Twentieth Century Pleasures, 2009
Classics of high-modernist poetry collected by Robert Hass in the book Twentieth Century Pleasures are read, along with the author's critical evaluation of each piece, to men and women who suffer varying degrees of mental disability. The piece investigates the space between the two extremes of intellectual capacity, thus becoming a meditation on the exacting demands of high culture. By emphasizing the distance between audience and material, the piece critiques the appreciation of complex poetry as a privileged experience. The arbitrary nature of biological endowment mirrors the equally bizarre logic of class privilege and distinction. High-modernist poetry requires a degree of erudition almost exclusively available to those in higher education. Universities urge their students to invest themselves in canonical text to reap the benefits within them. This borrowed financial jargon is telling of an experience that lies within the reach of few, requiring both biological and financial privilege. The intellectual is placed at the center of two systems of inequality, becoming the true center of the piece's critical interests. The work takes a surprising turn with the intervention of Vahid, a mentally impaired man who overtakes the reading and launches into his own free-associative torrent of language. This forceful and unexpected poetic intervention opens the possibility of abridging the gap through creative responses that are not bound by academic reverence. - Julio Chavezmontes |