#the american politician should alway be met with skepticism as they are almost never for you

[imperialboomerang]

“From Algiers to Marcha: The Cuban Revolution Today” by Che Guevara. Published in 1965, sourced from the Che Reader 2005. You can read the archive in full here.

[jamr0ck83]

If Nobody is Racist, Then Who Exactly is Keeping Systemic Racism Going?

Everybody seems quick to insist that they’re not the ones who are racist.  So, then who is?  If it’s only the people you say, then why are we like this as a country?

Recently, someone with which I somewhat briefly attended grad school for education (And no, I don’t want to talk about what happened with that whole endeavor) posted the following image to their Facebook profile.

On its face, it seems like a completely reasonable and acceptable statement, and as such, it was generating some likes.  At the time I first saw it, I think there were 6.  But before I, too, submitted my approval of this image, I thought a little more about it, and its implications.  And I realized that I didn’t really agree with it.  I knew the person who posted it had no ill intentions, and I think they even found the image on the profile of another POC.  But the more I reread the sign featured, the more I was sure that it was not a true statement.  I knew that my stance was not going to garner nearly as many likes or other accolades as if I had posted a phrase like “Black Lives Matter”, which at this point, it seems like all reasonable people are able to agree that they do (or at least it’s the obvious appropriate thing to say in this moment).  I knew I might receive some pushback or criticism, and while that did admittedly make me nervous, I knew that I needed to speak up in this way and in this moment.  And I was willing to deal with whatever consequences came my way.  I decided it was that important for me to make a case for a diverging opinion.  So, I typed out the reply below and posted it.

I want to agree with this, but I'm not sure if I do. Please hear me out. It is entirely possible to be a Trump supporter and not be a person who has ever uttered a racial epithet or been otherwise explicitly or overtly racist. However, I do believe that there are degrees of racism, and if you're someone who has responded that "all lives matter" or "blue lives matter" when another person asserts that black lives matter, I would argue that you are on the spectrum of holding onto or entertaining some form of racist ideology. If you watched the video of George Floyd having his life choked out of him and then watched the footage of riots from that first night in Minneapolis and thought "It's a shame that guy died, but what they're doing now is uncalled for", this might indicate that you prioritize law and order (no matter how unjustly they are being enforced) over the life of a man whose only transgression was that he was black, and that, too, places you on that spectrum of racism. Racism isn't always waving a confederate flag and yelling at POCs to go back to where they came from. Sometimes, it's knowing that the politician you support will turn a blind eye to or even praise people who march around with tiki torches yelling, "Jews will not replace us" and wanting to vote for him anyway. Sometimes, it's hearing black people beg to have full access to the citizenship rights that are due them but deciding it's more important for you to vote for the guy who advocates for you to keep your semiautomatic rifle. If you are deciding that your wants (not needs) have priority over the humanity of POCs, then I would argue that you are on the spectrum of racism. And that demands some self-reflection. Complicity is part of what makes racism so destructive. What's the point of knowing better if you refuse to hold others accountable for doing better?

And then I waited.  I waited for blowback.  I waited for pushback.  I waited for agreement.  I waited for literally anything anybody might feel compelled to say.  But the only feedback I received was a single “like” whereas the post itself had garnered six additional since the posting of my comment.  So, people obviously disagreed with my stance but couldn’t bring themselves to make that known in any kind of direct fashion.  And frankly, that concerns me.  A great deal, in fact.  And there are a couple of reasons why.

Firstly, and this is something of which I was starting to become more aware even months before the death of George Floyd and these subsequent protests, white people are very quick to assert that they, themselves, are not racist.  They are also quick to assert that most people who look like them are not racist.  According to them, hardly anybody is really, truly racist.  But if that’s actually true, then why is this country such an absolute mess, and why have we been that way for centuries?  It’s as if the term “racist” is being reserved for truly egregious and over-the-top cases.  And everything else is just the way people are.  White people seem to have a very specific and narrow idea of what racism looks and sounds like, and that allows them to never truly have to consider whether they, themselves, might be racist.  Or if their family members are racist.  Or if the politicians they actively support are racist.  Under their definition of that word, it barely applies to anyone. And as a black woman who considers herself knowledgeable of both history and current affairs, I will confidently say that this is wrong.  

