Bad or Boring: Doing Without Ethics in Poetry

Hi guys. I’ve noticed something about the word boring.

I noticed it most recently in discussions about Kenneth Goldsmith’s performance of his version of the St. Louis County autopsy report for Michael Brown. Many people responded with outrage to Goldsmith’s appropriation and objectification of Brown’s body (see the above link to Rin Johnson’s piece and Amy King’s piece asking “Is Colonialist Poetry Easy?”, among others); many of them saw his performance as symptomatic not only of an individual poet’s bad taste or careless sense of entitlement, but of the inherently white supremacist values of avant-garde poetry specifically and the American literary world in general (values that Cathy Park Hong brilliantly exposes in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” and that the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo continues to critique and rage against and lampoon). Goldsmith’s performance, many of these critiques point out, is a logical extension of a position he outlined in a 2009 inteview in Jacket:

I really have trouble with poethics. In fact, I think one of the most beautiful, free and expansive ideas about art is that it — unlike just about everything else in our culture — doesn’t have to partake in an ethical discourse. As a matter of fact, if it wants to, it can take an unethical stance and test what it means to be that without having to endure the consequences of real world investigations. I find this to be enormously powerful and liberating and worth fighting for. Where else can this exist in our culture?

The word, or the concept, of boring seems to come in when people want to preserve this anti-ethical practice but disavow the specific performance Goldsmith gave. I think that’s happening in this response from the publishers of SPORK Press, which celebrates Goldsmith’s “right to fail” as an artist, but notes that “personally I find the autopsy piece (offensive,) facile, and more specifically, boring.”

I’ve noticed this logic before, in similar contexts, in discussions of writing or visual art or performances that appear to celebrate or propagate or enact violence: let’s not try to discourage artists from producing hurtful or unethical work, because that might lead to self-censorship, to art that takes no risks, asks no uncomfortable questions. Let’s not reject this work on ethical grounds. But let’s reject it because it’s boring. Boring becomes this feint to avoid ethical judgment, to pretend your only rubric is aesthetic, to uphold your avant-garde commitment to innovation, to preserve the fantasy that art is the one space in the world that is free from ethics.

What a relief, I always think. It’s just boring. I wasn’t there at the reading, but Goldsmith’s reading of the autopsy sounds boring. And, as both King and Johnson have said, lazy. Could it be that the exercise of privilege, of colonization, of exploitation, is always boring? Because it’s so ubiquitous? Because we’re so over it? Because oppression is built not only on dead bodies, but dead metaphors? Because of the banality of evil? Remember when Krystal Languell wrote about a Male Poet who read for too long and all the poems in his crown of sonnets were about a girl seeing “her father’s cock” and the women’s bodies in the poems were exoticized and objectified? And I was kind of like, “Gross, but this doesn’t really seem worthy of a Misogyny Alert, Krystal, this is pretty typical Male Poet stuff, yawn.” And then I figured out that that’s why we need a misogyny alert, because the misogyny was so common that it was normal, it was boring. Maybe we can reconcile “boring” and “evil,” maybe  ethical and aesthetic systems tend to intersect at the point where we can point to “boring” and also be pointing at “evil.” We should remember, though, that this is superimposition, not identity. We should remember that sometimes evil is new and exciting, or can feel that way. Evil systems—or systems that perpetuate evil—produce beautiful art. By which I mean religion, imperialism, feudalism, capitalism, globalism. Don’t they? Can I bring myself to invoke The Birth of a Nation or Olympia? (You can invoke Godwin’s Law now, or maybe you already did when I linked to Eichmann in Jerusalem.) We can see what is innovative and thrilling in these films. We can debate about whether formal innovation can be separated from content that replicates state oppression, whether they should be taught as historical warnings or aesthetic triumphs, but if we saw them when they came out, or see them now, should we have tried to suppress our anger?

A Nazi discus-thrower from Olympia/a performance of classical perfection

Ugh, can I just quote Ruskin here? Something about use and beauty? Something about a medieval stonemason vs a classical stonemason. I’m out of my depth.

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But also what about how I kind of like boring stuff, how I think there’s a value to being bored? (See Twilight; the bureaucracy scenes in Fifty Shades of Grey; Jeanne Dielman; marathon readings of Gertrude Stein; long car rides; reviews of The Melting Pot written by science grad students.) Or if (some) conceptual poetry wants to be boring, how useful is it to dismiss an individual example as boring? Or what about Gamergate, and not feeding trolls, ignoring them because they’re boring, but what if you’re too scared to be bored? Obviously a poem can’t physically hurt someone; maybe the correct response to everything but physical violence is boredom. Goldsmith himself seemed to feel physically threatened, not bored, by the fantasy of violence–or the fantasy of a fantasy of violence–in the language of a tweet by poet Cassandra Gillig: “I want 2 organize large benefit reading…100000 poets strong 4 the death of kenneth goldsmith we wld take donations of weapons not $.” Twitter suspended Gillig’s account, perhaps because her tweet wasn’t as boring as the countless rape and death threats that women, particularly queer women and women of color, get on Twitter every day, from accounts that remain active. Boring!

