E-Mail This Article to a Friend Art demon (continued)

A (cont.): Young people are not getting any substance. So now I’ve written a book that I would’ve wanted to have when I was a high-school student or a college student, and I’ve tried to reach the general reader, who didn’t go to college, and tried to draw them into aesthetic response — because aesthetic response, of course, is a no-no. I mean, in an age of post-structuralism and postmodernism, that was driven completely out. That’s why I’m on the edge of everything. I’m totally persona non grata. I’m never invited to speak, and when I am invited to speak, interestingly, it’s not by the literature departments, who have ostracized me; it’s often by the history department or the classics department, because they recognize my scholarship. They recognize the erudition.

When I was in college, poetry was radical; there were giant readings. It was just so exciting; we had books of poetry everywhere. It was part of the culture. I want to bring that back. I want to give people a feeling of excitement. I want to give people a sense of confidence. I want to encourage people to go to the library and browse. Go to a bookstore and browse. Now, who goes to the poetry section of a bookstore? That’s why it’s good to have National Poetry Month in April, because nobody goes to the poetry section, unless you know what you’re looking for. When I started doing this book, I heard throughout the ’90s, "Poetry’s a flat market. People are not interested in it at all." So my doing this book is a kind of risk. I’m putting my reputation on the line. I feel that poetry belongs to everyone, not just the stupid academic elite, who play their games and do their maneuverings, with their gigantic salaries; they’re rip-off artists, from Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley. The money those people pull down! The pensions! The perks! It’s a scandal.

I got a really interesting letter in the early ’90s from a woman who said that she had left Berkeley grad school in English because when she sat at the seminar table and expressed enthusiasm for what they were discussing, the entire room stopped, everyone looked at her down their nose. That was just not permissible. These are going to be undergraduate teachers? You need enthusiasm to connect with undergraduates who are lost in the media landscape. So what we’ve done is driven out the most imaginative and the best of our future teachers from the universities, and who are left are these drones. They’re like dreary drones who are just mouthing this fake, leftist stuff. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re ass-lickers. Why has the alternative press been so passive about this for so long? We need to liberate American families and American students, I say, from the necessity of going to college at all! Why should anyone have to go to college directly out of high school? Why should they be on that goddamned hamster wheel, where for the last few years of your high-school experience, you’re all anxiety about what good school are you going to? It’s all about status envy, and your parents having the right sticker for the car. It is a scandal! And the major media, the New York Times and all the rest of them, have been absolutely cowardly in avoiding this. But the alternative press has been equally cowardly. The alternative press was bamboozled by thinking that this fake leftism, which isn’t real leftism — it’s all based on language and deconstruction and so on. It has nothing to do with real leftism, which is based on social realities and political realities, historical realities. These people are not historically learned, any of them. The alternative press did not want to come out on this issue, because it was inconvenient for them, because of the politics here. Well, that’s great. Thanks for your lack of balls, the whole alternative press from coast to coast. The conservatives have gained and gained moral authority over the last 15 years. They keep gaining and gaining, because they are speaking the truth about how bad the universities are. Now, I don’t agree with their world-view. We needed more liberals to speak up bravely and to be engaged in the culture war. You asked why I wrote the book? There it is.

Q: How do you see the book fitting into your larger body of work?

A: Sexual Personae, there’s 20-something chapters in it. Thirteen of those are about poetry. And then a lot of them are about paintings and so on. It goes from cave art through Egypt and Greece all the way down to Emily Dickinson. There were a lot of people who went bananas when I came on the scene. I was a feminist dissident, I belonged to a wing of feminism that had been suppressed since the ’60s, we’d been driven into the wilderness. Well, we returned with a vengeance in the ’90s, thanks to Madonna. We rule now. Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, all those sense-and-censorship puritans who were on the required-reading list in the ’80s, they’re gone. They’re invisible. We just won, won, won. When I first came on the scene, though, and was expressing these criticisms, no one had ever heard of me, and they assumed, "Oh, she must be conservative, because no one that we could ever respect would ever criticize feminism." That’s how elementary their education is — they don’t understand what an insurgency is. A rebellion against an establishment that’s become ossified. A social elite run by Gloria Steinem and all of the women’s-studies programs at the major campuses. They didn’t understand that. I was affirming feminism while demanding change in the way feminism is taught in the schools or discussed in the media and so forth.

I was so trashed. I mean, it was really bad. There was a campaign to get me fired from my college. They were harassing the president of the university. These were all feminist groups! They were awful. If that’s how they treated me, you can imagine how they suppressed all kinds of women, silenced them all these decades. Everyone assumed that they knew what Sexual Personae was about, and ha ha. They lost. They called me an essentialist. "She’s an essentialist! She’s a positivist!" All these labels. The Village Voice had a vicious campaign against me for years. At one point I actually went to a lawyer, and we put a stop to it. I was being defamed as a racist and all kinds of other stuff. I, who had suffered for so long because of my independent ideas, who could not get published, to be treated by the alternative press in that way, it’s a scandal. And it shows what’s wrong with this polarization of political opinion in the United States, where people are in lock step, and they’re just not perceiving political issues in a nuanced way. So this is another thing I’m trying to do here. If the liberal press is truly liberal, then it should show nuance and imagination in how it treats cultural issues, and stop this stereotyping.

We need to bring the nuance back. But I think it has to start on the liberal side, because conservatives are very, very invested in the Bible and in religious tradition. You’re not going to get much flexibility on the conservative side, especially when they feel that their religious viewpoints are being trashed all the time in the liberal media. But it is important for the liberal media to start doing a little soul-searching, and start asking whether its behavior has not worsened the cultural divide in America, and actually threatens the creation of young artists, their financial support by the society, and the whole career of being an artist. We need to get to the European model, where the artist is seen as in some way embodying the cultural history of the nation. It’s only the liberals who can do that. So I’m asking liberals: look at this book, and let’s get back to what is quality, what lasts. Let’s have a movement that brings art back, the cultural respect in America. Because it’s very, very threatened. The art world has been totally blind to its own PC leftism. So even though I’m a liberal Democrat, my primary allegiance is to art and the development of the young artist.