Poet Laureates and All
3 May 2008Some news and thoughts in and about Poet Laureate Land.
(1) Tony Brown is the new Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. W00t! I don’t know Tony Brown personally; I know Oscar does. But why do I think this is so fabulous?
(2) Charles Simic does not want to reprise his role as U.S. Poet Laureate. After one year, he’s had it. He’d rather be writing poetry. And here I was last year all excited about change. I think about this now and I wonder why I thought Simic (his presence really more than any programs he’d dream up and execute) would bring change to American poetry.
(3) Nominations are open for the position of Poet Laureate of California. Now this position I actually take seriously, because I have been recently thinking about and talking with folks about who determines what is California poetry. I don’t know of any California specific publishers of poetry, though the excellent Heyday Press is a California/West Coast specific publisher of diverse literature. Is it who the University of California Press publishes? I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the people of this culturally, socioeconomically, linguistically, aesthetically diverse state.
In fact, having recently seen Mr. Jack Hirschman reading, like, everywhere, and after he lost his voice doing reading after reading at cultural centers and political rallies, and still there he was, reading his anti-war, community mobilizing and community building poetry, I believe the San Francisco Poet Laureates are much more in line with what I envision to be a better measure of what California poetry is: written by a poet whose works address the people of California, a poet whose work actively engages the political movements of the people, the workers, the immigrants. We recently picked up Hirschman’s translations of Roque Dalton’s Poemas Clandestinos, and I have been thinking that I think we take for granted that Mr. Hirschman is a man of letters, and so this is reaffirming my preference and love for poets who are unabashedly political, and poets who transgress conventional borders.
Speaking of poets who are unabashedly political and poets who transgress conventional borders, here is my nomination:
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA for California Poet Laureate.
Who’s with me?
Information on how to nominate is here.
Bah! I nominate Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo for joint California Poet Laureate. Or, if they want to, they can duke it out like a Mortal Kombat fight to the poetic finish and shout “there can be only one” when the dust settles. Let’s mix it up a bit here!
I find the Poet Laureateship very problematic in how it posits poetry. It’s also a very Anglo-Saxon thing to do (I believe early Renaissance poet John Skelton was one of the first poets to use it). So here we have a function inherited from a feudal society. The question becomes, of course, for what purpose? Because a function sponsored by a state power may be problematic, especially when said state is engaged in military activities. If anything, the laureateship might be the prime example of what Marx means when he writes of intellectuals being the producers of ideology.
The flipside of this is the figure of the poéte engagé who claims to be speaking for the masses. In doing so, I am not sure that s/he is really going against the situation. It is still a very romantic(ized) position to take, this positioning of poetry outside of a capitalistic system of exploitation. I am somewhat dubious of a self-righteous politico-moral position in regards to poetry in that it does not realize that the writing of poetry is still a form of production and therefore, maybe, still reaffirms the values of the current economic system.
Yes on JFH!
Hey all,
François, I think you bring up very good and relevant points, in terms of manufacturers/producers of state sanctioned ideology. As well, I agree with you that poetry doesn’t necessarily exist outside of a/the capitalist system, that our current system of poetry reaffirms the dominant culture, even the poet who appears to represent the “masses.” Still, being poets, I think we do subscribe to the romanticism of the poet’s and artist’s symbolic importance in our society.
This is where I leave behind rational discussion and consider the artist as the “soul” of a culture. Or perhaps this is rational, and I can’t remember who said this, that the way the dominant culture regards art and artists is an indicator of the “well being” and integrity of the culture’s soul.
Ultimately I would just like some politicized multilingual visibility on a level larger than our small artist circles.