In Poetry’s Field: 9/11, Forever War, and Growing Theory

In this Forever War, what good has come is hard to identify (some would argue a modicum of greater safety, but for whom?) but the bad greets us daily. The paranoid militarism of the post-9/11 era has seen in American politics an acceleration of the previous decades' neoliberal project — the hollowing out of the state, even the dissolution of public good as a concept, under the auspices of a need to prioritize "security" above anything else that governments might spend money on. These changes in political economy have trickled down into many tiny corners, but here I want focus on mine: the field of poetry, which despite the difficulties it faces in the post-9/11 political climate has an opportunity to reimagine our priorities as national and global citizens.              

Mark McGurl notes in The Program Era that poetry has been "entirely absorbed" into the university throughout the twentieth century.1  Poets, and various aspects of their field, unable to cope with the external Fordist and later post-Fordist political economies that raged seemingly beyond the walls of academia, turned to higher education as a place of escape, to find various forms of funding (faculty and non-faculty positions); office space; cheap, educated labor; libraries; coffee, etc.2 And colleges and universities were happy to oblige: throughout much of the twentieth century, the United States was waging the Cold War, which required not just bombs and tanks but also the production of cultural objects for a cultural war — and that meant employing cultural producers and institutionalizing production. By now, Robert Archambeau jokes in The Poet Resigns, if you ask a poet where they are employed, the answer will have something to do with higher education.3 Whether that is in a faculty post or the myriad staff positions that colleges and universities require to function, poets have spaces that institutions provide. Further, as academic publishing centers still take on some publication of poetry, higher education functions at the center of the field, a place for the exchange of symbolic capital generated inside and outside academic spaces, such as prizes and publications, to be traded for forms of economic capital so that poets can do the very thing all of us must: survive. I will not argue that poetry as a field has been entirely reliant on the academy for support but the majority of publishing, prizes, and funds are still tied to higher education as a kind of marketplace. However, academia's long shift to consumer product is causing an expulsion of cultural producers from public spaces towards the private culture industry, with even the discourse of cultural production having moved into corporate-owned online/social media spaces.

The system of higher education-funded patronage, as McGurl calls it, was already in flux before 9/11.4  As we fell into the Forever War, though, public money once earmarked for education and arts shifted increasingly into the coffers of law enforcement — from national military, surveillance, and intelligence agencies, all the way down to our local police departments, creating and reinforcing tiny military forces in our midst.5 This was in lieu of spending collective tax funds on other social safety nets, within which we should include public education. The neoliberal narrative from the 1970s onward became about demonizing public goods from welfare systems to education, while lauding those in law enforcement, a gesture that itself reached its zenith as a result of 9/11. The late 2000s global financial crisis did little to change the narrative of governmental demonization, in part because federal help went to the corporations affected by the crisis and not individuals. Adam Kotsko argues that by the time of the crisis, a "simplistic libertarianism" had already become the dominant attitude to the public good in mainstream American political discourse.6 Higher education experienced its own sector-specific sufferings too, the financial crisis resulting in what Henry Bienan points out was 25-30% drop in endowments.7

Neoliberalism, David Harvey writes, is a "programmatic attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms [ . . . disguising] the drive to restore class power," a proposal that individual freedoms are curtailed only by governments and not by private enterprise.8 Such a paradigm, in other words, denies that higher education is necessary for a free society — in fact, it limits individual freedom by, worst of all, demanding evilly collected tax dollars. In effect, after 9/11, what higher education and the fields absorbed within it faced were intensifications of issues they had already been facing: the need to justify their existence in a framework that called for obedience over knowledge. In the post 9/11 world, government as a place where all members of society ought to be able to gather in order to further collective goals has been all but eviscerated in the name of combating terrorism. The climate of endangerment and vulnerability engendered by that imperative, moreover, legitimates the militarized "protection" of communities (or, rather, of property) from an expansive range of other purported threats — meaning black and brown people, poor people, homeless people, though seldom openly articulated as such.