I have had people who cloak themselves under the banner of liberalism say some things to me that would make me raise an eyebrow if I knew at all how to move that particular facial muscle. And no, it’s not the times when the racial epithets and slurs are used that I feel compelled to do this.  It’s actually the times when I’ve made some sort of assertion about the impact of oppression on the lives of black people today, and I am met with sentiments such as “It’s not fair that we keep getting blamed for everything” or “You weren’t a slave, so the legacy of that institution doesn’t create any modern-day problems for you” or “Slavery ended over a hundred years ago, so why do you keep wanting to bring it up? Why can’t we all just move on?  Life is hard enough”. (That last phrase is a direct quote from a white woman who replied to something I said on Instagram regarding the role that white women have historically played in the role of oppressing black bodies.  She objected to my assertion that this is an issue that is rarely discussed, because dwelling on it would cause white women to feel discomfort, and that is in direct opposition to this silent societal code we all seem to follow that says that we must do whatever we can to prevent white women from feeling uncomfortable.  Ironically, she was shutting my argument down, because it made her uncomfortable.) Also, I’ve been told that the ways in which I have experienced oppression throughout my life just aren’t true, that I must be mistaken and that I am making something be all about race when it’s not about race at all.  And finally, I’ve been told the oldie but goodie “I don’t see color; I just see people”.

To the people that are brave enough to read this right now, I will submit to you that these statements and sentiments all reek of racism.  Every single one of them.  And every single person who uttered these phrases would have gone to the grave denying that they could be considered racist.  And sorry, people who made these statements, but this assertion by you would be wholly incorrect.  By so narrowly defining what racism is, we have given many people permission to absolve themselves from any responsibility for how it continues to thrive in American society. Nobody needs to look inward; nobody has to come to terms with any mindsets they might harbor that are truly problematic. And if nobody is willing to deal with anything or even acknowledge it, how are we going to change anything?  If we can’t even recognize and talk about what racism is, how are we going to put an end to it?  And the short answer is, we’re not.

My second concern is that, while it seemed like almost no one who saw my comment agreed with it, no one felt compelled to say anything, give any sort of reason for WHY they disagreed with it.  Maybe it’s because I’m black that they felt like they should just let me get on my soapbox and say what I needed to say, and that would be their form of allyship (even though at the end of the day, them doing this was just a dismissal of everything I said so they could go on with their lives, which kind of flies in the face of being an ally).  When these protests first started, I think many black people were reasonably skeptical about the degree to which we could rely on non-black allyship for the duration of however long we needed it.  We wondered if the outrage and fervor exhibited was sustainable.  And we wondered if white allies, specifically, were truly willing to endure discomfort if it would eventually lead to the advancement of our movement.  And I hate to say it, but I feel like the instance of this post about racism and who it applies to gave me substantial reason to believe that they are not.  The fact that there are people aligning themselves publicly to the BLM movement who are already seemingly unwilling to settle in their discomfort in order to be a more effective agent of change greatly concerns me.  It indicates to me that for some people (not all, but some) a lot of what’s going on right now is an exercise for them in anti-racism theater.  To put it simply and bluntly, they are not “in it to win it”, because “winning it” requires that they sacrifice more comfort than they are ready to do.  And while that’s certainly not everybody who calls themselves an ally, I worry that it represents a substantial number of people who we are currently relying on as allies who really aren’t.  And when they start drifting away from the protests and the posting of hashtags because this movement is no longer the fun, new thing we’re all doing, the people who remain are going to have to pick up the slack and work even harder to account for their absence.

To be clear, I’m not trying to knock anyone who wants to be an ally or make it seem like I want to nitpick at everyone and that there isn’t anything that any non-black ally can do that would truly please me.  If that’s what you are thinking now as you read this, I would implore you to reconsider. Because that perspective is one that stems directly from the notion that we are trying to hurt people’s feelings. It stems from this idea that it is our responsibility to make our white allies feel good about what they are doing right now so that they will continue to feel encouraged, or else they will walk away.  But this movement is not about pacifying white people’ feelings, whether they consider themselves to be allies or not.  We are not here to make you comfortable.  We are here to seek the justice that we are due.  We are here to seek the rights of citizenship that we have been routinely denied.  We are here to put an end to systemic racism.  Catering to allies’ feelings is nowhere on that list.  It’s not even a close fourth.  We need people to put their own individual feelings aside (discomfort, guilt, or whatever else) and help do what needs to be done.

And I realize this might be a harsh reality check, I do, because I know that many black Americans have spent a significant portion of their lives doing whatever they could to make white people comfortable.  During slavery, we performed their backbreaking hard labor so they wouldn’t have to but could still reap the financial benefits.  In modern times, many of us deliberately hold back a lot of ourselves in white people’s presence, because it’s always been an expectation that successful black people who have properly assimilated in the larger American society need to make sure that nothing we do resembles anything that might make them remember that we are not the same color.  For many black women, this means stifling their voices and hiding their frustrations, because nobody wants to deal with an angry black woman.  For many black men, this might mean being keenly and constantly aware of their physical stature and proximity to other people, because they don’t want anyone to find them intimidating in any way.  I think white people take these acts for granted because we’ve always done them, but they are not “just the way we are” or “just the way we like to be”.  They are a series of survival skills that we have been forced to adhere to, because to refrain from doing so would allow others to perceive as people they’d rather not deal with, if possible.  That means, we wouldn’t be the ones who get into the good school or get the good job or even get to keep our lives.

