Reptile: I think you are mistaken, but the feeling of its remoteness gives me
an erroneous pleasure, a pleasure that lacks credibility I should say.
—Carla Harryman, from Memory Play, in A Voice to Perform

On 18 December, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars surprised me with its first substantial comment on the online mobbing and internal turmoil at Wayne State University I have been undergoing since April: “On the Attempt to Exclude Barrett Watten from the 2020 ’20th Century Literature Conference’ in Louisville.” Not only was the post substantial in delineating its reasons for rejecting the cancel culture campaign to create a “safe space” absent my participation—but it was principled. I have to say I was happy to see it:

Dispatches calls on all poets to reject the toxic culture of exclusion this petition represents and to speak out against its quasi-Stalinist demands. We urge those who have signed, or who are considering adding their names, to reconsider. Above all, we call on the organizers of the 20 Century Literature Conference to rebuke the petition as a matter of basic principle. . . . This attempt to revive an animus of retribution, censorship, and cancellation should be rejected outright.

My gratitude for Dispatches’ position, as also its timing, is likewise substantial and principled. The online bullying and mobbing I have experienced since April—over issues at Wayne State University I cannot discuss due to privacy concerns—have been a prominent feature of the online poetry world especially since 2015. From that time on I have been at the center of three separate online campaigns: controversies around Conceptual Writing and the “whiteness” of the avant-garde [here; here]; online and email exchanges with Nathaniel Mackey, which Dispatches had a key role in promoting [here]; and the current campaign. In the latter two, mobbing is supported by “doxxing” in the uploading of documents without permission, a tactic later used in the tweet of my confidential personnel letter. An even earlier example of “doxxing” is the upload of the tape of my 1978 debate with Robert Duncan, which everyone knows about [here]. All this is now a part of my history, and I do not disavow it: the only way out is through.

As we have seen, the policing of poetry communities in call-out campaigns and cancel culture has only increased since 2015. It is both a product of the internal contradictions of poetics as a “community” and a symptom of our depraved media environment since the Millennium and before, both within and without poetry. It is likely that students at WSU were “schooled” in the use of online tactics such as doxxing and petitions from the poetry community (my emails with Mackey were linked as proof of “racism” by one). At the same time, even Dispatches‘ principled statement, now circulating online with the petition it attacks, may be “too hot to handle” for many; a spectatorial distance is the predominant response. Who needs more antagonism?

There is a larger question, here, of the relation between “principle” and “antagonism,” and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars is at the center of that flame. The name itself could not be clearer: it recalls the good old days of the 1980s, when populists and neocons baited Language writers and theorists, and the (masculinist) gloves were taken off for pugilistic combat. I was at the center of those debates, in call-out articles in Poetry Flash, The Georgia Review, The New Criterion, and Partisan Review, with titles such as “Fakers in Paradise” and “Stalin as Linguist.” Indeed, the “quasi-Stalinist” locution hearkens back to my line from Progress: “Stalin / as a linguist.” Before that, there was the mother of all poetry wars, the event with Duncan, pitting Language versus myth and Marxism versus voluntarism in two “contrary” readings of Zukofsky. Dispatches from the Poetry Wars wants to preserve that moment like a fly in amber [here]. From that inaugural moment, it seemed, the brotherhood of New American poets wanted me gone—I was a “mosquito over someone else’s swamp” (Duncan) that was wrecking the bucolic picnic of the Lost America of Love [here]. What is also clear from that point on is that the Poetry Wars needed me—they had to have an antagonist to go forward on principle, in the absence of which it’s all over and done.

How to think about being someone else’s antagonistic kernel (Žižek’s core of ideological fantasy); what does it mean to be someone else’s “Bad History” (a concept I took as my title; second edition in print here)? The one objection I have to Dispatches principled statement is its glossing over specific controversies in poetics that pitted some against me over forty years, leaving the focus on me personally as the source of conflict. As a deep reader of Blake, I can see these shadowy apocalypses as merely the bad part of our mortal coil as we tend toward the light of revelation, where “opposition is true friendship.” They would be merely a form of “becoming” of the blesséd community under the aspect of poetry—such was the high vision of the 1960s. But there are downsides to that commune in the sky—real bodies being destroyed or at risk at the same moment. From the Vietnam War forward, it was not possible for me to credit the spiritual unfolding of community as a politics, and my critique of Robert Duncan in two major instances—chapter 1 of Questions of Poetics and the “Lost America of Love”—speaks to that.

