An email the other day
The other day, I heard from an English department that ran a literary publication that’d published some of my work, saying the department was being merged into a Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures. They tried to play cheerful, but you could tell they hadn’t mastered the art of annunciating heart-wrenching news through the gritted teeth of exclamation points and smiley faces. And that’s to their credit.
Of course, the email wasn’t news, even in my corner of the world. I’m no academic - I write for a living, which means writing for clients. But even in such mercenary waters, something had been shifting this last decade. I met fewer young English majors, heard less book talk, and bumped into fewer allusions in casual conversation and written communications.
As a writer, I was around this collapse in another way, hearing the sad tales of the PHDs - who assign and grade the homework. They could barely get paid, from what I hear - traveling from college to college and sleeping in cars like carnies, paid by the credit and sent packing before they get too comfy.
The other homework cops – the book reviewers who argue and extol and argue taste and style in the written word – weren't doing much better. Venerable literary totem poles like Bookforum, Confrontation or Believer were falling every other month. And it seemed like every year, ever more of the book trade shifted to interior decorators buying stacks of single-color hardcovers to fill the new condos, or to curating an on-brand background for zoom calls.
Homework cops
Homework cops is a bit glib. I’ll own that. But literature is an acquired taste. And the cops are there to help you acquire it. The cost of not acquiring it is narrow taste, and a life of ever-diminishing rewards within the few tastes you have acquired. It’s a fate of ever-more expensive luxuries or ever-drabber days. Either way, it’s a life of depression, of spiritual death while the body is still alive and kicking. That’s my position. Many others disagree. Many others golf.
But here we are. So what do we do without the cops? What do we do without homework?
And what about this world with no more English majors, perhaps soon no more English class. It's already time to ask what it all was. Was it a church? Was it a cover for subversive operations?
We might also yet be so bold as to ask why it’s going away. (We might be so bold as to ask why I retired from poetry and I might be so bold as to answer, one of these days.) What of the world I entered when I was fourteen and said – Aha! A writer! That’s me! – had it gone away? Was it ever anything more than a hopeful daydream?
What’s left of that world? Is it just copywriters and copyeditors cosplaying as noble, immortal souls on the weekends? Is it just a bunch of people who are freelance pious for a hard-to-love aesthetic, whining that no one pretends to love them the way they pretended to love the heavyweight career-makers of their day, back before they forgot they were pretending? Is it an underground stealing rations and waiting for a moment to strike?
I was a kid
Like anything, the English major is an accident of sensation and desire. I won’t Wikipedia anything at you. I’ll just give you my take. I was a kid. My father loved Ronald Reagan. I wasn't a rich kid, but I was given reason to believe I might be. I sipped of that arrogance. And when it betrayed me, I knew it was my own fault for sipping.
As a kid, I remember seeing a big POW-MIA flag filling a particular window on Belmont Street on my way to school. I remember getting no clear reassurance that the world wouldn’t end in radioactive fire. And there was a mortal relief of the end of the cold war, as I started puberty, after forty-odd years of living with a gun to our collective head. And this mild euphoria arrived just about the same time as we started to see the consequences of recently undoing the New Deal. The euphoria seemed to take the form of an idea. It was called Reaganomics, but has lived on in many forms, from the well-worn consultants’ tale of the pencils used by Cosmonauts to the One Simple Trick clickbait headlines at the bottom of news articles. The idea is that we could release wealth and joy by just trimming a few habits and traditions from our civilization. In Reaganomics, unwinding a few social programs would liberate workers. And deregulation would liberate entrepreneurs. For a while, it worked.
Once the Berlin wall fell, the United States no longer had to prove its bona fides as a civilization through culture. In the arts, no one thought that would matter. People believed that, freed from the cold war, art would flourish, high and low, far and wide. Kurt Cobain made a CD with William Burroughs. People bought it. The cool record companies did records with poets reading their poems and hired musicians to make it sound good. Steven Jesse Bernstein’s album for Sub-Pop comes to mind.