I have been deemed a quiet person my entire life, and while some of that is due to my genuine introverted nature, the majority is supplemented by the fact that, in most situations, if I am given the choice between being the quiet and unassuming black girl who nobody really has a problem with or the more vocal and passionate black woman that asserts herself but then has to deal with the consequences of nobody really wanting to be around her, I choose the former.  And I started choosing it at a very young age; I was definitely still in elementary school.  It starts that early.  Because we know that early.  We know that this country was not designed with us in mind unless it was to depend on our labor or our ability to entertain.  We know that the system is literally rigged against us in such ways that, if we were to inform white people of all those facets of oppression, they would accuse us of being paranoid.  Actually, that is precisely what happens when we try to tell people about our experiences of being black in America.  There are a lot of people out there who are masterful at gaslighting and being utterly dismissive of our struggles.  And that is a response that is literally for the sole purpose of driving the other person to the point of insanity.  So, for the most part, we stopped telling you things, because you weren’t really listening, anyway.  And we realized that, if we were going to make it in this country, then we really did have to work twice as hard, be twice as amiable in demeanor, and twice as resilient. Was that fair, for that to be put on us? Of course not.  But we shouldered that burden.  Because what was the alternative?  So, we did it, and we’ve done it fairly quietly for a very long time.

But we’re tired.  And we’re angry.  Because no matter what we do, people keep killing us for little to no reason and then justify it to say that we must have done something to deserve it. “Well, you should’ve known that wearing a hoodie makes you look threatening.”  “A toy gun could look a lot like a real gun, so that’s an honest mistake on the officer’s part.” “Oh, wait.  You were minding your own business sitting in your apartment when somebody shot you?  Well, were you really living beyond reproach and therefore entitled to keep your life? You sure you’ve never done anything wrong? Don’t you smoke weed sometimes?”  These are the ways people have justified our deaths.  And I would argue that all those statements and sentiments are couched in racism.  All of them. None of it is okay, and it all needs to end.  And we need everyone we can get to commit to joining us in this fight.  But if you’re really going to sit there and maintain the party line that racists are really few in number and that you, the non-black ally, don’t need to consider the ways in which you might harbor some racist ideology, then you’re not ready to be an ally.  And you can’t help us.  And you won’t help us.  Because as soon as things get a little less trendy or a little more uncomfortable, you will prioritize that over our humanity.  And that, in itself, is pretty damn racist.

[byshwetaupadhyay]

BEYOND LYRIC SHAME: BEN LERNER ON CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MAGGIE NELSON TWO FRESH INVESTIGATIONS OF THE PROSE POEM

Language poetry—and to my mind the best Language poetry was written in prose—was a machine that ran on difficulty. Reading a prose poem deploying what Ron Silliman called “the new sentence” was intended to be an exercise in frustration: the reader attempts to combine the sentences—which are grammatical—into meaningful paragraphs. The sentences are vague enough (“Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity”) that a logical relation between sentences will always almost seem possible. But the reader discovers as she goes that many successive sentences cannot be assimilated to a coherent paragraph, that paragraphs are organized arbitrarily (“quantitatively,” as opposed to around an idea), that no stable voice unifies the text, that her “will to integration”—her desire to produce higher orders of meaning that lead away from the words on the page into the realm of the signified (“a dematerializing motion”)—is repeatedly defeated.

The solicitation and then tactical frustration of the reader’s will to linguistic integration had an explicitly political object: it was advanced as a kind of deprogramming of bourgeois readerly assumptions. Such difficult prose would teach us that meaning is actively produced, never naturally given; that language is manipulable material, not a transparent window onto reality; that the “speaker” is a unifying fiction more than a stable subject; and so on. These deconstructive strategies were conceived not only as a critique of other writers—for example, lyric, “confessional” poets with their privileging of subjective experience and inwardness; mainstream novelists with their “optical realism”—but as an attack on existing social and political orders that depended upon the smooth functioning of dominant linguistic conventions.