Under neoliberalism, our government exists as a method of transferring public tax funds into private hands — some in the name of security, some in the name of incompetence. As Lenin and Deep Throat would ask us to keep in mind, follow the money and you will see who benefits. Yes, in the aftermath of 9/11 money came to our communities, but not in the way we needed, which was to build social safety nets and rebuild institutions, infrastructures, etc. Instead, our local law enforcement agencies have become the black hole at the center of public domain, absorbing all funding in the name of security and erasing everything else, slowly but surely.9

Higher education, and the cultural products and producers absorbed within, had already spent much of the twentieth century being demonized by politicians on behest of their private backers as elitist, out of touch, and exclusive. In the post-Fordist, neoliberal age, having public institutions of higher education exist requires them losing what Bill Readings called "referential value," a value of tying higher education to positive forms of culture (arts, literature, classics, etc.).10 Readings argues throughout The University in Ruins that as the nation-state's mission transformed from the generation and promotion of cultural values to the promotion of transnational corporations and their profit goals, the nation-state's need for higher education diminished as well. In order to adapt to the needs of the industries it now feeds (and can only justify itself by feeding), higher education has been compelled to reimagine itself, departing from the university's historical mission as envisioned at the end of the nineteenth century.11

Post-9/11, higher education can no longer, nor has any particular desire to, hold onto their former bastions of cultural production, the fields which it had absorbed in order to justify itself to the post-World War II nation-state. The neoliberal university has instead sought to catch up to certain producers of cultural commodities that have grown in the Forever War by bringing their discourses and professional pathways within its walls. I am thinking specifically of the video game industry, which so often takes themes of war and violence and places their ideologies and tactics into the hands of citizens. Consider the growing incorporation of video game-related majors and teams within universities. Unprofitable cultural producers, meanwhile, having been absorbed into the academy in prior generations, are dead weight to be thrown overboard in an age where profit potential is the only marker of quality and success.

Consider university presses, publishing research generated from within, which were long the hallmark of the research institutions, are facing shutdowns and staff layoffs — in the name of cost but also in the name of usefulness. The neoliberal mantra states that we cannot afford higher education or the cultural producers it has historically incubated because the benefits they accrue to our collective security are inconspicuous. The cultural needs higher education provided have been absorbed by consumption, by the ability to demonstrate class distinction through purchasing power. This has had the effect of erasing what an education can do in terms of creating citizens capable of engaging in a democratic society. In a post-9/11 America, this kind of democratic society is portrayed as a luxury we can no longer work towards. The international intervention aspect of this war may well diminish, but our local communities will continue their militarization, eschewing and even demonizing other — beneficial — uses of public money, despite public demand (increased since the public murder of George Floyd), for a redistribution of those militarized funds to other community services: mental health care, food access, and, yes, education in all its forms.

This is where art and artists must reenter the narrative. We are flooded with thought pieces, articles, and YouTube videos discussing these issues, but I think art can do something else. Rather than merely theorizing or cataloging events, dates, and data, art can provide the experience of it all, the internal mechanisms of capture that are always recording. What we cannot do, or choose not to do in the policy-making areas of our society, we can do in art. In poetry, we can take it one step further. Due to poetry's absorption into the academy, the massive changes that higher education has faced in the last fifty years have left the field in an untenable position, a situation accelerated further by 9/11's shift in definitions of what is a public good and the concomitant shift in funding settlements.12 What we can do as poets is start taking on these big social, political, cultural, and economic issues and not shy away from them, not fear for our positions when they are beginning to evaporate regardless of what we do. We can write and also promote work that takes these issues into account.

The difference in the Forever War (and beyond) is that there will be no way to fall back on higher education as an escape if entering the public sphere does not work. While it would be impossible to capture here (or anywhere, I am certain) the breadth of poetry produced in the Forever War, one thing has become clear: poets must become more visible by engaging with socio-cultural and political economy-related issues, even in the mass cultural marketplace. Throughout the twentieth century, under the protection of academia, there had become a kind of complacency, a double-ended inability to earn economic capital beyond academia's walls, but also a complicity in ignoring issues growing up around the edges. What protection institutions provided the field of poetry from being in the gale of political economy also insulated poets from a variety of struggles ongoing, no doubt a result of academia's own relationship to class and its policing of who is allowed within its walls. I am not suggesting here that socially-engaged work did not exist before or during the program era, but rather that as poetry and its institutions have been forced to reenter a marketplace that has existed mostly without them, poets are required more and more to engage with the observable and unobservable inequalities that exist in society at large, work that was going on in some places, but had not yet become the central driver of the field.

