Class
Class is the official podcast of the National Political Education Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America. We believe working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. Class is a podcast where we ask socialists about why they are socialists, what socialism looks like, and how we, as the working class, can become the ruling class.
Class
Poetic Force
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We’re joined by Nick and Tyler from Louisville DSA to talk about being socialist poets and glimpsing beauty in a chaotic, capitalist world.
Nick and Tyler’s occasional podcast, Poetry is a Destructive Force, is here.
Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is here.
Oscar Wilde's “Lecture to Art Students” is here.
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Poetry is a uh uh is a disease. It's something that happens to you. And uh as you as you I think alluded to, this isn't true in all societies. And in some Spanish-speaking countries, poetry is considered to be one of the highest forms of literature. Um in America, uh it is considered to be a very low form of art. Uh, you know, de facto, you know, you you want if you could choose to be anything, you should probably not choose to be a poet. You could be a puppeteer or a ventriloquist and uh, you know, and uh and have more cultural cachet, if that's your goal. But yeah, poetry happened to me.
SPEAKER_00Hi comrades, and welcome to CLAS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee for NPEC. My name is Michaela, and I'm chair of NPEC this term and a member of North New Jersey DSA. Today we'll be talking to Nick and Tyler about socialist poetics or poets as socialists. But before we dive in, a reminder that class is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter and Tech's Monthly Newsletter using the provided links. In his lecture to art students, Oscar Wilde said, What are the relations of the artist to the external world and what is the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings to you? Is one of the most important questions in modern art. He continues paraphrasing one of England's most important early socialist thinkers and artists, and Wilde's teacher. There is no point on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that the decadence of art has come from the decadence of beautiful things, and that when the artist cannot feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work. What does this mean for artists to relate to the external world and to feed his eye on beauty? We know that Wilde believed that socialism was the only real answer to a miserable, ugly world, and that the artist's role was to find beauty wherever it could be found in the world and make more of it. To model the good life through art, never compromising. Capitalism forces caring individuals to wear themselves out remedying the ills of a sick society through piecemeal, never-ending charity, Wilde says. Rather than being able to exert their care and energies to creatively transform society for the benefit of the whole community. In The Soul of Man under Socialism, he argued for what we might now see as the minimal standard for socialist politics. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such basis that poverty will be impossible. Perhaps ironically, he believed that only socialism would allow individuals to live for themselves and their enjoyment of the world, rather than toil for others, that only the abolition of private property would lead to individualism, the capacity to live fully, humanly, and humanely. Wilde was radical in his insistence that being really alive was synonymous with the pursuit of pleasure and beauty, what some judge decadent. And aestheticism was a way of life that included being oneself wholly and authentically in the world, what we might now call being true to yourself. This was a political stance in a moralistic world that criminalized behaviors associated with decadence or deviance. And Wilde himself ended up on trial, charges including gross indecency for sex with men. He was called to the bench to answer for his novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, as evidence of obscenity. His prose poem, tribute to beautiful personality, was deemed perverted in the court of law. And he suffered materially for that and for the way he wanted to live his life, dying miserably only three years after being released from prison in unofficial exile and poverty. What is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profaned. A famous line from the Communist Manifesto, referring to the destruction and perversion of all previously existing social relations under capitalism. It's a line that, like most good lines, people can freely read into. Today it reminds me of Oscar Wilde. With us today are Nick and Tyler, members of Louisville DSA and hosts of the podcast Poetry is a Destructive Force to talk about the role of the poet in capitalism, the socialist is poet, and the force of poetry. Welcome, Nick and Tyler.
SPEAKER_01Hello, Michaela. Uh I'm Tyler. Uh as you know, but your listeners don't. Uh it's a real pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_03And I'm Nick, uh also Louvel DSA with Tyler and co-host of the podcast. And it's uh wonderful.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for coming. Um just wanted to ask you the first question for everyone who comes and visits us here. How and why did you become socialists? And how and why did you join DSA?
SPEAKER_01All right. Um, so I uh wasn't a socialist uh in 2016. I didn't think Sanders had a chance. Uh, you know, and at the time I was still a liberal. In 2017, the Unite the Right ha rally happened, uh, and they killed Heather Hayer in uh car attack. Uh that you know, they drove that car into the crowd. And that combined with some other incidents of violence, there was a knife attack in Portland at the time that was white supremacist in nature. And I was like, oh, they're they're killing people, like they're killing people in the streets. And uh uh I decided to pick a side. Um, normally I uh my version of that story ends there. But uh the reality is there's a California poet named Robinson Jeffers, um, who wrote a poem uh uh what's it called? Uh that contains the lines uh when violence appears, uh uh seek peace with honor or back the least ugly faction. Um and uh looking around, you know, in 2017, uh you know, there were three factions. There were uh the Republican Party, a uh uh you know, a ever-worsening snake pit of fascism. Uh there were the Democrats, um, you know, people who have been trying to hold something together that has not been holding together. Uh and then there was the the nascent DSA, you know, the leftists um who wanted to make the world a better place. And uh so I joined DSA and I've never left.