Many of us learned something from the Language poets’ taking up of a constructivist vision of the self and its literature: their insistence on language as material, their combination of Russian formalism and various strains of French theory into a compelling reading of experimental modernism. (And many of us learned to appreciate certain texts associated with Language poetry in terms other than and often opposed to those provided by essays like Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” with its anti-expressive and anti-aesthetic bent). But who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?

Indeed, for many ambitious contemporary writers, disjunction has lost any obvious left political valence. Does the language of advertising and politicians, for instance, really depend on seamless integration? Transcripts of speeches by Bush or Palin or Trump would have been at home in In the American Tree. When aggressive ungrammaticality and non sequitur are fundamental to mainstream capitalist media (and to the rhetoric of an ascendant radical right), the new sentence appears more mimetic than defamiliarizing. In this context, “difficulty” as a valorized attribute of a textual strategy gives way to the difficulty of recovering the capacity for some mode of communication, of intersubjectivity, in light of the insistence of Language poets (and others) on the social constructedness of self and the irreducible conventional representation.

Language poetry’s notion of textual difficulty as a weapon in class warfare hasn’t aged well, but the force of its critique of what is typically referred to as “the lyric I” has endured in what Gillian White has recently called a diffuse and lingering “lyric shame”—a sense, now often uncritically assumed, that modes of writing and reading identified as lyric are embarrassingly egotistical and politically backward. White’s work seeks, among other things, to explore how “the ‘lyric’ tradition against which an avant-garde anti-lyricism has posited itself . . . never existed in the first place” and to reevaluate poems and poets often dismissed cursorily as instances of a bad lyric expressivity. She also seeks to refocus our attention on lyric as a reading practice, as a way of “projecting subjectivity onto poems,” emphasizing how debates about the status of lyric poetry are in fact organized around a “missing lyric object”: an ideal—that is, unreal—poem posited by the readerly assumptions of both defenders and detractors of lyric confessionalism.

“Who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?”

It’s against the backdrop that I’m describing that I read important early 21st-century works by poets such as Juliana Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs), Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and, very recently, Citizen: An American Lyric), and Maggie Nelson (Bluets). I mean that these very different writers have difficulty with the kind of difficulty celebrated by Language poets in particular and the historical avant-garde in general. Their books are purposefully accessible works that nevertheless seek to acknowledge the status of language as medium and the self as socially enmeshed. I read Rankine and Nelson’s works of prose poetry in particular as occupying the space where the no-longer-new sentence was; they are instances of a consciously post-avant-garde writing that refuses—without in any sense being simple—to advance formal difficulty as a mode of resistance, revolution, or pedagogy. I will also try to suggest how they operate knowingly within—but without succumbing to—a post–Language poetry environment of lyric shame or at the very least suspicion.

I call Rankine and Nelson’s books works of “prose poetry,” and they are certainly often taken up as such, but their generic status is by no means settled. Both writers—as with many Language poets—invite us to read prose as a form of poetry even as they trouble such distinctions. Rankine’s books are indexed as “Essay/Poetry” and Bluets is indexed as “Essay/Literature.” Bluets is published, however, by Wave Books, a publisher devoted entirely to poetry. Rankine’s two recent books are both subtitled “An American Lyric,” begging the question of how a generic marker traditionally understood as denoting short, musical, and expressive verse can be transposed into long, often tonally flat books written largely in prose. On an obvious but important level, I think the deployment of the sentence and paragraph under the sign of poetry, the book-length nature of the works in question, and the acknowledgment of the lyric as a problem (and central problematic) help situate these works in relation to the new sentence, even if that’s by no means the only way to read them.

Both Bluets and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely open with a mixture of detachment and emotional intensity that simultaneously evokes and complicates the status of the “lyric I.” In the first numbered paragraph of Bluets, quoted above, a language of impersonal philosophical skepticism—the “suppose,” the Tractatus-like numbering, the subjunctive—interacts with an emotional vocabulary and experiential detail. The italics also introduce the possibility of multiple voices, or at least two distinct temporalities of writing, undermining the assumption of univocality and spokenness conventionally associated with the lyric. “As though it were a confession”; “it became somehow personal”: two terms associated with lyric and its shame are both “spoken” and qualified at the outset of the book—a book that will go on to be powerfully confessional and personal indeed. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely opens with a related if distinct method of lyric evocation and complication, flatly describing what we might call the missing object of elegy:

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? We asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Throughout Don’t Let Me Lonely the traditional lyric attributes of emotional immediacy and intensity are replaced with the problem of a kind of contemporary anesthesia—the repression of the reality of death, the leveling of tragedy into another kind of infotainment in a culture of spectacle, the mediation of experience by technologies ranging from television to pharmaceuticals. The problem of the deadening of feeling—the negative image of traditional lyric content—finds its formal correlative in a flat prose in which verse can appear only in citation or paratext, for example, quotations from Celan embedded in the prose, a Dickinson poem reproduced in the notes. Instead of imagining difficult prose as a technology for deconstructing the self, a highly linear and plainspoken account of the problem of the “I” is offered as Rankine attempts to work her way out of social despair: “If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is ‘I’ even me or am ‘I’ a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?”

