Cahiers de Corey

Finishing the Hat

2011-12-13T14:52:00.001-05:00

Sometime in March 2009 I began, on a lark, to write pages of prose in the half-hour or so of consciousness that remained to me before bed after a busy day of teaching and grading and parenting a toddler. Pages accumulated; characters appeared; a semblance of plot ground into action. Images clung to me when I wasn't writing that asked for articulation: a castle overlooking the Mediterranean, the shoulders hat and head of a man seen from behind, dragging a wheeled suitcase over cobblestones; a policeman rearing on his horse like a black knight on the streets of Paris.

I kept at it, sidewise, sneaking up on the project, trying not to take it too seriously, keeping faith with what I was doing as an extension rather than departure from poetry, as a project essentially rhetorical, a game with-in language. But story! Story, once it gets going, is irresistible.

Mapping out a sky
What you feel like, planning out a sky....

Sometimes I wrote on the computer; for a whole summer I wrote in notebooks, filling two of them with material, much of which I eventually discarded. Meantime my life in poetry marched on. Severance Songs came out. I did readings here and there; I devoted my summer to Robert Duncan and only belatedly, sometime in late September, turned myself full time toward this project. Now that my semester's sabbatical is almost over, I am preparing to teach again, with an orientation toward poetry. But I have entered an undiscovered country.

On November 30, 2011 I finished my novel, much to my own surprise; I had thought I would need every moment right up until I began teaching again in January. Finished the draft, I should say; I am now revising, reordering, the many discrete pages and parts that magnetically attract each other and form the shape of an organism that the genre novel is loose enough to hold together.What I am wishing for most at this moment is the right sort of first reader. Someone who will understand that I came at this project as a poet and remain a poet. Someone who will challenge me, in fact, to bring out what is most poetic about the novel, and not to advise me how to smooth away its rough edges and make it more conventional, as I fear most readers would not be able to help doing at this stage. Undiscovered country.

Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see—
It's the only way to see.

But it probably falls to me to be that reader, in the spirit in which I began this project: to please myself. With the insane faith that what moves and entertains me will move and entertain others.

They have never understood,
And no reason that they should.

A last note: December 21, 2011 shall be the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death. This novel, then, constitutes, like so much of my writing, a milestone in the neverending work of mourning that began on that day, in 1991, when I was twenty-one years old.

Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...

It's only a hat. A purely conjectural garment made of words, not even so much as an image. A hat for my mother. Let her not go bare-headed beneath the sun of death.

Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat

A wild sort of hope for the page and for art and my M. The letter of the law, that tells it again. My story.

A Prose

2011-11-15T11:04:00.001-05:00

Last gasp, first gaps. Conditioned by my sense of an ending.

Hands outstretched in the darkness, finding no one. Lily Briscoe wept.

A mother is the original objective correlative. "An especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead." "The Mona Lisa of literature." The suprematist black square of literature. The useful urinal of literature. The video installation of book trailers. One and three chairs. One and three Hamlets, "like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art."

"as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series."

"because it is in excess of the facts as they appear"

"his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it"

He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone.

"he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action"

Too much of water hast thou.

"it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant"

Well, my lord.

"it is less than madness and more than feigned"

Ay, my lord.

"the buffoonery of an emotion"

Ply his music.

"under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible"

His purse is empty already; all's golden words are spent. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

Which the Earl of Oxford understood.

Most likely one proceeds without plan, in pieces, looking forward to the moment of abandonment.

that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life

2011-10-21T11:45:00.000-04:00

How does a poet turn into a novelist? A metamorphosis at least as mysterious as the transformation from caterpillar into butterfly, but reversed: the winged and glittery feeder on nectar goes into a long freeze, emerging from the chrysalis with many feet to plant firmly on leaves, bark, the earth.

The poet makes himself flexible, ductile, a vehicle for an accident, collision of words and things, which crash into each other without replacing each other; his words are not mimetic, do not represent, they are impact. The novelist creates for himself a secret life that he is helplessly impelled to disclose: when the disclosure is complete the secret world is destroyed, and he must make another.

