Home // January.19.2017 // Paul Rowe

The poet connecting the dots in a domestic conspiracy

A specter of "greatness" looms on the horizon like a malevolent titan, promising to haunt the ruins of America's dismantled democracy. However true it was before November 10th that all poetry is political, this fact is now obtrusively apparent. Writers, editors and publishers are working furiously to keep people informed and engaged about developing threats to US democracy. Their activities include:

Slate magazine's new membership appeal, which now asks for support specifically to underwrite their non-normalizing coverage of Trump's administration;
Entropy magazine's daily TRUMPWATCH list;
The Turnip Truck(s) new series "The Turnip Trump(s)", to feature work reflecting literary resistance to current political events;
the anthology If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, which publisher Sibling Rivalry Press scrambled to get ready for a release date on the same day Trump is sworn in;
and of course, Writers Resist, the coordinate network of direct action which involved thousands of poets, novelists and other creators participating in more than 100 reading events taking place concurrently across the nation on January 15th.

As American literary culture re-orients its priorities, it is a poet here in New England who, of all people, seems to be making the single most focused effort to connect the dots between Trump's circle and FBI director James Comey. The potted summary: Erik Prince (brother of Cabinet-nominee Betsy DeVos) and Rudy Giuliani directly manipulated Comey into using his position to poison the well against the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This poet's name is Seth Abramson. He is Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire. His Huffington Post columns typically take the form of poetry criticism, rounding-up his judgment on recent collections from independent presses; however, since Trump's election victory, Abramson has taken a hard turn toward politics, focusing his skills as a critical reader and trained attorney to discern the undemocratic activity connecting .

From Abramson's most recent HuffPo column:

While a full summary of the Prince-Giuliani-Trump conspiracy would require a longer discourse, the actions of these men, along with multiple still-anonymous actors, can be summarized in five paragraphs. It will be for journalists with more resources than this writer to follow up on these leads—and, moreover, to see how this domestic conspiracy dovetails with the Trump-Russia controversy...

Following the appearance of that column yesterday morning, our interviewer Paul Rowe reached out to Abramson to learn more.


About the subject: Seth Abramson is author of The Metamodern Trilogy, which includes Golden Age (2017, shown above), DATA (2016), and Metamericana (2015), all published by BlazeVOX. He is also the author of The Insider’s Guide to Graduate Creative Writing Degrees (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018); Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2013); Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press, 2011); and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Ph.D. in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Abramson is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University), a columnist at The Huffington Post, and editor for the refereed academic journal Metamodern Studies. From 2001 to 2007, he worked as an attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender.

GOLDEN AGE is the most recent book by Seth Abramson.

About the subject:

Seth Abramson is author of The Metamodern Trilogy, which includes Golden Age (2017, shown above), DATA (2016), and Metamericana (2015), all published by BlazeVOX. He is also the author of The Insider’s Guide to Graduate Creative Writing Degrees (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018); Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2013); Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press, 2011); and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009).

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Ph.D. in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Abramson is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University), a columnist at The Huffington Post, and editor for the refereed academic journal Metamodern Studies. From 2001 to 2007, he worked as an attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender.

Paul Rowe: In the past, your columns at The Huffington Post have taken the form of reviews of poetry collections from independent presses. Since November, however, the focus of your writing has shifted towards politics. What has attracted your attention away from literature to politics?

Seth Abramson: What I appreciate most in indie poetry is also what I most respond to in journalism: stories that have not yet been told, framed and disseminated in a way such stories are not commonly framed or disseminated. Early on during the Democratic primary, I began to feel that there were stories inside the stories I was reading daily in major media that were not being told—in part, I thought, because the language of conventional journalism was an ill match for those stories.

While both Clinton and Sanders were flawed candidates, I think the latent strength and slow evolution of Sanders' appeal to younger, nonwhite, and non-traditional voters was difficult for received journalistic practices to capture. After the general election, the same thing seemed to be true regarding Mr. Trump and the means of his election: we had a thousand think-pieces, but very little investigative journalism crafted to cut through the man's innumerable distractions and smokescreens.

In the end, I guess I felt that writing political columns with unusual topics, approaches, and fidelities was an extension of my longstanding interest in experimental writing. Of course, this is in no way particular to me; I strongly believe that poets as a class of creatives can bring a unique perspective to many other literary arts, and new media journalism may well be chief among them.

PR: What equips someone like you—a poet, academic, and critic—with the necessary tools to engage with political matters in an articulate and productive fashion?

SA: I was a public defender for many years, and have been a political activist—particularly in the spheres of higher education and voting rights—for about as long, so advocacy journalism dovetails with my native temperament pretty well. I can't really objectively self-assess my own writing with any clarity, so I'll just say that, as a general matter, I think the best journalists and columnists are categorically averse to nonsense and distraction, intuitively able to see what's really at stake in any conflict, and feel driven to expose something in every discussion or scenario that hasn't yet had a proper airing.