SPEAKER_03My story goes back a little further, I guess. Uh when I was 22 years old, uh so I guess this would have been 2013, uh, I graduated from college and didn't really have a lot of plans on what to do with my life. You know, I'd originally gone to college to become a teacher, uh, realized about halfway through that I didn't really want to do that with my life, and didn't have a plan for what the heck I was gonna do afterwards. So I graduated and uh went and got a job at a gas station uh because that's all I'd ever done. That's the job I'd had when I was in college to kind of work my way through it. And uh I was doing some other stuff on the side. I was a DJ at a college radio station that did not pay, you know. But I uh uh was working at the gas station for $7.50 an hour, and $7.50 if you're listening to this in some future inflationary hellhole where uh uh you get paid uh a reasonable wage, but uh you know, seven dollars and fifty cents an hour, which was actually more than I'd ever made before. It had just been seven dollars and twenty-five cents before, and I was working night shift, so I I get to work at about nine o'clock and I'd work until six a.m. And whenever I had a radio shift, I had to do that before, so I was actually working six to six. Um it sucked, uh just to be honest with you. Like I was living in a horrible apartment with some other people in a similar situation, and uh I was like, you know, man, I went to college to have a better life than my parents and my grandparents, and like here I am, and nothing's changed, you know. I didn't have enough money to buy groceries, you know. Um, and so I had a lot of free time because I was working night shift and there wasn't a lot of people coming in and out of a gas station at 3 a.m. And so it gave me a lot of time to think about my situation, about the world that was in. I'd always been interested in politics. Uh my grandparents had been union members, so they were kind of on the left edge of the Democratic Party, I guess. Um, so I was always sort of socialism curious. I'd been to Occupy, stuff like that. And I came to the realization that as long as there were capitalists, that they would always have a profit motive for keeping the world the way it was, and that we just would not be able to fix things as long as it made money for things to be bad. The thing that sort of unlocked that for me was climate change. I thought, you know, well, it makes sense to shift away from fossil fuels because they're destroying the world. And it kind of came around to, well, they're never gonna do that because they make money off of it, and we have to take the profit motive out of it. That sounds a little socialist. Oh, maybe maybe socialism was correct, actually.
SPEAKER_00You stumbled upon it.
SPEAKER_03So I looked around at a few different socialist organizations. Uh back then there wasn't really like a big one, right? Uh DSA was the biggest socialist alternative, uh, won a city council election around that time. Uh, the ISO seemed interesting, but I was just like, I none of these are present. I lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky at the time. I was like, oh, you know, none of these organizations even know where that is on a map. Uh and it wasn't really until the Bernie campaign got going and people in my life, and not just me and my like dirtbag friends, you know, with bad jobs, uh, other people started talking about socialism because of Bernie Sanders. And I was like, oh, okay, like these people are primed for it. We might actually be able to organize something here. And so I just kind of looked at all the organizations and I was like, okay, well, the the biggest one, the one that's most serious, the only one taking the Bernie campaign serious is is DSA. So I I joined DSA in 2015, and uh, you know, it's been more than 10 years now, and uh I I hope to be here for many tens more years. Thanks for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, the you may not be surprised, but a lot of people um who've come on the podcast when I asked this question talk about Bernie. Um, I think that Tyler, you might be the first person to mention Unite the Right. Um, I remember when that happened, I wrote an article about it actually, and I I wrote about it in relation to the kind of seeming condemnation of so-called Antifa and free expression and um kind of street protests and things that were coming from the so-called classical liberals or the the the ones who know, you know, the adults in the room, what have you. Um, and talking about how alarm alarming it was basically that this was happening while people were getting killed in the streets and people are marching, um, shouting the Jews will not replace us. And I think now, you know, this need for free expression and authentic like showing up in the world is so important and so kind of uh salient. Um, now that we're on Trump's second term and um things are happening at an even more rapid pace. Um, not to, you know, kind of overly segue ourselves into the next piece, but you know, you're we're here to talk about poetry, which a lot of people might consider to be the least important kind of expression or the least salient kind of expression at a time of crisis or something along those lines. But um both of you are both poets and interested in poetry and um are both committed socialists and activists. So, kind of how these things come together, or like what it means to live in a world that's so ugly yet needs beauty or you know, requires us to kind of be attentive to beauty, is something that I hope you both are interested in talking about. That's what you're here for. But maybe we'll begin with what to you is poetry or what called you to poetry as an artistic medium. Um uh Tyler, do you want to pick up on that? You're the one, you're the first person to have quoted poetry, uh, you know, so maybe that that's a sign that you should be the one.