Poets Among Artists: Ryan Fitzpatrick on “The Young Hate Us” by Donato Mancini
On “The Young Hate Us” by Donato Mancini
Ryan Fitzpatrick
“The Young Hate Us” is the opening sequence of Donato Mancini’s Loitersack (2014), a book that presents itself as a commonplace book, operating, like the loiterer, through a series of motivated blockages – a practice of halted poetic attention to language as a social material. As a whole, Mancini’s book leverages a critical humour in its hard work through long, formally promiscuous interrogations that include an expansive list of questions, a transcription of laughter, and a short family drama.
As one set of potential roadblocks, “The Young Hate Us” composes a series of theoretical questions and propositions about the state of contemporary poetry in a moment where poetry can do anything and is read by no one. Poetry as the ultimate neo-liberal niche product. In a note, Mancini suggests that the poem works as “a distillation of the issues (that have been) in play for me when making text-based visual art and concrete poetry” (141). His social-materialist poetics lashes together the ideological deck chairs of a creative practice interested in questioning the ship’s ability to float.
Asking how poetry is embedded in capitalist structures, Mancini quotes and ponders, jokes and mumbles, acting as resistant bricoleur of his own hopelessly hopeful position – “Meaning is our business, business is slow” (3). “The Young Hate Us” collects, comments on, and détournes quotations from other sources, from Pierre Bourdieu to Eric Burdon, positioning poetry between mere commodity and resistant social practice. The poem is fuelled by a critical anger, a hopeful pessimism with a punk-rock spirit (however self-conscious about its Hot Topic wardrobe) – when he announces that “[p]oetry-lovers should not be pleased to recognize the poetic so easily,” he points to a concern that by turning poetry into a fine-luxury good, it “loses its criticality, loses its vital otherness” (15). For Mancini, poetry has a critical potential worth holding onto if only we can drop the romance.
While Mancini resists easy definitions of poetry, late in the sequence, he proposes a triangulation (a trialectic?) between contemporary art, music, and social critique that crashes structure, concept/practice, and the social against one another. Within this, poetry necessarily crosses all three. (Is “crossing” the right verb? Does poetry do the “crossing” or are these three concepts/practices crossing poetry? Does it matter?) Through this, he challenges some of the theoretical and practical tensions around poetry – politics/craft, concept/expression, etc. – with the insistence that a vital poetry probably does all these things, or at least that all these things intersect poetic production (even if antagonistically). The rest of the poem belies this set of tensions, of challenges, proposing in the end that we don’t need a return to “disciplinary boundary, or generic specificity, or media purity” (18) and instead need a turn to openly questioning how we communicate – a form of Marx’s call to critique everything existing.
