Hoipolloi Cassidy
20th August 2011, 01:11
WOID XX-08. Ruthless cosmopolitan (http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid20/woidxx08.html)
reprinted and abridged from WOID: a journal of visual language. (http://theorangepress.com/woid)
Philip Levine has been chosen Poet Laureate of the US - He's one of us.
Not, according to the liberal media. For it is a fact universally acknowledged by the Universal Class that Poetry is on the side of the angels, and since liberals are angels, well, what would a poet do but celebrate the values of liberalism: work is tough, of course, and being of the working class; but, there's a grandeur there, a noble resignation in those who might have made it out and failed, and that's what Levine's about, yeah, right:
The working class is endangered, yet we select this great voice of the workers in order to savor the loss like a great Scotch. It goes down beautifully, but the loss remains.
Ah, yes, something sad - beautiful, yet sad, n'est-ce-pas?- about getting flattened by a fork-lift truck. This is the kind of sentimental crap that Levine set out to fight from his first days as a real poet and his first days on the factory floor; it's the speck of shit that irritates him to the occasional pearl,
the rich
smell of work
as strong as money.
Max Raphael, the Marxist art historian and critic, wrote that most "progressive" culturati, from liberal to Communist, were Proudhonians at heart, practicing a form of double-entry book-keeping: If Property is Theft, then Culture must be the good side of the Profit motive, that's why it's called "not-for-profit" when it's anything but. Culture, says Raphael, "stages in a well-ordered tableau the wishes of the petit bourgeois," and there is no prettier tableau (forgive my French) than Redemption through Work:
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Someone at the New York Times called Levine once "a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” in other terms a real American, a mirror of the mighty world of illiterate strivers. Levine's a real American immigrant type, typical, that is, of those who refuse to be assimilated into the hegemony of greed: the mom-and-pop owner with a piano in the back room, the New York cabbie who's a virtuoso sitar player on the side; anarchists all, of course, for whatever that means to them, and to Levine this means a deal. These are the ones who were never fooled by that Big Shoulder bullshit; the ones who've known all along that the myth of the individual striver would sooner or later collapse. Their goal has never been to create a culture that's congruent with work under capitalism because such a culture is impossible; their goal, above all else, has been to build a culture that exists in spite of work:
You love your brother...
... because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German....
"I hear America screwing people over:" Sure doesn't sound like Whitman...
http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd258/TheOrangePress/WOID%20Album/danzante.jpg
So here's a poet who's proud of growing up a "red;" who writes of laying flowers on the grave of the Catalan anarchist Durruti; who's made it his life's work to rip apart the lie of the American work ethic. And here's the man who hired him for the job of Poet Laureate: James Billington, Librarian of Congress, author of one of the great classic sourcebooks on the history of the dream of Revolution. And here's Levine again who's not quite what he's supposed to be to fit the part: not "on the side of the working class," let alone "from" it, merely engaged with the meaning of work because it's through this engagement that one joins the working class. Sartre might have said that engagement is the reverse of being "naturally" of a class, let alone the working class; but then nobody in America is naturally of the working class, they're each and every one unmeltable aliens to one degree or another:
Philip set out to prove there is social mobility in America, so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as an adult joined the working class. He got it backward. - Philip Levine's mom.
The question remains, to what degree can, or will, Levine turn the relationship scripted for him by his appointment into something altogether different; to what degree can, or will Levine, speak to and for all of us who, like it or not, are getting it backward, and front and back as well?
reprinted and abridged from WOID: a journal of visual language. (http://theorangepress.com/woid)
Philip Levine has been chosen Poet Laureate of the US - He's one of us.
Not, according to the liberal media. For it is a fact universally acknowledged by the Universal Class that Poetry is on the side of the angels, and since liberals are angels, well, what would a poet do but celebrate the values of liberalism: work is tough, of course, and being of the working class; but, there's a grandeur there, a noble resignation in those who might have made it out and failed, and that's what Levine's about, yeah, right:
The working class is endangered, yet we select this great voice of the workers in order to savor the loss like a great Scotch. It goes down beautifully, but the loss remains.
Ah, yes, something sad - beautiful, yet sad, n'est-ce-pas?- about getting flattened by a fork-lift truck. This is the kind of sentimental crap that Levine set out to fight from his first days as a real poet and his first days on the factory floor; it's the speck of shit that irritates him to the occasional pearl,
the rich
smell of work
as strong as money.
Max Raphael, the Marxist art historian and critic, wrote that most "progressive" culturati, from liberal to Communist, were Proudhonians at heart, practicing a form of double-entry book-keeping: If Property is Theft, then Culture must be the good side of the Profit motive, that's why it's called "not-for-profit" when it's anything but. Culture, says Raphael, "stages in a well-ordered tableau the wishes of the petit bourgeois," and there is no prettier tableau (forgive my French) than Redemption through Work:
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Someone at the New York Times called Levine once "a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” in other terms a real American, a mirror of the mighty world of illiterate strivers. Levine's a real American immigrant type, typical, that is, of those who refuse to be assimilated into the hegemony of greed: the mom-and-pop owner with a piano in the back room, the New York cabbie who's a virtuoso sitar player on the side; anarchists all, of course, for whatever that means to them, and to Levine this means a deal. These are the ones who were never fooled by that Big Shoulder bullshit; the ones who've known all along that the myth of the individual striver would sooner or later collapse. Their goal has never been to create a culture that's congruent with work under capitalism because such a culture is impossible; their goal, above all else, has been to build a culture that exists in spite of work:
You love your brother...
... because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German....
"I hear America screwing people over:" Sure doesn't sound like Whitman...
http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd258/TheOrangePress/WOID%20Album/danzante.jpg
So here's a poet who's proud of growing up a "red;" who writes of laying flowers on the grave of the Catalan anarchist Durruti; who's made it his life's work to rip apart the lie of the American work ethic. And here's the man who hired him for the job of Poet Laureate: James Billington, Librarian of Congress, author of one of the great classic sourcebooks on the history of the dream of Revolution. And here's Levine again who's not quite what he's supposed to be to fit the part: not "on the side of the working class," let alone "from" it, merely engaged with the meaning of work because it's through this engagement that one joins the working class. Sartre might have said that engagement is the reverse of being "naturally" of a class, let alone the working class; but then nobody in America is naturally of the working class, they're each and every one unmeltable aliens to one degree or another:
Philip set out to prove there is social mobility in America, so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as an adult joined the working class. He got it backward. - Philip Levine's mom.
The question remains, to what degree can, or will, Levine turn the relationship scripted for him by his appointment into something altogether different; to what degree can, or will Levine, speak to and for all of us who, like it or not, are getting it backward, and front and back as well?