In Zuccotti Park they are being poets as this article suggests, putting their bodies on the line, presenting an indigestible message to the world. The world can only understand the message if it transforms itself utterly. From leaves to nectar.

What would you do today if you knew that today would never end?

So who gives a shit? Well he gave a shit and she gave a shit and we gave a shit and they gave at the office. But they didn't give a shit, couldn't give a shit, about it. You couldn't give two shits, who shits on a shingle shits a brick, three shits. They're shitting themselves. Three shitheads walk into a bar, the bartender says, I don't give to shits. His shit don't stink, her shit don't stink, your shit don't stink, theirs stinks. Oh, shit. Gotta get my shit together, soon as I get my shit out of luck, soon as I get up shit's cree. What's a paddle for? What's a body no one speaks for? "It looks like a shit took a shit." A fly arrived, took one look at my spotless floors, said, Shit.

Recitative: from opera and bel canto, "a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech." Lower limit music, moves the plot along. "What's the good of a book without pictures or conversations?" A novelist can't do without recitative, a poet can. But a novelist can put a frame around recitative, ironize and insulate it, say, This is rhetoric, a continuous tissue of rhetoric in which many folds pretend at representation. These characters, narrators, settings, scenes, form one continuous substance. Only artful draping (Project Runway) creates the illusion of discrete entities. Poetry: discrete entities, discrete series, soul of discretion.

Just to say it. Just to say it and to be seen saying it. Not to be heard, let alone listened to. Too much. Too much to hope for it. But to say and be seen saying. To stand on a say-box or in a say-corner, to say before others' eyes. To say, why not, before one's own eyes. I say it and I see myself saying it and then I've never said it, I never will say it, I have said it. I am saying and seeing and being seen. The said.

Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Chicago, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Washington D.C., Occupy Topeka, Occupy Berlin, Occupy Paris, Occupy London, Occupy Brussels, Occupy Beijing, Occupy Moscow, Occupy Singapore, Occupy Tokyo, Occupy Melbourne, Occupy Delhi, don't occupy Iraq, don't occupy Afghanistan, leave Jerusalem the fuck alone. Occupation, when peaceful a close neighbor to vocation, something to do, answering the call. When we hear an aria we don't answer, we applaud, we weep.

This is the blissful moment. Not Qaddafi, not dead tyrants dragged through the streets, but a new birth of love. The pen crawls across the page and the reader creepeth with it.

Pure power of presentation, the it is (il y a, es gibt), of, in language. Pure communicativity of Liberty Park. What are your demands? It's the wrong question. A poem is an operation, maneuver, arrangement, something to be moved through. Objectivity--content--distracts from and inhibits the readers's focus on the experience of movement as such. Potential energy, a perched stone.

Occupy your own body, Cathy Wagner says. Try that one on for size. Debt as negative space. You are too big to fail.

You are beautiful protesters. Blue morpho that changes, that drinks, that flies, what do you want?

What you want is what you are.

I am with you.

Berlin Diary

2011-10-16T14:39:00.002-04:00

Thursday, September29, 2011

Berlin. Fog of sleep deprivation coloring an otherwiseperfect blue autumn day a sort of miasmic yellow in my mind. Bus ride, takingin the printed shirt, ice-cool glasses and goatee of a young man who would notbe out of place in Bucktown or Brooklyn or anywhere: a hipster is a hipster isa hipster. But this hipster appears to be traveling with his late middle-agedparents, her with hair dyed purple-black, him gently balding, in glasses thatdon’t challenge his son’s. Mesmerized by the U-bahn’s sinuousness, the way the unseparatedcars wriggle together and apart and up and down as they pursue the tunnels.Remembering that that was the first thing they got back online, postwar, theU-bahn, when everything else was still smashed to shit. ’47?

Winterfedltplatz.