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um, well, yeah, uh for me, poetry arrived before socialism. I think for Nick it's the opposite or the reverse. Poetry is a uh uh is a disease, it's something that happens to you. And uh as you as you I think alluded to, this isn't true in all societies. And in some Spanish-speaking countries, poetry is considered to be one of the highest forms of literature. Um, in America, uh it is considered to be a very low form of art. Uh, you know, de facto, you know, you you want if you could choose to be anything, you should probably not choose to be a poet. You could be a puppeteer or a ventriloquist and uh, you know, and uh and have more cultural cachet. That's your goal. But yeah, poetry happened to me. I can pinpoint it, actually, uh, if I if I go through, you know, I used to I had these old uh when poetry started happening to me, uh I didn't actually know what was happening. Uh I had I had these like old WordPress blogs. Uh this was back when Facebook was cool, like 2010, 2011, you know. Um, and I would, you know, and uh I remember the first time it happened, I was uh I was home from from college for the summer, trying to figure out what I was should be doing with myself or my life, uh as as Nick talked earlier. And uh my mother suggested, you know, I was teaching kids to like do like standardized tests or something, you know, like tutoring stuff like that. And my mom said, You should have a little blog. And and I was like, okay, I was resistant, but okay, I had a little blog, and I wrote I wrote this and that, like, you know, little little things about like you know the the process. And and then one day I woke up and nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Inside of me, there was this sorry, there was this thing, there was this uh this thing, it was like a story. It was like one page, and um it was called Sometimes You Open Your Mouth, and what comes out is not what you expected. And uh I wrote the whole thing down. Uh and um and then once a week like clockwork for a couple of years, and this was sort of in the first period for me, there would be something. And uh it took me a couple of years to figure out that like that that that I was a poet and that what was happening to me was poetry, you know, uh uh which I I was fortunate that like in the place I was at at university or college, you know, I was able to, I I met some people who were like, oh, here's what's happening to you, uh, which was great because I had I had no idea, you know. I was from I I am from like rural Northern California, and um sorry, I I don't I don't mean to get emotional. Um have I answered your question?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, and yeah, we'll we'll also be kind of expanding a little bit on it. Um Nick, what about you? What does poetry mean to you? Like literally, like what is it to you and what called you to it? Um, either as an artist or as a sort of interested, curious person.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I don't know that I liked poetry as a younger person. Um like it wasn't an interest of mine. Uh when we read poetry in school, some of it called me, some of it didn't uh I didn't think of myself as a poet or someone who was particularly interested in poetry really at any point until about four years ago. Um I'd known Tyler for some time, so you know Tyler was maybe the first poet that I'd ever known um who thought of himself that way. What I knew was stories. Uh I grew up, my grandfather was uh uh sort of a songwriter. Uh not sort of, he he he was a songwriter, uh wrote a lot of songs as a as a younger man, uh and never really had the the opportunity to pursue that professionally, although he uh he really wanted to, I think. Uh he had a lot of ideas about songwriting, specifically country songwriting, country music, uh, although he was pretty open to any genre, you know, of music. He'd listen to anything, uh, but was very interested in country music and folk music. Uh so I was familiar with uh you know all the classics of country music, right? You know, your Johnny Cashes and Lorena Lynn's and Tom T. Hall, who is a Kentucky songwriter who wrote uh a lot of interesting story songs, as people uh in in country music called them. I was also really familiar with folk music, uh, you know, John Prime, Bob Dylan. Uh uh my papa actually had a a remark that you know Bob Dylan didn't believe all that stuff. It was actually Joan Baez who had the real good politics. And uh the thing is, Joan Baez also says that. So I don't I don't know, I don't know if they ever talked. Probably not.
SPEAKER_00I believe Joan over Bob personally.
SPEAKER_03Uh so I was familiar with what I now understand to be poetry, actually. I I I think people have come around to the idea, you know, Bob Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, right? And I I think you can extend that out to songwriting in in general. It is a slightly different discipline, but very frequently it is just poetry, right? And sometimes it overlaps. You know, Leonard Cohen actually wrote several books of poetry um in addition to his his songwriting. Um, you know, but yeah, I I was familiar with it, but I'd never really I couldn't really rhyme. Just it wasn't it wasn't for me. I was interested in it. I liked stories. Uh, and I told Tyler a story a few years ago, and he was like, there's something to that. He was like, it sounds like something you hear in a novel or something. You should write that down and see what it is. And so I wrote it down, tried to turn it into like a short story. And it was garbage, it wasn't any good. And I just kind of didn't think of it anymore. I was like, okay, well, you know, I'll tell you what I'm not. I'm not the next Ernest Hemingway or or whatever. Um and and then I I I saw a poem. I just you know, I worked in a library for several years, and that's where I was at the time I was at the library, and I saw a poem, and something just clicked in my head and said, You've got you've got a poem that you've written, is what it is. And so I went and I wrote the same story, but as a poem, and by God, that's what it was. And then I wrote four more of them. And I sent them to Tyler, and I was like, I, you know, you're gonna think this is crazy, uh, considering you've been writing poems for all these years, but I've written some poems. I don't, you know, maybe I'm just looted here, you know, and and and he called me and was like, you know, okay, you've got to understand this is this is poetry, what you've written. You know, it's this is you know, I was like, what do I do? And he was like, there's nothing you could do, you know. It's it's terminal, basically. And uh, you know, the next day I wrote four more poems and and they just kept coming. Uh I wrote a few dozen in the first few weeks. It slowed down a lot since then, although I did I did write a couple uh about two weeks ago.