While the environments and, superficially, the personality types may often seem different, I think academics, critics, and literary artists are in many ways propelled by these same mandates. I might add, too, only because I'm a college professor, that I find these qualities in many teachers as well. We're prone to ask what's at the bottom of every well, as it's in the raw materials of such discoveries that we find ourselves and our audience—whether we're poets, educators, subject-area experts in the academy, or dedicated analysts in any field. As a professor, I often emphasize so-called "soft" skills (really a terrible misnomer) over hardened knowledge bases, which, translated to the discipline of journalism, means that finally anyone can contribute robustly if and when they learn to exert these five skill-sets: oral communication; written communication; critical thinking; creative thinking; and the ability and willingness to collaborate. Sometimes the collaboration is passive—for instance, when a columnist cites and then extrapolates from others' research—and sometimes the "oral" communication is as much about creating communities of interest as it is about presenting static information, but all five skills are definitely in play across a wide range of fields, in my view.

So while I don't know whether or not I have the right tools to do what I want to do in journalism—I think my editorials and opinion columns fail much more often than they succeed, and I've got innumerable bad habits that I can teach others to avoid but am preternaturally drawn back to again and again myself—but I do think I've gotten a handle on which skills would be, optimally, brought to bear in the sort of writing I do.

PR: Do you believe that the majority of professionals involved with creative writing and the study of literature perceive themselves as capable, willing participants in political discourse?

SA: I think both of those words, "political" and "discourse," are particularly fraught for those who love the complexities of language. That said, I'll also say that I think there's virtually no "discourse" on the internet or even in the news media today; punditry is not discourse, nor is the electioneering that increasingly poses as punditry, nor is the preaching to the choir that is often elevated as "punditry" and makes up most of our social media interactions.

So I think literary artists, like any professional community with a vibrant online component, consider themselves to be engaged with their world, but whether that means they're actively engaged in discourse—which is usually marked by reason, evidence, temperance, compromise, and dialogue with those one finds distasteful or even abhors—is a different question. I'm sure that sometimes they are.

As far as what's "political" is concerned, of course there are many spheres of political activity: domestic politics, identity definition, the cultural marketplace, and so on. At this moment in literary history, which like any moment I'm sure will vanish soon, it seems artists are highly engaged with the politics of identity definition, and I think that's an extremely valuable contribution for artists in all genres to be making right now. But I can't say that I find literary artists' engagement with the full spectrum of domestic politics to be, on balance, particularly robust, effective, or reflexive. That's not to say my own is, either, as I suspect it isn't; but I do think it's an issue the whole community is facing right now.

The good news is that I think there are many, many people within the literary arts community who want this to change, enough that we might expect that it actually will sometime soon. Discussion of identity naturally evolves into consequential political action in service of vulnerable sub-communities, and I think that, in time, actions of that sort fuse and pattern, blossoming into an inclusive politics that sees the nexus between individual political issues and the health and well-being of an entire (political, socioeconomic, psychosocial) culture.

PR: What do you perceive to be the role of literature and literati in the coming Trump era? Should academics, poets, and critics remain in their professional lane, or should they venture openly into political conversations?

SA: I think the Trump presidency constitutes a moral and cultural crisis for the nation and a clear and present geopolitical danger the likes of which we haven't seen since World War II. I think the role of the artist in such situations is not much different from the role of the artist in wartime—which is not to say that we're at war, only that the election of a dangerous sociopath to the highest office on Earth should put all of us, intellectually speaking, on a wartime footing. In other words, our reason and our nerves must be prepared for peaceful but impactful action at a moment's notice. That means continuing to make art while also ensuring, whatever we do, that we are always putting people ahead of art. We must, I think, continue to see with the second sight (and third, fourth, and fifth sight) that making art requires, without ever losing focus of the suffering and emergencies of the moment—especially when they don't immediately seem to be ours. We're a nation, after all: it's on us, and on all of us, all the time.

We must all be activists now, whether artist-activists or lawyer-activists or teacher-activists or whatever. But, finally, activists. Most of the important activism we do will have to happen offline, and in fact very little will involve conventional discourse—the sort in which we expect to solve problems collaboratively, with a sanguine temperament, and through compromise. In the short term, the country, non-militarily speaking, must be made safe, and that requires the sort of activism that's purposeful and reflexive about being impactful rather than one that's predominantly dialogic. Once the current moral crisis passes, we can all rediscover the meaning of discourse. For what it's worth, that'd probably require nearly all of us to quit social media.

PR: Is the study and practice of creative writing in and of itself political in nature? Is the act of writing in response to undemocratic activity the most democratic response available to humanists?

SA: All writing is in some sense political, as it positions the self with respect to a culture or subculture and therefore implicitly takes a position about how a self should (or, as the case may be, can) so position itself.

