Understanding Poetry and Expression

On Mark Edmundson’s piece in Harper’s Magazine

(I)

On Expression

One of the many reasons why the idea of individualistic expression has become such a paradox in terms, it would seem, is that expression itself has to be lent to understanding. Expression for the sake of existence is one of those vanity induced narcissistic things that postmodernist artists have been accused of. The key phrase here would be ‘It does not make any sense’. It is not so much a comment on the merit of the art or the work of the artist that I would like to reflect upon in this piece. It is this emphasis on some sort of model socio-cultural sense that Mark Edmundson wrote about in his Harper’s piece ‘Poetry Slam – Or the decline of American verse’ that must be discussed in a more elaborate fashion. In order to explore the various connotations of this argument, it would be worthwhile to think about the poets that he talks about and then perhaps think about transposing this socio-economic and cultural context upon the one that Wordsworth and Yeats were writing in.

He says,

Most of our poets now speak a deeply internal language not unlike Merwin’s. They tend to be oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning. They not only talk to themselves in their poems; they frequently talk to themselves about talking to themselves…

From the time Sir Philip Sidney wrote about an Astrophil who is writing a poem about his love within writing a poem in the Petrarchan tradition of Elizabethan poetry, the idea of poets writing about the act of writing a poem is perhaps not that anachronistic. It has a distinct and documented history of the self-consciousness of an artist. The same consciousness that made the Renaissance painter put himself in the frame of a painting in the mirror or anything that reflected his own frame is not unknown to art. Where this is exaggerated in our century is the way that self-consciousness of an artist, painter or a poet is no longer a background that used to be hidden in the main subject being represented. It becomes the subject. The beast of modern existence is the self that cannot seem to be contracted within the frame of one’s constitution. In websites or even government verifications, the self is the sole focus. The identity that you are born and raised with becomes a strange ghost of exaggerated monstrosity. So if there is reason if poets have become, in Edmundson’s words, ‘private, idiosyncratic and withdrawn’, the reason is unique to our civilization: an oblique and obscure or even eccentric way of existence is the only private thing that the self has been left with. Edmundson understands this perfectly and says,

The lines, one suspects, are an attempt to evoke the sheer strangeness of being alive and abroad in the world. But to me (other readers may surely disagree), their vatic quality (they sound like the pronouncements of a latter-day oracle; they could be no one else but Graham) isn’t at all matched by their power of revelation.

Where one will never question that Edmundson is right about the fact that being alive is being evoked in the strangest of verses in poetry where one can challenge him is this overarching idea of a powerful revelation at the end of a verse. What if, if one should imagine the reasons why poets write the way they do, poetry being the expression of a strange life, is built into making it a mundane idea – therefore, it cannot by definition be a revelation. It is just that – a life in art. His contention here lies here:

Their poems are so underdetermined in their sense that the critic gets to collaborate on the verses, in effect becoming a co-creator. This is a boon to critics, but readers rightly look to poets to make sense of the
world, even if it is a difficult sense— and not to pass half the job off to Ph.D.’s.

There are two ways that one can challenge this. On one hand, in a world where poetry and drama, two ancient art forms, are disappearing from the public eye, it would be interesting to look into the internal language of the poet as a reaction to this cultural context. The poets are the invisible mirrors in this society. It is highly idealistic an image where Edmundson is trying to paint the poet as the legislator of men when the men are simply no longer engaging with the poets of this generation. On the other hand, one cannot but look into the language that Edmundson himself is using; that of the reader who ‘rightly’ looks at the poet to make sense of the world. The onus of making sense that is interpreting, one must remember, is not inherently a part of the creative process of a poet, painter or an artist at all. In fact, it would be interesting to ask the poets themselves if there is such an assumed audience that anyone anticipates or reacts to in the creation of a literary piece. Creation of poetic senses, one can suspect, lies in the very personal domain of negotiation with the world. It can be shaped by the context and the audience but not dictated by the sensibilities of one.

(II)

On Identity and History

Edmundson has extensively written about Seamus Heaney writing with the voice of a young Irish girl. He has said that the politics of identity somehow makes poets incapable of writing with the plural. He has written

What cultural theory seems to have taught the younger generation of poets is that one must not leap over the bounds of one’s own race and gender and class. Those differences are real and to be respected…

How dare a white female poet say “we” and so presume to speak for
her black and brown contemporaries? How dare a white male poet speak for anyone but himself? And even then, given the crimes and
misdemeanors his sort have visited, how can he raise his voice above a
self-subverting whisper?

