Just to show you I'm not just blogging during my sabbatical, here is the beginning of the end, the start of the conclusion to my book:


This book has attempted to address the question of why the most ambitious and intellectually challenging poetry of our time meets with so much resistance or indifference. Posed in this way, however, the question virtually answers itself: the challenging nature of the poetry I have been championing and the resistance of the culture at large are one and the same phenomenon. As I have shown in the preceding chapters, recent Spanish poetry outside of the dominant school is not lacking in quality, variety, or depth. It should also be pointed out that such poetry, the heritage of the great moderns, has never enjoyed widespread appeal. Thus the notion that we are living in an age especially recalcitrant to poetry is at best an historically inaccurate simplification.

What has changed, perhaps, is that university professors, and others belonging to the "élite," culture no longer believe the modernist paradigm of an élite culture worthy of respect and emulation. Even many highly educated people today seem to share the widespread disdain for more difficult forms of art. The waning of the modernist imperative at the end of the twentieth century has meant that the expression of indifference (or hostility) to challenging and difficult forms of art no longer carries any negative stigma. In the academic humanities, the move from literary to cultural studies has undermined the traditional privilege enjoyed by literary works deemed to be more prestigious or "high-brow." It is true that such works continue to be studied--reports of the death of the canon have been exaggerated in the popular media--but many in the field have the sense is that the study of literature is an essentially conservative enterprise left over from an earlier, less enlightened period.

This conception of literary study is, unfortunately, quite accurate in many cases. The defense of the "literary" per se does often seem to be the province of more conservative members of the academic profession, and in this context the promotion of a cultural studies open to the study of all forms of cultural expression is quite welcome. When an elder statesman of my field starts to defend the primacy of the literary, I sympathize with him but wince at the same time: his "literature" is not mine. I remember the academy was never very adept at reflecting the vitality of modern and contemporary poetry: the New Criticism, for example, promoted a deeply conservative version of modernism, and prestigious deconstructive critics like J. Hillis Miller have professed their belief in the sanctity of the canon, turning their attention mostly to Romantic and Victorian poetry. I remember that Harold Bloom, also a champion of the Western Canon and a purveyor of popular "greatest hits" anthologies, uses the term "school of resentment" to mask his own resentment at Feminism or Gay and Lesbian Studies, and has zero interest in the work of any significant younger poet in the United States. The conservative English Department (or Spansh Department) really is no friend to contemporary literature. I think of friends and acquaintances who write language poetry, "flarf," or experimental comics. To continue to study "literature" within the academy in the same way as it was studied in the 1950s would not help bring attention to their work.

My own approach has been to follow a third path between a conservative literary studies and a ?cultural studies? with very little interest in literature per se. Cultural studies promises to democratize the study of literature and culture by placing cultural productions of various types on an equal footing. In practice, this almost always entails a devaluation of élite culture. Since the canon still survives in reading lists and in more traditional scholarship, what tends to be squeezed out is innovative work by younger writers. My "third way," then, entails following the example of Marjorie Perloff and other critics who have studied more innovative contemporary literature within the academy, attempting to bridge the gap between scholars and poets.

One argument underlying this book is that the autonomy of poetry has a tangible value, and that the insistence on this value in not inherently conservative. I believe that the lesson we have learned in the past few years is that, in the absence of some notion of autonomous value, literature will evaluated either for its market price or for its political instrumentality. A significant work, in other words, will have either some economic value, judged by sales figures, or some wider social resonance. Often, these two scales of value exist in an uneasy relationship to each other: without some measure of popularity in the marketplace, a work can not really do the "cultural work" it is called upon to do. This means that a poem is read by only a few people, we conclude that it automatically lacks the sort of social relevance that novels and films sometimes enjoy. Even socially-conscious poetry usually lacks this kind of entry into the marketplace to make it relevant to the larger culture.

The answer, according to some, is to re-popularize poetry, to bring something called "poetry" to the attention of a wider public. Charles Bernstein, in a biting satire entitled "Against National Poetry Week as such," point out the inherent problem in such an effort. The main problem is that the effort is deeply insincere, since what is being brought to the public lacks any qualities we associate with ?poetry? :

The path taken by the Academy's National Poetry Month, and by such foundations as Lannan and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, have been misguided because these organizations have decided to promote not poetry but the idea of poetry, and the idea of poetry too often has meant almost no poetry at all. Time and time again we hear the official spokespersons tell us they want to support projects that give speedy and efficient access to poetry and that the biggest obstacle to this access is, indeed, poetry, which may not provide the kind of easy reading required by such mandates.

This is the genius of the new Literary Access programs: the more you dilute art, the more you appear to increase the access. But access to what? Not to anything that would give a reader or listener any strong sense that poetry matters, but rather access to a watered down version that lacks the cultural edge and the aesthetic sharpness of the best popular and mass culture. The only reason that poetry matters is that is has something different to offer, something slower on the uptake, maybe, but more intense for all that, and also something necessarily smaller in scale in terms of audience. Not better than mass culture but a crucial alternative to it.