culvert

JS speaking of the absence of “walks” in today’s best poetry:

Whether this is because poetry has turned the bulk of its energies toward accomodating, or resisting, capitalist “schizophrenia” (symptom in part of the enormous time done, by knowledge workers, at desks) or whether “nature” is more deliberately edited out by writers alert to ideological and historical trappings, is hard to say.

JS, ecopoetics 01, page 5

This asks for some unpacking. Speaking as a knowledge worker, I am very curious about this statement, but not sure I can decipher it. As a knowledge worker, I’m very distracted by the missing m in accommodating. I learned “two c’s and two m’s on a date” back in my early career as a knowledge worker doing Word Processing for the City of Eugene. Okay, deep breath, I can let go of that.

Poetry turning its energies – poets turning their energies –
poets forced or choosing to turn their energies – or mindlessly turning their energies –

toward accommodating or resisting –
either or both – kind of what you do with the elephant in the living room –
some might try to push it out
others to move the furniture and rugs into attractive arrangements around it
And don’t forget – “what you resist persists” (which turns out to be a quote by Carl Jung)

Capitalist schizophrenia. I think I know what this is. I think he’s saying the poets adopt the mental habits of life that are “symptoms” of the knowledge worker economy we live in here in the (where). I acknowledge that I live in it anyway, and this is a concern. I know there is an impact. It is hard to articulate what it is when you are inside your own life. I guess he’s guessing.

Attempt: There is a weird, “they’re playing hooky” sensation that you cannot get around when reading Ted Berrigan on his train rides, or Frank O’Hara during his lunch breaks, or the Beats during their anything, especially as they grew into adults. And you read any poet under a cloud of awareness that one has to make a living somehow. I can’t get over the paradigm of poets who teach. Should this matter? I think yes.

Moving on to the second statement after the “or” – there is such an echo here of the feminist concern that poetry excluded reference to women’s experience, birth, bodies, babies, blood. I came into poetry through the “No More Masks!” anthology. Interesting to find JS making this same complaint, but this time around, with respect to Mother Nature.

Who knows the answer. Yes, it’s hard to say.