There is a sense in the tone of these lines that Edmundson is trying to understand the politics of identity and how it works in the trends that come with the publishing industry. Or rather dare the writers to defy the norms that they are supposed to follow in order to be published. This again has had its own precedents in every age of publishing history. That notwithstanding, I suspect, that the subject of identity has become more and more refined in this age. And the fact that literature acknowledges that subject position is not necessarily a bad thing. The cultural theory of our age has made us more sensitive to our respective cultural histories and therefore when a black female writer is very focussed on her heritage as a black woman and does not give a voice to a white woman, it is not because the aforementioned leap is not dared. It is because we are growing more and more conscious of a subjectivity that is within us. Any great work of literary art that can bridge this race-culture divide, and there have been many in our own discipline of literature in the last few decades, is written in the conscious of this duality of the voice that you are and the voice that you are trying to represent.

What Edmundson gives us instead is the very public idea of a poet in his article. But the use of ‘we’ and the plural that has decreased in the poetics of postmodern poets is not just a reflection of modern existence, it is also to be seen as an act of establishing their own subjectivity in a unipolar world where the metanarratives of culture and identity have already become a structure of meaning that cannot be altered in the concrete sense. History, in that light, is already there. A personal narrative that counters or ignores that history seems to become something that Edmundson does not see as an act that is deliberate. Instead, he writes:

I often think that our poets now write as though history were over and they were living in a world outside collective time. They write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom.

There is a great question of the location of the poet in this world that one must ask of this article. It pleads to the poets to make more sensible poetry that is not internal while it does not consider how to locate the poet at all. It speaks of the poet as a legislator of men while the article fails to see that the poet might not be obligated to the society to create art for it. The poet may, of course, write about the crises and, if one reads carefully, much of poetry is informed by the context. However, it is an aberration to say that it is a deliberate attempt to fend off boredom which contradicts the meaning of creating art. In fact, it may of course be fending off boredom and, I believe, there is nothing to be criticized in that. As I mentioned earlier, this right to create poetry which is internal, obscure and completely eccentric is a right that has to be defended in every age as an essential form of expression that one can read with history. For the poet can be a legislator of man, as Shelley said, but the poet is also the Thales who must leave London as a private act of rebellion against the age where he lived; as Johnson, who came before Shelley, wrote in the satire London.

On Being a Gay Activist in India

One blog post that is worth reading again and again. There are things that affect our society that we have a blindspot for.

Café Dissensus

By Ashley Tellis

Being a gay activist in India is like suddenly becoming invisible to the world around you and all its inhabitants. You are screaming to your friends and loved ones that they should listen to you, that you are here but they can’t see you or hear you. You turn to your enemies but they can’t see or hear you either. It is not just the state that does not recognize you, to whom you are an illegible subject, everyone around you, friend and enemy alike, erases you.

How many times in how many dharnas and meetings have you bitten your tongue and held your peace because somehow you convince yourself once again that this is not the right time, this is not the right place, women or Dalits or adivasis are more important and their issues are more important at the moment and sexuality’s time has not…

View original post 1,117 more words

Sidelines of a Really Long Game

As an intern in a magazine you are always in touch with the news. They make you read everything, you are constantly researching things for articles and transcribing press statements. You are really looking at these stories and you are meant to think as a medium; you have to think as someone who is over and above these people who will read the story. Adjusting to that takes some time these days.

I have been looking at the Ishrat Jahan story and thinking about journalists who have been deeply committed in bringing this story and keeping it in the public view. Something makes me think that we do become connected and then we are no longer just a medium of representing, we become mirrors of what should be, not just what is. There is of course a danger here where a well-meaning journalist can become a political pawn. There is a danger that in showing what is just you can become a ‘person’, not just a medium who has to make people think. How does one negotiate a temptation of being self-righteous when you know that people will listen to you? The public dimension that makes one journalist so powerful is the same dimension that can give rise to the problem of not negotiating with the role of the person who shows but does not tell. The old ‘show, don’t tell’ technique in fiction probably makes for a great argument in journalism too, who knows?

The interesting bit is the amount of data that these journalists consume and how they consume it. Many times, they are privy to little snippets of information that the readers aren’t and that makes it a little problematic. The transparency of journalism is blighted by the fact that not everything is to be ‘revealed’. The idea of whistle-blowers is dangerous in many respects because they are doing away with these sort of arguments. The side-lines of the game start coming out of the margins and become pioneers of a new system of epistemology. Seems like the world out there is waiting to be interpreted. But then, are the readers (fed on consumerist media outlets which depend on advertising for sustenance) go ahead and really see for themselves what new media is showing them?

(image credit: Tehelka)

Ethics on the Internet

With the advent of the internet age it was assumed that we were entering the virtual world. This was the site where ethics, it would seem was going to be irrelevant and obsolete and anarchy would be the norm of behaviour online. Ethical values were presumed by many to be dead in the world where you could be anything (in fact, one can exist on Twitter as a dog or a cat or even a turtle) and anyone (there are numerous instances of ‘God’ existing on the internet, including expressing his concerns about the society through Twitter). So are ethics dead on the internet? Can one take the idea of netiquette as an alternative to social norms in the online world and what are the dangers to such a ‘death’ of ethics? This paper will also talk about the desire of growing out of this ethical self that often becomes the reason why anonymity exists on the internet. This paper will also deal with the most important question that is raised regarding online ethics today: Do ethics exist in the virtual world and is it important to have to have norms and rules online?

