Steven Manuel: I’m aware the audience is rapidly growing, but for those unfamiliar, or who have perhaps only a passing knowledge, I wonder if you could explain the impetus behind your decision to start writing/publishing Dispatches from the Poetry Wars—the forces you set it up in opposition to, what ancestral derivations were revived, what possible “summons” were answered in coming to this particular work. The editorial stance is distinctive from most other “poetry sites.” I think of receiving things in the mail from Poetry magazine over the years—bookmark subscription request sort of things with quotes from Ezra Pound on them. But Pound wouldn’t touch Poetry these days (or at least he’d feel a bit contaminated after doing so). Dispatches, as I came to it some time ago, has a different feel.
Michael Boughn: Dispatches prides itself on being the only truly Emersonian poetry website in existence, based on the fact that it began on what Emerson called a whim. The provocation was a review of Robert Creeley’s letters on the blog site of a well-known Creative Writer. The CW started his piece by pointing out that many of Bob’s letters had been written during the “Poetry Wars” of the 60s. Arguing that the poetry wars are over, he then went on to attack Bob for being angry and attributed his anger to petty jealousy over other writers’ success, completely diminishing him. Knowing Bob as I did, and understanding the profound existential depths of his anger, I immediately understood that the review was a covert operation in the poetry wars. The poetry wars never ended. And the people who cry the loudest about how the poetry wars are over are the ones most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions.
Hey, I thought, why don’t I start a website called Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and go after these glib sons of bitches who pursue the poetry wars by denying they exist. I often throw out weird ideas. Sometimes they catch, mostly they don’t. This one did.
I mentioned this to a group of people I was in a regular email exchange with, all of whom were brought together by a deep respect for the work of Charles Olson—Ammiel Alcalay, Andre Spears, Ben Hollander, and Kent Johnson—and Kent leapt on the idea with his remarkable and indefatigable energy, enthusiasm, and intelligence. And we were off.
Kent and I were a logical match. We had both dedicated our misspent youth to working with radical political groups—Kent with Trotskyists, me with Maoists. He had taught Nicaraguan peasants to read in the battlefields of Reagan’s (and Regan’s) Central American wars; I had spent eighteen years working and organizing in factories and warehouses—and that spirit was still with us. Both of us found the professionalization of poetry that had gone on since the 80s to be not just disgusting, but profoundly threatening in a—dare I say—spiritual way. We share the sense of poetry’s importance as a unique mode of knowing, a transformative gnosis. And we could say that—we could say whatever we wanted, whatever we thought, because neither of us wanted anything the Machine had to offer: prizes, jobs, grants, fame and fortune (poetry version)—we didn’t want any of it. So we were fated for this.
We want to show young poets that you can take on the system with whatever resources you have at hand. We saw this as the legacy of the mimeo revolution of the 50s and 60s—Floating Bear, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Open Space, and J, and so many others—and magazines from the 80s and 90s, like Ed Dorn’s Rolling Stock, Jack Clarke’s intent. – a letter of talk, thinking, and document, and Ken Warren’s House Organ, up until more recently. Sites of resistance, they convened or made a space for communities of the imagination—Robin Blaser’s Image-Nation. We saw them in the light of Hakim Bey’s idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones, as the seeds of a new possibility of being-together.
Instead of a mimeo machine, though, we had a potentially far more powerful technology in terms of reach. We started the whole thing for about twenty bucks. A young student looking for experience with web design made the first iteration. It was clunky, but it worked, cost next to nothing, and the clunkiness was part of its charm. That was in April 2016. We got less clunky as more people began to pay attention.
Kent Johnson: Those Poetry Foundation bookmarks with Pound quotes on them, how perfect… Can you imagine anyone more adept and fierce in the poetry wars than Ol’ Ez? $200 million to Poetry magazine from an eccentric heiress, thanks to Prozac and Viagra, and there he is, poached, on a capital-campaign bookmark. Where’s Aristophanes when you need him?
Mike recounts how Dispatches from the Poetry Wars originated with a defense by him of Creeley, one of his mentors and friends, in response to a calculated assault on Creeley’s reputation, conducted by an academic player in the “post-avant” field.
