EP&M
Online Essay
Our Ersatz World
by
Dr. Joseph S. Salemi
Department of Classical Languages,
The German word ersatz means “substitute”
or “replacement.” The term became well known beyond
All human
activity, if it becomes habitual, has an eventual effect on the soul. Our
responses and ways of thinking—even our perceptions—fall under the
sway of our customary behavior. Do something often enough and it will
color your entire being. Could it be that the ubiquity of ersatz
products in our time has poisoned our tastes, and led us to prefer the fake to
the real?
It’s
possible, but I am inclined to believe that it’s the other way
around. There is something perverse in modernity that favors the unreal on
principle, that
wants fakes and stand-ins and substitutes for their own sake. The
widespread use of ersatz products is therefore just a symptom of a
deep-seated sickness, just as buboes are a symptom of plague. Claudius
said of Hamlet that “There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood.”
Well, the modern world has some kind of brooding soul-sickness that favors the
unreal.>
For example, I’m astounded at how many people have
homes filled with “replicas” of things. This is not a
financial issue—in some cases they have paid more for a crummy copy of a
Victorian chair than they would have paid for the original in a good antique
shop. People hang up replica Civil War swords, when in fact there are
plenty of original Civil War swords available if you look for them. You
can pay a high price for a reproduction of a Roman coin, although real Roman
coins are still found by the bucketful.>
What’s going on here? Well, recall what Eliot
said in “Burnt Norton”: Human kind cannot bear very much
reality. Eliot had put his finger on a key problem in modern
life. With the collapse of religious and cultural certainties in the
West, our stance towards real things has become more defensive than ever.
When metaphysical moorings are cut, the world turns shadowy, protean, and
relative. It becomes an even more threatening place than it would have
been under ordinary circumstances. And this accounts for our increasing
unwillingness to approach reality too closely. There’s an
unconscious assumption that the real is dangerous and edgy, while our synthetic
simulacra are somehow safer. And so we’ve created a child-friendly
world of rounded corners and antiseptic plastics and non-shatter glass and
sugar-free candy, because we have gotten out of the habit of dealing with real
things. They are too scary.>
I could make a case that the stupid nerd-box you are staring
at right now is the prime example of this tendency. Computers, of course,
make everything virtual and> non-threatening, even sex and violence.
Computer addicts dwell in a world of perpetual images, summonable
and dismissable at will, and utterly without
consequence. But let’s leave that hot potato alone, and instead
talk about poetry.
Those who are part of the movement known (for better or for
worse) as New Formalism are also subject to this tendency. They too are
afraid. In their case the fear manifests itself in an unwillingness to
write real formal poetry, as opposed to the numerous ersatz varieties
that sometimes try to take its place. For example, some people calling
themselves formalists pay no attention to the stress in a line, but merely
count syllables; or else they use so many substitutions that the resulting line
might just as well be syllabic. That is a completely fake sort of
“formal” verse, and I am tired of hearing the practice defended by
persons who should know better. Don’t tell me about
“freedom,” don’t tell me about “experimentation,”
don’t tell me about “new possibilities.” You either
compose in correct meter or you don’t.>
Another ersatz obscenity is the excessive use of
slant-rhyme or near-rhyme in rhyming forms. I ask the people who are
addicted to this practice, and who think that it is très
chic and classy: Are you aware of the fact that you are publicly declaring
yourselves incompetents who can’t get a rhyme? And don’t
lecture me about
Then there are the lyric-ladlers—the formalist poets
who, no matter what subject or genre they are handling, always seem to ladle
out something lyrical and breathy. This again is due to fear: rather than
forthrightly taking up the requisite style for a given poem, these
lyric-ladlers unconsciously try to fit their material into the critical
parameters of mainstream free verse, which has decreed the confessional lyric
to be the only acceptable mode. As a result, we have formalists writing
satire that sounds like Wordsworth’s “Intimations of
Immortality.” It’s totally ersatz. >
The three previous examples all involve the how of poetry;
now let me descant on something touching the very substance of New
Formalism. And that is the untoward influence of middle-class notions of
“propriety” in the movement.>
The Proto-Indo-European root dek-
means “that which is acceptable, right, and proper.” It
eventually gives us our words decorous and decorum and even dignity.
There’s a whole class of persons in the poetry world who could be
designated as> dek-people. They seem
to have an internal gyroscope that compels them to be constantly on the lookout
for anything that they think “unsuitable” or “in bad
taste” or “indecorous,” or some other euphemism to describe
that which offends their prissy sensibilities. These dek-people
are everywhere, banishing and censoring and hectoring, and they have a
crippling effect on the creative energy of others. They are constantly
harping on the need for sensitivity and courtesy and politeness and civil
discourse and good taste and consensus and… well, you get the
picture. Try to imagine a hybrid of Caspar
Milquetoast and Miss Manners in charge of a poetry magazine, and you’ll
get a rough idea of their influence on aesthetics.
In New Formalism, dek-people
have had the unfortunate effect of leaching out a lot of the vitality and vigor
that might otherwise have made our movement interesting. Instead, we have
a good deal of formalist verse that is anemic and ladylike, as if written in a
boarding house of spinsters. But that’s exactly what the dek-people want. They like it when we’re
all well behaved.
>
Granted, there are some New Formalist poets (Margaret Menamin and Richard Moore come to mind immediately) who are
rowdy, roisterous, and Falstaffian
in their approach. But they are not the common type. Everywhere
else there is the distinct feeling that hobbling restraints are on us, like the
over-engineered seat belts in new cars. We can’t say some
things. We might—God forbid!—offend somebody. So we
produce an inoffensive ersatz poetry that comes nowhere near the robust
vigor of our ancestors.
>
As long as there are workshops, seminars, study groups, and chatrooms, the dek-people
will maintain their unofficial hegemony over New Formalist poetry. For in
a public setting, where ideas are bandied back and forth, persons who express
dismay and outrage have a distinct advantage over others. It happens in
faculty meetings, conferences, and gathering of every type—the offended
party stands up in high dudgeon and delivers an impassioned indictment of
something “outrageous” (i.e. exciting and interesting), and
everyone else feels obliged to acquiesce. I learned long ago that the
only way to counter such types is to stand up and spit back defiance at them,
telling them exactly where to shove their outraged feelings. But most
people don’t have the stomach for that kind of response. They find
it easier to make adjustments and go along. And as a result, the> dek-people retain their stranglehold on what we write.
This is the terrible ersatz world of New
Formalism. The fake meter, the fake rhyme, the all-pervasive lyricism,
and the straitjacket of decorum are still forbidding presences that frustrate
much potential. Can we start writing real poetry again, instead of this ersatz
crap? I think we can, if a few of us start spitting back defiance and
thereby encouraging the more diffident to stand up and be counted too.
Lately, I sense that at least a few poets are willing to try. Let’s
hope that they persevere.>
>
Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved>