Toxic Positivity and the Pseudo-Happy Troll
Toxic positivity is a means of derailing any discussion that draws attention to social problems for the purpose of creating change. It's a means of preventing people from airing legitimate grievances, squelching their voice, and preventing dissemination. While the toxic positivity process is psychological, its impact is to preserve and protect the status quo. It achieves this along a vector of fake or performative morality and pandering to collective desires or fears. Toxic positivity is privilege protecting privilege. The troll who invokes positivity does so to shut down a conversation. The troll appeals to other forms of expression that are less powerful and less effective. This is whitewashing.
Academic Poetry
Academic poetry is the poetry of dehumanization. I get that generalizing all academic poetry into this category is perhaps slough-minded, but I'm still not wrong about this. Contrasting slam poetry to academic poetry is telling here. The poems of slams are about individuals and their experiences. The poems of academics are about concepts and techniques. In other words, there's no place for a person in it. In fact, the more person you place in your poems, the more likely it is that academics will look down their noses at you.
So, why does this poetry last? It doesn't last at all. It simply ensures that the art of poetry won't last either at least academic poetry.
The Bard and the Minstrel
Properly, an academic's approach to poetry should be that of the archaic bards where you learn techniques, approaches, concepts, and how to write a song. The ancient bards would memorize their works, along with meters, and provide stimulation and generative concepts to create new works. In other words, the ancient bards wrote for artists.
Minstrels, on the other hand, were skilled performers who recited, sometimes wrote and performed for the public. They were artists whose primary target audience was the masses. They entertained the public through song and story. They need bards a lot more than bards need them.
Academic poetry should be more bardic in nature and less dehumanized. Unless the performance of dehumanization is part of the poetics (and in the case of academics, it's just a style-pressure away from the common man which is absolutely classist).
The Reality of the Rulers
In order to be academic, you must be sufficiently boring so as not to be entertaining. However, I won't engage with anything that isn't enjoyable and you shouldn't either. So, very dry, dehumanized texts ought to have some sense that they are performing dehumanization and academic poetry does not. Instead, the environment evinces the image of a bundle of sticks fastened tightly together, placing poetry on a pedestal above human experience and emotion. The function, of course, is to put the academic poet on the pedestal. But poetry is harmed by the effort.
Academic poetry is negatively defined and hence, it is just an inversion of "the poetry of the masses" or "poetry for personal consumption and entertainment".
Establishing yourself as exclusionary on this basis is classism. It doesn't matter how many bones you throw the poor or marginalized, it operates on a vector of elitism and the psychology of what is excluded makes it likely to condition sociopathy. Due to how it operates, it can only break an individual down, destroy what was there before, and rebuild it in a new image.
Academic poetry or the "academizing of poetry" makes it exclusive and exclusionary, robs poetry of a vital source of emotional energy, and makes it nearly impossible to relate to unless you have some sense of how to read the text.
The Avant-Garde
Interestingly, avant-garde artists are considered the progenitors of the new poetics. The term is drawn from the military. It's inverted. In most cases, the soldiers that were organizing the battle would be in the rear guard. The frontline assembly died first. Hence why the metaphor is inverted. The frontline assembly or avant guard were among the most disposable in an army.
The job of the avant guard poet is not to negate everything that came before, but rather to subsume it, warts and all, so that it's in a strong position to push the envelope one step further.
Ultimately, a negatively-defined poetics can only limit poetry, while an undefined poetics, offers (at the very least) the possibility that it still can move forward. Negative definitions prevent this in 100% of cases.
Negatively Defined Poetry is the Play of Suicide
So, in order to move poetry into a space that is not limiting, we must divest ourselves of the concept of "academic" poetry.
The academic study of poetry or poetical responses to literature can all survive this philosophy. Negatively-defined approaches to poetry cannot.
We must divest ourselves of classist approaches to poetry before we can create anything unique or novel.
At present, academics have fostered a poetry that can do nothing more than strategize its own death.
When something is negatively defined, it hides its own definition and performs against itself. All performances of negatively defined poetry can be interpreted as suicide attempts.
So, the person is still there, screaming for release from an artificial prison. We just pretend otherwise.
Possession, Rejection, Beholding
James Joyce said that there are three ways to relate to an art object. The second, rejection, is the didactic or academic approach. Rejection exists to demarcate a boundary. It is by nature propertarian because it sets forth an exclusion zone.
The only possible function for rejection as a literary artform is satire.
Once they killed off satire, they killed off academic writing.
There is no academic creative writing beyond satire.
Ultimately, the performance of negatively-defined poetry culminates with its own suicide. The goal of satire is to change the audience so that the satire no longer has merit. The goal of satire is to kill off the very pressure that caused it to come into being.
In other words, the satire is there whether you like it or not.