But it’s instructive to recall how Creeley himself participated in the Poetry Wars in strategic ways. Not just in the insurgent, transformational assault by the New American Poetry on the hegemony of late-stage New Criticism, but during the later 80s/early 90s too. Most notably when he turned against the remaining representatives of the vibrant Olson tradition at Buffalo, in favor of his new-found fans (they would prove to be of the fair-weather kind) in the upstart Language phalanx—leading figures of which had embarked on a species of tactical coup at SUNY/Buffalo. Mike himself, in one of his major essays, “Poetics’ Bodies: Charles Olson and Some Poetry Wars,” cuts Creeley little slack on his sad connivance in the LangPo campaign against Olson’s legacy.
The rest is history, as they say. And it’s a delicious, dramatic irony, really, that the academic critic who inadvertently (by way of belittling Creeley) helped spark the idea of Dispatches, arguably wouldn’t even be who or where he is in his professional poetry career, if it hadn’t been for that paradoxical pivot by Olson’s old comrade and collaborator, at a crucial juncture of the recent Poetry Wars.
I raise the curiosity of all that to suggest that the long historical matter of the “Poetry Wars” is in no way a straightforward, zero-sum affair; it is, rather, the complex, contradictory dialectic of how things actually move and become in the literary field. And to identify that dialectical reality, and situate one’s critique within its dynamical rush, makes one something of an enemy, immediately, of those who stand to gain from the suppression of its uncomfortable truth. A truth that we are all irremediably inside, whether we like it or not, once we seriously enter poetry. Within it, poets battle and negotiate for the individual and collective positions they seek, and their poetics, in final instance, are never autonomous from the impulses, however cloaked, of that seeking. Be they “insiders,” “outsiders,” or something in between.
Just one more thing, also working off Mike’s opening remarks: Ammiel Alcalay and Andre Spears have, from the start, been core Executive Editors to DPW, and not least by way of keen counsel and inspiration. The late Ben Hollander was another indispensable spirit, early on. We miss him. Most recently, the scholar-poets Sharon Thesen and Miriam Nichols, from Canada, and Margie Cronin, from Australia, have joined Andre and Ammiel as Executive Editors. Our expanding list of Contributing Editors, now at over thirty well-known poets and critics (see our “Dispatches Crew“), rivals that of any poetry journal or site in operation. Add our retro-snazzy website to the mix, along with a regular readership of unique visitors that is now in the thousands every month—and rapidly growing—and you can feel the motor starting to hum.
SM: “The poetry wars never ended. And the people who cried the loudest about how the poetry wars are over are the ones most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions.”
Those two sentences brought to mind some of the more specious (and malevolent) political arguments that have been made in the past few decades: the fight against capital is over (or a Beneficent Capital has arrived); a new global ordering of the world, operated primarily through US–centered power, has succeeded in “getting past” the old traumas of colonialism and imperialism; we have arrived at an ever-softening mode of economic growth—labor movements, political organizations are no longer needed. These arguments are put forth by academics, “policy advisers,” political theorists; adopted by those more directly responsible for neoliberal agendas; and, on a more half-witted level, parroted by those in the mainstream press. Those “most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions”—in politics, too, this is the case: the denial of a problem, or even of an agonistic ground. Of course, anyone who lives outside this bubble—who works for subsistence wages, lives homeless, lives in the third world, etc.—knows these “theories” are bullshit (the sight in these “theories,” taking it at the root, is simply not there when you have eyes to look around).
The struggle against these intellectual strains has been taken up by groups working at times (especially pre-Internet) in near total isolation: small cells protesting this war or that war; anti-racist/anti-fascist groups; a few journalists doing diligent work to document state crimes. The journals you mention as the line you look to—Floating Bear, Fuck You, etc.—seem to have done similar work, and some of them in “both” areas (politics and poetry—which Baraka, Olson, etc., would collapse into one field); even something like The Jargon Society, which would seem more in the grain of an aesthete’s press—really has behind it traditions such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, the various little gay publications here and there, and so is also political.
So, how do you see politics and poetry operating in Dispatches?
