Amanda Gorman's Shitty Poetry: An Intervention

Generally speaking, I despise culture-war issues, and consider them to be a needless distraction. If you actually care about a potato-headed toy losing its gendering, you are quite likely an idiot.

But sometimes when something hits near and dear to my heart -- in this case questions of poetry, translation, and meaning -- I feel the need to intervene.

It was reported in the Guardian, among other sources, that the Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman's debut book of poetry "The Hill We Climb" was being removed from his assignment on the grounds that he was not a young, black woman -- remarkably, the second such row over the translation of this one book in Europe. Oh dear.

Even if you accept the shaky-at-best premises of standpoint epistemology, what connection is there between the experience of a black Catalan, likely a first- or second-generation Subsaharan African, and a black American, beyond being subject to systemic racism, when even the systemic racisms they experience are pretty fucking different? Does this very presupposition -- that the translator of a work needs to share a similar set of demographic characteristics as the author -- negate the very idea that a work is translatable, understandable, or communicable across societies, and if you carry the idea to its logical extreme, even between individuals? Doesn't this reduce the nature of an artistic work to the author, in complete ignorance of every lesson and every intellectual debate of literary theory in the 20th Century, from the New Criticism movement and the Frankfurt School on through thinkers as diverse as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom?

All of that being said, I'm not surprised. Ever since I saw the clip of her reading her poem at the Biden inauguration, her work was, fully and completely, reduced to her personhood. The quality of the poem didn't matter -- it was the media image of a young black woman with a Harvard education reading a poem, something that, in the American liberal imagination, functioned as a negation of the state-sponsored racism and crass vulgarity of Trump and Co.

I had vaguely remembered the video, and that I'd watched it and not been impressed. But I figured, what the hell, let me look at it as I would any other poem.

It fucking sucked.

To be fair, so does inauguration poetry in general, all the way back to John F. Kennedy having middlebrow fave Robert Frost give a reading. I get it, it was shared widely on social media, and largely by people who would consider themselves educated. If you look at the text, its substance is no more sophisticated than a motivational poster ("We've braved the belly of the beast / We've learned that quiet isn't always peace" -- pretty sure I heard a pimply white kid read that at a slam poetry night freshman year). But here's the thing -- it sounds poetic, in that it sounds like the idea of poetry in a world in which poetry has been all but expunged from the public sphere.

It's a point I belabor a lot. A lot of the "intellectual discourse" in the contemporary English-speaking world is really an illusion of discourse. People are drawn to Ben Shapiro because he sounds like he's debating, when he's really just yelling and invoking the concept of logic rather than actually deploying it. People are drawn to Jordan Peterson because he invokes a near-astrological conception of personality and uses it to provide fatherly advice, and this seems like psychology. People are drawn to Robin D'Angelo because white liberals prefer to engage in performative, self-flagellating mea culpas rather than admitting the ways in which capitalism props up the white supremacist order.

All of that being said, I can't blame individuals -- I really, really try not to -- because people really are deprived of a humanities education, given the way that testable metrics have become the focus of the American educational system and the system itself is largely taken over by disaster capitalists (see the near-complete dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans), leaving little room for the subtleties of perception and interpretation.

In an era in which information is so omnipresent in our lives, to the point where it's overwhelming, it would seem obvious to me that it's these perception and interpretation skills that are necessary for sorting it out -- failing that, you are likely to get a bad case of Joe Rogan brain.

For those of us who put great stock in the humanities, it's a massive fucking bummer.

But when you find contemporary cultural products that still resonate -- recent works by Jarett Kobek, Ben Lerner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Celeste Ng coming to mind, as do the media-studies texts of Evgeny Morozov, as did David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" -- it's a revelation. Those are the moments when, staring at the page, there is a hand on your shoulder. You are not crazy. You are not alone.