Poetry for the Coming Community

I’ve been thinking about blogging for some time now, but I was finally inspired to do something about it by a couple of links on Ron Silliman’s blog the other day. One was to a lovely little essay-manifesto on the emerging intellectual underclass (hey, that’s me!) at Notes for the Coming Community.

The other was a call for submissions from Wig and a brief response to it from Thom Donovan. (You can read both here.)

Here’s the money quote (from Kristen Gallagher and Tim Shaner, who edit Wig): “In terms of poetry, we hear complaints from some poets that it’s wrong that poets can’t make a living off of their poetry. We have come to think that fact is not only a given but a gift, of sorts. It is poetry’s strength that it exists somewhat beyond the logic of market forces, as a form of what Bataille calls ‘non-productive expenditure.’” They go on to suggest that because you can’t make a living with poetry, it’s a waste of time—in a good way. Just by existing, poetry offers a critique of the “laboring society” (Hannah Arendt’s term) in which we all live—a society in which all time is company time and every moment is devoted to labor/the social/bare life in one way or another.

Here’s the conclusion: “Our dilemma is common: we all need our time back. Our labor should create that surplus of time, not erase it.”

This is all very tidy, and I certainly wouldn’t say no to a three-day work week. But I’m always a little bit wary when someone describes poetry primarily as a kind of critique. Not only because I think that ends up being reductive (though I do), but also because I don't think it works.

I think it’s obvious that poetry has traditionally been what Arendt would call work rather than labor, a part of political rather than social life. As it happens, I’ve recently been reading Agamben’s Means Without End, which deals at some length with this same distinction:

Classical politics used to distinguish clearly between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between human beings as simply living beings, whose place is in the home, and human beings as political subjects, whose place was in the polis. Well, we no longer have any idea of any of this . . . our private biological body has become indistinguishable from our body politic . . . We have had to grow used to thinking and writing in such a confusion of bodies and places, of outside and inside, of what is enslaved and what is free, of what is need and what is desire. This has meant—why not admit it?—experiencing absolute impotence, bumping against solitude and speechlessness over and over again precisely there where we were expecting company and words. (138–139)

I think it’s overly optimistic to think that poetry can mount an effective critique against this state of affairs just by existing. The space in which such a critique could occur is exactly the same space in which poetry used to exist—the public space of the polis. And that space is no longer available.

There’s no reason to think we’re ever going to get our time back.* The question is what poetry can make of the time and space we have.

This is not at all a way of saying that we should capitulate to the way things are. Here’s how Agamben ends that paragraph I quoted from above:

But it is by starting from this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of another word. I would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and body politic, of zoe and bios, for any reason whatsoever. It is here that I must find my space once again—here or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me.

I’m deeply interested in finding space and time for poetry (I, too, have a day job). But I’m not very interested in what poetry can critique. I want to know what it can produce.

*Besides, only rich people had it in the first place.