As a praise word, "punk" was far deadlier than "poetry" was
Just posted this on an old blogger thread that I found via Google:
Bug said: I've read it over thirty times now and am still no closer to understanding what the penman actually meant by this.
"through the process of our appreciating them[, we] turn them into nothing."
What does this mean?
Seriously. It's not a rhetorical question.
Wish you [rmd] had made more of an effort to answer this, as it is an excellent question that I quite sympathize with. In fact, it's what I was trying to understand way back then, and still am.
Anyway, if you're still in touch with Bug (whoever you are, whoever he/she is), I'll try to give a rudimentary answer, just with an example:
Ashlee Simpson has recorded some of the greatest sung poetry in the history of sound recording. If you don't believe me, ponder the line "Sunday morning blues always about you" and ask yourself if you've ever written a song opening (or for that matter an opening line of an essay, letter, story, poem, or novel) as good as that one. But a condition under which the song was written was that it wasn't trying to come across as capital-P Poetry, was just a mundane attempt at communicating a mood and a condition, the language making no claim to specialness, merely being a few words among the thousands and thousands sent out every month in search of the consumer throat lump.* So the line is not saying, "pay special attention to me," for if it did call for such attention it would undercut its own expressiveness - the ache is an always ache, not a special ache.
But in saying it's poetry I'm calling special attention to it, potentially layering sheets and sheets of English-teacher-certified quality and piety between the readers' eyes and the actual line, so that "poetry" and "quality" are what you perceive and the ache of the week-in-and-week-out alwaysness can no longer reach to you through the praise.
So that's how a great line can be rendered precious and impotent by how we appreciate it. Calling it "poetry" feels almost like a lie, even though it is poetry. The word "poetry" has been contaminated by all the tedium and destruction inflicted in its name ("destruction" being the unspoken English-class message: "The assigned reading is poetry and you're not").
But not to call the line "poetry" also feels like a lie, not just for the obvious reason that the culture shouldn't be able to get away with sneering at the great stuff (Ashlee) and then consigning it to obscurity while lauding a whole bunch of lameness and mediocrity, but also because Shakespeare and Jeff Barry and Iggy have had moments as good as Ashlee and because they and "poetry" can at least temporarily be pried free from the tedium and destruction that accompany their presentation, if we somehow do the Ashlee appreciation right.
Of course, when I wrote my piece, directed at the fading postpunk of 1987 (or the burgeoning indie-alternative music and fanzine network, if you want to look at it that way), "poetry" wasn't the word in play, wasn't the threat. As praise words, "punk" and "do-it-yourself" and "subversive" and "the untamed wildness of rock 'n' roll" etc. were far deadlier than "poetry" was, with "fun" potentially just as bad, and those were what I had in my sights when I was talking about how we transformed great stuff into nothingness via our gaze and praise.
*I really don't know if Ashlee, John, and Kara had any idea how good they were being with lines like "Sunday morning blues always about you," or whether they considered it poetry or not. It's possible they did, though I wouldn't bet on it. But if they did they were wise enough not to try to present it as poetry.
But I'm not saying that words that do call special attention to themselves can't be good, and I hate pop being told to always know its place and not be "pretentious" and never to aspire to importance as much as I hate indie generally forcing itself to make a claim to specialness and daring. And Ashlee's ambitiousness was one of the things that exposed her to ridicule, at least from those taunters and wiseasses who listened enough to realize that she was ambitious.
Ashlee has had several moments of attempted "poetry," such as "Does the scent of regret ever haunt you?" which isn't completely bad, but is really really clumsy, and not nearly as good as that same song's non-"poetic" opening line, "What's she got that I don't have?"
But her being too humble and sensible are much greater threats to Ashlee than her being ambitious.
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