Two blocks from the Nollendorfplatz U-station toWinterfeldtplatz, where I find the “work flat” of my friend Peter where I willbe staying for the next two weeks. It is a lair,such as I have scarcely dreamed of. In the room where I type this a largewindow swings open like a door to admit the mild morning air and view of asquared-in courtyard, typical of the city I’m told, cool and white, shaded withgreenery, governed by the rectilinear forms that I can already tell will formmy chief impression of the city. And a blue sky lids it.

But the apartment! It is crammed with books, floor toceiling; I haven’t seen anything like it since my night at the Waldrops’ inProvidence. A sort of expressionist spoof on a classic sort of painting standshigh above the doorway, a mustached shabby-looking man in an overcoat and hisbasset hound in a landscape, looking sidewise out of the picture in a mannersure to unnerve me late at night. Books on the floor, books behind me onshelves, books in every room: one feels stalked by them, books in German andSwedish and quite a lot of English; I can see all my dithering over what booksto bring was entirely in vain, there’s plenty here to feed me. Plus it has theadvantage of being touched by Peter, the whole thing shimmers with his personalmana, Peter the author of European Trash,translator of Benjamin and Shakespeare, who couldn’t meet me this morningbecause he’s getting back late from the production of his new translation (inSwedish) of Die Zauberflote in Stockholm.He is a man of prose, and I am here to learn prose, or to evade it—nodifference.

Self-portrait as Corydon in front of a Cy Twombly at Hamburger Banhoff.

I’ve longed for this, it terrifies me. One more painting,right over the desk, a blue river at night with a greenlit bridge and the sortof squat, hatted houses I saw from the plane, a sailboat without sails in theforeground. It’s not detailed at all, just color and brushstrokes, a signaturein white that I can’t make out. The Spree? The Seine? The path taken byRimbaud’s drunken boat? Clearly it’s here as a point of departure, invitationto a voyage like the note Peter’s left me on this desk. Fingers of green paintunder the bridge mark the reflections of the lights in the water. You don’t putyour hand on a river and you can’t clench it with your fist. You open yourfingers and feel the flow.

Memorial to persecuted gays at Nollendorfplatz U-bahn.

Saturday October 1

Brandenburg Gate.

Went to bed at ten, exhausted from many hours wandering thecity, up Potsdamer Strasse to Potsdamer Platz, then further north to theBrandenburg Gate, east in the tide of tourists Unter den Linden, turning northonto Friedrichstrasse, then once I reached the Spree following it west until Icame to the Reichstag. I walked and walked, on not very much lunch and notenough water, from midday to evening. Everything mellow golden, perfectautumn-summer weather. Young people, sharply dressed middle-agedmiddle-European Volk, an abundance oftourists.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with Die Welt balloon in the background.

Though my map told me it would be there, I was shocked toencounter the memorial on my way up Eberstrasse with the park on my left: Afield of monoliths or stelae taking up a full city block, irregular in height:not the stones themselves, some two thousand of them, but the undulating groundthey are pitched on, create this impression. Ich bin ein Jude, I said to myselfover and over again, a touch melodramatically. But I felt for the first timethe shock of it, what this city is, underneath the manifold beauties of itsnineteenth and twenty-first century architecture (it’s the middle century, thetwentieth, that’s missing).

Ignored relic.

As abruptly as this feeling had arrived, it departed, as Iagain let myself be swept up to the Gate, which in an easy irony I foundswathed with Coca-Cola banners set up for some kind of festival that’s going upthis weekend. The city begins to take on a generic generic European qualityhere, like the imaginary monuments decorating the euro notes. The Spree couldhave been the Seine, could have been the Danube: a river walled in, patrolledby the ugly long excursion boats, lined with restaurants. Between the tables atone café was a mysterious concrete obelisk with the words dauer sauer mauer bauer written upon it,and a historical plaque I only notice now in the photograph. Not a brick in theWall, surely, not there on the river. steadysulky wall cage, my dictionary tells me, though Bauer also means pawn,peasant, bumpkin.

