Hi and Welcome to Episode 13 of Beautiful Losers.

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For this very special episode we were in conversation with the poet Roger Reeves. Listeners of the show will remember Reeves from Episode 8, where we spent the majority of the episode examining his poem “Domestic Violence.”

Reeves joined us to discuss poetry, protests, and his recent essay in The Yale Review, “The Uses of Memory.” We were overjoyed to converse with such a dynamic interlocutor and we look forward to continuing the conversation. Amidst all the chaos and confusion that the nation has been going through, Reeves thoughtful examination of a concept like ecstasy provides a useful and necessary heuristic for balancing the difficult and sometimes contradictory forces at work in contemporary culture. After we said goodbye to Reeves, we continued the conversation and tried to tie Reeves’ work within the frame of the questions that our show has been focused on from the outset: what is the basis and value for critical thought? How can one establish a strong appeal to norms or morals without relying on a metaphysics of presence? These questions will continue to animate our discussions and we look forward to the next opportunity we’ll have to think along side Roger Reeves.

Below is the written version of the intro we put together for Roger. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did while having it:

Our subject today is poetry. What is it. Where is it. Why must it. Ezra Pound said of his epic The Cantos - that the epic is poem containing history; of his work as a whole, in Canto 116, he wrote “the beauty is not the madness / tho my errors and wrecks lie about me / I cannot make it cohere.” T.S. Eliot said of the the lyric poem that it is neither “didactic nor narrative, nor animating any other social purpose” — it is the poet’s expression of the pursuit of pure verse, “an obscure impulse.” Theodore Adorno, contrary to Eliot, says “Today, when individual expression, which is the precondition for the conception of lyric poetry, seems shaken to its very core in the crisis of the individual, the collective undercurrent in the lyric surfaces in the most diverse places: first merely as the ferment of individual expression and then perhaps also as an anticipation of a situation that transcends mere individuality in a positive way.” Adorno argues that the lyric expresses the universal experience of no universality, and this negative expression may become the basis of a radical version of sociality.

Our guest, Roger Reeves, is a poet. He has written epics and lyrics. We asked Roger what we ask all of our guests: what are you reading and what are you thinking about? The epic of Gilgamesh. the jazz of Ornette Coleman. The essays of James Baldwin. The lectures of Audre Lorde. Perhaps the answer to our questions of poetry may be found 4700 year span of human culture.

In his essay, The Uses of Memory, Roger develops and political aesthetic theory of ecstasy, an essay that among its many virtues also redeems Eliot: “Ecstasy as inhabiting as beyond that liberates from future and past through non-attachment. Ecstasy as that which can detach us from the teleological.” Later he adds… “Ecstasy is a pinching, a theft of beyond-pleasure while being surveilled, prodded, and poked, and persecuted.” Reeves writes of ecstasy because like all great poets and thinkers, he is searching for another pattern: “we are constantly embarking upon a process that is amorphous, vanishing, renewing, and transfiguring itself into another pattern, even as we seek to make one.”

And with that said we welcome Roger Reeves to Beautiful Losers…

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