Sunday, December 6, 2009

State/Meant of Purpose

As I approach the fateful moment of Stating My Purpose as a prospective Ph.D. candidate at various east coast institutions of so-called higher learning, I'm revisiting those texts that pushed me toward my current preoccupations, ones that manifest themselves poetically and politically, the ideas that will likely shape my research & work as a professional intellectual (whatever that means).

My last year at the (sometimes) illustrious Gallatin School was a period of independent research, guided at times by my two intellectual & personal heroes, Rebecca Karl & Antonio Lauria, both of whom offered a way into the dense & fascinating work of some very important dead Communists, who spent several hours on Monday afternoons and Tuesday evenings discussing the tensions and truths of Maoist and Gramscian dialectics with me, and who showed me that intellectual pursuits are not always masturbatory, that a close-reading of a single turn of phrase could break open a new world of thought never before considered. With RK, I learned how to Read the Revolution, so to speak -- to investigate the ways in which the theory and practice of national liberation, cultural re-formation, & consciousness-raising were reflected in the form and content of the work of Marx, Lenin, Mao & Brecht. With Antonio, there were conversations about the function of language as a living part of the Revolution itself, the process (always process) through which Gramsci constructed and de-constructed his (and the collective) understanding of People as readers, speakers and actors of the Revolution. RK offered a structured, faithful reading of Great (Revolutionary) Books; Antonio was a friend & comrade with whom I could work through my own difficulties, academic or otherwise, with the Revolution as an idea and a living thing.

Their influence affected my personal out-of-classroom readings of the so-called 1st- and 2nd Generation Modernists, & allowed me to draw connections between their theoretical and practical exercises in the development of an American Voice & the Revolutionary work of my Marxist-Leninist influences. Almost every week, Antonio would remind me of Gramsci's famous emphasis on "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," the dialectical relation between criticism and hope, and I would excitedly paraphrase a line from Williams, a paragraph of Olson. When I crossed the stage at Lincoln Center, my fist thrown in the air in acceptance of my B.A. in Poetics and Revolution, I was thinking of Gramsci, of Mao, of Williams & Olson, of my comrades, alive & dead, in the always-changing & constant Struggle, unnamed & waiting for a new Voice.

Now, revisiting those ideas that shaped my concentration at Gallatin -- ideas that earned me a reputation as a shouting Maoist, a chain-smoking & rambling poet, an anachronism in an intellectual community emphasizing post-structural theorizations of prose & the unspoken & insurmountable coercion of a monolithic System -- I'm reassured that structure is necessary, and that we as Americans have a language with which to speak, a language that is our own, and that we must reclaim in the face of fragmentation & institutionalized decentralization of thought and identity. These are the lessons I learned as an undergraduate, lessons I'm beginning to recall at a crucial and necessary moment:

Language is ALIVE. It is not a mediator or a mirror. It is as much a participant in the construction of our cultural consciousness as the breath that manages to keep us living among each other and ourselves.

and BREATH, that is the key: the rhythm, the space, the silence that's full, always, of what's been said, what will be said, what IS said. (Curse the passive voice, inherited & emphasized)

INHERITANCE is not merely to be accepted, but must be considered critically. We must dig into the past to understand what shaped the things we've inherited. Capitalism. Formalism. The iamb, the trochee. (These rules of poetry extend -- the measured & constrained approach to consumption, the veil that covers the social relations of labor -- ask our President for an answer to rampant unemployment & you'll get a beautiful sonnet in response, an inherited answer to a question that seems to refuse to change.)

Change, which does not simply happen, but is instead MADE. By people. On the ground & on the page. We should not wait for a handsome senator from Chicago to deliver it, nor should we turn to the Mothers and Fathers of our form to offer it in the pages of the Paris Review. The longer we wait, the later it'll come.

I'm also reminded that there are, in fact, very real ties between such seemingly disparate characters as William Carlos Williams and Mao Tse-tung. Evidence:

The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode. There has to be new poetry. But the thing is that the change, the greater material, the altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem, in it. Made of it. It must shine in the structural body of it. [WCW]

The supersession of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe... In each thing there is contradiction between its new and its old aspects, and this gives ruise to a series of struggles with many twists and turns. [Mao]

By repeating an early misconception it gains acceptance and may be found running through many, or even all, later work. It has to be rooted out at the site of its first occurrence. [WCW]

Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition -- from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. [Mao]

If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use -- that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy -- their own world
differing as it may from mine... That is what is meant by the universality of the local. [WCW]

It is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides. [Mao]

They lack that which must draw them together -- without destruction of their particular characteristics; the thing that will draw them together because in their disparateness it discovers an identity. [WCW]
So to state it. The purpose. Here it is:

TO DIG, to discover the contradictions that propel the motion of history In the American Grain, to unearth the parallels and intersections of individual experience that will give rise to a unified voice, to examine (closely) the victories and failures of the poetic Revolutionaries of the American 20th century, so that we, the inheritors of their language & culture, may move forward with our own contradictory experience and being with a more full & complex understanding of that which came before. Because before we can understand the present, before we can create the future, we must -- MUST -- understand what came before.

It's Sankofa. It's my favorite pome:

If we go back to where
we never were we'll
be there [REPEAT] But