Since publishing "Is there a poet in the room?" I've identified additional material that may be apposite or relevant there, but hesitate to interpolate any new material into that established post. Below is a selection of that material, offered here as a set of interrelated fragments for possible elaboration later.
From an essay in Public Culture by Ryan Boyd: "Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture" (2.11.2025). Boyd's essay is an extended discussion of a book by Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, with reference also to a more recent book (2024) by Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. The reference to "Insta poetry" caught my eye:
More ominously, his conclusions are relevant to fields of cultural production, distribution, and consumption that he doesn't have space for: Why is short, anti-intellectual Insta poetry most marketable now? Don't ask critics or poets—ask Wall Street and what Kornbluh calls "algorithmic culture." Kay Ryan is still alive, but most new readers prefer Rupi Kaur. "In the extremity of too late capitalism," Kornbluh observes, "distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps. Whatever. Like the meme says: get in, loser.
Bringing Eliot into the discussion is interesting, which for my purposes will resonate with Renee Gladsmith's "brown fog", and more generally with the underlying argument of the previous post:
Reading Derivative Media's account of the popular-art industries, now subject to finance instead of Fordism, I kept thinking about T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which had its centenary three years ago. Part of this pertains to Eliot's subject matter: Published in 1922 amid endless wars and just after a brutal pandemic, his modernist assemblage of allusions and texts imagines the West as a hellish necropolis, where civilization lies in fragments: "Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many."
Boyd winds his essay down with notes toward possible solutions, as identified by deWaard:
Derivative Media concludes with a bold-faced set of pragmatic, social-democratic ways to break the grip of finance. We could, for example, tax billionaires more, or fight like hell for unionization, or close the "carried interest" loophole that only benefits hedge-fund and private-equity managers, or actually enforce antitrust legislation that is already on the books. (Indeed, under the Biden administration, Lina Khan was doing that at the Federal Trade Commission.) We could, deWaard writes, have "a less capitalist, more democratic organization of society [that] could be modeled in how we collectively allocate culture, in both how we access media and the labor that goes into making it."
This discussion touches on, or maybe is directly related to, recent writing on the heretofore largely unexamined valorization of economic over social priorities in late capitalist society and culture, or as Michael Hofmann has written:
In the 1980s we were just through being told that life was impossible. We were beginning to worry about ecology and overpopulation. There was a working class, but that went by "middle," or "lower-middle," and it was threatened by the coming of automation and robots (which in another language means "work"). The word "society" had just been withdrawn and replaced in general use by the word "economy." Unions of all sorts had fallen into disrepute…Television – the media – was proliferating, well, like frog spawn, and our overexposed rhetorics of persuasion and introspection were looking distinctly shopworn.
(Hofman's piece was published in the New York Review of Books, a version of the introduction to his new translation of Markus Werner's The Frog in the Throat.)
In closing, returning to Gladman and my discussion of color in the previous post, there's a striking passage from Mountainish, an experimental fiction by Zsuzsanna Gahse (recently translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire). Gahse's book is made of a series of brief numbered passages, 515 passages altogether, reaching 160 pages:
111
I recently heard about a yellow world.
Sour-lemon world and honey-yellow sunrise through fog, acrid yellow all around the world.
112
Four people in the fog, on a wide road, all of them little more than shadows. They are standing fairly far apart, three of them barely moving; the fourth, at the front right of the picture, strides slowly towards the viewer and transforms into a dark-red rectangle, or in fact is immersed in dark red, while the other three are contained in an unsettlingly foggy yellow-red. At the back this yellow-red, at the front dark red.
Has Ghase been reading Gladman? Or Gladman, Ghase? Or would synchronicity or zeitgeist or possibly even the fragmentarium be at work here? (on the latter see my October 13. 2024 post)
Meanwhile, more on yellow-red...at some other time.