Since I've written this, Sen. Clinton (like Sen. McCain) has stepped up the criticism of Obama as an 'empty suit,' now charging that Obama has plagiarized his 'change you can xerox.' Back on 1/6/08 when it still wasn't clear that the democratic primaries would become the two person race, I found myself getting swept up in Clinton's rhetoric (whether she plagiarized Cuomo or not). So I thought I'd put it up here now...

Hillary Clinton's Defense Of Poetry

Although I'm still upset with the news media reducing the Democratic Primaries to a Hilary Clinton/Barack Obama race, I was moved by Hillary Clinton 's thought-provoking quote,"You campaign in poetry (but) you govern in prose" in the 1/6/08 Debate. On further investigation, I found out she's quoting former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. This sound-bite quote, like many good lines of poetry or prose (advertising slogans or fortune cookies), is worth pausing over even if you are not one who, like me, has published books and has taught the writing of, both poetry and prose. I thus have a 'professional' vested interest in hearing how other people talk about the distinction between these two literary genres, just as I have a stake on who becomes our next President and try to determine how they may govern. One concern may seem more "merely topical" than the other while the other may seem of only 'specialized relevance,' but I'm fascinated by how the two realms (the political and the literary or linguistic) come together in this quote.

Most commentators take Senator Clinton's quote as a not-so-veiled barb at Senator Obama, who has been galvanizing a groundswell of younger voters (& Oprah fans among others) with his silver-tongued messages of change while Hillary tends to speak in ways that are, relatively speaking, more prosaic. Looking at the quote in context, the primary (or real) distinction Hillary is trying to make is between doing and talking: "Elect a doer (me); not a mere talker (Obama)." Thus Hillary's recontextualization of Cuomo's
Metaphor leaps from one contrast to three progressively more abstract ones:
Hilary Obama
Doer Talker
Governor Campaigner
Prose Poetry

This invites us to ask questions like: Are these contrasts analogous? Is Obama really more 'poetic' than Hillary? Is Clinton more of a doer than Obama? Etc.

But it also invites us to ask questions like:
"What is 'doing?' Is it always better than 'talking' (at least when 'governing?')
And what is governing?

Let's look at these three abstract pairings in turn.
1. Doing Vs. Talking

In the same speech, Clinton says "elect a doer, not a talker." This helps anchor what she means in her more 'poetic' or seemingly abstract statement. If indeed it is true that the job description of most politicians (even at their best), includes 'talking as doing' more than 'doing as talking' (the latter of which may be more relevant to football, between the goalposts, sex, or war), Hillary's attempt to contrast these two words itself becomes more metaphoric than literal. Since talking (whether to constituents, lobbyists, or other elected officials) makes up most of what an elected official does, Senator Clinton doesn't really mean to contrast 'doing' and 'talking' as much as imply that one style of talking is better than the other, at least if one is concerned with 'governing.' Thus, this distinction in itself is not sufficient for her argument, and she needs to let the associations proliferate so we may better understand her attempted contrast. But her use of the "doer vs. talker" distinction unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly) paints her as more of an establishment candidate in the process—for what was Bush's "Shock & Awe" but a refusal to talk to his (our?) enemy, Sadam Hussein? Obama has insisted on wanting to talk, to negotiate, with Iran in a way Bush refuses. In politics, if this is not doing, what is (aside from war?). If campaigning involves persuasion, why should we assume that a man who can persuade millions to vote for him (and not just trying to stack "Super Delegates" in the back rooms) would not be able to persuade Iran, or other countries that may be hostile to U.S. interests, through talking? Wars are called 'campaigns' sometimes, and on closer investigation Hillary's second distinction collapses like her first does.

2. Campaigning Vs. Governing
If this talking-kind-of-doing is mere campaigning rather than truly governing, it must be noted that most of our elected officials are campaigning at least as much as they're governing (there are too many examples of such to even say it's a 'conflict of interest' in any particular case). The distinction between governing and campaigning itself has blurred. Even the most rigorous empirical investigation of incumbents up for re-election the second they take office cannot draw a clear dividing line between the two. Congressperson A may take more money from lobbyists, or push for legislation that supports her corporate campaign financers while Candidate B may spend more time trying to push for more populist legislation, in an attempt to win more voters next time around, even if he can't afford as many network TV advertisements (or has to get 10, 000 people to contribute $25 rather than 25 people to contribute $10,000). But, surely, Hillary didn't intend to bring up the issue of campaign finance reform in her attempt to draw a thick line separating these two activities.