KJ: Well, we could say there is the politics of poetry, and then the poetry of politics. They can manifest differently, but they are also intimately connected. Often, both unfold simultaneously and symbiotically. They can sometimes be hard to distinguish.
But let me offer a few random thoughts, first, on the politics of poetry, which DPW is evidently concerned with, in significant ways.
Nearly everyone is familiar with Clausewitz’s chestnut aphorism, that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Similarly, we could say that the poetry wars are the continuation of cultural politics by other means. Now, many well-intentioned poets like to pretend that they stand outside, or levitate above, the politics of the field. But poetic politics is the material pond that poets swim in; it is all around and unavoidable. Species of poets literally evolve within its murky and treacherous waters. To go back to Creeley, and to adjust a famous maxim of his (though he actually stole it, unattributed, from Wallace Stevens): Both the form and content of poems proper are never more, historically speaking, than extensions of the politics of the poetic field.
Not that these politics consistently result in pitched battles. In normal times, the ruling elites of culture conduct their business with little challenge or disruption.
MB: That’s when they go on loudest about how the poetry wars “have faded into history”—the poetry wars are over.
KJ: Yes, usually most everyone seems fairly content with the power of the official parties and the tacit agreements of détente or polite dissent between them. But, by and by, fissures do develop, hypocrisy and arrogance begin to ooze through. Resistance builds, laying bare that the cultural power that seemed beyond challenge is really without robes—that it is contingent, cowardly, and banal, ready to employ unbridled symbolic violence, in its death throes, against its “impolite” critics. And this, in turn, quickly exposes a simple truth: The poetry wars were always already there, even if not so starkly visible as they become in moments of crisis, when the top blows off and configurations of influence and position begin to shift. Which is to say that the poetry wars are not provoked by malcontents with chips on their shoulders; the poetry wars, rather, are the permanent MO of those who have a cultural station of advantage to uphold. Eventually, those with position and authority get overtaken by the accretion of pushback, and little by little they are pulled out of the Power Silence shell from which they rule. And then things start to get really messy and interesting. In US poetry, right now, we are perhaps seeing the first glimmers of such a denouement.
The corruption of the poetry field via ubiquitous and unembarrassed careerism, the strategic infiltrations of state and private capital into its operations, and the never-before-seen levels of institutional and bureaucratic venality, practiced by poetry-pimps with benefits (as evidenced by powerful outfits like the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, or PennSound, say—virtual literary cartels flush with cash and demonstrably entwined with corporate and state interests) is one symptom, among many. The unabashed zeal with which poets cozy up—whether white or of color, mainstream or avant, right or left—to these sites of favor and power would be another symptom.
MB: It’s a “profession,” a “career.” It’s all about personal advancement. None of them give a shit about poetry. Have you seen that article “How Poetry Came to Matter Again” in the recent Atlantic? It’s not about poetry. Not a word about poetry. It’s all about career strategies.
KJ: In counterreaction, the phenomenon of DPW and its rapidly growing audience would be a symptom of resistance to the above general order of things.
We’re overdue for something fairly big. Starting with the Transcendentalists and Whitman, system-jarring poetry wars seem to happen once every fifty years or so in American lit. The last great, open poetry war was in the 50s and 60s. Much changed because of it. But much remained the same, too. The faces were altered, but the power channels continued along similar—arguably even more insidious—flows. (There are, in the interregnums, smaller, more localized battles taking place all the time: a significant one occurred in the late 70s and 80s, with the erstwhile “avant-garde” rebels quickly pacified and offered mandarin positions as the “opposition” in the parliament. They are now, of course, the most adroit defenders of the official order of things.)
Anyway, the above touches on the topic of the politics of poetry. As I said, there’s the entwined matter of the poetry of politics, which Dispatches seeks to push forward, too, as any of our readers knows. Times are urgent, and insofar as poetry may have a small, perhaps crucial say, we are in need of new Whitmans, Rukeysers, Vallejos, Mayakovskys, Ginsbergs, Lordes, Barakas, Olsons…
MB: Olson was prescient in so many ways, but never more so than at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. Olson saw how a touch of fame and attention had already started to corrupt the resistance movement known as the New American Poetry and channel it into institutional forms that would kill its spirit. The conference was a loud announcement of that. Everything organized according to the Poetry Reading Rules of Order. He was having none of it. How you see his performance has become a touchstone for where you stand on these questions. Poetry on one side, careerism on the other. I won’t name names, but you know who they are—the people who call Olson a shipwreck while they compose perfect little lyrics carefully designed to impress their friends and acquaintances on the Pulitzer Prize poetry committee.
