the poetics of the street and the language of counter-power
by MIchael Templeton
Whenever someone tells me poetry is stupid and all about “your feelings,” I always tell them to read “Owls” by John S. Hall. It is a great way to get past the idea that poetry is all about lofty candy-ass ideas that are just silly and of no importance to anyone. Just read the first stanza:
Owls don’t seem so fucking wise to me.
They look like dicks, usually,
With their chests all puffed out and shit,
Like they’re saying
“Fuck me? No–fuck you!”
But of course, they’re not fucking saying that.
You get where I am going with this. Hall’s poem completely interrupts the candy-ass narrative, and right away we know we are looking at something very different. At any rate, poetry is no more susceptible to the candy-ass thing than anything else. There is a lot of candy-ass in professional sports, but no one will ever admit it. It seems to me that given the nature of our current world in which we see what looks a lot like a fascist power laying hold of everything around us, it might be important to consider poetry in ways that have nothing to do with candy-ass-ness.
The Situationists said that poetry is the antimatter of consumer society; they saw poetry as an essential component of a life that exists not in empty performances, prescribed roles, and least of all in the positions people are compelled to fill in order to extract some modicum of a life from capitalism but, rather, as an expression of life as it is unfolding in the palpable present tense. This is why one of the slogans for the Situationist International is “Poetry is in the Streets.” Poetry is not what you are; it is how you are what you are. I suppose folks will say these kinds of sentiments are overly idealistic, immature, or unrealistic. Maybe they are, but I am inclined to think that if we put any real thought into these ideas, we find that the opposite is true. Performing a life in ways that adhere to the expectations of others does not seem terribly realistic to me. Who are these others, and how did they come to have such expectations? Simply running around in a kind of deaf and blind autopilot because life somehow kicked you into motion does not appear all that mature either. It seems rather infantile, actually. Finally, what is realistic about bowing down to a job that runs us down to nothing but physical, mental, and spiritual exhaustion so we can afford a place where we do nothing but sleep, all so we can steal away for two weeks every year and hate life by the beach? No, there is something like real life, and poetry has a lot to do with real life. All this other shit is what we end up with when we are swallowed alive by power. Poetry is what resists power, and power, again to cite the Situationists, “lives off stolen goods” (Situationist Anthology. 150).
Consider that the Trump Administration (regime) has focused relentless attention on cultural institutions in the United States. When they aren’t shooting people, kidnapping people, or raping children, they are busy taking over universities and places like Lincoln Center. On one hand these kinds of moves are not surprising. Any wannabe dictator seizes control of the ways institutions disseminate information in order to control the information. This is basic despotic rule. On the other hand, the drive to take over and control universities, cultural institutions, scientific institutions, and media apparatuses indicates a supreme obsession with language in order to steal language. They do not want anyone to have access to language because language scares them. For people who have built their power on a flimsy set of propositions that need to be defended with all the violence of the state, words and the ways people use them are modes of power that are a constant threat, and they are absolutely intent on stealing those words. Remember, the truth does not need anyone’s attention, bullshit does. Thus, power lives off stolen goods. Poets, on the other hand, create by arranging, situating, orchestrating, and otherwise playing with words in ways that power cannot control but have the potential to incite people to actions that are completely unpredictable. The unpredictable is another thing despots and petty dictators cannot abide. This tendency toward the unpredictable is due to the fact that poetry appears to spring from directly lived experience rather than ideas and messages that have been approved by a ruling body or individual. Yet another idea from the Situationists is that “poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of reality. It is liberated language” (150). That seems to be the issue. All those “realistic” considerations I talked about above are not all that real, and the language of what constitutes the real is liberated from all the constraints that trap our lives in systems that are not our realities at all.
