Proposal
The
twentieth century appears to have bestowed on us a legacy of constant
and seemingly irreparable disaster. It left us with the aporia that
poetry, as the synthesis of intellectual and creative activity, has
become incapable of dealing with stupidity and barbarism. This is
evident in the Nazi and Fascist crimes as well as in the institutionalization
of economic violence in a world that is becoming both global and disorganized
at the same rate, with catastrophic consequences in the form of local,
ethnic conflicts moved by hate, sectarianisms, and private tragedies.
What remains of the nationalist projects has become a strategy to
strengthen corporate interests; at the same time, internationalism,
rather than opening up to pluralistic and democratic human experiences,
has boiled down to a strategy of exploitation — economic, touristic
and for the sake of legitimizing racial and social prejudices.
In
the beginning of this century, a new form of such violence has begun
to emerge, one derived precisely from its continued existence: it
is the muffling, the dampening down of the scene of destruction. An
impotent creation — trailing behind technology, the market and
a voracious media and communications industry, lacking any political
impact or liberating aesthetic —, it survives by shrinking of
poetic goals or the audience for poetry. Skepticism vis-à-vis
revolutionary transformation, the consistency of the avant-gardes
or ideological dogmatism has not resulted in actions that are freer,
as we would like to think, but, instead, has given us more garrulous
production in increasingly homogeneous environments. Joint property
of peers, corporate genre practices — all these fragment and
render poetic production banal. Parochial activity takes offence at
criticism and deabate. Condescendence, pusillanimity, a pact of peers,
mutual forgiveness make evident the lack of seriousness accorded
to poetry, as well as the disbelief in its transformative power. But
what type of real production could relinquish the power to transform?
An
impressive consequence of that legacy of catastrophic continuities
(which precisely dampens down and absorbs disaster as a normal occurrence)
is the conformity poetry displays with an average production. In that
environment, writing becomes an inconsequential habit, a "hobby"
— i.e., a childhood
or juvenile activity one abandons once one reaches adulthood, or is
continued merely as a weekend activity--, or instead, a professional
occupation, as any other, a modest way to earn a living alongside
other editorial or university-teaching activities. In such times,
there is no more reason to expel the poets from the Republic —
as Plato would have it — which does not mean a lack of spiritual
progress: apparently, no poet is perceived as dangerous anymore, as
incongruous or rapturous, to the point of affecting the disorderly
order of contemporary uncivil life.
How
to respond to such a lack of vision and of urgency peculiar to poetry,
a realm that by definition is hostile to mediocrity? How to resist
that barbarian shrinking of horizons, proportional to the redundant
proliferation of garrulous writing? Or, at least, how to denaturalize
disaster and reconquer the pain emerging from it? Can poetry still
be more than an affirmation of frivolity, arrivisme, and
intellectual affectation or — on the opposite end of the spectrum
— of loutish modesty and a hopeless remainder? If we don't
already have plans for the future, it's important to say that the
present also does not belong to us: the dampening down of expectations
produces indifference, alienation and routine, not the enjoyment of
a pleasant life. What can poetry do against this state of things which
seems to have no end? And if it can do nothing, can it be more than
frivolity?