Emily Post-Avant: Replying to a Comrade and Sharing a Letter to Nathaniel Mackey on the Current Topic of Amanda Gorman
Dear Emily,
By way of reintroduction: When last I wrote there was a post-Marxism conference at my university. I am now a second-year graduate student in the UC Berkeley English Department. The conference proceedings are to be published by Cambridge University Press, that hotbed of Marxism. I hope the Niebyl-Proctor Library obtains a copy. Your essayistic response to my letter was among the finest works of literary criticism from our century. Right after the conference, just before Covid, and amid rape allegations, Commune Magazine disappeared like a fart at a Verso loft party. What does one make of a literary left whose projects can’t continue on like a run-of-the-mill magazine operation in the face of a roar from Twitter? I guess they’ll always have another academic press to fall back on.
At this point I’m starting to wonder about my chosen field. I noticed your critical viewpoint on Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” (aside: for Marxists like us, isn’t it a mountain of body bags from the American Empire?), but then later I read Professors Virginia Jackson, Meredith Martin, and Seth Perlow pen “lyric readings” (an actual thing!) of the poem plus gestures. With Jackson and Martin, their Riverside Review of Books argument dispatches with Marx and Marxism as a capitalized “White” idealism. Their modestly titled “The Future of Poetry” contains this gem on the Gorman poem and the politics of cultural representation: “Kamala Harris has begun to turn fantasy into fact.” Professor Jackson has a chair in the UC Irvine English Department, another hotbed of post-Marxism, while Martin is no slouch at Princeton. Your piece stands tall against these goofy whimsies. Emily, it’s inspiring how you really do take Gorman to heart: see it and be it, or be the change you want to see in the world, in the more official sounding hokum version of the phrase. Gorman’s poem is now the most famous American political poem since Baraka’s Leninist “Somebody Blew Up America” (a phrase he pronounced with showboating sarcasm) edified the masses. How times have changed, comrade!
Then I was watching the Super Bowl and Gorman read another poem, this time a major promotional with the Wounded Warrior Project. Some comrades may not know of this Bush-era fraud of a non-profit, which pocketed nearly half of the donations it collected for veterans. This warrior NGO is what happens when you prey on people with official patriotism while you privatize and hack the VA to pieces. Gorman couldn’t merely poetize for veterans — and of course she couldn’t do it the way Mayakovsky did it — but had to front for a paying NGO in need of an image makeover. I haven’t seen any “new criticism” by our esteemed professoriate on the Super Bowl poem.
I still cherish poetry and Marxism the way the returning vet cherishes his one remaining leg, but what does one make of my career prospects in such a field?
–Second Year Ph.D. Student at UC Berkeley
Amanda Gorman performing at the 2021 Super Bowl. NME.
Dear Second Year Ph.D. Student at UC Berkeley,
Pues, te recuerdo como si ayer fuera el encuentro, queridísimo compa!
Congratulations on making it through the first year, caro. You just hold your nose and butter up your profs, now, that’s the game. But don’t go overboard with the praise, like you do above with me! Everything will be fine, don’t despair. The key is to get through, get a gig, and get decent benefits for you and family, because something like Cuban (or even Brit) health care sure isn’t happening anytime soon, in these parts. [My recommendation: Flip a bird to the “prestigious” universities. The place to be is at a community college, urban or rural, with an AFT local. You’ll have more income, you’ll have some really smart, working-class students, you won’t have nearly as many bullshit committee meetings, you’ll never be under pressure to publish stuff no one will read, and you’ll have a much better pension when you get to my decrepit age, when all you want to do is start drinking by 1 PM and watch Eastern European movies from the 1980s.]
By the way, is Cambridge UP really publishing those conference proceedings? I hope Chris Nealon appreciated my suggestions and revised his embarrassing intro to the conference. Never heard from him. It would be a howler if that runs in the book. Hear me out, Chris!
Speaking of Eastern European Cold War films, have you ever seen Teddy Bear (Poland, 1981), directed by Stanisław Bareja? What a great anti-Stalinist movie that is. It’s a magically unintentional allegory of the current U.S. poetry field, if you pay attention.
Still from Teddy Bear (1980). Polski Radio.
I think you told me, amor, your dissertation was to be on the great communist C.L.R. James. He loved poetry and wrote literary criticism, I’m sure you know. Hilarious about the Pro-Poet Libs at U of California and Princeton licking the legs of Kamala’s death-penalty-drone-kill Hillary pants. Maybe you can slip in a couple of sharp ones on what James would have opined about suck-up tenured liberal poets (or suck-up liberal poets seeking tenure) going all teary-eyed over young IMG megastar Amanda Gorman marketing her wares as a poetic propagandist for the good-cop half of Wall Street’s Janus-faced Imperium. Forgive my over-wordiness, there, but Jesus Christ, what a fucking racket American poetry has become! With its little subcultural AWP/MLA Duma of Deep Image/Confessional overripe leftovers and Fifth-gen NY School/Post-Avant sold-out careerists all splitting up the perks 50/50, and with perfect professional decorum… Uf!