It can be difficult to see the power of poetry in our lives because the fact is, we are bogged down in all the things poetry is meant to resist. To gather what is needed to pull ourselves out of the morass of contemporary life and begin to see what is meant by poetry is a nearly impossible task, especially since, in the so-called age of information, we are drowning in other language systems that are the very opposite of poetry. That poetry is the antimatter of consumer society becomes more meaningful the more we consider what is actively clogging our minds and our lives. I will also readily concede that poetry is not the first thing many people think of when it is time to withdraw from the banalities of life. I did not come from a place where people read poetry, and like many young guys in contemporary America, I was taught to be an unfeeling dolt. Poetry came later when I began to understand that my feelings of frustration, outrage, and even boredom had their correlates in poetry and poets. For a lot of people, the realization that poetry has something to offer young rock and rollers, oddballs, and general miscreants comes through Arthur Rimbaud who inspired artists and punk rockers, thus lending an air of cool other poets may not have possessed. Rimbaud will give you the language of your young, suburban malaise in ways you have always felt but never had the words to articulate. A day came when I read lines like “But! who, what has made my tongue so treacherous that it has been able, up to now, to guide my indolence? Without using even my body to make a living, lazier than a toad, I have lived everywhere” (“Bad Blood.” From Collected Poems. 213). Therein I found the voice of my hatred of the shit boredom of my suburban existence, and it offered a way to spit back the accusations of laziness when I refused to flip burgers for minimum wage. Couple this with the Sex Pistols singing “I’m a lazy sod” over and over again, and I felt like I found my tribe. The poets were and are, at last, the shit starters I needed, if not the revolutionaries the world needs even now.
To launch a young teenage kid into a life of punk rock is one thing, to present a meaningful challenge to power is quite another. What would powerful people be afraid of in something as seemingly innocuous a poetry? Blanchot explains that the ways poetry moves us, the ways poetic language engages in the language that already exists in our minds, depends on something that no other language game can accomplish. While we are accustomed to having things explained to us, of reading instructions that tell us how to do things, poetry is something like a linguistic depth charge that does more than simply connect forms of meaning to each other toward the accomplishment of a goal. In writing about the poet Stephen Mallarmé, Blanchot tells us that “poetic emotion is... not an inner sentiment, a subjective modification, but a strange outside into which we are thrown in us outside of us” (The Book to Come. 235). Poetry engages the language that is within us only to situate us outside ourselves in the language forms that we believe are inside us. This is to say that language, a thing that is not us, not our own but which is the very thing that forms what we are in the deepest sense of what we are, is also an exterior power, and poetry moves our interior sense into the outside. As a result, the boundaries of inner and outer are revealed to be illusory, these boundaries are a beliefs rather than facts. What Blanchot claims is that poetic language reveals not the precise connections between meanings, between inside and outside, but the space that separates them, a space we are only dimly aware of in ordinary life. In this space, poetic space, language is revealed to “never be the thing.” What we believe to be the real thing before us is only ever the word for the things, and this transforms reality from a static immobile thing into a malleable and changeable set of conditions over which we exert some measure of control. When I connected with Rimbaud and the Sex Pistols, I was not simply excited by some cool sentiments and kickass sounds, I was lifted from being nobody in nowhere to being part of the world, of a world anyway, of people who understood these same feelings and ideas. I was no longer in me but out in the space of life. Poetic language is not just a message, it is a weapon of creation against weapons of stultification, and the powerful cannot stand that this is the case.
Still, one wonders how poetry can hold up to the people who sent a paramilitary force into American streets and began kidnapping and murdering people? Isn’t it naïve to imagine poetry as a sufficient weapon against masked rednecks with guns shooting lawful protestors in the fucking head? I would have to say the answer is no, but then I would have to insist there is more to this than that simple set of conditions. Poetry as a force against fascism is not a simple equation of words against guns, and when one wants to begin talking about how it all goes down in today’s hyper-violent world, we need to look at other variables and other poets. A contemporary poet like Sean Bonney has taken on issues such those we are dealing with in America right now, and he explains that there is something in poetry that is more than just the pie-in-the-sky source of inspiration. About the function of poetry and the world around us Bonney says, “I’m not talking about poetry as magical thinking, not at all, but as analysis and clarity” (“Letter on Poetics,” 15). Poetry reveals features of the issues before us and allows us to see them with a clarity not otherwise accessible in prose. Even when Bonney seems to claim that poetry is stupid, he clarifies by saying that "stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation," and this truly is something that is not to be found in prose. What we gain from poetry, more than the exposition of the horror and material danger of ICE and the powerful people who put them on us, is a way for all of us to find each other on the axis of the material damage that is inflicted on the body of humanity. In more direct terms, Bonney explains that poetry does more than connect us to each other and the facts of situations and issues, it reveals a beyond in which something more than just our outrage and anger can find expression, outlet, and, as we will see, pathways to connectedness that constitute a counter-power to despotism. Bonney explains that “(a)nyone who has suffered the gross humiliation of being left out of the ‘perfection’ of bourgeois reality knows all too well what that ‘beyond’, what that ‘secret’ is, and they know because they are it” (41). This is the beyond and the secret of what it means to be outside the smooth and ideal perfection of the powerful and those who have been empowered in the world, and what we gain in the poetic interventions is a clear sense of who and what we are in relation to the world that excludes us and even attacks us.
