The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectual, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. (Hannah Arendt cited in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
As I was reading Chris Hedges's very interesting book on the Orwellian or Huxleyan (or should I say Debordian) nightmare that is early twenty-first century life, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), I was struck by the way the spirit of its "triumph of spectacle" thesis could apply to the contemporary poetry scene in Canada provided I only transform the idea of democracy in America "as outgrowth of free markets" (185) and corporate power into the idea of literacy as the product of state-run Arts complex (of the kind we have here).
A simple substitution of 'corporatist' (America) for 'socialist' (Canada) would do the job. And so I make the same death of "complexity and nuanced language" thesis for much poetry written, fêted and anthologized today. Socialist Canada seems to have created the same type of "end of literacy" scenario as corporatist America. And, interestingly enough, I can faithfully employ the same critical language as in Hedges's book without too much harm. Though Hedges doesn't address poetry directly he very well could have done so. What follows is a reflection on contemporary Canadian poetry along the lines of an "end of literacy" critique as developed in Empire of Illusion. I've kept the spirit and impetus of Hedges's book but steered them towards a more uniquely Canadian poetry experience.
The literacy illusion can be traceable to the same socio-political and cultural causes of the narcissism, entertainment fetish, sense of entitlement and addiction to "commercial commodities" (whatever form they take) that characterize the post-millennial world. That is the general claim. I strongly commend Hedges's book for its well-rounded exposition of the scope & origins of what he aptly terms the empire of illusion. Applying its basic premises (& insights) to literacy alone seems to work just as well: in fact, I'd have to say a society of spectacle has snared even poetry in its net, its traditional (mostly lyrical) voice reduced to more entertaining "concrete, sound, list, translation, performance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, narrative, conceptual and long poems" varieties (as the Toronto New School of Writing advertisement goes).
The word (as much as the World) has been fragmented beyond repair into a myriad of faux copies of some original ideal from which we've strayed. It's my contention that digitalized, visual, video and poetry slam spectacles performed today in Vegas-like fashion offer the only available venues for hordes of poet-graduates who've been encouraged to mix artistic genres like literary libertines: making the cultural present into a sort of ahistorical arena for a collage of modes of expression that are an extension of the personal narcissism and techno-fetishism of its chief exponents today. Only the semblance (simulacra) of poetry has been kept because illusion is all that's remained and all that is now necessary. Perhaps the most devastating indictment of contemporary poetry is its reduction to what I regard as its "commodity fetishism": an array of spectacularly commoditized "pseudo-poetries".
Spectacle, once set in any socio-political or cultural arena, brooks no opposition. Look at the sense of outrage at a recent Canadian Heritage Department proposal to cut back funding to small magazines . In an age of declining readership in general and of traditional hardcover books in particular, coupled with the growth and dominance of e-books technology, the whining of the traditional mainstream mags (Arc, Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, etc.) over their share of taxpayer dollars is almost unpardonable. There's a sense of entitlement to funding and fierce resistance to any idea of having to justify their mags through proof of established readership.
Large-circulation magazines continue to receive current funding levels while small mags get no more than a proposed allotment of 1.5 million dollars. Their charge of subsidy cutbacks to the Arts as an assault on the country's cultural viability is ludicrous in the face of the normal financial assistance most magazines up to now have been eligible to get from no less than three governmental agencies: a Canadian Magazine Fund, a Publications Assistance Program and a Canada-Council literary-and-arts magazine fund. The arts-funding controversy adopts the language (to which we've recently been accustomed) of bailouts and the need to keep a literary "corporate" model of institutionalized writing in place: one that (the proponents of state-run Arts claim) can't be left to the forces of a market economy alone.
The debate on publicly-funded arts in Canada is virtually a non-issue, so used have we become to the idea of state-run culture: consequently the capacity for independent thought and, more importantly, self-criticism go by the wayside just when it's most needed. Open-ended debate, a sense of social responsibility, and indeed anything that curbs self-will in the interests of a greater good take a back-seat to the demands of spectacle. To dare to question this "culture of illusion" is to risk being seen as a malcontent or, worst of all, an anti-Arts ogre bent on ruining free artistic expression. With criticism of Canada Council practically non-existent in mainstream media, the fairest discussions seem to be reserved for the blogs, the only sites available for "otherstream" discussion.
How did this "empire of illusion" ever come about in Canada? Internet technology and the poet seemed to have morphed into a creature of pure spectacle, but it's something that was a long time in the making.The hordes of writing students, for example, spilling into the writers' market today have been sold a bill of goods in the classroom & in the world of real writing: the 'mainstream' marketplace, funded by taxpayers' money, create an illusion of standards, literary opportunity and vibrant cultural tradition. It's the illusion of Arts Canada, one orchestrated by legislative fiat (Canada Council, Canadian Heritage and all the provincial arts council bureaucracies), and enforced by academics and the mainstream publishers they control. And of the above-mentioned three I'd say academic institutions have done the most to create the illusion of literacy. It goes something like this.
