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158 barrett watten The Politics of Style Barrett Watten begins his essay “The Politics of Style” by responding to Ron Silliman’s “The Political Economy of Poetry” (1981), which argued that “poems both are and are not commodities.” For Watten, the politics of poetry ought to be seen “in terms of the function poetry performs within language itself.”In developing his argument,Watten takes up structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson’s six “linguistic functions” that may coexist in any act of communication. Jakobson defines the “poetic function” as “the foregrounding of language for its own sake” that predominates in poetry, even as all other aspects of communication (like“the referential”) remain in play. In seeking a poetics that conveys a politics that is not defined by overturning reification or the commodity form, Watten turns to Charles Olson’s controversial reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference (1965), where Olson abandoned poetry on the page to enter into a continuously unfolding, improvised performance. Citing Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1981),Watten shows how the rapid frame shifts and foregrounding of signification in Olson’s “uninterruptible discourse” are both ideological (thus mystificatory) and critical (and unmasking). For Eagleton, “history enters the text as ideology, as a presence determined and distorted by its measurable absences”; for Watten, Olson’s foregrounding of negativity in performance occasions poetry’s entry into language and politics. In “The Political Economy of Poetry,” Ron Silliman begins his analysis of the material basis of poetry thus: Poems both are and are not commodities. It is the very partialness of this determination which makes possible much of the confusion among poets, particularly on the left,as to the locus,structure,and possibilities of literary production’s ideological component. In fact, the reason for this confusion lies in the paucity of identification, either in writing or in criticism,of actual poetics with political intentions. The causal necessity of the “commodity” as a material basis for the poem is a construction indicating the lack of a politically viable poetic method. Rather than seeing the agency of a poem as latent in, or in some sense determined by, the object status of the book, one could better analyze the politics of poetry in terms of the function poetry performs within language itself. What is wanted the politics of style 159 is a consideration of this function as exterior, autonomous, in the world, and here the commodity status of the book is a cue. [. . .] Poetry extends itself by its own means, in the act of writing, in public readings, and as a published text, into the political context. Silliman is correct in asking for a “three-dimensional consideration of ideology .” What the text accomplishes on its own is significant; the question remains whether the commodity status of the book is a dominant or a supporting convention. Obviously, the specific slant on “the commodity” brought to a book, both by an author and by the producer of the book, is an aesthetic choice with ideological dimensions. There are greater and lesser degrees of conjunction, however, between the content of a book and the manner in which it is produced. For example, the notion of “fame” in the works of Keats and Coleridge came into being parallel to the expansion of the reading public brought about by the increased mass production of books.That notion of fame survives in such postmodern Romantics as Olson and Ginsberg, but it is a reaction to the modernist compression, rather than any fact of the book trade, that allows for their “all-over” poetics. The writing is stylistically committed against the commodity; it is not readily packageable work, even if the City Lights “Pocket Poets” series provides a convenient package. Production values often differ wildly from ideology; for example, the low-budget mimeograph output of the New York School often tails the art market with covers by Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and other known visual artists. Here poetry is borrowing from the stronger market,and in this manner such work as stylistically aspires to commodity status, in poetry, tends toward areas with long-established ideological superstructures. In a country with no real successors to Sandburg and Frost we still have a market for academic poetry (from George Keithley’s The Donner Party, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, to Iowa Workshop sonnet series) and magazine verse (Redbook, verse intended to compete for white space with cartoons). [. . .] While “the book” can be thought of as a kind of template or outer...

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