Any response to the question, “What’s the matter with American poetry right now?” addresses, at least implicitly, the fate of language itself in society at the present time and the role of poets in cultivating and defending language. As guardians of the vigor of language, poets readily — and even stereotypically — express a weighty affection for words, a love of language. At the same time, the residual effects of poetry’s feeling for language — philology, we could call it — can only be fully grasped in relation to the dangerous movement of logophobia: a fear of language, and resentment towards it, evident at many levels of society and culture today.
Mistrust of language, sharpened by conditions of exile and precarity, and by tremors of derealization induced by the technical media, may also reach down into the wellsprings of poetic philology, binding the poet’s longing for language to the stance of the infidel. And if we try to gauge the spread of linguistic estrangement, why would we assume that fear or hatred of language is restricted to the philistine or the tyrant? Isn’t it possible that poetry, too, involves and even draws some of its elemental power from the dissociative effects of logophobia?
We will try to address these questions in this brief text, which is tethered to poems collected in a project called logophobe: a book in which shame and suspicion overtake poetry’s love affair with words, a book that crosses over into the exclusion zone of stupidity and never returns. For we are concerned here not with a domain of stupidity that stands apart from language, or with occasional verbal defects, but a mode of dispossession integral to language, where we can’t ever quite say what we mean, or grasp what others (and we ourselves) are actually saying. Inevitably, the immanence and ordeal of verbal stupidity in communication of all sorts — including poetry — contribute to a volatile milieu of contempt, shame, and ultimately fear about language and its uses.
The universality of antipathy towards language often becomes focused, of course, on particular languages, on the speech of the racial subaltern, but also conversely on the language of the colonizer, the occupier, or nationalist majority. And nether worlds of stupidity open up as well between languages — the space of translingualism — exposing a borderland of doubt and chagrin: How do I say ? Have I said the wrong thing? Am I making any sense? Miscues and breakdowns haunt the predicament of the refugee, the exile, the migrant, without relief.
Even more sharply, the revulsion and defiance associated with logophobia become stratified in forced languages, when “detainees” cannot avoid learning or speaking the despised tongue of their tormentors, even as they tie its sentences into knots and sift through its vocabularies for scraps of nonsense to be made into curses and charms. Stripped of its sovereignty, the captor’s language becomes a reservoir of secret testimony.
Yet the experience of becoming estranged from language need not stem from using a second or third language. For the goblin of stupidity first takes possession of one’s native tongue as its dearest trophy. And the fate of verbal estrangement — inseparable from the habit of language — afflicts not only one’s efforts at personal communication but, more generally, the phraseologies of institutions, which exercise, but also camouflage, Medusean powers of verbal stupidity.
From this perspective, a verbal condition equated with the abdication of sovereignty — linguistic failure — penetrates ever more deeply into personal, global, and even poetic consciousness, thereby engendering a negative sovereignty sustained by linguistic decay even as it remains in thrall to the rhetorical powers of language. At the same time, as linguistic dread veers toward the renunciation of sovereignty, new underworlds of poetic language may be exposed and put into practice. Yet poets routinely and perhaps naively situate themselves as the last line of defense against apocalyptic failures of language, as self appointed guardians of linguistic virtue (even as poetry produces some of the most embarrassing examples of verbal stupidity).
But what if the poet’s posture as the custodian of language were to be suspended? What sorts of blighted phrasing and immunized vocabularies might seep into poetic usage? How might poetry’s linguistic extremism (every word counts), its experiments with language and truth — its notorious license — its failures of intelligibility, its commitment to utopian practices of not-yet-being, function as unreliable remedies — homeopathic in essence — against the insinuations of fake news? And what features might fake news share with the poetic “news that stays news”? Logophobe submits the practices of scholarship and theory, citation and reflection, to the dumbstruck rituals of poetry, and it does so not by seeking to eliminate stupidity from language, or explain it, or to shake off the paralysis of shame, but by inhabiting elementary failures of language and surrendering to its inherent (or acquired) maladaptation. Plagued by feelings about the miscarriage of words — annoyance, dread, misgiving — logophobe is a book bewitched by clichés, jargon, and bullshit. Its pages accumulate with a nagging sense that words break up in flight, never finding the things, persons, creatures, they name and solicit.
At the same time, stumbling across voids of ineptitude (and hints of mortification) in venerable texts—and then ramping up those vacancies— this book tries to dodge the failed language of its own making: to drown out its clichés and infelicities by sounding the stupidity of the idols. And even to gauge whether linguistic malfunction could be a faint Mayday signal from the idols, a buzz stirring both intrigue and alarm, a mistake pointing to a flaw in the creation of the world.
As for the unnameable, a single clue remains: much of the language of logophobe is second-hand, exposing the feral track of transcribed speech — or it may only seem to be cribbed, salvaged, ripped off. The garbled text does not tip its hand or give credit where credit is due. Some might conclude that authors remote from our own time and sensibility were somehow “speaking” to present conditions in these foundling texts, like rubbings from a gravestone.
Breeding, scavenging, without scruple or restraint, these broken poems cannot hide the fact that they have mistaken reading for writing. Listening becomes a way of speaking. In its crooked ways, the crooked text stages for the reader the experience of being fooled by things that are only half there — indeterminate sources of shame or pity commanding us to fall silent.
What's the Problem with American Poetry Right Now?
A Forum Edited by Edgar Garcia