The happening that Olson staged—and trust me, he knew exactly what he was doing—broke every rule of conference etiquette in the book. He got drunk in front of the audience. He wouldn’t read a whole poem all the way through. He continually followed the digressions of his thinking in order to be open to revelation rather than force his thinking into a proscribed etiquette. It was a ta’wil, a revelatory spiritual event, not a “reading,” and that really pissed a lot of people off, including good friends such as Duncan, who left. But Olson didn’t care. He saw what was coming. Have you been to one of those verbal circle jerks they call poetry readings these days? Talk about institutionalized, from the form—three readers, no more than 10-15 minutes to show your stuff, open mic at the end (the open mic is to be sure someone comes)—down to the generic poetry reading rhythm and the stifling silence of the audience. He tried to stop it before it took root, to smash the institution right there, on the spot.
He did everything but shout out I have seen the best poetry minds of my generation sucked down the drain of poetry careerism. His proposal of a Nation of Nothing but Poetry was a visionary challenge to those who were using their new institutional access to help fortify a poetry industry. The audience divided pretty evenly in response, between those who wanted to move into new dimensions and those who wanted to consolidate their literary capital.
Poetry is always “political” in a general sense that has “politics” meaning something like the tenor of our lives; hence, the “everything is political” school. It might help you explain how stopping by the woods on a snowy evening is political, but it’s not a very useful definition. As Hannah Arendt said, if everything is political, then nothing is political. Two further senses are more activist and specific. Most of the 400 poets in the anthology that Kent and I spearheaded after the Regime of The Big Yam came to power (Resist Much/Obey Little—Inaugural Poems to the Resistance)—which, by the way, was isolated in a cone of silence by every existing poetry business and reviewer except maybe one—directly engage with and address what you could call issues or particular battles. They contribute to a culture of resistance. We think that is important work for poetry. But beyond that is poetry’s potential to disrupt the control of the “knowledge field” by creating unprecedented form-events—transformative gnosis eruptions—that contribute to the erosion of the Doom Program’s authority and ability to dictate what’s real. That was the poetry of Olson’s vision of a Nation of Nothing But Poetry.
SM: I have been to some of those “readings,” unfortunately. With most of them, there’s little to distinguish them from events for academic scholars (in the frigid—and mostly correct—sense we’ve come to think of those). There are select poets—Nathaniel Mackey, Peter O’Leary, and Tom Raworth come to mind—who can move it out of that “vibe,” but it doesn’t happen often. I think of that Rexroth quote, “Poets these days are so square they have to walk around the block just to turn over in bed.” (Jonathan Williams was fond of that one.)
There’s a “politeness” to it all that reminds me of something Barrett Watten wrote in response to one of your several poetry “controversies” (leaks of emails, audio, etc.): that his exchange with Mackey was printed “both without permission, as is customary and a sign of respect among authors and publishers.” I can’t imagine Spicer—who “refuse[d] copyright on his poetry since he believed that he was in no sense its owner, and its creator in only the most tenuous sense” (quoting Poet Be Like God)—saying something like that. It feels like legalese.
I wonder if you could talk about how you view Dispatches and its stance toward the usual protocols of literary decorum—do you think of these micro-“leaks” as tactical incursions into a territory polluted by “politeness”?
Also: What in the world happened to poetry readings? I’m not old enough to remember the first incidents of putrefaction. I’m not sure you are either, but I thought I’d ask.
