That’s a great line. It makes me angry and I’m not sure why. At the same time, just from her voice, I get the feeling Ms. Zhang knows.

Great stuff.

Anyway, I’ve tried to get published and have had no luck. One could indeed infer it’s a class club. I’ve even asked a few times for ay kind of feedback as to why my work is unworthy for publication and get these half-assed non-committal aversions. You start digging and find things like ghostwriters, PR agents, trust funds, familial hookups, and all the other little Oompa Lompas of BSing pushing whoever has the cash or the pedigree to play adult make-believe. Never just good work getting it’s due.

And because we’ve been told it’s a “meritocracy” you do start cultivating those sour grapes like in your article here… what else do you have? Money allows people to pretend to be whatever they want. And if you’re just a guy with a job and a love of the art then you have little hope to play the game too; unless you have something novel about you like alcoholism or drug addiction for rich folk to latch onto in order to give themselves “street cred” and teenagers to latch onto because a petty level of “naughty” behavior is the only standard they grade things to – never just the work. Never what’s being said. “Gild the bars of the petty cages we’ve built – tell us our ugliness is beautiful and our deceptions noble”. That’s all they want you to do.

When the culture no longer studies the craft of poetry, painting, and music then the tools to discern what is good from what is merely artifice and posturing is gone – and all we’re left with are the same rich posers; who come in all shades and dominate every industry. Skin color doesn’t come into the class club – your ability to play pretend is all that counts. Ever seen a Warhol painting? The Emperor’s New Reality – the one we’re living in.

Art is supposed to be a dialog about what it is to be human and to feel and to be alive… and in that respect nothing has changed Art is now about how well you become a brand, live a lie, and what you have to offer people to buy and buy into. Hypocrisy is a given. A human centipede of fictitious persona gnawing at each other in the hopes of ascending the coil. And, ultimately, a place-holder of pretentious name-dropping, thuggery, or gaudy noise where Art used to be. Art has become irrelevant unless it’s a mirror of our own lie of who we want to be perceived as. It’s the necessary prop in the costume of pretending to be an artist.

But distracted by this noise, and the game-show histrionics, we never have to face ourselves and self-awareness. Never face the fact we are so fragile and impermanent, that we’re here to go. Never have to face the fact that all culture is just make-believe. And as the scientist wants us to know – We come from Nothing and we go to Nowhere, and forever and ever; Amen.

I guess even in it’s plasticity and venality art can never lie. So it goes, huh? So it goes. The ultimate and final work of the species could be the installation of our own extinction.

But there’s always hope – they can’t take that away from you. Keep working. Art is what is created despite the fakers and the phoneys not because of them. Keep going.

http://www.squidoo.com/poetry-poetry-and-more-poetry

somewhere in the sentence, holding things

together, while you would be standing, a tin

soldier, the rifle barrel of your h

sticking up over your shoulder.”

or “I felt a little

sorry for you, always announcing,

never the thing itself. ”

Dang, Sharon Olds, you stinker you!

Thanks for your comments. I wrestled with this essay because I felt, as you did, that to even utter or mutter the word “poetry” with the more staid and ostensibly yawn-inducing “ethics” was to risk reducing one of the greatest art forms in the world, ever, to some dusty obscure and pedantic exercise in moral philosophy.

I guess ultimately I agree with you, that “poetry admits ethical criticism…in the same way that every human action does, not in a different way.” I would only add that, because something takes place between two people (writer and reader), that something has an ethical dimension, just as it has a very vital and very important aesthetic dimension. We talk about the aesthetic dimension a lot in essays about poetry – talk about form, style, content, vision – but what does it mean to talk about that ethical dimension? That’s I guess what I was wondering about when I wrote the essay, How we talk about ethics without reducing poetry to non-poetry. Nussbaum, for me, is good on this topic – she talks about the relationship between style, say, and ethical content, and she uses Plato and his dialogues as a fascinating example.

As far as surreal poems not lending themselves to questions about ethics, I want to agree with you, but I do disagree. Simply because reading such a poem involves two people, even the most decadent symbolist art for art’s sake poetry can lend itself to ethical criticism (thought hopefully a robust, as opposed to anemic, one). That would probably make an interesting essay, now that I think about it! :)

At any rate, thank you again for writing and sharing your thoughts and poetry. I wish you all the best,

Andrew

In my blog, I published a poem the function of which is not to convey any ethical message, a poem just for the sake of the mere images – certainly not “neutral starting points for thought,” but neutral inasmuch as it neutralises, in some ways, the reader’s expectation to know better how to behave once she has read it…

http://greg-ory.blogspot.co.uk