Strangely, increased social engagement might be one of the few benefits that the collapse of higher education has given to poets, though the cost is exorbitant. The destruction of the public good in the name of for-profit enterprise requires a new kind of calibration, a new relationship between poet and public.13 If perception has been that poets and their product are exclusive and elitist because they were wrapped up in institutions of higher education, social media has changed the level of access we all have to one another; as the academy's status as the locus of critical discourse has weakened, online places such as Twitter have become the medium to replace public institutions. Poets are accessible in new ways and their access to social movements through social media might ultimately prove of great benefit but again, without the benefit of public institutions able to support these endeavors.

As such, changes cannot merely be in terms of content, but in terms of aesthetics and forms: what poems look and sound like are already changing to meet a public sphere that has long dismissed poetry as too exclusive and meant merely for other poets. Slowly diminishing is the lyric — not gone because people cannot write it, but because traditional forms merely reinforce existing structures and ideologies. In Citizen, Claudia Rankine's use of photographs provides visual witness to the narratives and lines that flow throughout the work, breaking traditional lyric into a new media approach to poetics. The prose poems of Daniel Borzutzky's The Performance of Being Human relay the experiences of a war while avoiding nods to lyrical beauty in favor of realistic depiction:

Poets such as Borztusky, who are engaging in issues raised by the struggles animated by the Forever War (inequity, systemic violence), are earning the kinds of capital within the field that promotes longevity within it, a substantial change in how those dynamics have changed over the course of two decades. The field of poetry has made room, within its publishing and prize system, for works engaging in issues of contemporary political urgency. Even though this has been paired with a simultaneous decay of academic-centered forms of success in terms of positions,  poets who are talking about the political economy, about broad cultural issues, are achieving success that might have eluded others in the past, winning national awards and also attaining those increasingly rare permanent and semi-permanent faculty positions. In small ways, it appears that institutions are having to understand the dire situation that they are in as a result of the Forever War's shift in funding and public perception of higher education. This is not universally true, unfortunately, during a period in which we need to make more allies and rely less on existing hierarchies. Whether institutions of higher education understand their current situation as being directly related to 9/11 and the Forever War seems worthy of further investigation.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen takes on the over-zealous police-military complex that has become the norm after 9/11's shuffling of funds and demonstrates the central affect of the Forever War. Rankine's work is a good example of what it means to be writing poetry in a Forever War as Citizen's release a little more than a decade after 9/11 coincides with the memories of the event slowly fading out of public memory while the residues of violence (and ideologically driven shifts in public finances and the shape of the state) remain. The book has taken on a life beyond the normal realm of poetry publication, entering into a broader public consciousness, outside of purely academic or arts circles and reaching people who consume other forms of mass cultural media. This is in part due to our collective search for meaning, for understanding, for the experiences of others. Rankine's success in Citizen is enhanced by an engagement in the crucial issues of the moment — here, reflecting the African-American experience of police militarization:

This exhaustion — our collective exhaustion — is an outgrowth not only of the post-9/11 frenzy for security, a near-obsessive response to the violence of others, but on the Forever War's saturation of society with military-style policing, which has further focused upon people of color. The escalation and the experience of the ubiquitous blue light is so central not only to Rankine's work here but to our collective experience in post-9/11 America.

It would be inaccurate to say that the field of poetry, constructed between various institutions, is facing a new challenge; rather it confronts an escalation of older challenges, which will not diminish simply as the United States begins to withdraw troops and support from nations who have been the object of the Forever War. Nor is it possible any longer to escape into institutions to avoid what is going on in the world beyond them. Poets are not suddenly becoming aware of the external socio-cultural and political climate — there is no doubt a rich history of poets engaged in social movements — but it does appear more that the publishing, award, and grant-awarding aspects of the field have understood that there is value in elevating those whose work is engaged with present issues. While I fear that this is a kind of capitalization upon 9/11 and the anxiety of the Forever War, perhaps poets are always on the forefront of such struggles, but always left waiting for their systems to catch up.

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Amish Trivedi (@AmishTrivedi) is the author of three books, including the forthcoming FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press). Poems are in American Poetry Review, Kenyon, and coming soon in Bennington Review. A journal article on the creative writing classroom will be out in Pedagogy down the road. He has an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English and Theory from Illinois State.

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