What happened between then and now – why absolutely everything had to be placed upon the chopping block – is the subject of a later essay: Because There Is No Growth out this October.
Who has time for poetry?
Poetry has played a lot of roles across human civilizations - google it and I'll spare us the litany. But what about today? As a departing member of that vocation, I’ll offer this: Poetry offers a place of gentleness and exploration, as well as rage. It is a pause, created entirely by words, in which absolutely everything remains under consideration. It is a place where language receives the careful and difficult understanding too often withdrawn from living human beings as they exist in the office, on the street and even within the family.
But who has the time for that? The answer, if we looked up from our phones, tablets, laptops and TVs would be everyone. Entertainment costs more than money. And based on how angry people get about the latest soggy emission from Netflix these days, I think people are catching on to the real price paid in time, in imagination, in our sense of purpose, and in personal courage.
Poetry is a room as spacious, delightful, frightening and frustrating as the actual world. And like the world, you can make a home in it. But unlike the world, you can politely decline, and go on living. It's that simple. And so people do. Not an easy pill to swallow for someone like me, who has spent so many years in its noble pursuit. But was it really so noble? Or was I scrambling among a throng of secretly ambitious men and women - all of us wanting to strike some secret chord and have our work assigned by the homework cops. I mean, imagine it! The immortality! The revenge!
The dime-store detective
I’m not so unique. I started writing and reading for my own reasons. What followed is something like the plot of a detective novel. It starts with a rich offer or some high-grade flirtation. Before long I discover that the person who hired me isn’t who they said they were, or they get killed. Next, I discover that the infraction that I started investigating isn't the real infraction at all. There are twists and turns, red herrings and MacGuffins. Finally having solved that ultimately petty mystery, I have to choose: Justice or just let it go. And I've seen too much of both for either option to hold much appeal.
Starting young, I aimed my best arrows at the homework-makers at the New Yorker, POETRY and Best American Poetry. It starts as art, but ends in box-checking and aesthetic risk management. Soon that’s all you recognize among the bird-names, tree-names, exotic foods, medication-names, maudlin come-ons and deliberate vagaries of homework-assigned poetry. Then add in the backbiting, a lack of daring, and the utter and complete absence of money.
And now that other bit - there is no one to assign new poetry homework anymore, and maybe ever again. That particular state-sponsored engine of immortality for a gifted or fortunate few has shut down.
Why? Money, it seems. This is the subject of a later essay: S.T.R.E.A.M. Takes Longer to Type than School out this November.
Who are the enemies, again?
So what remains in literature? Delight. Delight is great, but it's no kind of retirement plan. The only things less reliable than delight are people who specialize in transforming it into a steady flow of cash.
Of course people still argue that literature matters, that it works all kinds of social good. But they’re all pretending according to different faiths. Their arguments tend to make me feel tired. And the pharmaceutical industry has more money to put behind very similar claims. Reading is harder than taking a pill. Especially now, in what may be the single worst period for human communication in recorded history.
Why? Simple - it is easier to type than to think. We’ve had more than fifteen years of social media to show for it.
As the economists in the audience would expect, the written word has plummeted in value and esteem. It’s less of a product than a waste product. And that gives me an uncomfortably familiar sensation. It reminds me of poetry, which was the first place I encountered the awkward environment with more writers than readers. Now it appears poetry was at the vanguard in this sad terrain. We’ve all found ourselves in conversations where each participant’s urge to speak overpowers the topic being discussed, and where that impatience has the character of badly needing to use the toilet. These seem to be more conversations than before.
Is censorship real? Exactly.
This incredible bounty of eager voices has, surprisingly, led all sorts of people to become friendly to censorship.
Not legal censorship, not yet, not exactly. But certainly an increased sense of disposability of people’s experiences, views and opinions. There are just so many. And so what’s the harm in fewer books? Fewer perspectives? Fewer acceptable topics?
