Neo-liberalism
As one who keeps an eye on such things, I say there are all these poets now, many more poets than ever before, but there's much less poetry, and I know I'm right when I say this but can only speculate as to why. And when I say poets I don't only mean those who write poems, I mean all those who make art with a certain informational catalog containing models made in the past, in the hope of making something new, something that's never been heard or seen before, however modest.
Driving south from San Francisco and into the Central Valley the other day, on my way to knock on doors in Mendota, California for the Democratic Party's candidate for Congress, the answer to the question that has long perplexed me--why the dearth of poetry in a time flooded with poets--presented itself as I came to a place in the road where the absolute FLATNESS of the Great Valley as geologists call it, as flat as a piece of paper or the surface of a canvas, collided, at least visually, with the distant HEIGHT of the Sierra Nevadas: that we're all mountain climbers now!
I saw at that moment that poetic energies have been gradually drained away from originalty toward the barren flatness of unoriginality, where everything that needs saying has already been said, or the heights of supra-originality in which no trace of the past is allowed to exist--(It's not DADA I'm talking about here, an art movement born after World War I with enough crazy vitality and skilled art practitioners that will insure that DADA never dies). Driving in this landscape I began to think it's the tremendous power that neo-liberalism once enjoyed that has either made the climb up the mountain so difficult as to be impossible, and/or created the illusion that the top of the mountain is achievable if one has the right education and cultivates the right connections. Both notions are equally harmful, and both have made us mountain climbers instead of the poets and artists we are, or might be.
Neo-liberalism is taking a beating now, as all social-political movements take a beating sooner or later, accused of having created a privliged ruling class in thrall to corporate interests while maintaining a disingenous guise of openess and plurality. Instead of the mountain being lowered, the mountain was actually raised and the people--poets and artists included--had to work overtime, i.e. make more poems, more paintings, make more and more and more product to reach the mountain and then climb the mountain neo-liberals had created for their 'reward.' Hence, the more poets and more poems, the more artists and more art.
I kept thinking about the word neo-liberalism whiile walking the neighborhoods of Mendota, talking to people who were home and who opened their doors, giving them literature on the candidate, telling them they could vote by mail or by turning their ballots in to one of three Voting Centers in town, and that they ballots were printed in both English and Spanish. And to do it by Tuesday, March 3. Their homes were modest, these were working people who worked hard because there was no escaping hard work: if you wanted a decent life you worked hard for it. The more I walked through the neighborhoods of Mendota and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was a benficiary of neo-liberalism, that it was the political and social time I helped create, worked in, wrote in, raised my children in, and it had been more or less good to me and mine.
Last night, after dinner in Fresno, I sat in my hotel room and wrote this--neo-liberalism is the mask humanists wear to acheive and then to hold onto their power. It is the mask made of the Greek ideal of the possibility of human perfectability, welded to the belief that social progress is inevitable as long as it is created and then controlled by corporate interests both outside and inside the state. The neo-liberal movement has made this mountain appear to be climbable by appearing to invite everyone to the climb, in the name of democracy I suppose, a fantasy really, as it's a fantasy also that anyone can write a poem other than a poet.
Maria V_____, at her home in Mendota, CA, considering campaign literature promoting the candidacy of TJ Cox (D-C21), the incumbent. During our brief conversation, she graciously offered to passt the literature on to her daughter. Saturday February 29, 2020. Photo by author.