SPEAKER_01Uh I if I may break in to tell that story briefly, uh we were we were knocking doors in like seven-degree weather for one of our um one of our municipal candidates out here, Andrea Parr, um DSA member, DSA endorsed. Uh, and and and you know, and we're we're out this this brutal weather, and I and Nick keeps texting me poems that he's written. I'm like, Nick, I can't read these. Yeah. Busy right now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I knocked half of my turf. It was a real bad first half of the turf. I didn't really have any accomplishment. And I saw like a delivery truck go by and I end up writing a poem about it. And uh the second half of turf was great. Bunch of people that are voting for Andrea and uh uh end up talking to a guy that sort of brought the whole thing full circle. It was a fun little experience, but uh back to the the poetry, you know. I've I've written maybe 150 poems in the last four years, which is a lot. Um after having never written any for the first thirty two years of my life or or however old I was then thirty one, I guess. Um It it had been waiting a long time. Yeah, it was sort of a pent-up thing, I guess. But yeah, no, so now, you know, I I didn't know what to do. Uh Tyler suggested reading poetry, you know, intentionally. Uh, and so I have been doing a lot of that. And I I feel like I've gotten myself a little bit more familiar with the canon of poetry, which I, you know, I I was more familiar with it than the average person before, right? Uh I feel like I'm somewhat well read. Like I read some poetry in high school, I read some in college. I've worked in the library for years, so uh I I've read more poetry than the average person up to four years ago. Uh, but now I've read a lot of it in the last few years. So, and uh I don't know what it does in relation to writing it. Uh writing poetry is not something that's done intentionally, so maybe we could get into that at some point, but uh I I don't know that reading it has necessarily unlocked something for me. Although I will say that multiple times listening to music has done that for me, and I think it sort of makes sense considering the origins, and I think it kind of unlocks something, and so I I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm just a bad songwriter and not really a poet.
SPEAKER_01I don't know, but you know, uh if I did I I I know this is neither here nor there, but I did want to mention, you know, Nick and I uh uh have been talking about you know doing an episode of our podcast that was different from the format, and then you Ms. Michaela, you you suggested this, and so we're doing this instead. Uh but uh but I I did want to say uh no, it's great, we're having a good time. Uh this this is perfect. Um but no, but uh there was a um the the the the experience that Nick relates having, you know, which is you know, I saw a poem and then suddenly I knew how to write. Um this is something that that does happen. It's like, you know, uh it was not my experience, but like, but but I had a I had a mentor, you know, for whom uh she read an Elizabeth Bishop poem called In the Waiting Room. Um and uh she's like, at the end of that poem, I knew how to write. Um Nick and I had have another colleague uh who's who whom life has taken in a different direction, uh, you know, but uh uh uh he he was reading um uh there there are these fragments of the of the Greek poet Stessikoros as translated in Ann Carson's um at the beginning of Ann Carson's autobiography of read. Uh he read those and then all of a sudden you know he started sending me stuff. This is this is a known documented phenomenon that like if poetry is a disease, sometimes you uh you catch it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think it's interesting because the disease aspect, of course, gives a sense of unintentionality. But then Nick, you mentioned that part of your maybe unconscious exposure or onboarding, not to use an overly organizery term, was the experience of having been around songwriters and ones who maybe specifically wrote about the the world, the you know, the topics of the world, politics or what have you. The the thing you just related about seeing a delivery truck go by and then writing about it kind of gets us to this idea that Wilde brings forth that there's a relationship between the artist and the external world and kind of how to negotiate that relationship is actually something important because we're surrounded by what right now feels like an ugly world. Yet the poet, or at least to Wilde's view, the artist's task is to find the things in the world to write about, to celebrate, to, you know, immerse yourself in. And then when you mentioned reading poetry as like a an exercise or like maybe like a way in to the production of poetry is the putting out of beautiful things in the world. And what beauty means, of course, is you know, kind of multifaceted, but putting the putting out those beautiful things for other people and oneself to kind of immerse themselves in. So it's kind of this like cycle of production of the beautiful that is sort of never-ending. But to me, the the main thing that's in common with you too is that poetry happened to you or you realized poetry um as like something that comes out of you that's not something else specifically. You know, for you, Nick, it was not a story. For you, um, you know, it was it kind of appeared, for you, Tyler, it kind of appeared as like something distinct um from like what you were normally kind of writing um at that moment. So Terry Eagleton, who I think he might still be alive, he's kind of been kicking around for a really long time. Um he's a famous Marxist literary critic. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that literature is not mere reportage, um, from which I think he means that it's not supposed to say or repeat facts about or to the world or kind of like insert factuality into the world. Um, and in your view, like what is the relationship of the artist and the external world? If we're gonna kind of take up wild here, like that there is some kind of thing like important about that. And then, you know, maybe off of that, what is the relationship? And this is, of course, the classic kind of um debate, like the Platonic debate, the relationship between poetry and truth. And maybe you can take that up with a socialist lens if you like, or if you, you know, maybe have a hybrid lens for that question. So, yeah, this relationship between poetry and the external world. Um, and then also if you want to get into the debate uh arena with Plato and all them about poetry and the truth, please do.
SPEAKER_01So the the the documentarian uh Werner Herzog uh, you know, has uh uh you know to to sort of gloss an argument that he makes, you know. I mean, and yeah, and he seems, of course, you know, he's respected for both uh he has films that are straight fiction, you know, like uh Nosferatu and Agira the Wrath of God, which uh some people consider to be in the conversation for the great one of the greatest films ever made, you know. But he makes a lot of documentaries, and um, in talking about them, he distinguishes between facts or you know, or a sort of a mundane truth with a sort of like ecstatic truth. Um, and I'm going to spare you uh an impression of his accent or something.
SPEAKER_00Um no, please, come on.
SPEAKER_01Okay, here we go. Uh you know, his uh you know um facts are like the uh the the New York City phone book. Uh you you you open the book and it says John Brown lives at this address, but it does not tell you whether he weeps into his pillow every night. You know, and uh, you know, and and this I think is a very uh you know a sort of poetic, you know, uh description or or or distinction between those two things. This person is is five foot five and weighs 150 pounds, you know, you know, but you know, the the these are facts. But but who is this person? You know, what is true about this person? This is this is a different thing.