MB: Well, they are the main outlet for the Commercial Poetry Product being manufactured in the Creative Writing factories. It’s all about building your poetry career. But because of the manufacturing processes, they have no music in their ears. All they can hear is the drone that rises from a creative writing class. Poetry exists in the transition from one phoneme to the next, that sounding of the world. I don’t think you can teach that in a classroom. You pick it up by reading. You get Williams, Keats, H.D., Kyger, Baraka embedded in your ear, and they guide your sounding. A sounding is a measurement made with sound, and a poem is an instrument for making such a measurement. That’s where the thinking goes on.
Part of the problem with the current scene, such as it is, is that it might as well all take place in a bloody classroom because most of the poets have never been outside one. They have no knowledge beyond those institutional walls and so the only resource they can draw on is their feelings. What you perceive as politeness I call “Ken and Barbie politesse” in a poem from Cosmographia called “Shattered Laminar Dreams.” I wrote it for Victor Coleman. We were at a reading given by a friend along with a career poet from Montreal. As the poet from Montreal went into high drone mode, Victor started calling him out from the audience. I admit, we may have had one or two before the reading. Maybe three. It was a scandal. Absolutely delightful. They didn’t know what to do. The organizers (Ken and Barbie) and most of the audience were aghast. Vic was inspired by Jack Spicer, who was famously intolerant of shit poetry and didn’t hold back his critical judgments. We need a lot more of that. Maybe organize a movement of people to go to readings and heckle bad poetry. That might thin out the drone ranks.
KJ: Yes, let’s encourage decentralized Dispatches squads to go to authorized readings and cause some fun hubbub, in old Dada, Surrealist, Situationist, Infrarealist tradition. Though any comrades doing it at the Poetry Foundation would need to be ready for some jail time, as we know…
MB: And they would have to get by the security wall (Dispatch #6 – PoFo, Inc. Security Wall). Hey, why not? Dispatches is decidedly impolite, in so far as polite means ignoring hypocrisy, careerism, and cronyism and pretending everything is just tickety-boo. More poetry in the Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse—business is booming. More and bigger prizes—the more you win the better you are. More conferences and teaching positions—to the victor go the spoils. Professional poetry is dog-eat-dog work.
We are not professional. We are rank amateurs and proud of it. We don’t do customary. We call it like we see it, and take it from there. We announced that in Dispatch #1. Politeness is the retaining wall of mediocrity. Complacency is its mortar. It’s not even politeness, really. Pretty much everyone in those audiences is nodding off while trying to look interested. They are bored and somnolent, waiting for their turn at the mic. Dispatches is one of the very few places dedicated to disturbance, to shaking up the complacency that rules the Institutional Wastelands.
KJ: One, two, three, many Jack Spicers…
MB: Right on.
KJ: Though as someone who can one day read quite well and with gusto, and then turn around at the next event and sound like he’s just had a massive stroke, I’m hesitant to say much more about readings. Except that I, too, dislike them. Which will be my last clever allusion in this answer. But Steve mentions a few people who for him break the mold. I’ll add one more. Just the other day I came across a video of Caroline Bergvall, whose poem “Drift” has to be one of the great sequences of the century so far. She is hands down one of the most impressive performers going, and doing it without at all “being into herself.” Talk about a poet who takes Olson’s idea of going-by-breath and creates something transformative, where the work’s sounding truly fractals out into new (or ancient) dimensions: Caroline Bergvall Interview: Poetry as a Performance.
On the other hand, Bergvall, I’m told by a very knowledgeable source, was one of the key players in the manipulative destruction of the great and longstanding Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry (CCCP), which I attended on a couple inspiring occasions, so you see how it goes. Even some of the most talented people are expert operators in the poetry wars.
Anyway, as for our raids on “politeness” and decorum: So far, I’d say we’ve been overly cautious and polite.
MB: Love it! Indeed, we need to double down on our rudeness.
KJ: True, we’ve succeeded in getting ourselves permanently proscribed from PennSound (Mike and I are practically the only two “avant” poets in North America over forty who don’t have a page there) and disappeared by the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog (which refuses, in good-sport style, to even acknowledge the existence of Dispatches). But we could do better. We’re hopefully only getting going. And I suppose, given our ages, we should probably hurry up.