Bonney, and many others, work toward and create a poetry that “can force that ‘secret’ into the raw light of day.” As the powerful would silence us and even destroy us, poetry will force voices and lived realities into the light of day and refuse to be hidden or denied. When we read his poetry rather than his poetics we can see it all in action. Bonney’s words become our words, and that space Blanchot spoke of opens up for our inside to meet up with the outside toward something much more than the isolated atom of the world that each of us are made to believe we are:
one day I'll come out from the houses
I did it yesterday
no thought for anything
one small shred of my father
a tiny piece of the sea
no-one can take them from me
the city they fucked like a dead friend
so many dead friends
one day I'll come out from the houses
straight into powder and flames
I did it yesterday
you fascist bastards
you pig bastards
red banners barricades black banners
a new city a new kind of sun
(From “Poems After Katerina Gogou.”)
All the rage and outrage, but also the fear and horror and loss, comes to the surface, and, finally, the enemy is named and dragged into the light of a new day in a new city that no longer belongs to those who would hurt us, terrorize us, and make us believe our words are meaningless. It still remains for us to act, but we know we are not isolated, we know we are not acting alone. We also know that the official word that comes to us in the language of power, the language stolen by power, is filled with poisonous lies.
Poetry of the kind we see in Sean Bonney seems to lend a great deal of validity to the Situationist claim that poetry can be “direct communication within reality and as real alteration of reality.” These are poets who are our world, and they are engaging that world and taking steps to alter it. The reality many contemporary poets are addressing is precisely this reality of power and how to engage power. The Italian writer and poet Nanni Balestrini, someone who knew quite well the effects of power and abuse of power, presents such moments of engagement in the language of both crisis and defiance. In his long poem Blackout, Balestrini enacts the critical moment by alternating voices and repeating ideas in a staccato rhythm that captures the crisis:
if the shift in the status of the worker is a shift that allows him to bring political problems to the attention of the interior
a new concept is emerging it is the concept of direct counterpower
the force of the movement its continuity its determination to establish from time to time degrees of analysis that correspond to degrees of political activity
the relationship has become a relationship of power
(Blackout. 34)
Here we can see how Balestrini has lifted the appearance of the essay form and introduced a strange rhythmic quality which moves the words from mere explanation to active forms of what Bonney described as analysis and clarity in poetic language. This is the poetry that is in the streets, not the appropriated language of the institutions seized and controlled by power. This evades power in a form of poetry as counterpower.
When we think of poetry, so many of us have been programmed by public schools and popular images to think only of lofty sentiments expressed in even loftier language that have nothing to do with us or our lives. Musty and dusty old men from ages past who wrote about highfalutin ideals do not mean a damn thing to me or most anyone I know. But if we come to see that poetry is something that is created in the streets, that poetry is something that connects our inner lives to the world around us in ways that are immediate and extremely real to us, poetry can be understood in ways that are far more useful. In our current moment, a moment in which the voices of individuals are being silenced in the most brutal ways, a poetry of immediacy is perhaps precisely what is needed. We need strategies—material strategies that will counter the violence of power, but in order to formulate strategies we need a language that is ours and one that cannot be easily stolen. We need a language that remains elusive and unpredictable. We need to think in terms like those of the recently deceased poet Jean-Marie Gleize who wrote of revolutionaries and resisters. Gleize offers us these distinctly political terms in a distinctly poetic form:
A revolutionary movement does not spread by contamination But by resonance Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted elsewhere The body that resonates does so in its own way An insurrection is not like the propagation of the plague or a forest fire a linear process spreading little by little from a spark But rather this It becomes embodied in a MUSICAL way and whose focal points Dispersed in time and space manage To impose the rhythm of their VIBRATION To get more dense
(Tarnac. 73)
The rhythm of language that resonates with the language of our interior, linked to the music of our experience are all sparks of our very real lives that are the basis of that counterpower that is so critical necessary in our time.
Works Cited
Balestrini, Nanni. Blackout. Translate by Peter Valente. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2017.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Bonney, Sean. All this Burning Earth: Selected Writings of Sean Bonney. ill-will-editions.tumblr.com. March 2026.
Gleize, Jean-Marie. Tarnac: A Preparatory Act. Translated by Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang, and
Bonnie Roy. Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2014.
Hall, John S. “Owls.”Sensitive Skin. 8/26/14.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Collected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
The Situationist International Anthology. Berkely: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.
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