Going back to Johannes's recent post on the presentation of the Other (more specifically, relating to the marketing behind Ilya Kaminsky's first book, Dancing in Odessa), I have been struck by the obsession some American poets have for the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin has been creeping into Jessica's comment field and in a recent post by Jon. Michael Dumanis has written a poem in the voice of Benjamin's in his last day (I have a copy of it somewhere) and Joshua Clover has an entire book inspired by Benjamin (Totality for Kids), going as far as paying homage to Benjamin in his author photo.

While Jessica and Jon can be forgiven for actually discussion WB's work as a literary critic and his discourse on flânerie, I am a little bit more disturbed by the relative lack of references to his work in Michael's poem and in Clover's book, that is, beyond Passagenwerk. Sure, the comic absurd tone of Michael's poem points at Bertold Brecht's influence on Benjamin, but that tone is already present in Michael's other, non-Benjamin, poems.

There is an odd emphasis on Benjamin's biography, rather than his work, such as his attempt to combine the historical materialist aspect of Marxism with the transcendentalism of his Jewish upbringing or his significant volume Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (I've just realized that I've been citing Benjamin's work in their German titles; this is not out of sheer snobbism, but rather because I've read those works in French and don't know the American translations). As I said, Michael's poem recounts how Benjamin fled the Nazi, trying to cross the border to Spain, thought that he and his friends had been denied access, lost his final manuscript (possibly the final draft to Passagenwerk) and committed suicide. Similarly, Clover pays homage to Benjamin's time in Paris, painting the city with stock images of the bucolic era of l'entre-guerre, although it seems at times that Clover is describing the Paris of the Belle Epoque. Cafés, belles filles, baguettes, you get the picture.

Benjamin's death was certainly absurd, but by focusing so much on his biography, don't we run the risk of eclipsing his work? We certainly find this problem in poets such as Plath, Berryman, Celan, Keats, Shelley and others. When are we going to find poems written in the voice of Louis Althusser, Bernard-Henri Lévy or George Canguilhem, people whose lives were not tragic or horrible?

More importantly, what purpose does this romanticization of the tragic Other serve? In a way, Benjamin "legitimizes" Michael's work in general by providing him a lineage and a philosophical background. But, beyond that, the American persona poem tends, as we have seen, to be in a tragic voice, and tends to take place in an idealized foreign place (and usually in the past). What does this nostalgia point at?

As for the intriguing number of persona poems in American poetry, I'll let Eric explore the topic.