here we are, arriving at the place where we choose an “outsider” who is both a lesbian and, seemingly, a poet just like all the others.

Kay Who?
Kay Ryan. Who is she? No one knows. Well, no one except a few of the enlightened ones – Dr. Billington, Dana Gioia, and Carol Adair, her lover.

Now let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: Her poetry is good. There’s no doubt. The little bit that I’ve read in the last week or so has been excellent. I like it. But that’s not what the poet laureate is about. We really don’t care if their poetry is good. We hope it is, but it isn’t necessary that it should be. Their position is a promotional position, to make poetry more accessible to the culture and try to get more people to read it. Plain and simple.

But is that all? I don’t think so. I think in a broader sense the position is symbolic. It’s symbolic of the heart of our culture. We are in election year – change. For the first time in history, an African-American is leading a major political party to the final race that will decide who is the most powerful elected leader in the world – change. And you can bet that one of the big issues of the next four year years, especially if Barack Obama is elected, will be the civil rights of homosexuals, and it’s not just one issue. It’s several issues: Gay marriage, gay adoption, openness in the military, and countless other derivative issues that may follow. Change. Big change. And who best to represent that change than “an outsider?”

One other thing that represents change in our culture is the position of Americans on the Iraq War. On the eve of the war in March 2003, most Americans were for it. The polls were something like 60%-70% in favor of it. Today, that figure is reversed. The only people still saying that the Iraq War was the right thing to do are die-hard Republicans who will never admit that they were wrong – and Joe Lieberman. But the rest of us know they were wrong, and some of us were wrong right along with them.

Change. That’s what Americans want right now. We are ready for change. And that’s what Kay Ryan represents, a change. Not a real change. But a symbolic change. A change we can live with. Maybe not the change that needs to happen, but the kind of change that we can negotiate and get a compromise on by some of the people who resist it.

In a real sense, the poet laureate is not a political position. But then, poetry cannot be apolitical. And neither can poets. In a real sense, the position is not political, but in a technical sense – in a soulful, hearty sense – the position is a symbol of our national politics and cultural values. While certain factions within our society have not accepted homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle, most Americans are willing to accept it.

If Barack Obama is elected and the Democrats do get a chance to inflict an exit wound upon the conscience of Traditional Values America then who will be better than a lesbian poet to offer up the victory verses and sing a song of sixpence with her pocket full of wry? Dr. Billington certainly has his finger on the pulse of America and certain parts of it may be losing circulation, but I’m sure he didn’t select Kay Ryan for her sexual orientation, and likely not in spite of it. He likely never gave it a thought. He really didn’t have to. All he really had to do was look into the heart of America and take note of the direction into which it is leaning. He couldn’t have done better if he’d been reading tea leaves.

Meet the fake Frank O’Hara.

Meet Ron Silliman’s clone (but don’t laugh).

Meet the new declinists.

Meet Kay Ryan’s travel agenda.

What’s going on at the National Mall in September.

The accountability of the artist.

Poetry tagged.

That’s all for now. Goodbye.

R.I.P. Tom Disch.

Writing poetry on Otto.

My first blog post was published on September 10, 2007. Since then I’ve only missed a few days, but I’ve made up for those losses by posting multiple posts on other days. My second post, made on September 12, 2007 is still, to this day, the fourth most popular blog post I’ve written and still gets a respectable amount of traffic from time to time.

By way of trivia, my three most popular blog posts are:

• Poetics: The 7 Essential Elements Of Poetry
• How To Market Your Poetry Online
• Ushering In Black History Month With Poetry By Langston Hughes

The common element in all of these blog posts is that they in some way discuss poetics in the rawest sense. That’s good. It happens to be a passion of mine and something I enjoy writing about. Judging by the popularity of these posts, and some comments I’ve received over the months, that seems to be what my readers are interested in. Therefore, the new tag line fits.

The two most commented on posts during the past nine months have been:

• How Pretentious Can Poetry Be?
• Are You A Member Of The School Of Quietude?

Again, both address issues and problems of poetics in some way. Special thanks to Ron Silliman who has been an inspiration and his influence in the blogosphere has been a big help. His periodic links to this blog result in traffic spikes that increase my overall visitor count and lead to great discussions as is evidenced by the post on the school of quietude. Ron’s link to that post on June 23, 2008 resulted in the second highest traffic day since I started this blog.