Ubiquitous "Kepab" stand.

Giraffe made of legos at Potsdamer Platz.

The Reichstag was beautifully lit, with a long green lawn infront of it where groups of young people, some of them speaking French,sprawled and lounged. I sat under a tree and read a few poems from JosephDonahue’s Terra Lucida:

wandering,pouring spices on the fire

asthe moon pours a bitter wine

overthe coals of the city,

dousingwith sparks

whereveryou are not.

Each lyric is headed or titled “00,” a kind of doublenegation that reminds me, inevitably, of the code for international dialing onthe telephone.

Soul explosion.

Sitting in front of the open window at the desk, the starsare still out. Is that Orion? I am seethed and jumbled and uncertain. Tomorrowwill visit the address of my great-great-grandmother Elenor Reitzer Montag,whose existence I only just learned of, who lived here at the turn of thecentury, around the time of Benjamin’s Berlin childhood, at SteglitzLepsiusstrasse 20. There’s a tension, a strong one, between the ordinary culinarypleasures of being in Europe and the peculiar history that has had its hiddenhand in shaping me and the destiny of what I am forced to call my people.Melancholy and irony are summoned, but offer no defense, any more than they didfor Joseph Roth. The restaurant I ate at last night was named for him, onPotsdamer Strasse, a cozy pub-like place with his pictures everywhere andquotations on the walls, even copies of his books—I leafed through a collectionof his Paris feuilletons while eating my schnitzel. Paris for Roth was freedom,France a restoration of the childhood that the Great War had stolen from him;Berlin had been a purgatory, an object of satirical rage, a place not to feelnostalgia for even before Hitler came to power. By Roth’s lights I’m workingbackwards, being here.

Part of Roth's signature on the ceiling at Joseph Roth Diele.

The people stream by, the Berliners, whom I haven’t much ofa handle on. They seem sophisticated, oddly yet smartly dressed, intellectualin fits and starts (I was joined at the outside table for a while by a woman ofAsian descent reading something by or on Shakespeare, and her German husband orboyfriend brought out a stack of books from the used bookshop next door—yes,Peter’s street is a writer’s paradise, almost a parody of one). Many peoplewhom you’d think ought to know better wearing silly T-shirts with English orpseudo-English phrases on them—I’m surprised such English-for-the-hell-of-it isstill in fashion, don’t these people know our empire’s on the way out? Andcigarettes all the time, smoked by middle-class people; struck by how muchcigarettes are a class marker back home but here they’re still universal.

Chocolate shop.

Speaking of empire, no sense whatever on the street of thepresent crisis in the Euro, and Germany’s new role as reluctant banker andsavior to innumerable collapsing economies. Me not speaking the language, ofcourse, but still, no mood of crisis that I can perceive, any more than thedesperation back home is perceivable in the upper-middle-class enclaves Ifrequent, aside from the unpicturesque human flotsam clustering around theGreenwood care center or the halfway house on Main Street, whose numbers havenot appreciably increased since the crash. But who knows? Like the peoplearound me, I don’t focus on these things, I am consumed by daily life and thethings I think I can control: career, family, relationships. Politics migratesinward and becomes something else, not even a climate, mere opinion, as oneresigns almost gratefully one’s faith, misguided once again, in a savior politicianlike Obama. The only solutions reside outside existing institutions: we need toput pressure on what exists so that it collapses or adapts under the strain.But it will take more than Liking things on Facebook to accomplish that

Seen at the movie theater where I saw Attack the Block, near Hackescher Markt.