SPEAKER_03Hang on, I'm gonna have to clip that and report you to like the German American Club here and tell you.
SPEAKER_01I will die as I lived, doing extremely bad impressions and accents.
SPEAKER_03Um I think that poetry is a lot like other kinds of art in that what you're doing is uh the analogy that I've used before is portraiture or just painting in general, right? But when I write a poem, I'm just writing what I see. Uh this might conflict a little bit with the with the with the Eagleton uh framework. But the reason is because what you see is important and what Marxism does is actually unscrambles a lot of obscuring factors to the true world as it is. Um if you were to paint someone a picture of the world as it is, you know, I think at Norman Rockwell, who, you know, everyone thinks of like the magazine covers, but you know, Norman Rockwell once painted a picture of uh it's called The Problem We All Live With, of racists harassing uh a small black child as she goes to school. This was in the 1950s or perhaps the early 60s. And of course, people were outraged by uh that painting in in both ways, in ways both good and bad, right? Uh but the thing is that's just the way things were, right? What Norman Rockwell did with that painting was to say this is the world we live in. This is what's happening. You might wish to think that this isn't happening, and that the thing which you support, which is segregation, or at least taking a blind eye to segregation, is uh more sanitized than it is. But no, actually, if you were to look at the thing which you uphold in the face, you would be rightly horrified. Um I think we have lived uh many experiences of that in the last 25 years. Um I I believe much of our society right now is predicated on the fact that people refuse to and are actively being uh told not to look at things just as they are. So if a poet has a responsibility to anything, it is not to themselves, it is not to humanity, it is not to socialism or Marxism, uh, it is though to the truth. Right. Uh that you you have to tell the truth. You can't lie with poetry. It ceases to be poetry if you lie. Um uh prose is for lying. Right. And so if we if we as socialists, if we as Marxists believe that the world as it is, is bad and much must be made anew, our aims overlap. Um, I don't know that poetry can be wielded intentionally as an instrument of truth or as uh as an instrument of socialism, but it can certainly uh unintentionally uh be done so, and I think has been over and over and over again. Uh, you know, you don't see fascist poetry, right? Well, the futurists existed, but yes. Yeah. I mean, you saw fascist write poetry. Oh, yeah. But you don't see fascist poetry. Exactly. That's true. You know, uh, you know, Ezra Pound was a fascist, E. E. Cummings was a fascist. You know, there's plenty of been plenty of fascist poets. Yeah. You know, you know, we can have a different podcast where we talk about whether or not they're any good. But uh we do have a different podcast where where where I guess we could do that, yeah. But yeah, they you know, the the the the f the the work of those sad fascists does not necessarily it when it when it is truthful, it is not doing the work of fascism, it's actually undoing the things that they were committed to ideologically.
SPEAKER_01You know, you know, Nick and I um are both poets, and as you mentioned, we're both committed socialist politics, you know, who have you know devoted serious chunks of our lives to Marxism and to you know to try to make the world a better place in a serious way. We we've talked a little bit about you know sort of the ways in which those things are uh diverge, you know. You know, poetry is about truth. Uh, you know, I believe this very straightforwardly. Uh but politics is about power. You know, power is about who lives and who dies. From one way of looking at it, there's two kinds of Marxism, right? You have pre-revolutionary Marxism and post-revolutionary Marxism. Pre-revolutionary Marxism is about liberating yourself from capitalism. Post-revolutionary Marxism is about, okay, well, well, now what? Um, and uh, you know, historically speaking, you know, post-revolutionary Marxists haven't necessarily liked art or artists that much. The Soviet Union at a certain point was like, well, you know, everyone is now a socialist realist, which, you know, for example, you know, the Surrealists were very active at that time. The Surrealists were anti-fascist to the core, you know, and many of them were card-carrying communists, and they were like, okay, well, uh, now what I guess is difficult. Like, you know, you know, uh poetry is about poetry is about truth, and what we do in the political world is about power. So sometimes, you know, we say things that are not true or or you know, or are not not strictly speaking true.
