Perturbed by the conditions of possibility of usefully public self-knowledge, I intend to fully illumine my practice by reflecting LIDAR lasers off the Hull of Mirrors of various nefarious poetasters. In many lives there will come a time when, hearing the demand What art thou? boomed with all the attendant implicature of superintendence conveyed by a competent booming, it would be frankly less than human to other answer than “Why, Chill-Lipped M’Lud Jill is the name!” And I’m fine with that. Nor do I take issue precisely with these particular poet-peers, who will remain forever far-from-nameless, who deem to take such festering namefulness obviously too far, and even to propose to be many names utilizing one single author, rather than the regular deal of one plume tricked out with many a nom. That’ll cure what ails you and I get that.
All that riles me is when such heteronymity and Eigennamenhass and market-segmenting brand diversity makes itself a hellfire crucible of many vainglorious mediocrities. Why must poetry, as if loftily exercising its droit de turd, veil itself underleaf? IEDed dens none spelunk; masks sans faces, maskless fascinators; middling feats inferring non-existent extremes; vacuous universal sellsword caveat; garrulous mushy-headedness; lotuses every-which-way wafted with an aura of Pétanque — all of this repulses me, yet so circumambiently that I must suffer my repulse in sessile quiver.
These steethful heteronymous scribblers may, in apology for their unfortunate habit, a habit redolent of the swift-breeding excuses of swindlers backing into tall brick walls, snivel that any poem’s basic building block is not the word, but the speech act. To pretend neutrality with respect to authorship, they cajole, their eye-swivels discoverable in the sprinkler-arcs of their crocodile tears, is tantamount to turning down paper and ink entirely. Or at least, it is defaulting to the dogear as though that were the whole folio; and in short, saving we disarray our ouevres with countless vapid, doodled avatars, we are blamed for dogmatically ignoring tools merged to our bones.
Beware. Adjust your grip around its throat, and this species of insidious apologist will go in a flash much further, proposing that any poets who do not incorporate the middling status of their poems into their poetic practice, any poets who decline to notice and act upon the de facto limits of the hospitality and hospitableness of the mental lives wherein their poems manifest, any poets who do not somehow solemnly “take into account” the supposed categorical iffyness and adequacy and so-so-ishness of their art, resolved against inter alia Ezra, must needs be condemned to mere distracted and myopic finger-painting, must toil unceasing as smearers who can only ever semi-see canvases at best, and whose fingertips, ever in darkness, dabble without distinction, now in pots of richly coloured paint, and now in air whorled in imaginary pots.
And I understand these calculatedly depressing sentiments perfectly. Doing Things With Poetry can be purportedly distinguished from current conceptual writing by conceptualism’s recourse to allegory, by conceptualism’s unresolved and dilettantish engagement with — well! with any energetic and masterful practice of administration, quantification, or reification, e.g., the lament that Vanessa Place’s corporate bureaucracy bungles its BrightPay roll-out! — but above all with positivism. E.g. grief that Kenneth Goldsmith’s experiment supposedly required regression analysis.
I dunno — and here I must address myself directly to one specimen, a former collaborator — has anyone ever persuaded you of their facility as “speech actsmith”? Have you ever persuaded anyone of your own facility in the forging and merging of speech acts? Save that baseline theatricality of yours? You can’t expect me to have failed to notice that when you address a public, you go up on one foreleg, crooking it like doggies do playing Fetch; and what you scamper after is its esteem. You may gaze towards adopted policy docs and the cumulative and fallibilistic pretensions of the sciences with frankly stalkerish yearning, yet surely are you waded as deeply into negative capability and poethical wager as any. You edit, fretting over contributor quotas, with but one identity aspect your guide. You write, hypocritically, words. With wimpering grace you accept every solicitation to submit your words for publication or your mouth for performance.
Why then do you falsely claim to have a megalomaniac aversion to tickling a li’l’ absent vellum with a li’l’ wind-tipped nail? I can take a pretty good guess. It’s because of your plaisir. It’s because you’re too scared to lose the comfort of complaint by overcoming the objects of which you complain. I care little for the cunning intricacy of your complacency. All I know is that you have for some time now succeeded in maintaining a continuous critique of hope, in the name of some more exacting hope, in which you have no real belief, and of which you show no real need.
I would urge you to cease this, only I believe it to be some literal curse. You and your default associates will be deliberately discouraging and bumming people out from your deathbed in the most high-handed manner.