Is it so wrong to want poetry to be counterproductive? To quite literally—to quote Auden—to make nothing happen? I’ve scoffed at those who see poetry as somehow revolutionary in the Marxist sense, at those who see poetry as a way out of capitalism or class or privilege or entitlement (there is not a way out of these things, only a reckoning with them). I see the academy as the greatest patron that poetry has ever had, and yet it requires me to teach an awful lot of composition classes. How did my love of poetry lead me to spending my days telling students about topic sentences and the differences between citation styles? Today we are told over and over that all poetry is political. But these voices don’t mean the word “political” the way that Nothingism does. Before the popularized slogan was “The personal is political,” the second wave feminist slogan was iterated as “The political is personal.” This tiny distinction is everything to a Nothingist. Funding for health care, voting rights, gun control, rent control, free college tuition—these are all political concerns that are immensely personal—how could they not be? But this is not the same as saying that everything is political. Isn’t the point of free tuition that everyone can make a personal choice as to whether or not college is right for them? Isn’t the point of fighting for reproductive rights that you can make personal choices without juridical intrusion? Is not the search for an ideal politics, a search for the politics that would free us to enjoy the personal? For the Nothingist, politics must have an outside in order for there to be such a thing as politics—the Nothingist says that if everything is politics, then nothing is politics. When I read, my body is expending the energy I generated by eating a meal; that does not make reading a form of eating. Nothingism votes, but a vote is not a poem. Nothingism demands that we be a part-time everything.
What Nothingism bemoans, of late—what I am bemoaning—is the end of reflection. The end of a process that culminates in a final product. Nothingism resists the endless “here’s where I am now” that properly belongs to intimate spaces, rather than public ones. Nothingism insists on intimacy as the opposite of “public”. When we complain of the constant campaign in our politics, wishing for a government that would govern with the best interest of all its citizens at heart, we are wishing for reflection. When we bemoan the endless hunger for non-fiction that seems to crowd out fiction, we are wishing for imagination. When we bemoan the “poetry” that has been prefixed with “insta,” we are bemoaning instancy itself—the brief snippets of language, offering repetitive iterations of shallow self-adoration that begin with the premise of radically empowered independence that in turn lead to a ferocious rejection of the painful realities of interdependence. We must retreat and return, but the retreat must be to a productive space. “Scrolling” has become a metaphor for how we read online, the “page” endlessly opening up onto the “bottomless trough”—but what of the forgotten scrolls, the rolled-up papyrii in Alexandria? The language of writing is endlessly re-purposed for the medium that devalues it, the value desperate not for articles or poems or interviews, but “content.” Contemplation is a name I offer for poetry. Privacy is a name I offer for poetry. Nothingism is a name I offer for poetry.
—Jason Schneiderman, from “Nothingism: a Poetry Manifesto”
