Epic monetary poets

Al Filreis

At left: Ray Kroc, poet of the economy.

This is the first recession in the blog era, so we are getting a glimpse of all the rhetorical stretching that we must presume was there before but unseen. Now we see it. If I had a dollar for every time Wallace Stevens’s “Money is a kind of poetry” has been quoted in this (loose) context, and invested them in stocks that are low (General Electric maybe), I might start to believe in the aphorism — to live off it.

There’s a blog called “Culture11” run by Joe Carter (ex Lawrence Welk roadie) and his less-traveled friend David Kuo. They write on politics, economics, and culture, and it’s usually fairly good.

Now they want to make a list of their favorite financial geniuses (Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, and people like that) but, well, it’s a blog and there must be a soft stretchy lead, a cute hook or gambit. So we have, once again, “Money is a kind of poetry.” Then something that’s not true: “As a Pulitizer Prize-winning poet and president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Stevens was familiar with both free verse and the free market.” Stevens was an insurance executive who (after his first years out in the field) did mostly administrative work at corporate HQ. He worked with surety bonds and constraining devices such as that — and believed in their efficacy. If anything, he expected the free market to fuck up pretty much continuously, and conceived of the insurer’s mechanisms as the proper application of brakes on that freedom.

Untrue here too, in that phrase, in its implication of the positive relationship between “free verse” and “free market.” Not by any stretch the same “free” there. So it’s all bloggy b.s. aimed at getting us … where? To this point: “So if Stevens is correct, and money is a kind of poetry, then who are our epic monetary poets, the ‘poets of the economy’?”

Thus Gates, Kroc, Tom Watson … these are the great economic poets. Their talent for creating just the right removals economic constraints on business is a kind of free verse, and so poetry is a kind of money.

Epic, man. Really epic.

It’s still the case that smart people (the makers of Culture11 e.g.) assume that the businessman poet must be someone who would side with Ray Kroc and Sam Walton, thus that the poetic aura gets to include these latter gentlemen. (Stevens, for his part in particular, would have been appalled by them.)

Here finally is the moment where I get to express frustration and even occasional outrage at the way in which advocates of an unconstrained market are being permitted these days to switch sides, support constraints (regulation, moral hazard, etc.) and keep the same language about economics. Read statements made by congressmen who have been voting for the big bailout. Most who are free marketeers speak of this as the big exceptional moment where all that must go out the window (but how free is that?) and a few will talk about how this proves they’ve never really been “ideological” and that crossing over, when necessary, for the people, is okay. Yet when conditions improve “free” will once again be the poetic word of the day, and those great economic poets can take the field once again.

October 2, 2008

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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.