What she apparently did mean---"Barack's a good campaigner, but I am a better governor" (though strictly speaking, her experience has been as a representative not a governor)—implies that one must be a bad, or at least less passionate, campaigner to be a good governor, and that we should we wary of a good, poetic, campaigner, if we want a good (prose) government. History, however, shows that one can rarely, if ever, judge the book (the governance) by looking at the cover (the campaign promises), for better and worse. More specifically, Hillary's (speechwriter's) attempt to apply Cuomo's quote to her current campaign for President reduces and distorts the context in which Cuomo uttered it.

Cuomo was using the word "you" to refer to himself as a representative politician. In Cuomo's original formulation (for all its reductiveness), there's more of a symbiotic relationship between these two functions. You have (one has) to do both, campaign and govern, and therefore you have to be adept at poetry and prose, to be a successful politician. If you've ever read, seen, or heard an interview with Cuomo it's clear he, too, was one of the most eloquent statesman (with a silver tongue) in recent American politics (when an interviewer playfully accused him of being volatile, he quickly responded, 'no, mercurial!) And perhaps he ultimately decided not to run for President because he felt he was too much of a free-talker, and that Hillary is right, that politics-as-usual in Contemporary America is wary of such eloquence (it's a little too loose of the tongue, gives away too many secrets, etc). Yet Cuomo did not intend to say the two were incompatible with each other, and certainly not that a prose style or sensibility was preferable to a poetic style or sensibility, and Obama is more restrained as a talker than Cuomo was (at least so far).

To be fair, Clinton did not actually say "Others (Barack, etc) campaign in poetry, but I campaign (I almost wrote complain) in prose." But this implication is as strong in her quote as is the implication that "He who campaigns in poetry will necessarily govern in poetry, and you can't govern in poetry (unless, like Jesus, your 'kingdom is not of this earth'), so vote for she who campaigns in prose!"

3. Poetry vs. Prose

But what's to prevent someone who campaigns in prose from governing in poetry? (if one sees 'governing in poetry' as having more negative, pejorative, implications, one could say that is exactly what George Bush did, as the direct prose meaning of campaign phrases like "No Child Left Behind" are, by his actions, now invested with an ambiguity often associated with poetry as much as with Orwellian doublespeak). Even if we think that no one should "govern in poetry" (except for unacknowledged legislators) that doesn't mean one can't "Campaign in Poetry" and yet govern in prose. A politician, almost by definition, must speak, must act, different ways with different people (and that's no more hypocritical than any one acting differently around one's mother than one's daughter), or in different situations. And if Obama wants 'change' as much as he says he does, who are we to assume he couldn't change roles (and many have vouched for his strength as a no-nonsense straight-talking negotiator in his behind-the-scenes dealings on congressional committees).

Of course, if we take Hillary at her (Cuomo) words, the mere fact that she is campaigning (and, like Obama, spending more time and energy applying for another job than doing her current job of representing her state in the senate) means that she, too, uses poetry as much as Obama, just a different kind. The stylistic differences between these two senator/candidates becomes less of a distinction between poetry and prose and more of a distinction of aesthetic taste as ethical or moral predisposition, within poetry (like the difference between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sappho and Homer, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, or Pound and Eliot vs. calypso singers).

One blog commentator quipped, "Hasn't she ever heard of prose-poetry!" or for that matter poetic prose (or verse plays like Shakespeare's?)

Spatially, in Clinton's metaphor, poetry is bigger than campaigning, and prose is bigger than governing; "poetry" and "prose" are places, like "New Hampshire" or "Washington D.C." "Dialogue" might be pre-genre, a third candidate, like Kucinich or Edwards, or state with a really late primary, an excluded middle or heartland that falls through the cracks of Clinton's stark dichotomy. Neither genre can really claim exclusive rights to it ( prose more often claims dialogue, which may be why Clinton sides with prose here; though if governance means listening, and Shakespeare's "Hal" learned to drink with any tinker in his language, the "poetry of rock and roll," or beer commercials, then getting of rid of campaign poetry the second one governs may isolate one from a range of listeners).

