Monthly Archives: November 2006

Poetry has been charged with “aestheticizing,” thus being complicit in, the violent realities of power, of practices like collective punishment, torture, rape and genocide. This accusation was famously invoked in Adorno’s “after the Holocaust lyric poetry is impossible” – which he later retracted and which a succession of Jewish poets have in their practice rejected.

But if poetry had gone mute after every genocide in history, there would be no poetry left in the world. If to “aestheticize” is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be described and dismantled – much hangs on that word “merely”. Opportunism isn’t the same as committed attention. But we can also define the “aesthetic”, not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, which totalising systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched.

Link to the full Guardian Unlimited article