I’d Like To Thank The Academy
I’d also like to thank my regular readers and commentators for keeping things active. You all have kept me going and inspire me to keep going. As of this writing my monthly visitor count hovers around 3,000, where it has been for a few months now.

I love comments. I like to read the comments posted by my readers and am privileged in being the first to read them. To facilitate more comments and to reward those brave souls who make their way to the World Class Poetry Blog, I’ve made two changes that I believe will foster more community here at the WCP blog. Those two additions are:

• The installation of the CommentLuv plugin
• The implementation of do-follow links

These are important developments. The CommentLuv plugin adds a link to commentators’ last blog post. If you write a blog and you post here on my blog then a link to your last blog post will appear directly after your comments. That’s a huge benefit to you and I hope you get additional traffic to your blog as a result of it.

The do-follow attribute on the links is good for search ranking reasons. WordPress automatically makes all links no-follow, which tells search engine robots not to crawl those links and give credit to webmasters for those inbound links. Readers who are aware of SEO tactics will know that inbound links count as points with the search engines. I’ve decided to reward my commentators with those points. For a deeper treatment of that subject you can read my comment policy, which I encourage everyone to read anyway.

There may be more changes forthcoming, but I hope you’ll take the time to read through some of my archives and leave a comment or two. Make some friends and join the discussion.

I guess that depends on what you mean by “liberal.” Ezra Pound has often been criticized for his fascist views. Not exactly the darling of liberalism. But aside from the conservative/liberal dichotomy, Perillo’s post is boldly shallow in another way. She actually had the audacity to write this sentence into a paragraph at the end of her post:

Maybe this is why there is not much good poetry written about war (OK: Homer) compared to the bulk of good poetry written about love.

That’s an awfully nutty thing to say on a poetry blog. I’ve read countless love poems that were mere drivel. But the volumes of good war poetry can be stacked to the moon. Stephen Crane’s “War Is Kind” comes to mind. Walt Whitman wrote some fabulous poems during the Civil War and many of them have withstood the test of time in the American narrative of poetics. One of my favorite poems is “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Tennyson.

If we remove the classics we can still find good war poetry being written today, though admittedly not by many total liberals. But they aren’t all written by fascists either.

I said I wouldn’t discuss Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet again until I finished my fourth reading of it, which I did last night. I am not ready yet to publish my review, but he has a few good poems on war in that book, the latest of the war poets worth a read. The title poem itself probably has the most widespread recognition but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the best poem in the book despite it’s being a good read. Virtually every war of the 20th century produced at least one poet who wrote on war quite effectively and worth a read. So this business about where is all the good war poetry was really just kind of silly.

Are poets too liberal? Some of us, I suppose, but if we consider that liberalism (classical liberalism, at any rate) has always been about individualism and free markets then I’d say we’re probably not liberal enough. And I’ve never understood why war has been lumped into the laps of conservatives. Liberals start wars too and they’re not always to save the poor from poverty.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has been published.

R.I.P. James B. Hall.

A new poetry forum.

Now this (read below) is pure poetry:

If you want to believe that America is a governable country of informed citizens and not a nation of ignorant, Fox News-watching sheep, the single most depressing fact to come out of the Bush years is that vast numbers of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. According to a 2003 Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that. And in a poll taken last September, 33 percent of Americans still believed it — presumably the same 30-odd percent of Americans who will vote for a Republican even if he is running on a platform of sacrificing all the nation’s firstborn children to Beelzebub.

Call it the Dumbshit Factor, the Nobody Home Problem, the Absentee Ballots from Mars Issue. Whatever you call it, it’s the Republicans’ built-in advantage this fall.

That’s just frickin’ rich! ROFLMAO

Ho, hum. Of course, Shakespeare didn’t have to compete with action/adventure films and MP3.

PennSound featured resources.

Finally, listen to “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath:

Rather than say I agree, or disagree, with the whole post, I’d rather simply take a few snippets from the post – highlights, if you will – and respond to those. Some of them are rather harsh and striking. Whether they ring true or not, you can be the judge.