Rankine forgoes difficulty as a strategy for disrupting subjectivity in order to acknowledge the difficulty of calibrating a responsible self socially. We could say that the anti-lyricism of Language poetry is gestured toward in the banishment of the traditional trappings of the lyric—verse itself, musicality, intense personal expression (what Rankine often confesses is a sense of inward emptiness)—but here these lyric strategies are less willfully rejected than made to feel unavailable. And the felt unavailability of the lyric is a result of Rankine’s explicit invitation to read her markedly nonlyric materials (essayistic and often flat prose) as lyric—to invite us to think of lyric as a reading practice as much as a writing practice in which the ostensibly “shameful” attributes of the mode (e.g., an egotistical, asocial inwardness) are replaced by a collaborative effort on the part of reader and writer to overcome “loneliness.”

Bluets explores many of these concerns with related if ultimately distinct means:

70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Nelson’s “blue bower” evokes not only the actual bird, renowned for how the males construct and decorate “bowers” to attract mates, but also the traditional association of lyric with a metaphorics of birds and birdsong. It further evokes the Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a shamelessly lyric poet if there ever was one) painting of that name, as well as his poem with the received title “The Song of the Bower.” To build a “blue bower” out of “propositions” is to cross a lyric and anti-lyric project in the space of prose, implicating and complicating both. It is hard to find dignity in the privacy of the aestheticized bower—indeed, one might be ashamed of such inwardness—and one of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.

The color blue functions as the organizing metaphor for both the possibility of intersubjectivity (“15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.”) and its limits (“105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no ‘color thermometers.’ How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver.”). Nelson’s accumulating “propositions” do not integrate into a “bower,” but the relation between sentences and sections has little in common with new-sentence disjunction. As in Rankine’s prose poetry, difficulty here is not deployed as a political/poetical tactic irrupting within the norms of prose; instead, the difficulty of finding a defensible, dignified ground for intersubjectivity is narrated explicitly.

“One of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.”

The shift from the tactical deconstruction of ostensibly natural narrative or lyric unities to the effort to reconstruct them with a difference is legible in part because Bluets foregrounds its relation to avant-garde prose poetry. Nelson’s use of Wittgenstein as muse and model, for instance, invites us to position her work relative to new sentence experiments. Silliman not only cited the Philosophical Investigations in “The New Sentence” as an important precedent, but Silliman’s own The Chinese Notebook models the tone and structure of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing. More generally, the work of Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) and others has made clear how the philosopher’s inquiries into language as a form of social practice—and his own peculiar linguistic operations—have been central to scores of experimental (“difficult”) writers. If Nelson weren’t also the author of volumes of verse, and if Wave weren’t the publisher of Bluets, my experience of context and thus text would be different: those facts function as a quieter version of Rankine’s subtitle, inviting—or at the very least enabling—us to think of poetry as a reading practice as much as a writing practice, and to experience verse techniques as withheld or unavailable in Bluets instead of as merely forgone or forsworn.

As in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, in Bluets, actual verse is exiled to the space of citation: William Carlos Williams, Lorine Neideker, and Lord Byron, among many others, are quoted; line breaks are replaced with slashes. Indeed, Nelson doesn’t have much faith in the effects of actual poems: “12. And please don’t talk to me about ‘things as they are’ being changed upon any ‘blue guitar.’ What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.” Or: “For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all” (proposition 183). And yet, the relegation of verse to the virtual space of citation lends it a certain power, displaying it while also insisting that it’s nearly out of reach. This allows Nelson’s prose to be haunted by the abstract possibility of a poetry it can’t actualize, somewhat like the Mallarméan fantasy she at one point describes: “For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.” Moreover, Bluets—taking its cue (and lifting many of its locutions) from Wittgenstein’s attacks on Goethe’s Theory of Colors—often refers to outmoded regimes of knowledge or technologies (e.g., the 18th-century “cyanometer,” which sought to measure the blue of the sky). One begins to wonder if verse—lyric poetry in particular—is another set of defunct measures, outmoded conventions for communicating experience.

