The Last Non-Performative Reader

Stop All the Clocks - Noah Kumin; Arcade Press; 240pp; 2025

This week’s post, our ninth following our review of Kevin Honold’s Molly, features Noah Kumin’s Stop All the Clocks, released this year by Arcade Publishing. Started in the late 1980s by Richard and Jeannette Seaver, Arcade has published “literary giants such as Samuel Beckett, Leo Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, and E. M. Cioran alongside newer voices such as Andreï Makine and Ismail Kadare.” Since 2010, Arcade has been an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, an independent house with a reputation for publishing conspiratorial, controversial, and cancelled books. You can read a little more about Arcade/Skyhorse in this John Pistelli profile of one of their leading lights.

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No one will bat an eye if you admit to not knowing anything about contemporary poetry. For the vast majority of Americans, poetry is simply not part of their regular cultural intake: the NEA says about 12% of Americans read poetry daily (way more than I would have guessed), and we can reasonably assume that the number who read poetry published in the last thirty years is significantly lower than that. No, the more embarrassing confession would be to admit, as I will now, that I believe my ignorance says more about poetry than it does about me. In other words, I assume poetry is washed. Done. Spent as a cultural force.

Because if it wasn’t, well, wouldn’t we be hearing about it way more?

Unsurprisingly, the truth is more complicated. Near the end of Context Collapse, his book-length essay on the history of poetry (which is itself somewhat preciously composed in iambic pentameter), the critic Ryan Ruby reviews two remarkable facts: 1) at least a thousand collections of serious poetry are published in the US every year, and 2) submitters to literary magazines outnumber their subscribers by a factor of ten. From this he draws the conclusion that not only do many people still find poetry significant, but most of those people are writing poetry without reading it. As a result, poetry has come to seem culturally irrelevant at the height of its popularity.

In any other industry, this would be considered a crisis of overproduction. The incentives to produce poetry have seemingly outstripped the demand for it—as if everyone wanted to own a car factory, but nobody wanted a car. Since things have been trending this way for roughly two decades, the lopsided poetry market might have rung a tocsin for the situation that now defines literary writing more broadly: a culture in which literary commodities have become the most rarefied kind of luxury item, desired more for the signal they send than for the uses they are put to, instances of pure exchange-value.

I thought of this while reading Noah Kumin’s Stop All the Clocks, if only because its protagonist, Mona Veigh, feels like a carefully-crafted rebuttal to the state of contemporary literary culture: although she’s been obsessed with canonical Western poetry since childhood, she has never felt the need to write it. Instead, as a computer programmer, she’s channeled her obsession into the creation of a large language model (LLM) named Hildegard, which she hopes will help her discover the universal laws of poetic form. When the novel begins, Mona has sold Hildegard to a mysterious tech billionaire named Avram Parr, whose untimely death pulls her into a vast conspiracy.

Though the plot unfurls at the brisk pace of a thriller, it was Mona’s single-minded fascination that gripped me. She approaches poetry with the devotion of an acolyte, reading and reciting poems by figures like Browning, Millay, Swinburne, and Auden as if they were sacred texts. Her veneration is so pure as to be solipsistic, that is, the complete opposite of performative.

This obsession is underwritten by a conviction that poetry truly possesses metaphysical power:

What she sought in the realm of the word was an ineluctable, divine sensation—not a mode of self-expression. It was enough for Mona that others had gone into the depths and brought something back. She felt no imperative to mix halcyon meter, rhyme, and timbre with mundane lived experience.

It’s an understanding of poetry not so much eccentric as esoteric. Mona sees verse as a means, perhaps the means, of accessing the divine, of glimpsing a world beyond this one. The unreconstructed “Western Canon” serves as her Tanakh or I Ching, which predictably spoils most more recent poetry for her, something that becomes clear when her friend Del introduces her to a contemporary poem on “the relation of power structures to language.” The notion repels Mona, who insists that “language is the one means we can remain free, despite the dull murderousness of the past which has formed us... [and therefore] it was absurd to think language would be weighed down by something as inconsequential as material reality.”