But the Poetry Wars after 2000 are not the Poetry Wars of the 1980s, and Dispatches might rethink what that means. In the 1980s, the defense of community, in all its mythic or even cultic dimensions, intersected with the end of the Cold War: in Reagan America and with the rise of the neocons, red-baiting was still a live option. “Stalin As Linguist” played this card in the most cynical fashion, as The New Criterion would have no other reason to take on the poetic avant-garde unless they could associate it with a new threat of communist conspiracy. The pay-offs for 1980s politics were cultural exclusion and hierarchy—reviving the threat of social death in the 1950s, when shape-shifting communists were outed to enforce the Tyranny of the Majority. What are the similarities between that moment and the present? Dispatches’ position addresses this in evoking the Red Terror:

I think “quasi-Stalinism” is a perfectly evocative phrase for the kind of ideological Puritanism that has come to infect significant swaths of the poetry field in the past years. The mob outbursts of hateful invective, character assassination, public shaming, and collective shunning that are the norm with these theatrical indictments are quite in the vengeful spirit of a 1930s Show Trial, or a 1960s Red Guard kangaroo court. No one gets killed, true, but reputations and even careers sure get ruined. Or at least that is the aim. The other aim, as with Stalinism, is to terrify people into silence and compliance. The Po-police have been highly successful in this, too. So no, I don’t think I will stop using the term “quasi-Stalinism” to describe this kind of self-righteous policing. The “virtue poets” doing it, I’d suggest, should probably spend a little more time looking into their faces on the selfie screen of their phones and asking if they might first best attend to their own defects and sins. (Kent Johnson on Joe Amato Facebook page, 18 December 2019; permission requested)

In principle, I agree: call-out and cancel culture work in a manner similar to red-baiting; not only do they exclude, they terrorize. In a series of posts on Jacket2, I addressed the question of “naming names,” which can lead to all kinds of peripheral effects in the zone of righteousness that can be perverted to quite different ends. Instances of “misuse” of call-out and cancel culture for merely personal and venal motives ought to be in the spotlight, and they are precisely what brought the 1950s Red Scare down, as we know from the Army-McCarthy hearings. The attempt to exclude me from the Louisville Conference is at its core personal, vindictive, and opportunistic, and it should be rejected on principle. I am happy that Dispatches has taken this up, not on my behalf but in defense of the poetry community itself.

What then of antagonism as a politics? Did Dispatches go too far in the direction of call-out culture by uploading the Duncan tape and Mackey letters? Is it preserving me, as fly in amber, to fund future new Poetry Wars? If this is all Blakean spirit-play, I am OK with it I guess, but there is a mortal part too and real people are being hurt. Having been nominated as antagonistic kernel, I will say: no I am not comfortable with that, nor with being Robert Duncan’s bad object (he got over it, as Lisa Jarnow’s chapter shows). Do I admit “to a natural and strong alacrity I do find in hardness” (Othello)? Not really. Rather, I will say now that if, in forty years of my own “fulfillment in order and strife,” I have come off badly at conferences, or have thrown out an occasional verbal barb from the back row, or promoted difficult poetry in a haughty and intemperate manner, I will take responsibility for it. But I am not guilty as charged at present. The aye of poetry has it; see you in Louisville!

Links: Page 01, “Breaking My Own Story”
Page 02, “What Is Mobbing?”
Page 04, “My Literary Controversies”
Page 05, “Questions of Unreason”
Page 06, “Defend Louisville!”
Page 07, “Difficult Speech @ Louisville”
Page 08, “Nonsite Speech”
Page 09, “Archive News”
Page 10, “Public Documents”
Page 11,” “Endgame Notes”

Image: Kim Young-ik, The Eye of Poetry #18, 2018 (Barbara Wien Gallery, Berlin)