Why is the sun setting? My body seems much slower this timein catching up with its time zone. Remembering someone’s lovely claim about howthe soul cannot travel much faster than walking speed, and so when you fly toanother continent it can be days or weeks catching up with you. Now for thehouse of my great-great-grandmother, whom my cousin Ava, my main source forinformation about my mother’s family, says had a daughter, Illona whom, shewrites, “was taken to Auschwitz in 1943 where she perished.” Ilona, who wasshe? She perished. It’s a good word,perishing, it suggests, doesn’t it, something of the completeness of theannihilation, the more-than death, that enfolded the Jews here. Death ofpersonhood, death even of memory. Who was it I read recently that remarked ofthe third generation’s typical obsession with the past? Claudio Magris, was it?Or was it Joseph Roth, who said of his generation, the WWI generation, that it wasin the unhappy position of putting their grandfathers on their knees, andtelling them stories?

Historical revisionism at work at Karl-Marx-Allee near Alexanderplatz.

Sunday, October 2

Forty-one today.

Lepsiustrasse 20.

There wasn’t anything to see, of course.The building was a tawny stucco thing, clearly postwar in its construction, inSteglitz, a perfectly ordinary pleasant bourgeois neighborhood, leafy andquiet. Who knows if its character was remotely similar a hundred years ago.What’s reinforced is that sense of ordinary life, how ordinary and full ofpreoccupation all these lives were, until the war came. So hard to understandthe connections between ordinary life and “History,” how one apparentlytranscends the other. Yet this must be an illusion: how we live our lives, thelittle decisions we make, must somehow accumulate into gigantic convulsionscapable of sweeping all that ordinariness away. “Capitalism” seems too simplean explanation, though it explains a lot. Certainly an ordinary blamelessbourgeois life led now cannot be separated from the drain on the Earth’sresources, the carbon filling the atmosphere, the animals whose habitats wedestroy.

Caspar David Friedrich, Frau am Fenster (Woman at Window), 1822

Spent a couple of hours at the Altes Nationalgallerie,looking at nineteenth-century artworks by guys with names like Schinkel (KarlFriedrich, painter and architect, who virtually built the city). There weresome interesting things in there, a few Max Beckmanns; but it’s myunderstanding that the most interesting parts of this collection were dispersedor destroyed as degenerate art in the 1930s. The Caspar David Friedrichpaintings were not as compelling as the famous ones I’ve seen reproductions of,though the Rückenfigur motif doeskeep popping up in those landscapes he chooses to people. A lot ofcontemplating the moon goes on. All of Friedrich’s paintings seem to be aboutlooking; there’s a very good one, taller than it is wide, of a woman, her backto us, looking out of and blocking our own view through a window, creating alittle drama out of our own frustrated desire to see. And there’s a seascapewith a hole in the clouds, dead center of the painting, that has the sameeffect.

House, Kreuzberg.

Wall, Kreuzberg.

Saw a bit of Kreuzberg, which has a sizable Turkish population. Bigtenement-like blocks of buildings studded with satellite dishes—a look Iassociate with Third World-countries where the infrastructure is unreliable.Astonishingly vigorous and profligate graffiti, some of quite striking. On mymap I saw “Orthodox synagogue” so I walked down there, to the banks of a riverwhere a church bell was ringing incessantly. The synagogue itself was adepressing sight: fenced off, security cameras everywhere, plastic sheetingover the windows to deflect (I presume) rocks, a booth marked Polizei. I later learned (and saw) thatevery Jewish site in the city enjoys, if that’s the word, that level ofsecurity. There was no one around except a single policewoman walking slowlyback and forth along the river across the street from the shul. It is,emphatically, not a living place, in spite of the off-puttingly cheerfulMediterranean blue color of some of its columns.

Fraenkelufer Synagogue.

A man approached me as I was walking away and asked me if I knewwhat the building was. “Synagogue,” I blurted, and when he didn’t understandme, I pointed toward the freestanding metal information plaque that explainedthe synagogue’s dismal history: “Da.” There was a bit of black comedy in thatmoment: me the Jewish guide to the ruins of German Jewry, historian of what Idon’t understand, unable to communicate in the language of a no doubtinnocently curious German who has possibly never met a Jew.

Philharmonic building.