SM: Dispatches also has a stance, it seems, that places more value than most other journals (or sites, magazines, etc.) on international poetry. In other words, the US isn’t necessarily central to the poetry world. (This, again, for me, harkens back to the older, earlier modernist days of Pound—him writing Patria Mia, abandoning his homeland; the dilation of the poetic sense to the whole world.) You have editorial contributions from Australia, Latin America, Canada, Kuwait, and elsewhere. Do you think the US “poetry scene” is too insular? What’s the role of Dispatches as relates to the expansion of poetry beyond US borders?
KJ: Yes, our range at DPW is more international than most, and our Contributing Editors board, with representation from a dozen countries outside Canada and the US, also reflects that. But here, too, we’re far from satisfied and certainly aiming to do better.
MB: Check out the first poem in Resist Much/Obey Little. It’s in Spanish. Untranslated. A big “fuck you” to the Big Yam and his xenophobic fear and hatred of Hispanic people.
KJ: From the early avant-garde modernists, as you point out, to the New American period (following some decades of New Critical nationalist retrenchment), the international purview has been central, so we see ourselves as very located in that tradition. We’ve even done poems from afar without translation.
MB: Having been raised in Uruguay, Kent is more attuned than most to the rich, deep contribution Latin America made to modernism. Montevideo, Mexico City, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Managua were all home to enormously influential work that had a huge effect on Europe. Not so much the US, at least not until much later, although that’s no surprise, is it?
KJ: Though the US modernists certainly latched onto European and also Asian poetry, even if largely via misreading, in the latter case. But without that appropriation, going back to Transcendentalism and early modernism, especially with Asia, American poetry wouldn’t be what it is today. Obviously. No Ideogrammic method, no lots of stuff. Not that we can ever take the internationalism of US poetry for granted: In addition to the New Critical insular turn, Language poetry, in its first couple decades, was ridiculously self-regarding and parochial in its outlook—reactionary, in fact, vis-à-vis the broad internationalist spirit spoking out of the New American formation it set out (successfully, for three decades) to supplant.
MB: And let me just point out quickly that the New American Poetry had multiple international connections in Europe and Latin America. The takeover of the Poetry Society in England in the 70s was directly tied to the new poetics. Olson’s “Projective Verse” blew the top off a lot of thinking about poetry—because it was active and spoke to the spirit of liberation, unlike the theory/poetics that came after it and paved the path to academic acceptance.
KJ: Yes. And that narrowness hangs on, to some extent. Only a few years ago, even, the major critical champion of LangPo, Marjorie Perloff, was able to write a long historical entry on the “Avant-Garde” for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics mentioning virtually no poets or movements outside the American-European nexus. To be sure, the quasi-isolationist spirit of US avant “high formalism,” most prominent in the two decades after Vietnam (the title of this tendency’s flagship anthology, In the American Tree, says it all), has seen some significant internationalizing corrections—ones importantly sparked, back in the 90s, no question, by the ground-breaking Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris anthologies. And news of the world has been flowing in since, for sure, to the point where the avant current of North American poetry now seems well embarked on a mini-renaissance of translation practice, actually. And as that change proceeds, it’s becoming clearer, all the time, that NAmPo is but a little blinking dot in a constellation whose vastness—in contemporary space and in deep time—we’re only beginning to grasp. In fact, we’re beginning to grasp that things we thought were our inventions are actually Johnny-come-lately “innovations” that other distant civilizations came upon long before. Such as radical parataxis, or its more recent formalization in the supposedly revolutionary “New Sentence” (by now a period style, like the Deep Image was some years before it), which the Japanese were happily practicing, guided by exceedingly complex, subtle principles, in the 13th and 14th centuries.
MB: Both Kent and I have the advantage of having spent large amounts of formative time in locations outside the US, Kent growing up and working in Latin America, and me spending most of my adult life in Canada. And that has meant we share a sense of the marvelous tenuousness, the adventure, of the experience of something called identity. Some years ago, I was asked about immigrant identity in a high school class my daughter was in by a student who wanted to know if you had to choose between who you were where you were born and who you are where you end up. I explained that what we think of as identity is never singular. It resembles a midden heap, a piling on of layer after layer of knowledge and experience. Having many different layers of otherness in the pile means you operate outside any centering compulsion, always alert to what else is next. I think we would like Dispatches to be more like that. And we will be.