Currently as solid as a rumor and as persistent as car horns in a traffic jam, censorship is a thumb on the scale. It alters the algebra of opening your mouth, as an unknown variable, creating a heads-they-win-tails-you-lose relationship to everything you may say or write. This is a vulnerability that every writer feels, though some handle it better than others.
Roughly, this is how the new, spectral censorship seems to work. When you speak or write, there is the platform to consider. The word seems deliberately vague. Platform refers to a wide array of things, from a multimillion-dollar contract with a global media conglomerate, to your audience, to your job, to just your personal reputation.
You can lose or damage your platform, easily, it seems. It’s not so much what you say, but the platform that comes under attack. While hardly Soviet in scale or consequences, this kind of censorship has had the effect of turning on all the lights and shutting off the music of what was supposed to be a party.
I feel ill when talking about AI
And then, as if we needed any more trouble, in comes much-hyped generative AI with its promise of limitless counterfeit language. And it is counterfeit. It has no actual meaning, the way counterfeit money has no actual value. AI writing says something no one means. It means something no one says.
The counterfeiters know they’re doing no reader a favor. They act as if the reader or the listener is the victim of the transaction. They fulfill the dark premise that only a sucker would read or listen in the first place. They think they have a tool for fuller domination, for global conversational filibuster. Maybe they’ll win. But I doubt it, even short term. People always find a way to slip away from the bore at the party. And the pro-platform, anti-human perspective works best when left pointedly unsaid. It won’t withstand scrutiny. It is ugly. And few aesthetic experiences are as formative and lasting as disgust.
But the bigger platforms - be they famous names or publicly traded media companies - will probably give AI a go for the same reason that they’re so sympathetic to censorship: They’re not really in control of themselves. Most institutions spend all day preaching to the choir, because the choir selects the preachers. The people who keep their jobs are usually good at adapting and keeping their jobs, and often rather shaky in every other department.
Why literature always wins (after we’re dead)
There are always alternatives to committees and to the crowd. Literature is one. Its tradition of difficult, solitary individuals has long thrived on exactly this tension between empire and imagination, consensus and conscience. That tension plays out in literature, and in the stories of how writers relate to their censors, their audiences and to their own customary poverty.
Even without homework, literature has a power found in few other places. Poetry is rich and poor the way each living moment has a way of being both high stakes and no stakes. I think of times when I was really reading a poem – a good one – and all the swelling grandeur and generosity of one line might collapse into embarrassment the next. And somewhere in that focus and suspense is a creeping sensation that maybe two dozen humans on earth have read those lines and lived in the same suspense.
Literature – the subject of the English major - has always been a dubious guide through inexplicably hostile territory, like the future, the frontier, a lonely sleepless night, or hell. And the territory is no less hostile nor more explicable now, but more people have lost access to those almost-trustworthy guides.
This loss comes at a time pervaded by a high-stakes-but-maybe-no-stakes sensibility. It’s an age of quantity and uncertainty, where every new day is the most, the biggest, the best and the most dangerous, at least according to the numbers. But it feels hollow and helpless, when expressed in numbers. It’s something a person can only participate in as a number, a victim, a trend.
The new guides are either professional manipulators or the professionally manipulated. And like most innovations and upgrades of the last quarter century, this has been - on balance - a bad trade.
A secret for those who read to the end
Like AI, these new guides have an incredible weakness. They can't be honest. Even if they wanted to, they’ve lost that thread. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. They may avoid outright lies for legal reasons. But that’s not honesty.
These enemies – well-funded, well-liked and so well-known as to have blotted out half of humanity’s hard-won knowledge – have, however, succeeded in rigging the game against honesty. And on a sunny day, when the consequences truly outnumber the opportunities, how will you be honest? Honesty requires that you be both smart and brave. And the game is rigged so that one would seem to preclude the other.
This is the corner into which it’s easy to feel painted. Maybe it’s the same corner we clever types have always been painted into. It’s where something like faith or madness takes over. From there, the next thing happens.
That’s you and me. Good luck. And may G-d forgive us.
As a former history and literature, major, I love white you say about poetry and literature here. Thanks Colin!