Review of Poetry Magazine July/August 2009 (part 4)

Probably the most politically engaged poem in this issue of Poetry is Nada Gordon's "Unicorn Believers Don't Declare Fatwas." I realize that many people would balk at the description of a poem like this as "politically engaged," so I'll explain what I mean.

The poem opposes the figure of the unicorn to the figure of Hitler, and it's easy to understand the implied allegory: unicorns are good, Hitler is bad. Yet this silly binarism is constantly undercut in the poem by images that put unicorns and Hitler together, culminating in the image of "getting hit in a collision between / a comet being ridden by Elvis, and Hitler / riding a unicorn." The poem satirizes an easy, dualistic view of morality that works by analogy. The unstated term in the poem's argument is the idea of "Islamofascism" coined by neoconservatives, a term that employs analogy to suggest that Islamic radicals are, like Hitler, profoundly and unredeemably evil.

Furthermore, the poem makes fun of the way the name Hitler is used as a shorthand for the idea of absolute evil in American culture. This practice of using Hitler's name as a metonym for evil contributes to a radical simplification of political understanding, as it suggests that political violence is produced by profoundly evil personalities rather than developing out of political history. What does a typical American know about German history? The answer is one word: Hitler. Gordon has fun decontextualizing this word, pointing out that the way Americans use "Hitler" is as naive (though less charming) than the way they use the word "unicorn" to represent an idea of childlike purity.

Gordon writes:

"You're really a unicorn?" "Yes. Now
kiss my feet." Hitler as a great man.
Hitler. . . mm yeah, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,
Hitler, Hitlet, Hitler. . . German food is so bad,
even Hitler was a vegetarian, just like a unicorn.

Here Gordon points out that it is as pleasurable to repeat the word "Hitler" ("mm yeah") as it is to repeat the word "unicorn." Repeating his name is a simple mantra that evokes pure evil. This repetition is as naughty as it is trivializing. In this way, Gordon points out the pleasure inherent in a simplistic viewpoint that trivializes history and political judgment. But her ultimate point is that once morality has been simplified into binaries, the moral poles (in this case "Hitler" and "unicorn") become exchangeable and similar. Thus she points out that Hitler and unicorns are both vegetarians, reminding me of the argument that, since Hitler was a vegetarian who didn't smoke, it is leftist non-smoking vegetarians who are the most fascistic and dangerous people in our society, the people who would brutally tyrannize the rest of us if they could. Implicitly, Gordon objects to a mindset that constructs moral judgments through simplification and equivalencies, a mindset that equates some parties with evil and other parties with good. Her poem performs such a mindset, as well as the collapse of such a mindset into a sensual play of references, such as the reference to "scenes in which the baby angora unicorn / and Hitler stay warm on a cold night." This snuggly reference feels good.

Gordon is alert to the fact that moral simplification is a source of great pleasure, of comfort. She immerses the reader in that comfort and makes it strange through bizarre combinations of unicorn and Hitler references. She writes:

This blog is dedicated to the individual
mystery of Hitler's moustache and my book of poems
to becoming a unicorn. That unicorn is worse than Hitler.

Here Gordon references the way in which the process of oversimplification and equivalency makes Hitler's moustache a symbol of absolute evil, a symbol which is mysterious. We can imagine some internet user looking at a jpeg of Hitler, wondering what it is about his moustache that made him so evil. Why did this particular facial hair choice lead to the murder of 17 million people? Once Hitler is a decontextualized icon, all of his iconic properties, including his moustache, both symbolize and are absolute evil, an evil that emanates, not from the complexities of German history, but from an image. And images are exchangeable, which is why "that unicorn" (or anything else you care to name) can be said to be "worse than Hitler."