(insert drawing here…)
The circles could be different sizes, and poetry precedes prose as campaigning precedes governing. No overlapping spatial relationship is posited between poetry and prose, but neither is one precluded. Yet the relationship is also teleological, as both are means to an end. Hillary seems to be joining he long tradition of critiques of poetry as too seductive, charismatic, unstable, verbal, merely decorative, lacking substance---a lie that should be banished from the republic of governance. Like those who say poetry 'makes nothing happen' in a pejorative sense, like the 'do nothing congress." Yet the assumptions about poetry in Hillary's quote, though disturbingly dismissive in a way, are also rather flattering, as she is acknowledging a power. If Obama is "campaigning in poetry," it is a wider sense of poetry (including inspiring public speeches that 'reach across the aisles' and memoirs) than most poets practice.

You Campaign in Prose, But You Govern In Poetry?

Whether or not Obama is better at poetry than Clinton (or whether what Obama is better at that Clinton can, or should be called, poetry), Hillary presents herself as afraid of it, of its potential popularity and how that could get in the way of what she calls good governance (getting things done, but for whom?). Lurking beneath this is the relationship between "poetry" and "advertising slogans" (for instance the 'poetry' of advertisements for HMOs that certainly 'govern' in cold-hearted bottom-line prose), which, like it or not, is a big part of American life (and for all the talk of Health Care Reform neither of these candidates has mentioned that they would do away with all the waste that is paid for by such advertisements). But, when I look at the contemporary American literary (and, more broadly, cultural) landscape, I see more people more often campaigning in prose than campaigning in poetry.
It seems that inverting Clinton's (Cuomo's) statement is at least as accurate a characterization. Most of us are running for something (even if it's just a job as resident), and not too many job applications want poetry or even prose; they want sound-bites. If one wants a job as a talker/listener today, one usually has to campaign in writing. If one wants a job as a band leader (governor), one has to have composed songs written charts or have some vision of bringing people together through 'covers.' Even many writers who are primarily considered 'poets' more often campaign in prose—from writing cover letters, grant applications, manifestoes, teaching job vitas, giving (semi-)public reading/performances that are more monotone than Obama's, or even Clinton's, in many cases.
Space forbids me here from getting into what it could mean to "Govern in Poetry." Many poets don't wish to 'govern' as Hillary seems to define it. Some find governance in the way a poem unlocks language energies to name the unnamable, or gives pithy words to a shared mass feeling. Many presidential one-liners, which were part of their governance while in office ("we have nothing to fear but fear itself," "read my lips…no new taxes," or "ask not what your country can do for you…"---to say nothing of The Gettysburg Address), may very well have effected the reality and can mobilize people, for good or bad, as much as a Vice President's stroke can have real consequences in the stock market (as we live in a 'simulacrum economy,' like an imaginary garden with real toads in it, as Marianne Moore once wrote).

The funny thing is that poetry is much less popular these days than prose is (even if Obama is more popular than Clinton is), and much less popular today than it was in 1959, 1969, or even during the Roosevelt Era when The New Criticism in the Academy often held prose up to high poetic standards. Today, even in the academy, commercial standards (like 'electability') have elevated literary prose and ghettoized poetry (although part of the problem here comes from within the communities that speak for poetry, as the idea of the 'public poet' is more often scorned as 'lite poetry,' this fear mirrors Clinton's and can become a chicken-egg question).

The bottom-line in publishing, as in the news (infotainment) industry, has made poetry harder to find in mass culture. This is not because of the "Dumbing down of America"---if such "dumbing down" exists, it's more likely the result of lack of means of cultural access granted poetry in its little (not necessarily 'academic') corner. But I'm not so worried about any 'dumbing down' (which implies elitist standards) as I am excited by the fact that a popular/populist Presidential candidate was accused of being too poetic by another candidate who is increasingly out of touch with an increasing desire for cultural change on the part of American voters.

If Obama represents "poetry" for Hillary, he may also represent poetry for his legions of inspired supporters. As a culture, we could do far worse. We've done far worse than that. A president is a symbol, not quite like the King's 2 bodies, but a synecdote for his administatration and, beyond that, a wider cultural shift that 'we the people' will continue to campaign for, even if (and as) he governs. If Obama is a phenomenon, it's because people who have even more progressive ideas than him feel that he at least can listen to them (as they felt similarly about RFK, JFK and FDR, who would not have been as progressive had not people pushed him that way).

If A Politician Campaigns In Poetry, Do Poets Campaign In Politics?

