merely to reject the apple. The apple tree itself must be cut down. And then the orchard. Hell hath no fury like a consumer inconvenienced.
In this way, shopping is confused with resistance; a bogus egalitarianism prevails; a vicious man-on-the-streetism becomes dominant. The tricoteuses make their return, clicking not needles but touchpads. Need one add that the poem is the first to be dragged to the guillotine?
Who knew that writing this stuff would be such fun? The voice—at once pedantic and forceful, and strangely aged and pampered—was the most fun of all. It was the voice of the short-tempered Central European professor whose wife’s principal domestic project is to ensure that her husband enjoys peace and quiet in his study.
Mark had not had a wife or a study in six years. Liz and he became close during the chaos of his divorce, when he was outed as a cuckold and outed from his house. His male friends, he was a little shocked to learn, were ineffectual, indiscreet, and bizarrely merciless confidants. Liz listened to him sympathetically—and honestly, too. When Mark said to her, I was blindsided, Liz said, Yeah, maybe, and he said, What do you mean, maybe? and Liz said, Quarterbacks are blindsided. You weren’t blindsided. You were myopic.
Liz’s criticism of Mark’s poetry was similarly sensitive and forthright, and he was very grateful for it and happy to reciprocate. Her work wasn’t right up his alley—it was a little too academic and sexual—but there was no querying its intelligence and carefulness. In any case, Mark mistrusted his own alley, which at this point, as he’d once remarked to Liz, was overrun by the rats of resentment. And the cats of confusion, Liz suggested. Not to mention the dogs of disillusionment.
If Mark envied Liz at all, it was for the growing kudos that E. W. West enjoyed as a writer who disturbed edifices of gender and sexuality. But it wasn’t Liz’s fault that her biologically and culturally determined homoerotic inclinations were now in vogue, just as it could hardly be held against her that she’d grown up in bourgeois luxury on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Liz often complained to Mark about finding herself in Virginia, a dislocation that she experienced, as any reader of her “Sappho in Sicily” quickly grasped, as an exile.) Nor did he hold it against Liz that, in an unpublicized complication of her biographical profile, she was for the first time romantically involved with a man. His name was Pickett, apparently as a tribute to Wilson Pickett. Did anyone call their children after poets anymore? Mark doubted that there’d ever be a kid named McCain out there in the world. Or, if there would, the kid would certainly be named for the political weasel John McCain. Mark had long felt defamed by this echo.
Every word is a prejudice, Nietzsche famously points out. One might add: Every word prejudices. Nowhere is this truer than in the nominal realm. One’s name cannot be separated from one’s good name.
He cared deeply for Liz and was her biggest fan and cheerleader. He felt bad that she had not been contacted about the Snowden poetition.
“So what should I do?” he asked her. “Sign it? Rewrite it?”
“Ah,” Liz said. “The patriarch’s quandary.”
Mark did the work of smiling sympathetically. He saw that Liz was peeved, and hurt, and with good cause. The problematic situation of women was not to be underestimated, not that Liz was in danger of committing this error. In her most recent sonnet, “mandate” had been displaced by the neologism “womandate.” Now Liz was, as she liked to say, lady-pissed. Mark totally got it.
But in the meantime he had a problem of his own, and an itch to explore the problem in writing. They had finished their coffees and their refills. It was time to go.
The two friends stepped outside. It was a lovely November afternoon. They hugged and separately went off.
As soon as he got back to his apartment, he wrote:
We attribute to Bertrand Russell the following notion, that to acquire immunity from eloquence is of utmost importance for citizens of a democracy. We are curious about the notion because Stevens was. And we connect Russell’s statement, thanks to Denis Donoghue, to this one, by Locke: “I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind, since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred.”
If we grant Russell’s words a merely provisional validity, we can ask: What is a verse petition if not fallacious eloquence? What is poetry if not a riposte to the forces of fallaciousness? What are these forces if not power’s language?
Mark wondered if he should explain that, by “fallacy,” Locke meant “deception.” He decided not to. The reader would connect the dots.
Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.
He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? To write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.
Mark wrote:
How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.
Then:
Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of … bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.
He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:
It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.
Now it was dark out. Usually the poet would read a book, but tonight he lacked the wherewithal. He opened a can of beer and went online. For a while he skipped from one site to another. Everything was either about the election or not about the election. He checked his e-mail. Nothing new. Then he went onto Facebook, then back to skipping around the Internet. He found himself reading, without interest but with close attention, about persimmon farmers in Florida. He rechecked his e-mail. Hello, Merrill had written him again.
Actually, Merrill had written Merrill—Mark had been bcc’d. The e-mail brought “exciting news”: funding had been secured (from whom, Merrill didn’t say) to buy half a page in the Times for the poetition. This moves the needle, Merrill stated.
Mark’s reaction involved three thoughts. One: “Move the needle”? Two: What an operator Merrill Jensen was. What a maestro of fallacy. Mark knew for a fact that Merrill not only disliked Bob Dylan’s lyrics but also disliked Bob Dylan’s songs, which he’d once sneeringly characterized to Mark, who did like them, as “Pops’ music.” But sure enough, the minute the Nobel was announced, the prick was at the forefront of the congratulators and imprimatur-givers, arguing that Bob Dylan was an unacknowledged legislator of the world; ergo, Bob Dylan was a poet. It made Mark want to puke: the pseudo-reasoning, so right-wing in its dishonesty; and the big lie that Dylan somehow lacked acknowledgment. The big truth, not that anyone dared to speak it, was that Shelley’s dictum needed to be revised. Poets were the unacknowledged poets of the world.
Had Mark been among the scores of writers contacted by the media for their reaction to the prize—which he hadn’t been—he
