As a business model fails, forever is pragmatic

Al Filreis

In the postal business, there’s a term of art (as it were): the forever stamp. Forever stamps are always equal in equal value to the current U.S. first-class mail 1-ounce rate. The term has been in use for some years, but hasn’t really been relevant until fairly recently. In eras when rates were stable — we all remember the days when the announcement of a rate increase was an event, causing a slight shock and even protest, something for which we anyway had to plan — a “forever stamp” was essentially superfluous. Now that rates increase often, almost unnoticed by a public in the process of abandoning a form of communication, one can almost not even recite the current first-class postage. Conceptually, "forever" has become handy.

Because of the impending failure of a business model, forever is pragmatic.

Okay, nothing other than a shift in business here, right? But USPS has long prided itself on iconic canonicity, official taste-making, permanent cultural celebratory gestures. Commemorative stamps are still much debated and pre-tested on the cultural-capital market. A bad choice of person or iconic scene can cause controversy.

It’s apparently time for USPS to say which 5-by-4 grid/sheet of 20th-century poets is forever (two sets of just ten chosen poets). They could have opted to commit this significant act of public canonizing for stamps that would be less relevant, and eventually essentially useless, when rates changed. I would have advised that they go with a largely different set of choices (they didn’t ask — but whom, I wonder, did they ask?), but, short of that, I would have urged them not to make these "forever stamps." It’s as if, the twentieth century being over, discussions of the valuation of 20th-century poets are done too. Is contigency of value that difficult a concept — especially for people running an organization now dependent on it for its short-term survival?

Surely there are creative technologies associated with franking a letter that could be made to enable pluralities and shifts and dynamisms and multiple aesthetic and other -isms. Stamps.com is just a simple instance of alternatives that make the provision for change and valuation part of the process. That USPS can’t think its way out of what is at this point a fairly minor matter suggests where they and their premodern sense of value is headed. Anyway, if the mode is premodern, why not stick with emblems of premodern culture. (Well, even here, they largely have.)

So we have Brodsky, Brooks, Williams, Hayden, Plath, Bishop, Stevens, Levertov, Cummings, and Roethke, forever.

April 22, 2012

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.