Perhaps there is a sense for Nelson (and Rankine) in which poetry isn’t difficult—it’s impossible. There is faith neither in poetry’s power of imaginative redescription (the blue guitar) nor in its practical effects as a technology of intervening in history (“I do not think that writing changes very much”). The subject isn’t a dominant bourgeois fiction of inwardness and univocality in need of deconstruction via new sentence difficulty but an avowedly social and linguistic entity deployed over time in the space of writing; expression itself must be constructed, and that process is narrated clearly in a prose that, when read as poetry, makes actual verse present as a loss. Although I believe these authors use the prose poem and the felt absence of verse in fresh and specific ways, I am not suggesting that the logic I’m describing is exactly new. Stephen Fredman and others have suggested that the prose poem arises as a form during periods in which there is a crisis of confidence in verse strategies, and the notion of the lyric being felt as a loss as it becomes prose is at least as old as Walter Benjamin. Here my limited goal is to indicate a few specific ways the new sentence valorization of difficulty can become a frame for a specific kind of accessibility for two important contemporary poets who write primarily in prose.

One can’t pretend to contextualize these books without stating explicitly that part of the contemporary dissatisfaction with attacks on narrative and voice as political strategies is that they can serve to mask what is essentially a white male universalism. The rejection of linguistic integration and anti-expressionist attacks on the lyric subject have recently been described by Cathy Park Hong as a symptom of the avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness,”

its specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.

In a related vein, Nelson’s own work as a critic has been attuned to how “the male Language writers’ occasionally monomaniacal focus on warring economic systems” was both challenged and expanded by women writers inside and outside of the Language movement itself. In ways I haven’t had the space to explore here, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Bluets are engaged with demonstrating how the uncritical acceptance of voice and narrative conventions as well as their “wholesale” disavowal by certain avant-garde writers can preserve racist and sexist ideologies. This is by now an old difficulty, echoing the even older modernism/realism debate—how the emancipatory potential of poststructuralist strategies quickly cools into a conservatism (or worse) like the one Cathy Park Hong describes. Out of this abiding difficulty more complex, accessible prose poetry is likely to arise. How might verse return? And when and why?

[nataromanovas-blog]

Never Enough Time (Moscow, 1982)

@wintersoldier-weatheredpatriot

It didn’t look like much. A dusty jewel among all the other jewelry in the open drawer of the vanity. And she hadn’t been trained to be a looter. But something about the gem called to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Natalia,” the Soldier said. He’d already cleaned and hidden his weapon, and was waiting impatiently for her by the door, looking deadly with tactical uniform and metal arm. He was always impatient, and with good reason. They never had enough time--

Time--

“Time,” she murmured quietly, and touched the gem.

-- and she was lying on her back on a hard mattress, the blankets piled carelessly around her body, staring at the Soldier sleeping beside her. When he slept, the line between his brows softened and the corners of his mouth relaxed. He looked almost boyish, and tired, and sad, and Natalia ached for the secrets of that grave look, secrets that the Red Room had hidden from them both. Who had he been, as a boy?

-- and she was in a street, in a place she didn’t know, that smelled of trash and car fumes and waste, and two boys hurtled down an alleyway, one blonde and one brown-haired, shouting with excitement. They nearly crashed into her. “Sorry!” the brown-haired one, in pursuit, cried over his shoulder on his way past, and Natalia felt her heart twist with the inexplicable knowledge that this was him, her Soldier.

-- and then she was lying in rocky sand, her heart beating sluggishly and her breath catching in her lungs, as a man stood over her and his shadow blotted out the sun, but she knew who it was without needing to see his face, and she knew somehow also that she was bleeding into the sand. 

-- and she saw him across a room, turning away -- in a cryo-tank, his metal hand pressed against the glass -- in front of her, no recognition in his eyes.

--  and she was sitting across from him at a table in a restaurant. A nice restaurant. He was wearing a suit and the lines around his eyes looked a little more worn, and his mouth seemed more like he smiled. He was holding his hand with both of hers. She was wearing a dress that felt silky against her skin, and (she knew) his favorite set of underwear, and she was older. Much older.

“It feels like we never have enough time to ourselves, these days,” he was saying.

She laughed. “You know it’s more than we used to get. And it makes our dates even more special.”

“I know,” he said. “But I want--” He cut himself off and shook his head, laughing. Natalia was enthralled. She’d never seen him laugh like that before, so easy and free. Then he sobered up again. “Listen, Natalia. I want... to spend my life with you. Whatever that might be like. Whatever happens.” He let go of her hand with one of his so that he could reach into his jacket and pull something from his pocket. A ring box, she knew before he opened it. The ring was silver, with a blue sapphire in the center. He held it out to her, like he was offering his heart in his hands. “Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” he said in Russian, with that same slight American accent she’d caught the first time they’d met. “Will you marry--”

--

“Natalia!”

