From Black Swan Review, No. 3 (1990),
"Special Issue on Illiterature
(with a special emphasis on Neoilliterature
and a special postemphasis on Postneoilliterature)"
copyright (c) 1990 by Robert Kendall
Having become increasingly alarmed at certain vices all too often infecting the modern
page, we feel obliged to spring to the defense of the law-abiding piece of literature.
More and more unscrupulous writers are getting away with murder (specifically,
monotonocide) in their work, verily flaunting a disregard for the life, limb, and front
lawn of even the most upwardly mobile conventions. Some of the most lawless have even
defrauded Death itself, breaching the multinational headquarters of Posterity Inc. with
the aid of such burglar's tools as imagination and--dare I breathe the
word?--individuality.
It's well-known that the only legitimate access to the creative writing process is via
an appropriate degree from that most diligent guardian of writerly rectitude: the
Accredited Writing Program. An assiduous sameness--in the tradition of that most
all-encompassing of artistic movements, Xeroxism--and a careful attention to
student-teacher relations are the honest man's key to literary achievement.
Crimes of literature have, of course, always proliferated among the lower-circulation
strata of publishing society. But their insidious infiltration of even the more exclusive
venues of literary life must give us pause.
Since efforts at interdiction too often prove fruitless, our best hope is to curtail
the demand for illicit, ill-gotten literature (henceforth referred to as illiterature)
through an appeal to the honest citizenry of this great nation. We urge you not to read
this trash, however tempting it may be. Remember--anything that makes you feel that great
couldn't possibly be good for you.
The following guidelines are offered as an aid for your personal protection:
1. Beware the poet who strays from the rest stop of himself onto the
highway of life. Autobiography is poetry's true topic. Anything else requires a
willingness to consort with the imagination, an oversized nose for other people's
business, an intent to tamper with society, a weakness for thinking, or other equally
regrettable tendencies. The poetic diary entry requires nothing but the desire to have
written a poem--an admirable quality that can do harm to no one. And no matter what its
worth as art, poetic mirror-gazing always stands as testament to the sterling honesty of
its author.
2. Don't give humor the time of day. If it catches our attention, it
can prove dangerous. A funny story or poem is literature with its pants down. So, it's
human after all--just one of the guys, we think with a smile. Then while we are thus
disarmed, it can slip inside us by the back door. Once in, it may get serious. Then we'll
never be able to get rid of it.
Besides, Art should hold a mirror up to life, and life is never funny. Those who
mistakenly believe otherwise are merely inadequately schooled in the crafts of self-pity,
bitterness, and pretension.
3. Guard against the cliché, that deadliest of all illiterary
devices. I refer not to clichés that have slithered in through the ill-latched door of a
lazy imagination. These we can overlook as honest mistakes. I refer to clichés
deliberately harbored in the writing of certain illiterists.
They know these archetypes of language are the subconscious building blocks of
communication. They twist them, corrupt them, put them to work in unauthorized contexts
until they've stirred up the muck of the linguistic unconscious. Why can't meaning be
allowed to dream in peace?
4. When they get their hands on the clichés of the culture, the
consequences are even more dire. Decorating a work with sinewy Grecian deities or
tender-eyed Christs and Magdalens is a fine way to add a pleasing touch of universality
and conjure up the days when faiths were faith. But invoking the idols of the silver
screen, the oracles of the airwaves, the icons of the glossy ad is another box of pencils
altogether. These are the things we really believe in.
Subjecting these straight-shooting stereotypes and buxom platitudes to illiterature
tells us more about ourselves than we care to know. These images come straight from the
inner heavens and hells--the desires and fears--of that mysterious, collective soul known
as The Viewing Public.
Sometimes this species of cliché-mongering will degenerate into out-and-out parody.
Cross to the other side of the street if you see one of those coming. Parody can take
these subversive principles to an extreme so dangerous it's no laughing matter.
5. A poet who stoops to puns and double entendres--those two-faced
pretenders--is merely casting his lines in murky stanzas. He's lost in the woulds--left
teetering at the edge of a sheer if. Ambiguity lets a poem reach off into the infinite and
the poor reader may never get to the end of its significance.
This approach also sets poetry back a good hundred years. Well-played plays on words
are shackles as cruel as any rhyme. Free verse indeed freed verse from the tyranny of the
craftsman. Once properly understood, it brought about an artistic revolution of
unprecedented magnitude. Here, finally, was art for the New Age American, art requiring no
technique. Anyone could don the sacred mantle in exchange for just an anecdote ornamented
with line breaks.
The shamelessly clever wordery indulged in by some illiterists sets back the clock by
once again inflicting music and order on poetry. A pun is nothing but insidious
simultaneous rhyme--one word invoking a consonance with the word it implies.
6. Literature, especially poetry, should not taint itself with vulgar
contemporary realities. It should have the decency not to remind us that we're not the
dead and buried remnants of a purer age. When we look up from our book, we're confronted
by a world whose life blood is the ebb and flow of the airwaves, whose brain is a
microprocessor with a one-year warranty, whose breath is asbestos tinged with
fluorocarbons, whose voice is just an ad for something else. We can't even drive to the
corner store for a TV Guide without being bombarded by the 20th century. We
certainly don't want to find it in our poems, too.
It is our hope that you can go out now into the wide world of the word, properly armed
against temptation. Whenever you find your soul wanting to dance the wrong steps and your
vision starting to turn inside out, stop and ask yourself: Am I under the insidious spell
of the illiterists?