Silliman started off with this paragraph, a finely written thesis that set me up right away with anxious anticipation:

If you set a Google Alert for the name Robert Creeley, one thing you will discover fairly quickly is that there are quite a few blogs and a growing number of Flickr! pages that tend to post snippets of literature as daily words to live by, rather in the manner of homilies on page-a-day calendars. And that Robert Creeley is becoming something of a favorite for this kind of use. I have no idea how long these sites stay up, nor how many of the upwards of 180,000 websites that mention Creeley they might account for. But there do seem to be a couple of new ones every single day.

Creeley has become somewhat of a hero for many poets of my generation, and Silliman’s as well (I’d like to point out that Ron Silliman is a Baby Boomer; I’m one of the oldest of Generation X), though I think he may have had more direct influence on Silliman’s generation. Creeley was a seminal member of the Black Mountain Poets, who were heavily influenced by the Beats, and who in turn influenced later avant-garde movements including Silliman’s own L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School. I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of the avant-garde, though I believe Creeley to be among the best poets of that tradition.

Silliman wasted no time getting right to the meat of his argument, a skill that I admire. Why waste time? In his second paragraph he launched into the “setting of the stage” for what is to come. If paragraph one was “Lights!”, paragraph two was “Camera!” Get ready for action; it’s coming!

Lights, Camera, Silliman!
Here are the opening sentences of “Camera!”:

This is, of course, a traditional use of literature, not so far removed in its historical context from the sort of use implied in the idea that high school students memorizing & reciting poetry is a “good thing.” Both are a far cry from the conception of poetry as “news” advocated by William Carlos Williams, and are in fact profoundly pre- if not outright anti-modern (let alone postmodern) notions. They recreate a world prior to the invasion of technology (or, for that matter, electricity) into the home. They’re one step removed from using the Bible for these exact same purposes,

Nice jibe. In one breath he gut punches high school students, pre-modern humans (if you wish to call them that; maybe “Neanderthals” would be a better term?), and Bible quoters. For the record, I like quoting the Bible; to me, it’s one of the best reads of ancient literature still extant. Nevertheless, Silliman is quite clear that he doesn’t like the use of poetry as “daily words to live by.” Well, quite frankly, I can think of worse.

Ready for “Action!”? Here we go:

(Paragraph 3) I tend to think of such literary projects as the true flarf of our time, since both public recitation and the idea of poetry as homily seem deeply committed to the most sentimental notion of writing one could imagine.

Well, there you go. That could have been Silliman’s thesis statement right there, except that it was finding Creeley in a Google Alert that sparked it. Still, he has a point. As far as “literary” projects go, taking words of out context as a means to daily inspiration is rather sentimental. It’s the same kind of sentimentalism that the majority of Christians adhere to when they clip Bible verses to chains and hang them around their necks. It’s good to look down and be reminded of all the things we should be doing before we forget to do them. “Poetry as homily” as Silliman calls it is the secular version of this practice.

Reductio ad Hitlerum
A little further down Silliman pops a big boner and blackens the eye of his readers with a paragraph so striking in its imagery as well as its truth that many of his readers (as you can tell by their comments) totally missed the point:

Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Or, for that matter, how these same phenomena contributed also to Stalinist social realism. This isn’t a left/right question so much as one of totalitarian psychology per se. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. As one reader put it, “Reductio ad Hitlerum.” Only it isn’t.

Usually, when someone plays the Nazi card, they have a political agenda. A left-winger hurls it at a Republican, or a Christian fundamentalist screams it at a Yellow Dog. In this case, quintessential liberal Ron Silliman is using it as a statement of literary aesthetic aimed at those who would take literature out of its context to be used for other purposes. Aside from the fact that he misused the word “sentiment” for the more preferable “sentimentalism”, I think he’s right.

He isn’t saying, of course, that the Nazis were wont to lay around reciting pretty verses of love poetry to inspire them in their quest for the Ubermensch. Rather, what he is referring to is the underlying philosophy that led the Nazis to their political statements of superiority. What is underneath it all is the Romantic notion of art. The Romantic aesthetic, which Silliman is criticizing, is the bedrock of the Nazi weltenschauung.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was an aspiring novelist whose doctoral thesis was on 18th century Romantic drama. Hitler’s favorite classical composer was Richard Wagner, one of the best classical composers of the Romantic era who is well known for his fascist beliefs. Indeed, the entire Nazi philosophy is based on the idea, propounded by Wagner and his philosophical cousin Friedrich Nietzsche, of the leader as a man of vision and the superiority of The Will over intellect and reason. Likewise, the Romantic aesthetic is based on heightened emotion to create within the reader, or viewer, a cathartic experience rather than to appeal to reason and intellect as the Modernists attempted to do. This is what Silliman is criticizing when he says “Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.”

And, he’s correct.

True blue liberals know this. That’s why the extremists on that wing of American politics are so quick to judge their conservative counterparts when the latter approache that end of the philosophical spectrum. Unfortunately, they seldom see the same tendency in the extremists standing next to them. And this is why Silliman is so careful not to draw a line between political right/left and to instead draw the line at the aesthetic door. The Stalinists were just as guilty.

Can Poetry Save The World?
In his penultimate paragraph, Ron Silliman follows his loaded guilt trips on the psychological extremes with this final sentence:

But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.

This is a hard pill to swallow for some because poets are largely an “anti-war” crowd. I’ve said it before – I wouldn’t go to a peace rally organized by poets because it would generally consist of sentimentalism with regard to peace, love, and flower pots. There would be little, if any, intelligent discussion on when it’s right to fight, what makes a war just, and how a strong defense can curtail conflict and make the prospects of war less threatening. Instead, all one would hear is a bunch of ranting about those “Nazi-like warmongers.”

The problem with Iraq is not that it is war – it really isn’t. The problem, rather, (or one of it’s many problems) is that it is an unnecessary and unjust police-like action that could set a precedent for how future presidents, and Congresses, deal with foreign nations. This Administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policies have established our nation, both in the minds of our enemies and our friends around the world, as bullies and unenlightened militarists. If we can’t get what we want through diplomatic means then we’ll just bomb the hell out of them and take it by force. That’s not a principle upon which this nation was founded.

Politics aside, poetry cannot solve the problems of the world. We’ll do well if we don’t create any new ones. And when Silliman makes these sweeping statements that appear to be non-logical, one must understand them in terms of historical context and the underlying philosophical principles that this context stands upon.

So far, I’ve agreed with Silliman’s insights. It is uncanny, I know, but I was with him all the way up to his last paragraph in which he wrote:

The question I have isn’t about Frances Richey or Robert Creeley or Ron Padgett, who are being used for the agendas of others, so much as it is why are we seeing this resurgence, right now, of totalitarian framing on the part of NPR, PBS and the National Endowment of the Arts? And why do we see it burbling up like so many toadstools along the riverbanks of the Web?

Well, I can answer that last question – it’s because the Web in all of its “democratic” glory is the last bastion of sentimental freedom. Since anyone can get online and start a blog, everyone does. And the same level of sentiment that they bring to their daily lives will undoubtedly be taken to their online lives. People’s natures and characters don’t change on the Internet. If anything, they only shed themselves more light – like a drunk’s at an all-night party.

But I do take issue with the statement previous to that last. I don’t take issue with the philosophical underpinning, but rather the timing. Why “right now?” Well, quite frankly, I think Silliman has already answered his own question, in the previous eight paragraphs.

I think the “totalitarian reframing” may be a bit harsh, but remember that these programs, for the most part, were invented by Silliman’s generation. They are the outpouring of the Baby Boomer sentimentality that has followed in the wake of the New Deal and the Kennedy/Johnson years. It his Silliman’s own generation, and the one before it, that has been the most adamant about using the government and public funding to promote the arts. I am against this.

I believe that literature and the arts should be subject to the same market forces as all other products, but if you want to see the essence of authoritarian philosophy, one need not look beyond the hallowed walls of our own institutions, one need not glance across the great pond to a small nation with big ideas or a larger nation with a dwindling economy. If one wants to be confronted with totalitarian ideas, you don’t have to listen to the radio or turn on the TV, you can just drive by Pennsylvania Avenue on any day of the week during any month of any year and pay homage to the two legs of the body politic that hold up and support the arms of our warfare. And by arms I’m not referring to arsenals, but to literary artists who survive on grants and fellowships.