From Goldsmith’s Twitter

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One version of the boring argument goes like this: If we focus on ethics, if we police each other, writers might stop taking risks. (To be policed in the real world, especially for people of color, is to be subject to surveillance and violence. We’ve been using this word a lot on the Internet—tone policing, attention policing—usually to indicate when someone with power is trying to silence someone with less power. But slowly police seems to be becoming a synonym for “criticize,” or maybe “angrily criticize,” even if that criticism is directed at power.) Poets with privilege will stay in their ivory towers, too frightened to engage with issues of race or class or sexuality (see Cathy Park Hong’s terrifying explication of the way in which critic Marjorie Perloff uses “racially encoded oppositions” to figure white intellectuals as besieged or conquered—policed?—by “nameless hordes” of “indistinguishable minority writers”). If, however, we focus on aesthetics, or specifically on boring-ness, writers will keep trying until they produce something worth reading.

Is that why I, as a white woman, am reluctant to write about race? Because I don’t want to be policed? Maybe a little. My own silence about race is probably one part complacency, one part discomfort, one part fear, one part respect. I’m trying to make that silence a listening silence, then hopefully an amplifying voice. Is it worth the risk, ethically or aesthetically, for me to replace another person’s voice or body?

(Am I doing that now? So, shut up, then. Somebody is policing me, in my head. That might be OK, actually. Look, I’m still typing.)

What would the reward be for taking that risk? Maybe I can make a poem that is a (beautiful) body you would love to see, but its making does violence to someone else’s (beautiful) body. Is that ethics? Maybe I can make a poem that is also a beautiful killing machine, its ignition studded with pearls. Maybe I could turn into a poet-supervillain, the best one, my cloak aswirl with velvet and surprise. Do you stop me for aesthetic reasons? Yes, you say, boy-critic hating this purple-velvet prose. Refusing to imagine my optative brilliance, the sci-fi future in which my evil poetry is worth your attention.

Is that the fantasy, for some of us? Supervillain?

But also: yes, if you stop the supervillain’s lovely machine, that is an aesthetic act, right? Because no machine is as beautiful as a real person. That’s another way to reconcile boring and evil: your poem is more boring than the real person it effaces.

It gets complicated. Who’s getting effaced and why: those questions matter, of course. There’s no bright line. But the fact that there’s no bright line separating art from life means that your aesthetics has an ethics. I’m sure it does. To put it in terms white broets can understand: when you stand against capitalism, bourgeois domesticity, Official Verse Culture, when you say “burn down the museums!”, those are ethical stands. The question is not whether you make ethical judgments about poetry. The question is whose bodies does your ethics protect, and against what, and how far.

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Or is it not a question of whether that ethics exists, but whether it matters in the larger scheme of things? On Monday, the poet Ron Silliman told us all to “lighten up a little, folks. Take a deep breath. Some tone deaf poet is not your enemy any more than Charlie Hebdo was anybody’s enemy.” Silliman’s point is that the forces of late capitalism are so powerful and terrifying and impossible to fight, and that the planet is so doomed, that squabbles about poems or the Internet are kinda meaningless, and, like, I get it, I’m in total despair about how doomed the planet is, let’s all give up on all of this and wade into a swamp, I’m serious. Is there a swamp big enough for all of us. But also: here’s more rhetoric casting Goldsmith as boring (“some tone-deaf poet”) and us as boring if we get worked up about him. Or is he so boring after all? In one deft twist, Goldsmith and Charlie Hebdo both get elevated to the role of Holy Equal-Opportunity Trickster: nobody’s enemies, but the joke’s on you if you get upset! Or rather: if you get upset, you’re not only boring, you might be a terrorist.  

No, but seriously, will someone make me a chart plotting the aesthetic and ethical value of the following: #thedress, breastfeeding, a poem, a novel, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a climate march, coffee cups at a climate march, Serial, The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, AAA videogame titles, ethics in gaming journalism, Charlie Hebdo, polar ice caps, an ice-bucket challenge, Black lives, the lives of trans women of color, all lives, all men, capitalism, a Christmas tree, a rape joke, a “death threat” made by a woman poet against a male poet, a death threat, a doxing threat, a bomb threat, a rape threat made by hundreds of men against white women, against women of color, against queer women, The Norton Anthology, The Oscars, The New American Poetry, disposable diapers, Weird Sister, Against Expression, Michael Brown’s life, a police officer’s feeling of safety, a swamp, Plato, the Bible, a father’s cock, cloth diapers, risk-taking, silence, Sheryl Sandberg, Beyonce, Beck, Taylor Swift, Kanye, hunger, human trafficking, human rights, poverty, our water supply, manspreading, dignity, private property, the Left Shark, the Second Amendment, the First Amendment, censorship, silence, violence, ethics, aesthetics, boredom.

We’re going to have to get a really brilliant, blameless, creative genius to make this chart. But when we finish the chart it will all be clear. We can spend our working hours advocating against the #1 ethical problem until it’s solved. We can spend our leisure hours in guilt-free enjoyment  of only the funniest, most exciting aesthetic objects and ignoring the rest. Our blood pressure will be so low, except for these brief spikes of pleasure! We will all get along so well! No one will police anyone. No one will be even the least bit bored.