Your Poetry Sucks: The Heel Manifesto

Or, In Praise of Aesthetic Antagonism

[Originally written in December 2023]

There’s this pretty funny interview with

Tao Lin

from several years ago by noted oversharing blogger and professional stalker

Emily Gould

[since this was originally written we wrote a short lil’ piece about her coverage of the phenomenon of “monster fuckers,” which you can read here. —Ed.]. In it, Gould takes aim at Lin’s insistence on abundantly using “scare quotes,” which she considers to be irritatingly arch and condescending. Lin awkwardly defends this style by exposing his own neurosis, a phantom readership in his head that is filled with cruel dickheads ready to pounce on Lin and mock him at a moments’ notice, requiring him to constantly be alert and on edge about what he may be construed to be saying and the multiplicity of meanings contained in the words he chooses.

Two things interest me here: 1) Tao Lin’s self-consciousness about reflexive irony, but most principally 2) Emily Gould’s insistence on rather boldly standing by an aesthetic principle to the point of minor aggression, even toward a guy who she is standing directly next to, on-camera, and who she invited to be interviewed. Gould would go on to have a public feud with Lena Dunham (sic semper blogger) and Lin would reveal that he did that entire book tour high out of his gourd on mushrooms (which is pretty obvious in hindsight), but the interview has stuck in my mind ever since. That moment in the interview feels more and more shocking to me the older I get because as someone invested in literature, and more specifically as someone in and around the CanLit scene, it feels just so fucking alien to me.

The “professionalism” of the writing career in this country in particular (though our neighbours to the south aren’t far off) has turned writer-to-writer relationships into professional contacts which require the sort of tenderness HR culture demands. A lot of these writers seem, privately, not to like each other very much (or their work), but the “workplace” of CanLit requires a kind of decorum in order to thrive that quashes most clashes. When “drama” does arise it is largely interpersonal and not aesthetic. Usually it’s because of the incestuous sexual-romantic nature of the arts scene, its one major non-professional element, in which Canada Council recipients ill-advisedly crawl all over one another like hamsters, or else leverage their place in the hierarchy in exchange for the submission (sexual or otherwise) of their peers.

The Heel performing at Bonfire of the Poets

A lot of people in this community are perfectly nice and likeable (albeit far too networking-oriented), but ultimately put out work which is extremely boring at best. Concordia theses are freely open to browse, and the fact that many of these people got through their Masters is a complete fucking mystery to me, and ought to be to you as well. A creative writing prof I’m friends with once confirmed to me what I once saw with my own eyes: that the lion’s share of those she considers her undergraduate program’s best talent do not even end up publishing anything. I remember fondly a few luminaries from my very first poetry workshop, and of them there is only one whose work I respect who has stuck around in the scene at all. I haven’t seen the others in years, though I did spot one of them waiting tables a few years back while another one of our former classmates, an irreconcilable hack who writes like someone gave her a frontal lobotomy, was shitting out the worst cw MA thesis I’ve ever read in my life, available through the aforementioned thesis portal.

Shouldn’t someone be telling aspirants like this that their efforts are better spent elsewhere? Well, no, because then, firstly, how would these for-profit universities pocket their grant money? I saw Judith Butler’s MLA keynote a couple years ago where she grilled the academic industrial complex for spitting out doctorates with nowhere to put them, and the same can obviously be said of the MFAs. They pump out mediocrity, refined by the insipid focus grouping that the MFA environment entails, work that is on the whole worth writing a polemic about on its own (I’ll get to that one) but is individually just boring at best. It’s inoffensive. It has the edges sanded off. It’s work that seeks to please everybody and bewitch nobody. But the MFA wheels have to keep on turning. The self-legitimating machine has to keep grinding on. What it grinds up in the process of grinding on is culture.

When the MFA becomes an industrial focus-group craft-party networking-club, expanding entirely to pocket more grant money for the schools and make the appropriate social connections for mediocre writers whose admission is more about filling chairs that assessing prospective talent, what should be the mission of these kinds of programs in the first place gets lost. I remember that former Concordia cw professor David McGimpsy, shortly before being run out of town for some *lawyerly cough* “alleged” acts, made a desperate last move in which he candidly revealed in a Twitter thread his thoughts on the profession of “teaching” creative writing, which were that he sort of saw the whole thing less as instruction on craft than a sort of guided therapeutic process towards self-understanding. This insight, if true, actually makes his behaviour even more odious than it already otherwise might have been now that he was implying he was also these students’ therapist, so I’m unsure as to why he thought it might help garner him sympathy. It also, if true, suggests a conscious failure on the part of the institutions of writing in this country to demand any kind of standard of excellence. Rather, it reduces “Creative Writing” to what the general public probably already sees it as: a vanity degree in self-indulgence.

