My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

339 Pages·2013·2.44 MB·English

by  Tiffany

My
Silver
Planet
Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Douglas Mao, Series Editor
My Silver Planet
A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
Daniel Tiffany
This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, University of Southern
California.
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tiffany, Daniel.
My silver planet : a secret history of poetry and kitsch / Daniel Tiffany.
pages cm.— (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-42141145-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN-13: 978-1-
4214-1146-0 (electronic)—ISBN-10: 1-4214-1145-8 (hardcover : acid-free
paper)—ISBN-10: 1-4214-1146-6 (electronic)
1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Kitsch—In literature. 3. Banality
(Philosophy) in literature. I. Title.
PN1126.T55 2013
809.1—dc23 2013010184
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
1 Arresting Poetry: Kitsch, Totality, Expression
Unpopular Pop
Missing Verses
Bogus
Twice Made
Mass Ornament
2 Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
Dreams, Mottos, Gossip
Chatter and Virtuosity
Phraseology
Morbid Animation
3 Miscreant: Dialectics and the Persistence of the Commonplace
Doppelgänger
Synthetic Vernaculars
Poetry vs. Literature
Commonplace
Lyric Fatality
Thieves’ Latin
4 The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature
Balladry and the Burden of Popular Culture
Exploded Beings and After-Poets
Live Burial
5 Illiterature
Refrain
Lullaby Logic
The Cult of Simplicity
Pets, Trifles, Toys
Gothic Verse and Melodrama
Silver Proxy
6 Queer Idylls: Imposture, Inversion, Unknowing
Topologies of Privacy
Reliques
Poetaster
Kitsch, Camp, and Homo-fascism
1800 Words
Poison
7 Kitsching the Cantos: Totality, Fascism, and les Paradis Artificiels
Vortex and Cream Puff
Contraband
The Kitsch of Apocalypse
Epic, Rhapsody, Seizure
Bad Infinity
Ethnofascist Souvenirs
8 Junk: A Shopper’s Guide to Poetic Language (and the New York School)
Thermofax: Warhol, Malanga, and the Art of Suicide
Dada Kitsch
After After-Poets: Collaboration and Collective Writing
Coterie and Melodrama
The Metaphysics of Kitsch
9 Inventing Clichés: The Lost Legacy of Baudelaire’s Muddy Halo
Plastic Poetry
Liar, Liar
Afterword
In the Poisonous Candy Factory
Counterfeit Capital
Notes
Index
My
Silver
Planet
1 Arresting Poetry
Kitsch, Totality, Expression

Unpopular Pop
Once upon a time, long before it had been reduced to a synonym for
mediocrity in the
arts, the term “kitsch” functioned as a lightning rod in debates about mass
culture
and the fate of modernism confronting the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s
and
1930s. For a word now applied quite casually to trivial and spurious things,
“kitsch”
has a surprising history of provoking alarm and extreme reactions: Hermann
Broch called
kitsch “the element of evil in the value system of art.”1 Theodor Adorno refers to
kitsch as “poison” and, drawing upon the German etymology of the term, as
“artistic trash.”2 Clement Greenberg later refers to the “looting” and “traps”
associated with kitsch, to its criminal aspect.3 In these same essays, the “evil” of
kitsch acquires an array of sinister qualities: it is said to be at once parasitic,
mechanical, and pornographic; a “decorative cult”
and a “parody of catharsis.”4 These attributions—always linked to a presumption
of complicit, indulgent pleasure—acquire specific and sometimes contradictory
historical contours in Broch’s and Greenberg’s