SPEAKER_00I want to pick up on a couple things there. One is the way that you phrased this, Nick, that you might be at odds with with Eagleton. I think that what Eagleton was saying was that it's not mere reportage, that it is saying something about truth, but not necessarily saying something about like facts as they would be kind of like universally accepted. So like the idea that the artist could be a person who shows things as they really are to people who may or may not be ready for that. I mean, when we're when we're also talking about the Marxist framework of, you know, hegemonic or, you know, sort of false uh conceptualization of like what is within the realm of belief, I think that the idea of the artist as someone who speaks the truth because that's what they see, or what you said, Nick, about it being what's important, maybe what's more true than what is right in front of your face. That's something I think that has, if not, you know, strictly political heft, it has social heft, right? Because what this means is that artists can be agents of resistance. And what you said about it not happening intentionally or not happening, you know, kind of, you know, in order to create. I mean, here we get into the distinction, of course, between art and propaganda, right? Um, and this gets also into what you were mentioning, Tyler, about the way in which the Soviet Union decided that the official art of the Soviet Union was socialist realism, which was a name for a particular style. Um, and there was actually some incredible art that came out of the revolutionary period, right? Um Maxim Guerki wrote uh novels that were heartbreakingly beautiful because he decided instead of writing novels of the bourgeois, I'm going to write novels of the working class that centers the working class as the center of this um protagonism, right? The center of the world, really. So the idea that someone can be inspired by their quote-unquote politics, but maybe we should call it their ideology in order to um serve literary purposes is something that I think results or can result in good art. But the point you're making about politics being about power and art or poetry being about truth, this is uh an interesting distinction, right? Because, you know, in the classical period, you had people saying, well, the poets are the ones who you have to be circumspect with because they'll lie to you, right? They're they're gonna tell you lies about the gods, or they're gonna tell you lies about the king or or whomever. And so poets have often been in the position of dissidents, whether accidentally or whether as an outcome of their other commitments, they've often been on the side of the socialists, right? Or the side of the dissidents. And in DSA, you know, we often do have debates. I think they're kind of annoying debates personally, but over what's more honorable or effective in socialists organizing the work or the politics, which often mean the day-to-day tasks of organizing against debate and soaring statements of principle that can inspire action. I don't see a huge divide between these things because they usually mix together and impossible to separate a lot of the time. But I guess just to kind of go a little bit deeper into the distinctions you're all making, it's like, what about pleasure, beauty, and art in socialist politics or socialist thinking? Um, you know, you've already mentioned that there's a sort of maybe accident to it, but then there's also the sense of socialists want to give a picture of the good or a picture of what is possible, a creative kind of impetus towards a transformation in the way in which people usually see things, which I think we can agree under capitalism, it's obscured, it's mystified, it's given the lie. So maybe speak a little bit about how you see this third thing, like, you know, kind of intervening in a socialist politics or or a socialist kind of light frame. Um, and both of you are coming from a Marxist perspective, as am I. Um, Wilde was not a Marxist per se. He was kind of more of a Kropotkin follower, if you want to even call him an organized socialist. For him, he's the one who's famous for the joke about there being too many evening meetings for him to actually commit to being a socialist. But for him, it was also about like the ability for a society to transform enough for people to be able to do what they want, become individuals, and for the artist to make art. And then the artist involuntarily sort of struggles to do that under capitalism. So love to hear from you about the role, the intersection, the synthesis, or maybe the absolute rejection of uh socialist politics and poetry or art.
SPEAKER_03So I think where socialism and poetry overlap is that they're both revolutionary. And I I want to use the word revolution or revolutionary with some caution, uh, because I'm I'm I'm using it as synonymous with socialism, uh, and I'm not wading into any debates about tactics or strategies or anything or what different types of socialism. Uh, I'm just trying to use it in the most basic definition of the word revolution, which is that uh there must be a change, right? That we live in capitalism and that system must die and it must be replaced with something new. I think that's a unifying belief of socialism. Uh I question a socialism that doesn't believe that at its core. Um and and and so when you you you you break from there, right, you could have different arguments about what that means in terms of how it plays out. Uh, but what I think what it does at its core is that it has the goal of bringing the world into alignment with truth, right? That the things as they are and the things as they must be are not the same thing. And so things that are must be smashed and brought down, and the things that will be must come. Uh this is the same thing that poetry uh is is in service of. Um you know, it it's it's also the same thing that religion is in service of in some ways. Um you know, uh the the world is or the the the worldview I just described is one that that you know uh Christianity would would describe. Uh it is explicitly things that Jesus said. Um so you know this is a a broader thing, and the point I'm getting to here is that I think that socialism and poetry and revolution and perhaps religion all come from the same place, right? They all come from the same origin, which is something beyond us that we can't really tap into. Perhaps it's the collective consciousness, perhaps it's God, perhaps it's whatever. I have my opinions. This is a political education podcast, we're not gonna delve into my esoteric religious opinions.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, we will eventually.
SPEAKER_03It it it doesn't just overlap with socialism. It it it it feels wrong to say it's the same thing, but it kind of is the same thing, right? And so if you draw out from that, it means that socialism as a movement, if it is to be rooted in that thing, which is truth, to what extent do beauty and arts and these other things Are they rooted in truth? Well, I think that that that they are, right? That there is something core there, you know. Uh uh, you know, what is beauty, right? Is there an objective standard of beauty, or are humans beautiful because they're humans? Well, if you start thinking like that, you're liable to become a socialist, right? And the same thing is true uh uh, you know, for art, right? Is it important for humans to have the freedom and and the liberation to express themselves and to express the world as they see it and as they understand it, you know, with with no boundaries? Well, again, this is the kind of thing that comes into conflict with capitalism, and you're liable to end up a socialist. And so, in that regard, uh, you know, there have been plenty of artists, there have been plenty of people that rejected socialism that might have some sort of alignment with truth. Um, and there have been plenty of socialists that have failed to live up to it. However, I I think at its core, you can't actually separate it from it. If you're going to have a movement that can win, a movement that can actually do a revolution, a one that can actually bring our world into alignment with the world as it should be, then it has to be dedicated to truth in all its forms, including art and beauty.