SM: A parting question: Lately (last few years), there has been a battle over the legacy of Olson, who has been accused of being an imperialist, and also over that of Whitman, who has been disavowed completely by some as a racist unworthy of attention. Here, the “avant-garde” has copulated with an unnuanced Baptist morality, lacking perceptive expanse—Negative Capability thrown to the wind. To mention Mackey again: he’s given close readings of Whitman and Olson, pointing out their flaws while preserving the advances they made. As I see it, Whitman is in us, just as Dickinson, Shakespeare, Homer, and Vergil are, whether we like it or not. What do you think of these recent debates over the place of Olson and Whitman? (Those two, perhaps most visibly, but the argument extends to conceivably any poet who’s failed morally in some way.)
MB: On the whole, I would say that those people are poor readers. Like most fundamentalists, they can’t grasp modes of reading beyond the literal. They encounter their own Shadow in the text and try to excise it by attacking the writer. William Blake proposed that humans exist in a fourfold reality, that we move between states of what you could call being or vision, insofar as who you are and what you see are the same thing. Single vision is a state of complete narcissism in which only the self is real. Ulro, the second state, he imagined visually as a man and a woman tied together back-to-back. There is a world beyond the self, but it is in conflict with, or opposition to, the self. The third state, Beulah, is a sexual paradise in which the man and woman come together, escape the world of mutually exclusive opposites at war and achieve a creative union. The fourth state is Jerusalem, the fourfold city in which spiritual reality illuminates all creation. The people engaged in the debates you refer to are frozen in an Ulronic state, locked into moralized, exclusionary judgments that are the equivalent of moral paralysis.
I was recently reading a transcription of a 1988 conversation between Derrida, Gadamer, and Lacoue-Labarthe over how to come to a relation with Heidegger after the publication of the Black Notebooks, which gave rise to a loud clamor of condemnation and self-righteous moral rejection. In the introduction, Mireille Galle-Gruber proposes that the significance of the event was to be able to read Heidegger “as he did not read himself—that is, rather than limiting ourselves to condemning him, to make it such that his silence on Auschwitz carries us toward the difficult courage of thinking.” Reading anyone as they do not read themselves opens the writing beyond the expected judgment into the adventure of a conversation that leads beyond both participants into a new courage of thinking. We would like Dispatches to stand for that attempt to realize the difficult courage of thinking today in a world where various totalitarian forces across the political spectrum would like to be able to silence all difference and dictate an unambiguous truth.
KJ: I was going to interject something about little fang-baring white liberal poets who jump with transparent opportunism on the politically correct bandwagon and thereby reveal so much about themselves, in their torch-mob, Stalinoid enthusiasms. And I was going to say, too, something about self-righteous liberal POC poets—not least the academic kind from up high, like in the old Mongrel Coalition (led by a white scion of the Brazilian bourgeoisie posing as a POC)—who get all finger-wagging mean, and are in many cases just as deeply flawed as the liberal white writers they single out for shaming under barrages of sanctimonious derision (see the recent Nation scandal, which destroyed the reputation of a naive but well-intentioned young poet). And then I was going to say that much of this Stalinoid piling-on is nakedly impelled by energies of position-taking animus, which is to say that it is motivated by atavistic, careerist impulses, at bottom, while waving a convenient flag of “ethics” as cover. And then I was going to say how interesting it is that in such a climate we are criticized for calling attention to “poetry wars,” as if we are being extremists for doing so. And then I was going to say something about how deeply flawed all the people who are involved in Dispatches are, as well, mainly me and Mike, who are as full of embarrassing contradictions and crap as anyone else, but so it goes. But I’m not going to say anything about all that, because it might come off sounding a bit over-the-top and piss Stalinoid poet-types off. And we wouldn’t want that. So that’s it, from me. Last word to Mike. Thanks for doing this, Steve.
MB: Just to say that complacency is the enemy of poetry. Poetry is forever unsettled and unsettling, or else it’s just another commodity on the shelf, another brand of deodorant or pain killer in a fancy box. Many thanks, Steve, for allowing us to make that point as best we can.