For autumn '25

EPHEMERA

“Your eyes, that once were never weary of mine,
are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
because our love is waning.”

                                            And then she:
“Although our love is waning, let us stand
by the lone border of the lake once more,
together in that hour of gentleness
when the poor, tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
how far away the stars seem, and how far
is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
while, slowly, he whose hand held hers replied:
“Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.”

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
a rabbit, old and lame, limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
on the lone border of the lake once more:
turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves,
gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
in bosom and hair.

                      “Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“that we are tired, for other loves await us;
hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
are love, and a continual farewell."

© William Butler Yeats 1889

P.F.S.: Baudrillard's Conspiracy (2006)

Got around to reading Baudrillard's Conspiracy of Art. Baudrillard's main thrust is that after Duchamp, the banal got tangled up into art, creating what he calls a "transaesthetic" society; a society where everything could possibly be art. Warhol then took this to the extreme by turning "art" into a mechanized routine, taking out everything transcendent in art and replacing it with plain quotidian artifacts, or the simulacra of these. Baudrillard claims, staying on the surface of things, and accepting surface-level narratives of art history without inquiry or objection, that this influx of banality has destroyed art as we know it, and that art has reached an advanced stage of "nullity," with the art community frantically trying to pretend that this hasn't happened. It will be seen, over a durational expanse, whether Heller-Burnham will prove to be the antidote to this melange of circumstances, contexts, established aesthetic mores and neglected ones, or not. The melange, of course, being traditional, parochial America. 

Significantly, Baudrillard never mentions poetry. so it's clear his critique is aimed at visual art and visual artists. Nevertheless, I took his rather vulgarized critique somewhat personally. In Language/post-avant circles, there is a somewhat prevailing ethos that "anything can be poetry/make a poem." Certain experimental poets have used this as an excuse to substitute banality for transcendence, nullity for depth, simulation for authenticity. Authenticity, of course, is a dicey issue here; objections to the lyric "I" and long-standing quandaries inhering in it, and in poet-extolled authenticity, are commonplace in avant-garde circles. I mean authenticity on a level which is meant to imply seriousness, a commitment to aesthetically and not merely conceptually or politically valid or relevant poetics; an approach not wholly ironic. And irony not used, as it often is by Conceptualists, as an excuse to abase, belittle, and sanitize an art-form into advanced rigor mortis obsolescence.

Pursuant to this reading of Baudrillard, and as I've discussed elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the bravest thing a poet can do now, paradoxical as it seems, is to "warp" backwards, towards form and narrative. Warping back per se is the bete noir of post-avantists in general; but, as Baudrillard noted, going forward into even more vapid banality is not much of an option either. A brave retreat towards formalism and narrativity is a valid move because, as you cannot step in the same river twice, a narrative-thematic movement backwards/forwards would have to create new forms to reflect new circumstances and contexts. We wouldn't be going back in a merely imitative or Centrist sense; we'd be warped forwards/backwards by our emphasis, our preoccupation with content, specifically as regards crafting poetics out of an engagement with the most serious issues poetry and philosophy can address, the primordial ones. Philosophy in poetry, dialectic or not, nullifies whatever the transaesthetic impulse might be. It also nullifies irony, when irony is employed, as it often is by the Conceptualists, to emasculate the aesthetic.

From Dusie

ROPE DANCE

Morning is a burned thing, Louise.
Spoiled like a shuttered house.

Paper everywhere— under the beds,
in the dresser, floating
the pale skin of soup.

You make a cage of your fingers
to keep out light. Chicken bones
to keep out the dead. Grey
where it’s all wearing at the ends.

Your braids still tied in a V
when the dark comes to you like a cat.
A long hallway. A girl in pink
sateen against a backdrop of stars.

When you shut all the latches,
shut your eyes. A little gin, Louise.
Make one turn, then another.

© Kristy Bowen 2006