Drawing his from several sources, including Bataille, Barthes and Bourdieu, Steve McCaffery in “Writing as a General Economy,” articulates of how a notion of play in extremis might help open the “restricted economy” of this literary ideology. McCaffery begins from a familiar postmodern inversion of normative poetic values (play valued over work), then progresses to a more radical critique. He breaks apart the simplistic dichotomy that might be drawn, for example, from Barthes’ rather direct inversion of values (against work in favour of play):

Restricted economy, which is the economy of Capital, Reason, Philosophy, and History, will always strive to govern writing, to force its appearance through an order of constraints. The general economy would forfeit this government, conserve nothing, and, while not prohibiting meaning’s appearance, would only sanction its pro!tless emergence in general expenditure: hence, it would be entirely indifferent to results and concerned only with self-dispersal. A general economy can never be countervaluational nor offer an alternative ‘value’ to Value, for it is precisely the operation of value that it explicitly disavows. (202)

In terms of the further poet-customer agreement implicit in craft discourse, the poet who hasn’t worked hard enough, who has merely doodled, scribbled, idled, masturbated or played with words – what McCaffery characterises as “general expenditure,” or “nonproductive outlay” (207) – has no moral right to ask for the common reader’s time. In this same vein, John Baglow, author of two poetry collections and a study of Scottish socialist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, holds out the possibility of forgiveness to playful poet Mark Truscott:

There is not enough in [this book] for a real night on the town … Instead we have page aaer page of what can only be described as verbal doodling … But luckily this is not all there is to Truscott … Sometimes, as above, this is just the flash and dash of an enthusiast taken with his own discoveries, but when the frivolous mood wears off, he proves to be capable of much more … ‘Canadian Poetry’ is proof that he can do far more than play with words … If Truscott can abandon the self-indulgence of “It Was,” and give us instead the more lucid and compelling contents of his mind’s “succession of torn envelopes,” that night on the town will be well worth waiting for. (“Said Like Reeds”)

Baglow initially allows for possible temptation (against his aesthetic con- science) to a poetic night on the town, before he decides Truscott has not been cruel enough to his own flesh to conscionably purchase rest. Truscott’s writing does not demonstrate often enough the ideologically legible signs of toil, and therefore most of it is categorically not poetry. Instead his poetry “can only be described as verbal doodling:” undirected semantic play, speculation, discovery. Rather than see the root problem as their incompatibility of poetic values, or their divergent aesthetic imperatives, Baglow slanderously infers that Truscott is not a serious character. Truscott’s affects – frivolity, playfulness, enthusiasm, self-love – are not those of virtuous, responsible poetry. Baglow seems to believe Truscott was either high on marijuana, and/or Prozac (either way: temporary moral insanity!), when the book was put together, in a speedy “flash and dash,” or that he is immoral because he is still immature (i.e., he has not yet formed an aesthetic conscience). But Baglow’s poetry science church guild nevertheless prays for poets like Truscott, with whom some hope remains, because “luckily … [they] can do far more than play with words.” Truscott, in the end, is compassionately encouraged to be strong, to grow up, to put away childish things.

Stuart Newton, in the same review cited above, takes a more severe adjudicative position:

These books disappoint the reader in a fashion that is peculiar to contem- porary theories of poetry: vis-à-vis free verse and concrete forms. Worth- while poetry requires much more than verbal and graphic stimuli. Unconcerned, the three writers plopped down their lines produced their graphics in three rather showy texts … All this poor work occurs because Fertig has no sound notion of poetics … Fertig’s random symbol scheme demands that the reader be the poet, in that the reader has to fuse together some sort of cohesion from such disparity … [Varney’s] book is not a serious proposition … Poetry is not a free whim, it is a persistent vision that drives the poet to his pen and paper … Poetry, then, is much more than a reasonable account of a passing moment: it is very serious work. Good poems are not just chance … It is easy to hoax readers when they are meant to be open to Vers Libre, even easier when the readers are made to be the poet so that they are disinclined to judge. (Rev. of Fertig, Rappaport and Varney 142)

Newton, outraged, spurs to a strong position-taking in a stringently moralised definition of poetry. As reviewers will, Newton shames the actual persons (not the author-functions, nor the fantasmic poets) Fertig, Rappaport and Varney. His very parental Common Reader expresses the moral-narrative emotion of disappointment: I thought you would do better. He defines poetry specifically as a work ethic, not by reference to form or content. “Poetry is not a free whim … it is a persistent vision … it is very serious work.” Vers enchainé, not vers libre. In this scheme, all of postmodern poetry, and, it would seem, most poetry of the 20th century, is the hoax of con-artist writers whose works turn readers away from the honourable duty of judgement, in order to hide their chicanery. Such “unconcerned” poets are disturbingly unburdened with aesthetic conscience. They limply plop down their lines without design, and let the reader do the work of symbolic re-assembly, a labour ghoulishly intended to sap the common reader’s passion for whack-a-mole gavel-banging. “Worthwhile” here, as elsewhere, imagines the relationship between reader and writer in economic terms, as an exchange of readerly time for writerly goods. Newton’s parental reader is also an angry tough customer, cheated of cohesion-as-value. A tough customer, no less, who has to assemble the product him/herself. Reviewers like Newton instrumentalise poetic value: A poem is good because it does something definite, pointed, obvious. What apparently good poetry really does, for a reviewer like Newton, is to signal accrued labour value in the correct ideological code. Ideological features, such as cohesion, function as a signs that the poet is not an aesthetic welfare bum, but that he/she works for a poetic living.


‘Secretary of Smash the State’ appears in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence: Crafts Discourse and the Common Reader in Canadian Poetry Book Reviews. Toronto: BookThug, 2012.