But I think the current study and practice of creative writing in the United States—which is almost entirely dependent on a "workshop" methodology devised in the nineteenth century for advanced composition courses and never intended to be used as it is now—explicitly tamps down the political component in not only creative writing but critical thinking as well. Often, aesthetic conformity is emphasized over the development of an idiosyncratic, dynamic, ever-evolving poetics (one that forces an author to map herself against a complex matrix of identity, culture, language, and genre). The manner of reasoning favored is generally deductive and corrective—therefore, definitionally, ever at risk of re-entrenching the status quo—rather than inductive and exploratory. The artist's positioning with respect to "error" is all wrong (ironically) inasmuch as error is viewed as something to be avoided. Students are narrowly focused on bringing an only slightly elevated copyediting function to a single piece of work, rather than doing the much more difficult labor of engaging multidisciplinary, multidimensional concepts that transcend the discipline of creative writing even as they enrich our understanding of its possibilities. Genre borders are respected rather than transgressed; new forms, cultural philosophies, and media are far too rarely explored; virtually no attention is given to elocution or the accoutrements of public performance, though this is critical to the life and community-building function of a working author; hierarchy rather than collaboration is emphasized; reading lists are narrow rather than tailored to each student, and cautious rather than audacious; publication wrongly stands in for innovation as a collective (if generally unstated) ambition; curricula and classroom subcultures are far too often implicitly underwritten by students' discomfort with divergence and one another, rather than featuring a chaotic celebration of heterogeneity in both ourselves and others; students are taught how to produce publishable writing rather than given the tools to think critically and courageously about either writing or publishing. Worst of all, creative writing is taken to be a knowledge base, rather than an intersection of transferable skill-sets that any American of great common sense would want to develop in themselves for a host of personal and professional reasons.

SA: I guess what I'm saying is: critical and creative thinking, when and where unbounded and brave, is democratic. A nineteenth century curriculum that should have rewritten itself wholesale seventy years ago is no more than that.

PR: Writers with backgrounds in both law and poetry, such as Monica Youn, have been outspoken in light of the recent election results. What do you make of the convergence of law and poetry? Does this duality inform your own writing and your sense of purpose within a community of writers?

SA: My Jewish upbringing encouraged me to recognize and empathize with vulnerability and fight like hell to prevent the powerful from exploiting the vulnerable; my legal education gave me an intellectual framework within which to wage those kinds of battles; and my years of work in the criminal justice system underscored for me that far more of life is prosaic than poetic, and what is poetic is often tragically so.

When I was writing poems late at night after days in court—more or less how I lived as a poet in the Aughts—I thought the law and poetry couldn't possibly be further apart. One was cold, the other hot; one pragmatic, the other unanchored by pragmatism. But now I'm not so sure. I think my strongest works are those in which, if only in my own mind, I'm fighting for something I believe in desperately. The law, to be properly practiced, requires that same sense of drive, purpose, and (as we can) embodied virtue.

At their best, I think both the law and poetry are ennobling because they demand that we reveal ourselves using methods sometimes surprisingly ill-suited to that task. They're also alike because they're rarely seen at their best. Therefore, they're rarely as ennobling as one would hope (and sometimes need) them to be. I think trial attorneys speak of their strongest moments of advocacy with the same reverence and sense of the world having crystallized as poets do when they speak of the works that land closest to their most deep-set ambitions.

Of course, moments like those are elusive in both poetry and the law. What I think electoral shenanigans and a dangerous would-be autocrat do for both lawyers and poets is metaphorically grab us by our collars and say, "Well, there's no time anymore—this has to be one of those moments for you." It's a great deal of pressure on both the lawyer and the poet, though I think the two are alike, again, in seeing their best selves in their best work, and therefore in wanting the moments of greatest need to be those moments in which they themselves see and speak most powerfully.

PR: Although many writers and academics might feel the necessity of becoming more vocal about politics—more articulate and critical in the face of anti-intellectual political trends—others might feel that literature has insulated them from engagement with the American political climate. What professional guidance would you offer writers who currently shirk from political discourse?

SA: I think "discourse" is too often misidentified, misplaced, and misdirected in the digital age. And that's doubly so when the intensity of domestic politics activates everything that's wrong with social media and our use of it—which is a lot. So I think that, in an odd way, this is a great time to be shy about discourse, as for the moment what's required, really, is action: calls to legislators; local organizing; large-scale, high-visibility protests; peaceful civil disobedience; statutory nullification, as warranted; investigative journalism; public exhortations for resolve and courage among one's political compatriots; short-, medium-, and long-term strategic planning; spontaneous volunteerism; even running for one of the local offices within which context so much critical public policy is set.

Activism is a pretty vast landscape, so everyone who stands upon it can eventually find at least one spot to plant a flag in and thereby contribute meaningfully to a cause. I'd probably go further and say that, because discourse in the digital age is really only impactful when one of two elements is present—either the parties are in a pre-existing trusting relationship or else they've voluntarily entered a dialogic space doggedly conducive to generative engagement—those who are shy about political discourse really needn't be. The key, on some level, is to avoid it altogether unless and until one or both of those conditions are present, and in my experience once those conditions are present most people are comfortable enough engaging in dialogue.

Outside those two surprisingly rare conditions, the real imperative of the moment is to fight smart, fight long, and fight hard—especially, perhaps even exclusively, for other people. I think that's often the shibboleth that confirms for us that what we're doing is humane: when we fight not for ourselves but for others vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.