Is lyric poetry just aristocratic bullshit?
The essential attitude of the poet, the fine artist, is still the model of an aristocrat: Rilke, Frank O’Hara, etc. Bohemianism, notwithstanding the appeal of fakes, is usually a shallow pose. Lyric poetry begins with Sappho proper. What is revolutionary about this mode is that it directly confronts the war mode of epic, which is the only mode of epic, and therefore about the exchange of captives (whether enslaved foreigners or “free” women), foundationally. In Sappho, the soloist is not simply anoriginal and peachy. Sappho sings something entirely new, an emphasis of subjectivity:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
ever you love best.
By now, this kind of moon-eyed adoration feels thoroughly apolitical. The troubadour tradition bequeathed to us the idea that Romance could be a substitute religion, more idealized than sexual (devotion without sacrifice, without confronting violence). The Elizabethan court lyrics represent this Sapphic continuation, ala Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where the mapping of desire between the narrator, the Young Man, the Dark Lady, are a more abstracted psychodrama. While Shakespeare was exploring bisexuality and transexuality interpersonally, there is little to connect the dots between the Sapphic and Homeric modes in those private poems. Yet at the very time between 1592 and 1600 when he is writing the majority of these queer sonnets, Shakespeare is learning how to mix in plays his meditations on violence and dominance with the pursuits of desire and enjoyment in ways that are still unrivaled in the language. Romeo and Juliet is idyllic, because the warring families which seem to be the backdrop of teenage love are still neatly equivalent, ambiguous, symmetrical, metaphorical almost. It’s basically exquisite backdrop. With Richard II, ca. 1595, almost Shakespeare’s most intensely lyrical play in terms of phrase-making and word music, there is something light years more compelling than Love’s Labor’s Lost pyrotechnics of polysemy, punning, preening. It’s devastating.
I’m saying it’s quite hard in art to disentangle structural violence and interior fantasies in the same space. What the aristocratic mask does, even (especially) for those who come from relative nothing, whether a Rimbaud or John Wieners, is let us sing about the affairs of the heart, of the erection and hole, as a kind of cul-de-sac. White art is such a cul-de-sac. Empire art, masc art. These things are in all of us. When people call something bourgeois, as one might dismiss Proust, what they mean beyond whining is the intuition that this Thing, this painting or libretto, this dance or whatever, can’t admit into its consciousness such a thing as war, genocide, slavery, i.e. the world. I don’t even mean at the level of content, but as affect, as disturbance. What makes the most precious and dissociated art often secretly compelling is therefore:
we love escapist fantasy, as a palliative, because we wish to be (or stay) precious and dissociated;
there are often seeds of some kind of (radically) dissonance still there, afoot.
Mallarmé’s tortured torturing of grammar, like Henry James’ diver’s breath and rococo clauses in those late novels, convey something essentially off about the merely beautiful. There is a grossness in such works that is oddly life-affirming. Immanence. Potential. Queerness.
—On your desert island, do you take with you a copy of Homer or Sappho?
The opening of Homer foregrounds brute thug soldiers arguing over captive enslaved women while the conquest and flattening of a city, as nakedly evil as the US-Israeli destruction of Gaza, will soon take place openly & bluntly. Contemporary readers can dissociate from that reality because the Greeks and Homeric epic seem mythological, arcane, removed. Simone Weil worshipped The Iliad more than any other European classic precisely for its show of force, what she considered a truthful depiction—without sentimentality as cushion—of the world without God. Naked violence.