Maybe it's not about poetry at all. Sure, Bill gives Monica a copy of Leaves of Grass while governing and campaigning, and "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" is both a campaign and governance slogan. After all, many poets today would not want to acknowledge that campaigning is a part of poetry, that the poet or poem is not simply 'governing' but also pleading a case as it were. Hillary was just using a metaphor, with no real significance to poetry as a discipline. Of course, other countries have had poet-presidents or governors (Martinique, Nicaragua, etc) and we have "the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld" while George W. Bush may have been great as a "corrupter of words," like Feste the Clown in Twelfth Night, a noble office that doesn't, strictly speaking, govern. But Bush is not governing in such poetry, rather using (whether consciously or not) it to mask the prose doings of Cheney/Haliburton and such. It's the discrepancy between the words (campaigning, the way the policy is sold to citizens, the 'spin') and the actions (governance, as the words are used, in secret, to make the policy) that's the issue. Hillary's distinction between poetry and prose isn't very promising for those who would like to minimalize (if not entirely do away with) such oft unacknowledged discrepancies.

Ah, not all poetry is 'political'---nor need it be (though it depends to some extent on the way it's read). But there is a 'politics' to poetry, and some people who labor in the field called poetry believe that the main thing that distinguishes poetry from prose is that the former is attuned to the sensitivity of language or words so much that it must question any easy claim of 'transparency' or reference, whether in writing or speech, on the grounds that language is slippery, or truth is a mobile army of metaphors, etc. In the absence of rhyme and rhythm and other traditional structures and devices that clearly mark a piece of writing as poetry, in the 20th century a notion of poetry as purer to the extent it is less like prose in terms of meaning, argument, has become naturalized. This has certain advantages, in unlocking language energies and getting people to think; I'm still a sucker for "this is not a pipe," for instance, as a pedagogical tool). But as a result of such distrust in any claim of language's transparency, these writers, at their most extreme, claim to eschew what they call 'normative discourse' altogether, as if that itself is an adequate political gesture. It has the effect (whether intended or not) of a reduction of their involvement in the public sphere, or what could be called "the commons," for a privatization of their linguistic resources. If, by chance, Dick Cheney would walk up to them and say "Are you for me or a terrorist?," they might say "Pie Glue!" or "of of all/ but boat 7" (and it's probably not an accident that in the Reagan/Bush/Bush years such writers have achieved more success in the USA, despite their claims of oppositional poetics).

Transparency may be impossible, but in a culture presided over by an administration that unconstitutionally rejects any attempt at 'transparency' or disclosure, a President and Vice President who actively encourages a discrepancy between what he does and what he says (which branch of government aren't you a member of, Mr. Cheney?), such a notion of poetry seems to shuck responsibility as well as dreams. Yet this is not the kind of poetry Barack is campaigning in. Barack is campaigning in prose as much as poetry, in talk as much as writing, in listening as much as talking (oh, call it 'phallogocentric if you must.). Whether or not he'll govern in prose and poetry equally no one can tell yet, but what we can tell is that Hillary, like Bush (or many poets who are afraid to put many things into their poetry, such as 'normative discourse,' telling as well as showing their private lives or their political views with attempted clarity), has been very secretive and distrustful of the voters on the campaign trail (despite her 'poetic' use of her first name to claim more intimacy with the voters). Thus the main issue is the LINE she draws (both spatially and temporally), between poetry and prose, campaigning and governing, talking and doing. We learn a lot about Clinton from her use of this quote.

But if we accept Clinton's terms at least temporarily, Barack is therefore governing as he's campaigning, does-through-talking, and Clinton's seeming put-down is a left-handed compliment, that acknowledges that Obama's vision is wider, more inclusive and dialogic and that he has the potential for being more of a uniter than a divider. This is all evident through a 'close reading' (with a little deconstruction thrown in) of her sampling appropriation of Cuomo' words.

I can't say that Clinton's quote is a 'gaff' or that she's lying (the way Bush is for instance), or even mud slinging. I believe she believes something when she is saying them. I take her words very seriously (some would say too seriously). But the fact that Obama didn't start this by saying, "Clinton is mere prose, whereas I am poetry and can govern better" (unlike too many poets, in their politics, I know), helps make the choice clear between these two candidates, and also helps illuminate the necessity for poetry and prose to be in dialogue with each other. If we only had two choices (which we don't), I know which 'side' I'd be on.