It’s too much to have to fight at the same time the dastardy of the enemies of freedom and the blindness of its friends.
Jean Paul Marat, Letter to the Jacobins 1793
I am, as you may have noticed from the infrequency of blog posts that I make, not particularly prodigious in terms of writing. This post is being written somewhat hastily because i have decided that there are certain scenarios arising which I am unwilling to abide. Forgive my spelling and grammatical errors but it occurred to me this morning that this can no longer be a thing that sits. As this is a poetry piece, I offer you, as a token of my good will, a piece of poetry from a great communist poet. There is no intent to destroy communist poetry here, but rather to strengthen it, and to take what is and turn it, as Enver Hoxha said in his eulogy for Chairman Mao, “a brilliant and fiery red”.
She stole the salt, the fishes he.
That's all. Such heroism.
And as she cooks those fishes, see
The children sitting on his knee
Bertolt Brecht
It would, at this point, be necessary for me to mention that the spectacular infiltrates all aspects of our lives. Its character is, as Debord so aptly put, "stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity." It would be easy for us to act as if this all encompassing spectacle, the wide ranging enemies of the working classemp have established for us. The unfortunate reality is that this passivity has become normalize by so called and nominative "left" academics, writers, and artists. I have the good fortune of issuing this criticism as someone who has for two years been involved in poetry actively, been published as a poet, but who is not entrenched in the "poetry scene" as it were.
The nominal left-poets have decided at this juncture to form a movement called the "anti-press movement" which has for better or worse led to them consolidating around several ideas. It is not unfair, or unjust to say at this point that many of these poets are still academics, and some of them have chosen to engage in an age old practice. Many of my feelings have been summarized before but I will here point to the work of Walter Benjamin in "The Author as Producer" who said that the goal of the writer must be to change the productive apparatus not merely to reproduce it. This has been the ultimate and untimely failure of the anti-press movement.
The work of capital is to sublimate all that is opposed to it into itself. It is in this way that the empire of passivity has been solidified. In his work, "Capitalist Realism", which has now become seminal on the left, Fisher, the wolf in Zizekian sheeps clothing tells us that the solution is accelerationism in a badly cribbed piece that he stole from Benjamin and (as capital trends towards) sublimated it to the spectacle. We must see here the failings of the anti-press movement not as indictments of those involved, many of whom are youthful and unaware of their errors. They are our friends, but those at the top, those who seek to grift from and steal the labor of the working class? They are our enemies.
The anti-press movement has a truth to it. The presses are enemies of the people, as Poetry and The Paris Review feed you CIA funded art, incapable of any revolutionary value they seek to replicate the work of Sean Bonney. The difference of course, is that, what Bonney offered was a militant poetic. A rifle in the hands of a reader, and an understanding that the author is simply part of another production line. The anti-presses are just a new production line, this should be mourned.
This is not a lost cause, there is a solution. The unfortunate reality for us is that great threats will either be sumbsumed by the work of capital (Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson both being sanitized for capital), driven to the edges where they can be watched and co-opted slowly (non-tenure jobs in academia), or, if a threat is immediate enough, executed or jailed.
Given a structure to work from the second, which is where the anti-press group was left can be a blessing or a curse. They became part of the standard publishing format, but they did not, as the Kusnitza poets would say "turn art into a particular weapon". What does this mean? How does it appear? How do we remove poetry from the reading rooms where poets only engage with other poets and bring it to the people?
First and foremost, there is a need for poets to be organized. A poets union is meaningless as long as poets continue to place themselves outside of productive relations in their own mind. Until they are willing to wade in, and turn their poetry from poems into pipe bombs in the hands of a publishing house, their poetry has the revolutionary value of a scented candle in a public restroom. Nice to have around maybe, but ultimately its just covering up the smell of shit that permeates the place.
Organization is not a group chat, it looks like replicating party structure and putting politics first. It is demanding that both the ideological and poetic styling of our poets is as strong as it can be. Not everyone is capable of doing this, and that is okay. John Steppling once said that the role of critics is to elevate the discourse surrounding theatre, and poetry will always need the same. Those who show how to read poems, those who can exist as a part of the productive process but not as the writers of the works themselves. Gramsci himself was once a party theatre critic, and famously referred to Pirandello (the fascist theatre writer), as being an example of Dialectical Theatre, whether he wants to be or not.
So, what does an organization for poetry need to do? Actively contribute to building a revolutionary and organized working class. Just as Proletkult, the John Reed Clubs, the KultIntern all did. They must take poetry out of the hands of Poetry Magazine and The Paris Review. They must treat it as a weapon, your poetry must become the rallying cry of disparate elements of the working class. Aspiring to perfection in form and perfection in politics. A living breathing thing imbued with militancy, fury, and class consciousness. Even in the best of times this is difficult.
Poetry has a gift in the realm of art, it is inherently opposed to ironic distance, it does not allow as easily for the form to surpass its content. It is the, "presentation of our humanity... and of the forces which move it."(Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction) They become the most accurate way for humanity to show the "objective bound up within art" (ibid). So, as a result we must do as all socialist poets of the past have done. Organize with and within revolutionary movements, treat ourselves as they did, worker-militant-poet, in that order. And e must bring poetry back to the people, public writing classes, public readings, and publicly educating the people will be the weapons of the poet until the time to fully realize their role as militant comes. For now, the worker-poet must be the primary relation, but worker must never be sublimated to poet.
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