Poetry vs. Ideology 2

Remember @morningporch’s quote:

“Poetry is a cure for ideology.” Yves Bonnefoy

As a corollary to my last post, the one about Iranian interest in poetry, here is a snippet from Jeremy Schmall’s article Poetry as a Site of Resistance:

But the question becomes, if poetry is irrelevant to the culture at large, if it doesn’t sell, then why does it still exist? How has it not disappeared yet?

In the past twenty years we’ve seen the rise of capitalism 2.0: globalization, which can truly do only one thing well, and that is commodify and sell. All other factors must be subordinated to this goal. Local cultures and traditional ways of life—if they can’t be appropriated and sold—must be smoothed out, pulverized, and replaced by quantifiable markets.

The truly great promise of poetry—today, right now—is as a functioning site of resistance to globalization; and to be very clear, I don’t mean that poetry should be explicitly political, or anti- or pro-anything. Sloganeering is best left to pamphlets. Poetry resists simply by stubbornly existing largely outside the control of the capitalist hegemony, by creating a true and uncommodifiable culture.

The crucial point here is understanding the difference between a consumer market and true culture.

Via

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