![]() For now suffice it to note that flippancy opens directly onto the question of how subjects are formed, the main theme of Goodnight, Marie, and one which serves to explain the book’s frequent dallying in the topoi of psychoanalysis. I’ll have more to say about Googling and Billy Madison in a moment. The zaniness of the Billy Madison allusion introduces another temporality into the mix, placing childhood (at least adolescence) alongside nighttime and the abstract determination of a life’s end via sentencing to death. It’s the punchline of a famous monologue in the famous, if totally unwatchable, Adam Sandler movie Billy Madison, which I didn’t need Google to dredge up but which nevertheless appeared before the Wikipedia page when I searched for “May God have mercy on your soul.” Whatever grandeur we might have imputed to the figurative connection between bedtime and the death penalty has been qualified by this possible, even plausible, referent. Specifically, as Google tells me, “May God have mercy on your soul” is a locution used during the pronouncement of death sentences in courts of law. But the end of a day is linked to the end of a life through the juxtaposition of the language of bedtime with the language of the law. In the first place, the title locates us in time: we are at the end of a day, it is nighttime, time for bed, time for someone to say goodnight to the poet, etc. ![]() The title, Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul, is a long and unwieldy phrase that announces a concern with time and temporality. Flippancy, in other words, is a means to a poetic end it evinces a sincere commitment to exploring the ways that poetry might make itself useful for politics.įlippancy rears its head from before Buck’s book even begins. ![]() It is through insubstantial and trivial articulations that Buck goes about some very serious business here. Which is not to say the book is insubstantial or trivial - or, actually, it is these things, deliberately. This distortion of the Auden line seems like a good way to frame my account of Buck’s latest book, Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul, not least because of the way that it underscores the flippancy of the book’s tone. Buck’s work puts a peculiar spin on the problem of Auden it seems to say, sure, poetry makes nothing happen, but it doesn’t feel that way. I mention these two in particular because it is between their competing claims for poetry - that poetry is immediately political in the terms it sets out for itself, and that poetry is utterly useless to politics, and so is political to the degree that it orients us away from its own terms toward the proper domain of political struggle - that the poetry of Marie Buck takes shape. There are probably more Audens we could caricature. It is an especially interesting Auden because the holders of this line are very astute critics of the very avant-garde ideology their position winds up advancing. Then there is the Auden of poetry that makes nothing happen because poetry is a pointless exercise when revolution is already ongoing in the streets - so why bother, except that we are bothering in order to point out the uselessness of our own bothering - this is the Auden of a reinvented historical avant-garde, which insists that art should struggle to abolish the distance between itself and life. It’s the Auden of aesthetic autonomy, the Adorno Auden. This is a line I associate with conceptual poetry, but on the other hand it rears its head in the context of attempts to explain why in the wake of Donald Trump’s election more people than ever started clicking on links to poems online. There is the Auden of poetry that makes nothing happen because poetry, itself, is the happening. So a new question is now on the table about how poetry is or can be political: what’s the best way to understand the politics of poetry? In this connection, many morbid Audens appear. It’s more like the question of whether poetry (and art more broadly) is or is not political has been answered by the movement of history - it is. But in quoting it, nobody tries to argue for some distance between poetry and politics. ![]() Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W.
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