She came back to herself with tear-filled eyes and a lump in her throat, to find the Soldier in front of her, his hand around her wrist. She felt older than her twenty-two years, like she’d been gone for ages, and exhausted, like she’d slogged up a hill in mud or snow. It was similar to how she’d felt when Rodchenko had worked on her in the past, but less... sinister. Something strange had happened, but nothing was wrong.

“Natalia,” the Soldier said, his voice softer as he saw the tears in her eyes. “Are you hurt?” He glanced at the jewelry she’d been touching. “Do you... want one?”

She wanted a silver ring with a dark blue sapphire in it. “No,” Natalia said out loud and had to laugh because he could always make her feel better. “No, my darling. Our target is dead. Let’s go.”

The Soldier gave her a skeptical look, clearly deciding whether he should try to continue this conversation. But the longer they stayed in this bedroom, the more dangerous the situation became; the more likely they were to be discovered by one of the politician’s bodyguards.

A ring, Natalia thought, a little giddy, as they rappelled out the window and into an alleyway below, then, lightfooted, made their way to the rendezvous point. A ring with a sapphire. With a certainty she didn’t often feel, she knew it would happen, but not when or where. One day. Somewhere.

They just had to make it that far.

[itsfinancethings]

October 22, 2019 at 07:00AM

I trust Bill Kristol. Not his political opinions, which are nuts. The guy wants to bomb Iran. No, I trust Bill Kristol’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism. He is the very model of a modern major elite: soft-spoken and chipper, with a default half smile that implies he’s looking at a world as if it were a beautiful painting that’s not quite centered on the wall. There are no photos from any period of Bill Kristol’s life where he does not look old.

Bill’s dad was Irving Kristol, a member of a group of writers redundantly called the New York Intellectuals, making Bill a second generation Intellectual Elite member. Bill spent more time at Harvard than John Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude in three years, got a PhD in history, and taught political philosophy there. Harvard is where Bill met his wife, who later got a PhD in classical philology. Do you know how hard it is for a Republican to get a girlfriend at an Ivy League school?

Bill’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism makes him the perfect Founding Father of the new political party that I want to create. The old parties are dying, the ones who argued over how much socialism you dipped into my capitalism. They’re being replaced in each country by parties representing populists versus parties who believe in globalism. Brexit has split the Conservatives. The McCain/Romney followers have left the Trumpists. In Italy, the Five Star Movement formed a government with the League; in Greece, Syriza aligned with Independent Greeks. In France, the left and right jointly protested gas taxes to reduce carbon emissions by burning cars in Paris while they wore yellow vests, because the French like to stay safe in traffic even when rioting. These groups have a thousand differences but one thing in common: a hatred of the Intellectual Elite.

So I want to form a new party. In the Intellectual Elite party, conservatives will sit at a table with liberals, saying grace over meals of cold-pressed juice.

Bill is already starting to work on this, in exactly the way I hoped he would: he’s joined a secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite. Even better, he is a member of two secretive, elitist organizations that do this. Patriots and Pragmatists consists of a mix of about fifty Republicans and Democrats who meet a few times a year. One conference was held at Sausalito’s Cavallo Point, a resort built on a former army base that has rooms that were former officers’s residences and a spa offering “energy work,” thereby pleasing and annoying both left and right. The group has yet to talk about forming a new political party, instead focusing on ways to tout democratic ideals. This sounds lazy to me. I fear they spend too much time in conference rooms and not enough time doing energy work.

In case Patriots and Pragmatists fails, the second secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite that Bill belongs to has a more direct plan: Since the 2016 election, Bill and more than one hundred other Intellectual Elite Republicans meet every other week to figure out how to regain control of their party. This organization also has a great name: the Meeting of the Concerned. “Concerned is a euphemism. It’s the Meeting of the Freaked Out,” says member Brink Lindsey. To my chagrin, they do not drink brandy in a wood-paneled offices. “The aesthetics match the mood. We have a windowless conference room with various breakfast items,” says Brink about the basement offices of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. I have never heard a term as sad as “various breakfast items.” Even the Holiday Inn calls them “hot and fresh fare.”

I am not allowed to attend the Meeting of the Concerned since some members are worried that I’ll reveal their names and Republicans will expunge them from the party, thereby decreasing their power to change it. The group is so secretive that CNN has never covered it despite the fact that their meetings are in the same building as CNN’s DC headquarters.

So I reproduced a meeting. I found out who the members were, called them while I ate a tiny muffin and cereal from one of those single-serving boxes you can pour milk into, and started the conversation by saying, “Can you believe what Trump did today?”

