The Voice Over

Where then does the growing uneasiness come from, the sense that the picture of a general feast has been badly distorted, if not fictitious? The “market mechanisms” of poetry’s existence, as they’re generally described, explain and justify the existence of literary clans and unions, the warring parties, the literary struggle with all its losses. But market mechanisms don’t explain the particular inflammation that has distinguished any conversation about poetry for the last few years, flattening the mass media and blogs into a single style. It’s really not easy to explain it—with an enormous quantity of publishers, journals, venues to speak up, poetic series, there’s lots of space for everyone,¹ and the variety shouldn’t dispose anyone to bitterness: what kind of animosity could the butchers’ row feel for the greengrocers, or the “Space” pavilion for “Horse Breeding”? Yet there’s a shared feeling of some kind of unnamed, unnoticed distortion, offense, disagreement with what’s going on—and this turns out to be more or less the point of consensus that critics were for so long declaring impossible. This feeling—“things aren’t right, guys”—is uniting aesthetic platforms that wouldn’t imagine knowing of one another in the most terrible dream, and it makes allies of authors who have nothing else in common.

It’s been accumulating slowly, day by day: first this or that link runs through the blogs, and everyone follows the sound—they’ve trashed someone again: time to read, discuss, take a position, and defend it. After a year or so goes by, “they’ve trashed” won’t suffice to get anyone’s attention—everyone’s trashing everyone; the very tone of irritation has become a tool for advancement in the literary market. (Someone’s grouching—that means “he’s not afraid of anyone,” “he has the right,” “he speaks from a position of strength”—strength being the key word here.) But then any praise becomes a pressure point: the words “X is a good poet” provoke a lightning reaction: to give him the acid test, to conclude that the poet is bad, to let the world know it as soon as possible (to pull out the splinter). Strange substitutions occur here: a good or, why not, a major poet in the context of that sort of conversation is understood (and refuted) as the best, the main, the chosen one, as if the interested reader constantly measures the author’s place in an underlying yet unmentioned table of ranks, where any “I like” lifts a poet up a few invisible steps. There’s another thing, too: it seems that praise (a mention, no matter whose; publication, no matter where), like a streetlight in the dark, picks out one person’s face, and that alone shoves everyone else back into the outer darkness, beyond the bounds of the visible world. What lies behind that feeling, besides the general loss of culture, which makes one see money or a personal connection everywhere? Plenty of things. An abolition of conventions that finally allows us to see what is complicated as a failure of simplicity (and to talk about it with a soldier’s bluntness). A certainty, abashed at itself, of the existence of a single military hierarchy, a big general staff, which alone can make a recruit into a poet. A deep distrust of the very possibility of parallel systems, of planes and poetics that don’t intersect, and that aren’t evaluated on a single scale. And a sense that everyone shares of some kind of massive unfairness.

About the Change in the Air

To my taste, it’s too seductive and simple to explain what’s happening to us with the usual set of external conditions, as is routinely done in literary life. The parties that are clearing out a place for themselves under the literary sun are doing so industriously but somehow not seriously. They have nothing to divide: there’s no venue that could be the contested object, no prize that everyone would treat with equal respect, no united audience that everyone would like to please. The situation is thus conducive to peace and calm. But there’s no calm, while a sense of the anomaly of the present condition remains—for me myself, too, among others.