SPEAKER_01If if I may, um, you know, uh beauty isn't a really isn't something I really think about a whole lot. Um, and I think it's because beauty is, in my opinion, a sort of secondary uh characteristic. Um it um, for example, uh a tiger is beautiful, right? Tigers are beautiful, but what a tiger isn't doing is thinking about how it's beautiful, right? You know, a tiger is not like time to pose, hit my light, you know, whatever. You know, the tiger's like, I need to eat this deer. I am hungry. The things that are beautiful about a tiger, you know, emerge like, you know, an observer, she's like, whoa, like look at him go. But the tiger is concerned about, you know, doing tiger stuff. Uh, in the same way, poetry is and can be beautiful, but uh, you know, it it ought to be concerned with truth. Um, and if it is concerned with truth, it will end up being beautiful, right? But if you but if you're if you're if you're out there, you're like, my goal is to be beautiful, uh, that can be a barrier to to achieving that thing in the same way that kind of like, you know, like I want to be, you know, I want everyone to think I'm cool. Well, that that's really hard. You know, if you if you're starting from that place, you know what I mean, like, you know, you're you're already like two or three orders up, you're way too self-conscious, you know.
SPEAKER_00I think what the kids call that is a try hard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, well, and and the thing about poetry is is that trying isn't really part of it. Because it's not an intentional form of art, you know, uh, the harder you try, uh the the the the worse it's gonna get.
SPEAKER_03Nick. It kind of reminds me of something from about the last decade of socialist discourse. Uh every every few months someone comes along and it's like, you know, well, if we tried just being normal, and it's like, look at me, I'm normal, you know, and like the the the problem is that like you can you could start off that way and then like end up being the weirdest person that anyone's ever met, you know.
SPEAKER_00The weirdest normal person, yeah. You know, uh normal.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and uh uh you know, so it's something that you can run into all the time, right? Uh I I've tried to write poems before and they were not good. And uh it wasn't that I wasn't supposed to write a poem about that thing, it's just I was attempting to do something uh you know, it it's kind of like it's kind of like trying to swim when you don't know how to swim, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Uh oh, that is that is uh unfortunate for people who don't know how to swim.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You're not gonna you're not gonna be able to do it. Well the more you try, the worse it'll get.
SPEAKER_01You should well please look please please let someone teach you how to swim. It's good enough to drown. Um well, I did what's it called? I did um sort of on this on the subject, I did um when Nick told me that that we want he wanted to us try to do this, uh I I I did come preloaded with an anecdote. Um what's it called?
SPEAKER_00Um Well, we can't not let you say the anecdotes.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. That's so generous. What's it called? I I it it's got another bad accent in it.
SPEAKER_00Oh good.
SPEAKER_01If you want another bad accent, it's it's uh uh okay. What's it called? So I I uh once upon a time um uh uh I uh I was acquainted with a a person who's uh uh a scholar of many things, but among uh but one of them is uh the poet Robert Frost. And uh the f and and so we'll call him the Frost Scholar. The Frost Scholar told me an anecdote in like 2012 that went something like this. I forgot, I've forgotten the relevant name, so all that's left is all that's left is the story. A university reached out to uh a poet from the you know the former Soviet bloc somewhere, you know, Poland or this or that, and they wanted him to give it come out and give a talk on poetry and revolution. And the poet agreed, great, okay, so they flew him out, they put him up there on the podium, um and the poet says in his thick Eastern European accent, which I poet three, revolution, and he produced a cigarette and he lit it, he took a drag, he exhaled, and he said, They have nothing to do with each other. Any questions? And this is this is this is a funny story. Poetry revolution, you know, do they really have nothing to do with each other? You know, I mean, we live in a world where um Israel, for example, targets uh and kills not only Palestinian poets, but their entire family. And and some of some of some of these poems that you know that that are coming out of you know out of Palestinian poets these days are just incredible poems. The Enemies of the Sun is an incredible poem. There are too many to list. Of course, the thing about these poems is that they're incredibly beautiful and and wonderful uh and heartbreaking and ferocious, and one should never, ever, ever hope to live the kind of life required to write that kind of poem. You know, Marxist thought has a lot to do with like people are shaped by their material situations, the ideologies and you know, are a product of the lives they lead, the and and the relationship to people in those lives. And um, you know, in the same way that like, you know, from a Marxist perspective, you know, and you talked about like the relationship of the poet to the outside world, we get our politics from like you know, our class relationships, you know, and the things that happen to us. Poetry is like that too, and and it is a sort of involuntary process in the same way. You are shaped by your environment. You have some degree of choice in that. To to quote Marx, you know, in the 18th Premier, you know, men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. You you get to steer the ship a little bit, but you don't get to decide what ocean you're in. You know.
SPEAKER_00That's a great way to put it.
SPEAKER_03I think it has a bit to do with kind of what instrument you are, right? And I mean that very literally, yeah, right. Uh you would guitar what? Right. You could blow into you could blow into a saxophone, you could blow into a trumpet, and they make two different noises, right? It's the same effort, but it it it sounds different. Same breath, yeah. It's it's just shaped differently, yeah. And I think that's true for for poetry, right? The same energy or whatever that is being channeled into a poet in uh uh the Eastern Bloc, you know, 50 years ago or whenever he told that story, and uh a poet in Gaza today under the gun of a genocide that comes from a different place, but the the noise that makes is different.