No doubt Kumin is aware that Mona’s views are, shall we say, untimely (not least because he seems to hold some of them himself). Today’s working poets, most of them university professors, are likely to take a more metaphysically modest approach. For example, in his essay “The Hatred of Poetry,” Ben Lerner argues that it is precisely this desire to see capital-p Poetry as transcendent that often results in widespread resentment for the form: where “Poetry” in the abstract is lauded as a gateway to the divine, particular poems and poets are castigated for their failure to live up to that very high standard. Lerner, secular liberal that he is, believes such failure to be simply a part of the practice; there is no metaphysical Ideal that could ever be reached.

This is poetry skeptical of ideals, absolutes, and universals. For just this reason, Lerner celebrates Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the prime example of a contemporary poem expressly committed to interrogating language’s relation to power structures, specifically “how race determines when and how we have access” to certain kinds of language (like the universal “you” or “we”). Contra Mona, Lerner and Rankine see language as inherently material, accepting that poetry has a relationship to power because, well, in our earthly realm, everything has a relationship to power. Their approach complements the ubiquitous emphasis on “craft” in MFA workshops, where the slow process of toiling with language has taken precedence over spontaneous overflows of any kind.

But these are the views of professionals, the elites and experts in their ivory towers. Mona’s take, however singular it may be, has more in common with the views of people outside the academy—say, the majority out of that 12% who still read poetry daily. While I doubt the average poetry enjoyer would follow her so far in suspecting that poetic form is “somehow engrained in the fabric of the universe” (which Mona does recognize is “uncomfortably similar to the sort of hunch typically held by paranoid schizophrenics”), evidence suggests that people want do want poetry to be visionary, or at least capable of touching some kind of higher truth.¹ That the higher truths people seem to want to access can be reduced to warmed-over therapeutic clichés is, I think, besides the point. People want poetry to be oracular. And they probably don’t care what god they’re calling on, whether it’s Apollo or Dionysus. They just want someone to pick up the phone.

If Mona thinks poetry comes from the gods, and the profs are convinced its a material structure upholding power, the people are still convinced it comes from one place: the self. Just as that New Yorker article suggests that “performative reading” emerges from a desire to be seen as an authentic, cultivated individual, poetry is now referenced off-hand as a short-cut for expressing authentic selfhood. It comes from the heart (or, if not from the heart, from the soft animal of your body, according to maybe the most popular poem of the internet era). This means that, despite the intervention of innumerable avant-gardes of the twentieth century, the dumbest version of the Romantics reigns supreme: we still believe that poetry is what happens when a special kind of person draws from the deep vatic well of the self.

Maybe this explains why people want to be a poet more than they want to read or write poetry: it’s the ultimate confirmation that you are that indispensable, one whose every thought and word should be studied for decades to come. Precisely for this reason, poetry has remained a vocation—a calling! a life-task!—against all odds, because it shows others that you are not earthly-minded, it performs the hidden drama of the inner life. Thus, anyone can write a novel, just like anyone can make a film, paint, draw, and dance. Anyone can write poetry, too. But how many people can really be a poet?

Against all social incentives to advertise her taste, Mona walks the path of lonely devotion. She reads, like Christ tells his disciples to pray, in secret. Her LLM is named for Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval nun who created a private language to speak with God. If she goes too far in any direction, it is that her total rejection of performativity—that innate desire to be recognized by others as authentic—results in an unexpected magnification of her own isolation. Hildegard is not the escape from subjectivity she dreamed it would be, and as she descends deeper into the intrigue around Avram Parr’s death, she comes to learn that an AI-created culture may end up being the most solipsistic of all.

Readers will have to decide for themselves if Mona offers a genuine escape from performative reading or a warning lest we all become anchorites—in touch with God and ourselves, if nobody else.

1. If we look at what poetry people actually buy, dutifully excluding the books for children, the big theme that emerges is transcendence: Dante, Khalil Gibran, Rumi, Mary Oliver.