Financial support for the academy always has both curriculum and administrative implications for the Arts. Teaching style and content chase after money and connections, with ever rising student enrollment becoming a lucrative publishers market. Rather than a place of inquiry and ongoing critique of the economic, social and political conditions of all institutional structures, the university is a micro corporatist entity: in particular, a bastion of blinkered specialization & technical expertise in every subject area. Even in the humanities students must decide on a very narrow thesis-friendly subject area if they're to be received into academic practice, restricted as they must be at a very early age to a world of coded (almost masonic) language and writing ritual. In the minds of young student-writers success is bound to be equated with commercial viability: they feel necessarily entitled to reap the rewards of patiently jumping through all the prescribed academic hoops. Literary bang for their buck!
Acceptance into the profession creates a sense of wanting more of the same even long after graduation. If universities have become corporate institutions among others, vying with the marketplace for student tuition dollars and government research loans, then academic standards of excellence in general usually subserve a wider corporate & bureaucratic ideal of "good governance". And that ideal of "good governance" means in Canada a commitment to a means of literary production that is both taxpayer-based and run by bureaucrats in Ottawa.
Even liberal arts grads (say creative writing students) cannot be any less aware of the necessity for bringing 'marketable' skills into a very specialized work world than doctors and engineers: the bohemian campus Arts crowd having died a long time ago with the Beats (if they ever really existed). But as Mark Bauerlein says in his The Dumbest Generation students have turned into a "Creative Class" looking to find in the world of work outlets for creative expression. In Canada "good governance" usually means a policy of multiculturalism designed to be a both theoretical and achievable reality. Even humanities grads, students of wide ethno-cultural diversity who are reared in a fake university and student-worker "harmony", have already been groomed for the rigidly legislated and administered social welfare system of governance that Canada's become in order to serve the needs of its multicultural citizenry. What Hedges says in regard to the American government can be almost inversely applied to our own subsidized arts regime: "It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception." (169)
Even the poets that popular writing classes create by the thousands will thrive only under the academic-corporatist conditions of the university that profits from a lucrative student textbook market and the warming ideals of state-sponsored Art to which they've been encouraged by their teachers to aspire once they leave campus. Which means that rather than fending for themselves, with the marketplace dictating literary taste, poet-graduates will turn naturally to the only agent of state-sponsored literacy directly suited to their writerly needs and aspirations: Canada Council or Canadian Heritage, new surrogate university departments with office hours, application forms and rigid administrative guidelines of their own.
The state becomes an academic playground where graduates expect to find the same classroom spirit of creative 'specialization' and literary production work: paper and/or electronic application being the usual first step to writing projects of any kind. The classes never end nor the call for papers. Here's an academic-government (bureaucratic) isomorphism intended to facilitate the poet-grad's transition into a potentially rewarding writing vocation. But when reality frustrates (as it inevitably will) the academical expectations of budding poets, and a Malthusian imbalance between writers and publishing resources looms on their personal horizons (with its attendant dysphoria), poets turn to spectacle instead.
A sense of entitlement fostered by the faux excellence of literary work in the creative writing lab, coupled with the ubiquity of Internet technology, stirs contemporary poets on to a hope of instant universal acclaim and acceptance in a virtually endless, unfettered e-market. The switch-over is easy once traditional ("old school") literacy's been redefined as e-literacy. Poetry as "celebrity culture" with all the tricks of "mass entertainment" now at its disposal.
An egregious example of literacy illusion at the level of poetic discussion took the form of a recent Bök-Starnino poetry "cage match" first viewed by many on Vimeo or YouTube. More bombastic and self-serving than informative, with its own WWE stage design, the poetry debate was really poetry theatre, the main event crassly served up as choice of two poetry styles rather than as the complex multi-layered discussion it ought to have been:namely, whether Canada is better served by avant-gardism or a more traditional poetry. A type of sophomoric presentation (highlighted by Bök's comical gestures & expressions and Starnino's equally comical dead pan delivery) rather than any advancement of ideas seemed to result from this. The whole had the look of a "frosh week" prank: true spectacle framed by image, poetry peddled as brand-names (amounting to a "junk poetics") and a type of literary sloganeering that resulted in little more than claims by both poet-debaters that his poetry is more popular than the other.
And if a World Wrestling Entertainment format grows stale (and performance novelty always does), there's always the more ingenious cyborg poetics of Christian Bök alone who's lately partnered with ALICE, acronym for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, a sexy "chatbot", more technically a“natural language processing chatterbot” to whom/which Bök posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's post-avant work Sunset Debris (itself a series of questions). Poet as talking cyborg-head reminiscent of the 80s Max Headroom.
And if he isn't dialoguing with a robot he's usually using Power-Point to read poetry as more silent graphic (letter-glyph) fusions. It's hard sometimes in this emerging age of "Vispo" to separate graphics from language; poetry from techno-poetries. In fact, a growing trend towards digitizing even more traditional flesh-and-blood poets from the past, like Fred Wah and bpNichol, Internet sites comprising mostly of "uploaded scanned images" of poet and their writings, is the extent to which traditional poetics chases after cyber spectacle.
If "fun and fantasy", augmented by Internet media, are preferred to traditional literary expression, the result is a rampant bibliophobia among the young (as Mark Bauerlein argues in The Dumbest Generation): a disdain for reading and the patient and thoughtful inquiry it entails. And if the young aren't reading books, that means poetry as well. But the young are also the largest consumers of Internet social networking, iPod, and video technologies, and the most likely to be drawn to "spectacle" of e-literacy & Bökian techno-tricks rather than the substance of the word.