These posts are about the fin de siècle "grunge" movement in American poetry and its lasting ramifications for poetry in the new millennium. The confluence of global prosperity, unchallenged American power, technological innovation, and aesthetic experimentation made the 1990s a very fertile period for poetry, the likes of which hadn't been experienced since the heyday of modernism between the world wars. The commercial and artistic triumph of Kurt Cobain was such that writers today are still intimidated by the awesome overhang of his influence and legacy. Carles writes approvingly that "there are certain artists who are apparently ’shattering genres’ and ‘changing the way that young people think about the concept of COOL.’" But when the genres we have known are smashed into irreconcilable pieces -- perhaps like a pumpkin heaved to the ground in a fit of impotent, post-bacchanal rage -- what remains of the possibilities of poetry? Can a new poetry emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the temple that the grunge poets burned to the ground with their fiery, uncompromising furor?
Ever the contrarian, Carles tries to flout Cobain's undeniable centrality to the postmodern poetic tradition, asserting that he was neither "good" nor "influential," but only reveals that his influence is actually beyond good and evil, and transcends mere poetic inspiration, reaching to the very possibility of writing itself. Carles is forced to admit "I think I’m just kinda bitter and jealous that I am not perceived as being as revolutionary as certain bros." What can it mean to be revolutionary after Cobain, whose anarchy of forms dispersed the the very tenets of style and expression that one could have mounted a revolution against? He left no targets standing. There can be no siege when the city has been so thoroughly razed.
Cobain raised the bar for poetic expression to an astoundingly high level and left an oasis of silence in his tragic wake. Realizing this, Carles understands that it is imperative that he destroy the idols of the previous generation and create a space in which poetic expression can rouse itself from its laconic stupefaction.
Was Cobain's death inevitable? Was it rendered cruelly yet logically necessary by the inexorable demands of poetry itself? Did he die so that poetry could live? Carles poses these questions, which are themselves poems, and attempts to answer them in a set of theses consciously modeled after those that Marx, Carles' spiritual and intellectual progenitor, composed for his attack on Feuerbach. The gist of these theses is that Cobain may not have thrived in the cultural climate his own death served to foster.
Then, as if to present evidence for this, he examines the sad case of William Corgan, Cobain's chief but distant rival in the "grunge" movement. Unmoored by the death of his literary antagonist, Corgan drifted into a life of decadence and self-loathing, exemplified by his drastically diminished output and his becoming subsumed in a demimonde of second-rate cable-television award shows and internet attention whores. His poetic muse flown, Corgan seems content to chase chimeras of sincere emotion. As Carles remarks dryly, commenting on a paparazzi photograph of Corgan and his current consort, "Think they look like they are ‘actually in <3', though. right?" But what is love in the absence of poetry? The poet without his muse is a mere shadow of his former self, a Samson shorn of his locks.
Carles' sudden interest in the past generation of poets evokes a question that has apparently begun to haunt him: Is poetry dead? The voices of the giants have grown quiet, and the best among the new generation are too timid to speak in lines longer than 140 characters. Just as Lukacs declared the end of the possibility to write epic poetry with the onset of capitalism, perhaps now, as capitalism dies, Carles is ready to proclaim the end of lyric poetry (sometimes figured as the death of rock and roll) and outline the genres that will come to fulfill the new functions that literature must fulfill in an age without illusions.
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