Stello's Choice

I picked up a pamphlet put out by Rubba Ducky while at the 4th Annual Printers' Ball titled "Neoliberal Poetry." (PDF)

A new order has emerged, so quickly & so thoroughly that most of us have yet to notice it
has already taken over our lives. This new order runs on the assumption of strong property
rights, free markets & free trade as inherent moral goods. Deregulation, privatization, &
withdrawal of the state from social services & cultural initiatives are its hallmarks. The
individual stands alone, “making it” or not – thriving, surviving, or falling dead to the side
– by virtue of the resources that she can marshal & her sole ability to manage them; by the
birth-rights of capital, connections, education, last & often least, ability.

It is a scathing denunciation of accumulating cultural capital, of publishing irrelevant poetry, of the tenure-track academics, of the graceful and purposefully ambiguous writing that turns too many away from poetry today:

Pseudo-phenomenological abstraction! Poetry that kind of talks the language of academic
phenomenology without the least interest in applying that knowledge to an experience of
the world. & all in the quasi-mystical tone of endlessly drifting self-satisfaction, as though
to speak from a mournful quietude – the hallmark of the first-person lyricism supposedly
being deconstructed.

They do not present their vision, and they do not construct more borders. They simply point to the branding of the contemporary poetry scene and its suffering under our economic system, point to its vacuous self-aggrandizing intertextualities with a contemptuous disgust and say, “Ugh.”

The same people put out two pamphlets under the flag “Stay Bored,” both of which are entertaining reads.