Occupy Policy with Wild Edges

When we say "political poetry" these days, there are implications in the phrase about both political "content" and advancing "forms." How a book employs both in co-ordination may be the best measure of its potential effectiveness, but there is a built-in ineffectiveness, too, that comes with the territory not just of "poetry" but of all "Art" as we know it. Critics Terry Eagleton and Jacques Rancière have described the dual nature of our aesthetics as both potentially emancipatory and persistently repressive. I have selected four recent valuable books of poetry, each exemplifying another way of employing political content and advancing forms so that we can look at this conundrum: with one book borrowing a popular form from the Occupy movement (Scott McFarland's O Human Microphone), one working with "audio-visual patterning" of "shaped prose" to emphasize the dialogue between possible "inner" voices (Fred Moten's The Little Edges), one gathering a number of poets' voices looking at "how we are watched" in "an anthology of surveillance poetics" (Andrew Ridker's Privacy Policy), and one looking back over several centuries of history to gather Barbaric Vast & Wild "Outside and Subterranean Poetry" in forms not always recognized as poetry (here edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Jerome Rothenberg as volume 5 of the latter's Poems for the Millenium series). Each of these four books attempts a breakthrough in its reading of the world and in our possibilities for reading it. We can see, through an analysis of their approach to the ruling ideas of Art, both their potential effectiveness and the inevitable failures of our aesthetics. This analysis goes beyond a simple review by incorporating a critique of those self-defeating forces and a suggestion of what might overcome them, as exemplified in these four books and others they might lead us to read. These books are well worth reading and even more so in the ways they can lead us onward to other advancing works.

We can begin with a look at our core four through Rancière's concept of artistic "regimes" and his inter-related definitions of "politics" and "policing." This will show each book's adherence to, and variations from, the ruling ideas that have accumulated through the histories of our arts and their regimes. Each of these representative volumes takes its own emphasis from among Rancière's three angles, and each also fits Eagleton's blatant assessment of hegemonic bourgeois thinking and the resistances to it in our aesthetic practices. Where they take us beyond the aesthetic is where it all gets interesting; there in a fourth angle that joins the other three to form a "semiotic square," they can expose the contradictions among the contrary elements of our art—and in our hopes for it.

The basic three "regimes" that have held sway in our art world are described simply and clearly in a generalized historical context by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. He sees us as being in a period when art is ruled mostly by aesthesis, the ancient Greek concept of "feeling-perception" relayed from individual to individual. Our time also includes echoes and remainders of the generally earlier regimes of poiesis and mimesis. These come from periods when art's job in society was to shape objects, varying according to the medium, mostly to affirm the social perception of "the powers that be" in society and among "the gods" and nature. Poiesis is the simple shaping of a statue or a song or whatever to praise nature, the gods, or the more mortal powers of society or politics. It fits our earliest history and...