On the Importance of Being Tasteless

In a recent review on the Swedish website Örnen och Kråkan, critic Rebecka Kärde writes about the features of “program era” poetry in the US, arguing that in a lot of poetry coming out of these programs are “polish and measured”, it is “politically conscious” and “elegant.”

These are not incredibly original observations, but it is interesting to see foreign critics taking note of these features. One important and possibly unusual aspect of Kärde’s take is her recognition there is a political dimension to mainstream poetry: mainstream poetry needs to show that it is politically aware, without troubling the “elegance” of the composition.

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In her book Keats’ Odes, Anahid Nersessian argues about the importance of tastelessness, wrongness - katakrisis - in Keats poetry, how he constantly breaks decorum in an attempt to both register and reach beyond his age. This tastelessness caused him to be ridiculed by his contemporaries (including Byron who compared his writing to masturbation), but it’s also what makes him such a powerful poet.

Keats’ failure to follow decorum is in direct relationship to his extreme sensuousness:

“The word that gets used most often in conjunction with Keats is sensuous. He is fascinated by how things feel, and by the capacity of metaphros to register the dizzying strangeness of being a body among others.”

And this sensuousness comes out of his “camelion” poetics: “The best poets Keats says are “camelion”: they change to match their surroundings, sometimes entering fully into the psychic and sensational orbit of other beings.”

In another post here, I’ve called attention to this “camelion-ness” as Keats’ poetics of mimicry: “We might say that he “sensuously” mimics the “skin” of gothic language, generating an excess that overtakes proper language, the language of mastery and rules.”

What I like about Nersessian’s description is the sense that this mimicry follows a “sensational orbit”; we tend to think of mimicry as a 1:1 reproduction of an object, but it might be better to think of mimicry as a sensuous engagement with an affective zone.

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Michael Taussig might add something to this:

“To get a hold of something by means of its likeness. Here is what is crucial in the resurgence of the mimetic faculty, namely the two-layered notion of mimesis that is involved – a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived…”

Taussig points out that according to the model of mimicry engaged in by African people fighting off colonialism is not based on “correct” replication; the inherent errors in mimicry do not undo the power of the mimicry, they are a key feature of its powers. (We might draw a comparison between the “bad” but powerful mimic Keats and the contemporary mainstream poet who is a “good” mimic who makes polished and “elegant” but dull poetry.)

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Nersessian argues that this sensuousness - born out of this tastelessness - is what makes the poem political (diametrically opposed to the “elegant” politics Kärde sees in US mainstream poetry):

“Keats anticipates Marx’s claim that industrial production requires an espcially brutal “expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs,” and the poem, much like Das Kaptial is downright ghoulish… Keats’s poetry is chock full of viscera… they are signs that Keats grasps something deep about capital’s cannibal logic.”

I can’t help but think about one of my favorite aphoristic statements by Chilean poet Raul Zurita (from an interview with Prairie Schooner):

“All that I came to do in those years, like the art actions with the CADA, was because I felt that pain and death should be responded to with a poetry and an art that was as vast and strong as the violence that was exercised over us. To place in opposition the limitless violence of crime and the limitless violence of beauty, the extreme violence of power and the extreme violence of art, the violence of terror and the even stronger violence of all our poems. I never knew how to throw stones, but that was not our intifada. You can’t defeat a dictatorship with poetry, but without poetry, and this is no metaphor, humanity disappears, literally, in the next five minutes.”

Another way of putting it might be: poetry needs to be as tasteless as the violence exercised over us.