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1 1 IN PRAISE OF OBSOLESCENCE He was the first sane member of our family. He thought that poetry is dead in this modern world. —Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity (1990) In Lyric Powers (2008) Robert von Hallberg asserts without apology or qualification that poetry remains a vital art form in the twenty-first century: “Poetry is quoted in public, even from memory, and read aloud among friends, as often by working people as by intellectuals. And of course it is taught everywhere in schools.”1 True, a “half century” of “intellectual critiques” has fostered among many academics a“strenuous suspicion”concerning verse.2 “Inevitably, the prestige of lyric poetry has been eroded,” but, von Hallberg predicts, “this too shall pass,”just as“throughout literary history . . . skeptical, agnostic periods have been followed by reassertions of the highest claims for this art.”3 The optimism of this claim is startling. More typical are arguments that poetry is obsolete, persisting, if at all, as a marginal, residual discourse. Famously, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), the media studies scholar Friedrich Kittler argues that breakthroughs in communications technology killed the lyric poem by the early twentieth century. He labels verse a “mnemotechnology” that first developed to make the storage and retrieval of information more efficient under “oral conditions.” In the era of print, poems transmitted “by the medium of the book were still supposed to find their way back into the ears and hearts of their recipients.” Once the gramophone was invented, however, rhyme and meter became“superfluous,”no longer necessary to“endow words with duration beyond their evanescence.” Furthermore, “Edison’s talking machine store[d] the most disordered sentence atoms and its cylinders transport[ed] them over the greatest distances.” The consequence: “The death bell toll[ed] for poetry, which for so long had been the love of so many.”4 2 NOBODY’S BUSINESS Von Hallberg’s contrasting, upbeat tone stems from his faith that poetry occupies a temporality different from the cycles of innovation, popularization, and senescence that have characterized the history of technology in the West since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Poetry, he states, is a “deeply traditional art” in which texts and ideas “persist well” despite time’s passage. A writer such as T. S. Eliot, he points out, felt “unconstrained” by historical distance. He drew higgledy-piggledy from Edmund Spenser, the Bhagavad Gita, and a prodigious array of differently dated intertexts. Poets today, if they write quality verse, should be honored as participants in a long, continuous, uninterrupted story stretching from Pindar to Robert Pinsky.5 Neither Kittler nor von Hallberg has much patience for a third possible position, namely, that poetry is subject to change over time, and sometimes quite drastic transformation. It can adapt itself to new circumstances—including the invention of new media—by adopting new guises, pursuing fresh goals, and disregarding old limitations. What the Italian critic Francesco de Sanctis wrote in the nineteenth century still holds true today: “Unfortunately . . . poetry is dead. Or rather . . . what is dead is one of [its] particular ways of being.” Poetry, he concludes, is “not dead” but “only different.”6 Emblematic of this approach to contemporary writing is Marjorie Perloff’s classic study Radical Artifice (1991), which asserts that since the 1950s the advent of an “electronic culture” has made it impossible to continue writing serious work in the style of previous generations . “From now on,” she announces, “like it or not,” poetry has to “position itself . . . in relation to the media . . . that occupy an increasingly large part of our visual, verbal, and acoustic space.”7 I agree with Perloff’s thesis, up to a point. There is no ironclad law forbidding contemporary poets to make use of locutions, models, and genres that predate television, radio, or the gramophone. Poetry, as von Hallberg puts it, is “retentive ,” and its “preservative capacity” permits authors to revive “very old” beliefs, theories, and practices.8 Alan Liu, though, is also surely correct in Local Transcendence (2008) when he argues that this aspect of poetry can make it look outmoded, even “atavistic,” from the standpoint of people accustomed to life in “our postindustrial New Economy.” Citizens in the “technological society” of the present, caught up in its frenetic rhythms of innovation and expiration, cannot easily“translate”such willful anachronism into“socially meaningful terms.”9 Poets, in other words, often confront the reality of the digitally enabled communications revolution by persisting in what they do not simply despite but because...

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