The first thing I learned in my pretend basement conference room was that members of the Meeting of the Concerned do not agree on how to handle populists. The two competing philosophies are change and fight: Is it better for the Intellectual Elite to study the populists’ criticisms and adjust our policies, or to shout at them for being racist idiots?

Every one of my liberal friends has chosen fight. They cheered the DC restaurant that kicked out Sarah Huckabee Sanders for working as Trump’s press secretary.

The Intellectual Elite didn’t used to embrace fight. Michelle Obama’s directive from her 2016 Democratic convention speech was “When they go low, we go high.” But two years later, former Obama attorney general Eric Holder told a crowd, “When they go low, we kick them.” Democratic representative Maxine Waters held a rally in Los Angeles that was 10 miles from my house and 1.8 miles from a Whole Foods, in which she said, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

These attacks seem like the oppressed fighting back against their oppressors, but they’re actually skirmishes in the war between two elites: The ones who care about ideas and the ones who care about money.

The restaurant yellers aren’t ethnic minorities. This is all rich-white-on-rich-white violence. More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree. Progressive activists are twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, three times more likely to have gone to grad school, and way more likely to be white. Only 3 percent of progressive activists are black. Progressive activists are me and my friends. We are the ones most scared about the Trumpists because they are coming to replace us.

Fear is not a good reason to surrender to the gut instinct to fight. The most important thing we elite can do is act elite. Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, the swoopy haired Concerned member, is frustrated by seeing politicians host town hall meetings that devolve into mob shouting. “Having respect for Congress as an institution should be part of a ‘small c’ conservative culture. You put your hand on your heart when you salute the flag, you wear a suit to church, and you wear a suit when you talk to someone from Congress,” he says. “If you honestly thought you had a solution, would you come to a town hall unshaven in a T-shirt to talk to a member of Congress? I don’t think these people believe this is how political change happens. They just want to shout and feel good.”

Bill Kristol feels the same frustration. “The appeal to expertise doesn’t work, obviously. The appeals to history and common sense don’t work. Maybe modern liberal skepticism and rational argument has always been a little bit more tenuous than you think. People think, ‘That kind of society doesn’t do much for me and is kind of boring,’” he says. “I went to a couple of the Trump rallies in 2016 and there’s a lot of ‘This is a lot more fun than a boring political speech.’ It’s a combination of anger and entertainment.”

I want to make a plea solely to my fellow Intellectual Elite, largely because you’re the only ones who make it to the end of an article.

Our new party needs to embrace Humble Elitism. We don’t have a choice. Because an angry war is a war that populists will win.

In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis under the advice of his chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who undoubtedly regrets it. “We have two cultures: the cultural elite and the rest of us,” Quayle said. “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.” It is hard to admit that the man who could not spell potato and thought it was likely that we could breathe on Mars understood something, but he did.

The fuel of populism is rage at those who claim higher status. To extinguish the populists’ fire, we have to stop dismissing them as deplorable, racist, ignorant, unsophisticated, sexist, and I’m going to stop here in case someone tweets this sentence, which will impede my strategy. We have to bite our lips, feel their pain, and do that thing where you slowly nod while squinting.

I fail when I’m smug. The thing I’ve been most smug about is not listening to decades of people telling me I’m smug. I was so young when people started calling me smug that they used the word precocious, which means “smug child.” My smugness is the least elite part of me. It’s insecurity stemming from yearning to be in The Loop. It’s tribal—a way to exclude others by drawing a circle around ourselves. It also fails our beloved scientific method because it almost never works. The only people who have ever been convinced by smugness are shoppers at Whole Foods.

We have to stop introducing ourselves by listing our jobs, our secret organizations, and what college we attended, which I am refraining from doing right here, although I would love for you to look it up on Wikipedia, which I should not mention that I’m listed on.

We need to stop acting as if our electric cars, our organic food, and our fair-trade, single-origin coffee make us more evolved humans, when they simply make us poorer humans. We need to stop lecturing West Virginians about the obvious inanity of remaining in the coal industry when we are working in the journalism industry.

Humility is not much of an ask. Part of embracing facts, logic, and history is knowing that we will sometimes be wrong. Galileo was wrong about tides. Albert Einstein was wrong about quantum physics. I was wrong about smugness. The point is: I’m exactly like Galileo and Einstein. This smugness thing is going to be tough to overcome. But if anyone can do it, it’s us. Seriously, this is not going to be easy.

Adapted from I Am Forming A New Political Party For Smug Elites Like Me by Joel Stein (Grand Central Publishing).