This, coupled with the overall culture of comfort in the writing world, is making writers unbearably SOFT. Last year [read: this was published in 2023, making “last year” 2022—Ed.] Canadian Literature Quarterly PULLED a negative review of a poet’s book simply because the poet in question had his feelings hurt. “If he hated it so much he didn't have to write about it,” is an actual quote in-writing from said poet, which perfectly exemplifies the problem. There is a growing backlash against negative feedback, and it seems to be predicated on a growing idea that that’s just, like, your opinion, man!

…and I checked the book out! IT FUCKING BLOWS!!!

We are living in an era of aesthetic nihilism. Nothing is true, so everything is permitted. But if nothing means anything—if nothing has any relative “value” next to anything else, and everyone’s taste is valid—then why try? Why spend your time obsessing over your creation? After all, it’s just as valid as anything else. A dear friend of mine and an immense talent once opined that “nobody is ever going to be as precious about your work as you are.” Certainly there’s something to be said about fighting the urge to be such a perfectionist that you never get things done, but c’mon! Don’t you WANT to live for more than that? Don’t you WANT to see your work as the expression of something worth taking preciously?

An artist cannot make anything of value without a sense of aesthetic principles. Everything else is doomed to become pastiche. You must not only believe in something, to believe you can express it through your own work, you must oppose something else, and you must overcome the reflexive urge to consider this preoccupation silly.

Consider the “great works” of history and how they are situated within an aesthetic battle, how these writers were attached to “movements” which may be described in terms of shared ideologies about art, its place, what it should look like, and what it should do. The work produced by those movements is exciting in part because it knows what it is and what it wants to be and it knows what it is not and what it does not want to be. Even within those movements the distinction is important—it is what distinguishes, when we see the parallel paintings of Monet and Renoir covering the same scene, the former’s vitality from the latter’s vapidity.

What this is not is an appeal to “art for art’s sake.” Whether you believe in that principle or not is irrelevant—social writers still “believed” in aesthetic principles to undergird their politics. Politically-motivated writers such as realists, naturalists, surrealists, writers of social novels—they all possessed deeply-held convictions about what art should “be” in order to best express and embody their political beliefs, and they fought for and defended these aesthetic principles vociferously. The aesthetic principles of their work served their purpose.

What “movements” are observable today in Canadian literature that are defined by more than just an identity group? Anything other than the unchosen circumstance of one’s race, gender, or sexuality? [Or now “language” as we find ourselves in the midst of a so-called “Anglo” renaissance of literature in Montreal—Ed.]

The most we can hope for in this barren wasteland of the arts is a work’s identitarian content: whose “voice” does it “uplift”? Is it “problematic”? These accusations are often wielded against things we just don’t like, but we feel the need to justify our feelings with political ramifications. When James Wood famously derided the work of Zadie Smith and her cohort on aesthetic grounds by dubbing it “hysterical realism” everyone called him racist and sexist as a result. (Smith, for her part, mounted a brilliant charge in the same style against Joseph O’Neill for what she termed his bloated “lyrical realism,” but we seem to already have forgotten that one.) We feel too guilty to hate without just cause, feel inclined to see such hate as inherently suspicious or hiding latent prejudices, and “aesthetics” does not feel to us like just cause. I’m here to tell you that it is just cause.

As with life, bereft of access to confirm any “meaning” that life may have, you must forge your own meaning and live by it, you must live life as if it has meaning even if you feel on some rational level that it doesn’t. Art is the same way.

The machine grinds on. It grinds up writing, it grinds up writers, it grinds up culture.

The economic forces of the cultural grants industry, the profit-driven creative writing programs, the publishing monopolies, streamlined literary careerism, and late capitalist pastiche are destroying literature and helping to contribute in turn to a growing separation of the public from literature and, with it, rising illiteracy. Sometimes somebody’s got to throw their body onto the gears.

It is time to HATE. It is time to HATE OPENLY, PROUDLY, VINDICTIVELY. Be angry, be rude, be MEAN. Everything which is an affront to your aesthetic sensibilities is an affront to YOU, it is an insult to your values, it is an insult to your hermeneutic for living, and it must be challenged or you and your work will wither and DIE in a miasma of meaningless NOTHING. If you deny your aesthetic principles, if you refuse to accept that these are principles worth defending, then you are writing towards death.

Take offense. Give it. Draw your battle lines. Identify your enemies. Escape the endless cocktail party of the literary scene. Stop writing towards death. Start writing towards life.¹

1. First published in print as the first Discordia zine (K no. 1) for the first Bonfire of the Poets event.