CLR James. Charnel House.
Just the other day, wouldn’t you know, the day before I got your letter, I opened one from Nathaniel Mackey, responding to an email I sent him about Amanda Gorman. Mackey, with whom I collaborated on a big anthology, quotes Moten in correspondence to him. I had a nice note back today from Nate to the below (all very collegial). Here they are, very slightly edited, to make myself sound better, which I always try to do, even if with fairly modest success:
From Nate:
I think you're making way too much out of this (I read your piece on the Inauguration poem) and you’re way too hard on her and it comes across as kind of petty. The reception of AG has nothing to do with the state of poetry or the direction of poetry and “big-money music-world strategy and economics” could still not care less about it.
Myself:
Dear Nate,
Thanks for this. I appreciate the response. I have admired you for a good while. So I don't dismiss your critique in the least.
But I have to argue a bit on it with you.
First of all, I sure hope I'm not meant to be included in whatever that group was that didn't care about Maya Angelou dying! Because, forsooth, I wasn't there, nor would I have been. Maybe Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin were (along with some of the other folks in their "experimental" posse)? Coolidge and Fagin wrote the mocking N+7 poem about her inauguration reading, in which they called her a "Moron," in the title and final word of the poem.
Maya Angelou, who read a poem at President Clinton’s inauguration. California Museum.
Also, believe me, even as the Superman Bizarro World scenario is pretty hilarious, I can assure you I would never wish to be up there with Biden, nor with Obama, nor with Clinton (either one of them), nor with whatever periodic Democratic Inaugural there might be, in whatever parallel universe. The Democratic Party is one of the dual-faced branches of the ruling corporate class. an instrument of imperial, massively violent, planet-destroying power, ultimately speaking. "Progressive" poets now seem to think, in overwhelming numbers, that this is where they need to put their money, figuratively and literally (grants, prizes, foundations, retreats, establishment presses, etc.).
In that sense, if you'll forgive what I understand may sound to some liberals these days like melodrama, I sincerely think it is the duty of any poet who opposes the reign of the super-rich, their corporations and banks, their intelligence agencies, and their fake, moneyed cultural institutions (which those intelligence agencies are now well inside), to publicly and adamantly refuse any invitation to become a "lyrical" mouthpiece for State power.
As it should be their duty to publicly and adamantly critique any poet, regardless of background, who accepts such a compromising charge. Yes, Amanda Gorman may "cut a nice figure," as you say, and she is no doubt a delightful person in manifold ways, but think about it: Wasn't that perhaps partly the idea of the recuperative move — a regal one, to be sure, in a long series of subtler moves in the past decades, which have succeeded in bringing poetry ever closer to being a pacified accoutrement to power? Who better than a beautiful superstar model — infinitely more charming and hip than Jackson Pollock ever was — to be a Culture-agent for Capital, on the big propaganda stage?
This matter of Poetry, Spectacle, and Power is the major point of the Emily Post-Avant piece. With all due respect, she stands by it.
All the best to you,
To which Nate responded:
Thanks for your note. I didn’t expect I’d change your mind. And I don’t imagine you expected you’d change mine. Hitting Gorman with your critique of global corporatism looks to me like going after a mosquito with an ICBM. Anyway, happy you wouldn’t want to be up there.
OK, I will stop there. Thank you for writing, Second Year Ph.D. Student at UC Berkeley. Stay strong, the road is long. Confused ultra-voluntarist books from Verso about glorious, bloody riots, written by comfy academics who call for killing cops and then cry like babies in paddy wagons during Occupy days are but little fake-blips along the way.
Long live Vladimir Mayakovsky and C.L.R. James, flawed as they may have been. Long live Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, and Meridel Le Sueur, too.
Solidaridad, y con a little bit of saudade, as well,
— Emily Post-Avant
Amiri Baraka, poet. NPR.
Addendum
Portions of the above column have been slightly revised from its original posting on 2/15. Specifically, some of Nathaniel Mackey’s original comments to me about the Amanda Gorman topic are now included, at his request. They give further context and perspective to the disagreement, and my response can be judged more clearly in their presence. As well, references I’d made to Fred Moten have been deleted. Mackey’s first email to me referenced remarks from Moten, which I sincerely took to be in reference to my first column on Gorman’s Inaugural reading. They were not (apparently Moten had not even seen that posting), and I apologize to both him and Mackey for the mistaken assumption and for suggesting that they were. If I gave the impression of an over-familiarity with Fred Moten, I am sorry, as that was not my intention. We have never met, and only briefly, long ago, did we exchange an email or two over some kerfuffle on the old Harriet list. Readers of this column know that it is exceedingly rare for me to make hasty interpretations or rash leaps in judgment that could cause offense to anyone. But in this case, I did, and I offer my regrets.
— Emily Post-Avant, 2/16/21