Firstly it would be very interesting to understand the whole idea of ethics from an individual’s point of view. Even though the subjectivists believe that ethics and morality as a whole is one of the limiting aspects of existence, the objectivists would believe that the people should have a uniform code of ethical values which would eliminate the idea of disharmony in the society. It becomes very complex for an individual to see the difference between the idea of behaving like his innate self which may, at times, instinctively react against social norms and the idea of behaving as per the norms of the society even as the ideas seem ridiculous to the individual. The individual, in his life, will have to function within the space of the society and hence, he can never exist outside the society as an entity because in that case the entire idea of morality falls. Being born in the society would bring in the aspect of conditioning where the individual will never be able to function without it at all. So where does the idea of the individual ethics and morality exist if it is taken away from the society?

In the internet though, the ambiguity is very interesting in this regard. Even as the internet struggles to contend with the various ideas of human behaviour, there are people online who showcase the very dichotomy that we are discussing in this case. There are people who call themselves the netiquette police (a portmanteau of ‘net’ and ‘etiquette’) and another group of people who are called in derogatory terms as ‘trolls’ (the ‘obnoxious’ nature of their posts often earn them such names). It would be interesting to study why people behave the way they do online. If the netiquette police is accused of being the ones who accuse others to failing to stand up to the standards of a certain online community, the ‘trolls’ are accused to being particularly filled with the idea of being rude and impolite under the guise of certain pseudonyms and fake identities. There is constant struggle within the internet community where the names are often interchanged; that is, a person who is obsessively trying to belittle someone with higher debating terms and language will be labelled a ‘troll’ and a man who is obsessively trying to defeat someone while being very punctilious and sarcastic will certainly be called a ‘troll’ by someone else.

It is perhaps important to remember that the internet being inhabited by a very heterogeneous population of languages and cultures, many times what we can notice is also the clash of different ethical values and beliefs. A person from the Asian context will perhaps defend a certain custom of his online which would be looked down upon by someone from the western world and vice versa. So this is where the objective idea of ethics falls in some cases. Even as one can concede that certain idea are uniformly praised in all cultures as being noble and good, certain contentious issues become the bone of the matter where one can notice a complete example of cultures clashing as ideas. There is of course, no rule hard and fast that most of these exchanges are volatile online, but it had been noticed that in case of sites where people can use pseudonyms, the people often deal with one another differently. Perhaps people who cannot deal with the differences in a globalized world use the internet as a pressure point to let out their frustrations. In that case, should one treat the internet as an alternative space where the usual ideas of ethics and morality don’t apply? Many would disagree because even as there are people who exchange explicit curses there are those who don’t believe in such exchanges and continue to act as they do in real life. What one can suspect, conversely, is that this group of people are so conditioned in the society that they cannot think of disrespecting anyone and treating anyone with disdain. Is that a bad thing? One cannot make value judgements over this issue without looking into the psyche of the people who inhabit these spaces. If psychologically the people are not satisfied with their surroundings then they may try to channel their anger onto the internet. Then the question is: who decides what is the purpose of the internet? Or is the virtual world too transparent for us to judge people?

Perhaps we should look into the idea of anonymity here. If the anonymous individuals are considered as people who letting off their ‘steam’ then the internet becomes a good distraction for them so that they cannot harm anyone in real life. However, with the number of people who have committed suicide over internet threats and taunts is also very telling of the very dehumanizing idea of anonymity. Anyone who is a ‘nobody’ loses his individuality completely through his pseudonym and may sexually harass anyone because then the person no longer feels any pressure of the super-structure of societal morality. In that way, the very trappings of morality in the society may, in the long run of the internet age, turn to dehumanize the people and take them away from ethics. That is the dichotomy of the ethics on the internet which we must try and understand.

Even as there is a freedom for people from different cultures to come together and collaborate giving birth to a more united community, the is a danger that social media and other such sites may desensitize and dehumanize people to an extent that ethics, even as they exist in the world, there will be no use of them because we will start looking at them as being distant from us. The dichotomy of the ethical values or the lack of them on the internet gives us an insight into the minds of the people. It exposes a great danger in which the ethical value systems, in either becoming more rigid or too loose will end up in the collapse of belief systems all over the world. It is, of course, a very postmodern idea of a dystopia but one cannot help thinking of the idea that it is very possible.

(This was a paper that I had written for my Ethics in Public Domain assignment in the IIIrd semester. The image credit goes to this Tumblr site)