SPEAKER_00They all come from the well of humanity. I think that this is also important to note that these are things that fight for humanity, and your observation that fascists write poetry or may have individuals within them that write poetry, but fascism does not make poetry, and part of that is I would say most of that is because fascism is an anti-human, anti-social politics. It's an antisocial and anti-human way of looking at the world. It's it's thinking of human beings as well, you said the word instruments, and I think you were making a metaphor, but thinking of human beings as purely as units, and this is actually capitalism. What fascism does is, of course, is corporatizes it and militarizes it, militarizes it. One of the things that kind of cracks is what does a modern socialist movement in a non-revolutionary period um, if we want to agree that right now we're seeing an uprising, but um, as Marxists, the weakness of the working class and the and the organized labor movement leaves much to be desired for an actual, you know, um revolution. But we are we are in the midst of of ugliness and misery um that feels in many ways um to be kind of relentless and and sort of multifaceted and and you know, it keeps on kind of adding upon itself. Yeah, I would say that the interest in finding beautiful things, um, not just cute things, not just entertaining things, but finding beautiful things still still persists. And what you said, Tyler, about you know, you don't think about beauty. Well, maybe that's because you're a poet. You know, you're not trying to think all the time about beauty, um, because you see things and you say them in your poems. Um this is the world that you know we live in where it's hard sometimes for people in the workaday world to just find things that are beautiful. Um, but poets, you know, if we go along with what Wilde said, and maybe if we go along with you, you two say, maybe they're the ones um, you know, who kind of persist. And poets are, of course, are not just writers of one thing. I think that we can say that classically poetry stood in for all kinds of beauty in writing. Um, it didn't have to be in the form of any particular kind of poem, but you know, the scholars among us, um, I I guess I count myself as potentially one of them, at least erstwhile, um thinks about those things and says, is this a poem or is this something else? And maybe socialism or a socialist perspective provides um some answers to what we can can what we ought to see as beautiful. Um in our committee, we talk a lot or we kind of like promote this idea or like the shape of an idea of socialist humanism instead of thinking of it as like liberal humanism, thinking of it more like what you said, Nick, about seeing humanity as beautiful, like that the beauty is found within the well of humanity. Um, these are all things that I hope that we can, you know, maybe have another conversation about at some point and be great. But since we have to end, I just wanted to um thank you both and also ask you is there anything that you would like us to um post in our show notes or any last minute thoughts you have um about this topic?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I I I did have a couple. The root word for poetry etymologically is the Greek poesis, which just means like to make. Poetry is kind of a catch-all category, you know. There are an enormous number of poets, and all of them are very different, you know. And uh, you know, poetry is is like is like a thing that is made, you know. Poetry is like something that isn't other things. I think the word I want to try is eumenical. Ecumenical. Thank you so much. Ecumenical. Uh uh poets are so you know, whatever. Like, you know, you you brought up Oscar Wilde, and you know, um Oscar Wilde, you know, uh in a letter after after his imprisonment, he said, you know, the uh I hope I don't butcher this, you know, the you know, the the two great like turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison. If he'd lived, I would have been very interested to see who that new man was, you know, and what he thought. Uh but I'm what's called I'm uh but we have to end, I'm sorry. Uh uh Nick, do you want to talk about our podcast? Or anything else?
SPEAKER_03You know, uh my closing, more profound thought, I guess, is uh, you know, no to to to quote uh a Tom T. Hall song, uh first ever DSA podcast with two Tom T. Hall name drops, probably. Um but uh you know it's funny where a man can find beauty. Um this was about uh sort of a an artist that he knew, um uh wood carver. And I I I think uh I think that's true for poets. You know, I've written poems in the grocery store or you know uh about all kinds of manners of things that just you know might not be beautiful, they might be mundane to someone else, but in the moment, I think I captured their beauty, and I think this is true for poets in general. They're good poems. Uh but but we can But yeah, so to wrap up, our podcast is named Poetry as a Destructive Force. Uh we have a few episodes. I think we have one in the can that I need to release still, actually.
SPEAKER_01We record it whenever we want. It's it's very experimental, you know, and weird, you know, it's not, you know, um, and perhaps actively hostile to the listener.
SPEAKER_03It's not it's not even a little bit experimental, actually. I think it is so much like every other podcast you've heard. It is two people talking for an hour. Fair enough.
SPEAKER_00Hey, well, today we're three people talking for an hour. So we've we've uh mixed it up. I I just wanted to say one more thing. We could obviously go on forever, but one of the things that I'm thinking of here is something that Mia, who is uh NPEC alum and and was on the socialism conference panel with me this past summer, said that socialists should be interested in everything. And it was, you know, in reference to kind of what a party ought to contain within it, um, you know, like what are the kinds of roles of the party. And the idea here was also that there might be some permeability between, you know, a lot of the things that we think are like specifically for the socialist politics, the serious party building, whatever, and like everything else in the world. And I think that was probably well, Wilde himself was not, you know, he was an aesthetic. He was a decadent, he was, you know, someone who was living a life of, you know, relentless pleasure seeking in a way that he felt was um completely within his rights and duties as an artist and and as a poet. But to think about this in terms of the sort of ecumenical aspects of what poetry is and what you mentioned, Nick, about kind of finding the beauty in the pl in the place rather than just writing about the beautiful, I think this is something we can really kind of hang our hats on to finish out. Um, and thank you both so much for coming on. And thank you to our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. Class is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media. But the best way to find out what our committee's up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. If you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description, and this week we'll also have a link to episodes of Poetry as a Destructive Force, Nick and Tyler's podcast in the show notes. Okay, until next time, Solidarity.