Reconsidering Abramson's Essay, "The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now"

If "we're too jaded" for "the Romantics' watchword, emotion," why is "a denial of our collective emotional reality [...], our national culture considered, a cruelty?"

If objects "have been troublingly commodified and packaged pre-consumption," how would the Sophists, who 'sold but two goods: language and persuasion," be a model worth revisiting? That is, aren't language and persuasion two (autonomous) aspects of advertising, which commodify and package objects pre-consumption?

Language, persuasion... attention? Their respective autonomies?  The "object-in-itself" and now the "subject-in-itself"? What? Maybe if I took "a simple course in ethics" I would understand, but as of now I don't.

Back to attention: "So what if a contemporary avant-garde were to emerge, sensitive to the culture of the day, that had precisely that historic capacity? To consume the entirety of our attention in one go?"

Is there a difference between returning art to the praxis of life, and returning life to the praxis of art? Which is more mimetic? And is mimesis even the goal anymore? The ends, the means?

If avant-gardism is, in part, a response to what came before, does the avant-garde at all resemble what came before the before, making aesthetic movements Oedipal and somewhat cyclical? Maybe, maybe not?

How is Abramson's "historical sense?" I don't know.

I (tentatively) propose a not-so-novel idea, and that is a poetics that is historically contemporaneous/simultaneous a la Eternalism; and mimetic of a culture (as a whole) as well as any one moment in time, which requires both the Eliotian "historical sense" and a contemporary sense. Though, not at all/necessarily universalism, but being able/learning to juggle multiple universes and their respective aesthetics, in spite of the cognitive dissonance that may result; which shouldn't be confused with/reduced to mere allusion or postmodern pastiche (intertextuality), but regarded as that which supersedes them, et-blah-cetera.

Abramson is not the first (nor will he be the last) to condemn the technocracy in which we all live, and to lament its effects on the arts/poetry; and to long for a poetics which "might, at once, retrieve the goodwill of a generation lost in the packets of digital information." It simply won't do to be an antagonistic/nostalgic/romantic purist, or to be blindly complicit and overly self-indulgent with no "historical sense." 'Cause, baby, technology ain't goin' nowhere. One can only hope to aspire to a kind of antago-complicit self-awareness which oscillates along the slippery continuum, making art/poetry inquisitively engaging, if one desires the return of art to the praxis of life (and/or mimesis [the same?]).

Edit (vis-a-vis Robbins): [Forthcoming.]