Gordon concludes her study of moral equivalencies with the image of "Hitler riding a unicorn": an image which is like Yin Yang, a fusion of opposing forces. This image unifies polarized moral opposites into a mysterious totality, as is often done in the symbolic poetry of William Butler Yeats. Gordon goes on to describe this totalizing image as "a psychedelic unicorn light show" before ending her poem with the tagline from Austin Powers: "and you know that's groovy baby!" By repositioning her poem in popular culture, Gordon points to how the representational systems of American media evacuate our capacity for moral reasoning. And at the same time her poem is groovy, an underground answer to pop culture that explodes binaristic conventions of moral representation while at the same time enacting the comforting chattiness and dramatic triviality of popular media. Of course, it enacts these things with a difference--with an estranging weirdness.

I like the other 3 Flarf poems and the comic strip by Gary Sullivan in this issue, but I'm going to skip discussing them in the interests of brevity. I will say that Mel Nichols' "I Google Myself" is one of the funniest parodies of internet behavior I've ever read, and that I like to sing it to the original tune by the Divinyls.

Kenneth Goldsmith's poem "Islam" from "The Day" is concerned with some of the same political issues as Nada Gordon's poem, though it has less to say about them. "The Day" is a project which consists of the entire text of The New York Times for September 11, 2001, an issue which was made immediately obsolete by the 9-11 terrorist attack and which thereby became almost the definition of old news. "Islam" demonstrates one moment at which this issue of the NYT seems to comment on the terrorist attack, in an interview with the French writer Michel Houellebecq who, at the time, delighted in making anti-Islamic comments as part of his bad boy persona.

Goldsmith writes (or copies, if you prefer):

E2 THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
ARTS ABROAD
Continued From First Arts Page
On Islam, Mr. Houellebecq went still further, deriding his estranged mother for converting to Islam and proclaiming that, while all monotheistic religions were "cretinous," "the most stupid religion is Islam." And he added, "When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is
Sexual tourism
and inflammatory
remarks about
Palestianians.
very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent."
And later, noting that "Islam is a dangerous religion," he said it was condemned to disappear, not only because God does not exist but because it was being undermined by capitalism.

That is the entire poem, though I haven't reproduced the formatting exactly.

How course it is very ironic to see this was written in the New York Times on the very day that islamic radicals who believed that Islam "was being undermined by capitalism" succeeded in destroying the world's preeminent symbol of globalized capital. It is also ironic that Houellebecq's deliberately provocative and extreme remarks would soon be mirrored by many everyday Americans, that a calculatedly offensive display of what Etienne Balibar called "neo-racism" (i.e. an expression of negative sentiments about a racialized other in terms of a critique of their cultural heritage) would be quite similar to much mainstream political discourse in the years after 9-11. (I believe Houellebecq stopped making anti-islamic tirades in the years after 9-11, focusing instead on other provocative ideas that continue to be marginal.)

These are interesting ironies, but probably not quite enough in themselves to make for a memorable poem. So I suppose the question is: what else does the text have to offer? I find the way it frames the narrational voice of the New York Times very interesting, the way elements such as "E2 THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 / ARTS ABROAD / Continued From First Arts Page" become part of the paper's voice. It makes the voice seem more mechanical, more rigid, and somehow makes the rest of the text seem less natural and more artificial. In the context of this piece, my attention was drawn to how complicit the paper was in putting forth and emphasizing the provocative aspects of Mr. Houellebecq's views, carefully trimming his statements so as to remove all words that did not carry a neo-racist payload. In a sense, the voice of the paper loves Houellebecq's racist views and does its best to present them with a surgical minimum of words, such that the paper is able to express Houellebecq's racism much more surgically and economically than he himself ever could.

This piece also makes me aware of the robotic aspect of the NYT's narrational voice, which is a byproduct of its highly conventualized strategies of compressing information. There is no room for any unnecessary verbiage in the newspaper's sentences and as a result of this the newspaper's character is a mechanism for compression and emphasis. This realization undercuts the sense of naturalness that I usually feel when reading the NYT in its "dead tree" version or on-line. It also says something very interesting about literary characterization, and the way many literary characters are also mechanisms for compression and emphasis.

In general, I conclude that this excerpt from "The Day" offers a great deal and increases my understanding of our culture substantially. I look forward to reading more excerpts from this project.

I'll conclude this review in a few days with responses to the "Comment" section of the magazine.