Mahler’s First Symphony at the Berlin Philharmonic: kitschyand glorious: he has been thoroughly plundered by pop culture, so thatI hear incongruous echoes continually. The eerie opening sounds like nothing somuch as the opening notes of the old StarTrek theme, just before William Shatner intones space. There’s a part in the second movement where theclarinetist puts so much soulful squeal into his playing that it sounds like aklezmer band; is this in the original, is that Mahler’s homage to Jewishfolkways, or was it the interpretation of the musician or tonight’s conductor,Zubin Mehta (an Indian who lives in Israel)? When the trumpets sound it’s likethe cavalry, or a fox hunt. His symphonies are intensely narrative, film scoresavant la letter, but the man died in1911; did he go to the cinema, where orchestras often played along?

Tribute to a composer at Deutsche Oper U-Banhof.

October 4

A rather kindly old man just helped me through the mysteriesof the German Laundromat, which operates on a kind of federal system or Bunde: you feed your money into a singlecontrol panel that runs all the machines and dispenses soap as well. Now myclothes are being treated a bit roughly by the machine and I’ll dry them andfold them and stuff them in my backpack to go home. Last night I spent a long,late evening with Ken Babstock at a macabre little bar in Charlottenberg withpuppets and marionettes everywhere. None of the other clientele, whom werenever more than three in number, was a day under seventy, and the bartenderlooked to be in his eighties at least. Topics included but were not limited to:the elder generation of Canadian eco-poets; sight versus sound when it comes toword spacing; the dismal state of the world economy; the dismal state ofAmerican politics; question: is history taking place, right now, in the form ofthe Occupy Wall Street movement?; Toronto’s similarities with Chicago;childcare challenges for expatriates; whether or not I should go to Prague; hisfavorite poets of the moment (August Kleinzahler, Peter Gizzi); my favoritepoets of the moment (Lisa Robertson, Jennifer Moxley); August Kleinzahler’s failings as a teacher; the influence of Michael Palmer;the influence of Erin Mouré; the benefits and drawbacks of the PhD; thegenerally deplorable state of cuisine in Berlin; and much else. We exchangedbooks and I very nearly persuaded him to go out for another drink when thepuppet bar closed, but he wisely declined.

Jewish Museum exterior.

Victor Kégli, Hershel and Gretel in the Jewish Museum (2011), just outside.

The Jewish Museum. The architecture, by Daniel Liebeskind,is shattering; that basement area, with the three Axes—of Continuity, of theHolocaust, and of Exile—was for me the center of the experience, compared towhich the (adequate) exhibits above ground seemed like something of anafterthought. The Axis of Exile ends in the Garden of Exile: a group of stonepillars with plants and trees growing out of their tops, and a slanted groundthat makes walking between them a disorienting experience, which is of coursethe point. Had the thought that, according to the onto-topological argumentimplicit in the design, the Garden of Exile was where I was born. It’s notstrictly true—my father was born in the U.S., my mother was born in Hungary in1942 and only emigrated after the war—but it feels true. How long have I felt,even at home, not quite at home, on slanted ground, everything looking straightbut not feeling straight?

No comment.

The Axis of the Holocaust ends, as it must, in a cul de sac:a tower or “void” that was one of the most terrifying rooms I’ve ever stood in.It’s a bit like a concrete grain silo, unheated, with a few holes and slitsadmitting a minimum of daylight, as well as ordinary Berlin street sounds. Itactually felt like being inside a grim sort of musical instrument: the soundsof my footsteps seemed to echo, the scrape of soles on concrete, the faintrasping of my fingertips on brushed metal.

Menashe Kadishman, Fallen Leaves.

Friday, October 7

Show your wound,says Joseph Beuys. Yesterday at the Hamburger Banhoff seeing some of his workfor the first time. The video of How toExplain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Beuys’ head encapsulated in what lookedlike gold leaf, the upper left corner of the image obliterated somehow, like adead zone in the lens. At one point holding the rabbit’s ears in his mouth soas to make its paws prance across the floor with his hands. Show your wound, the hole, theinadequacy that you are, the vampiric double-gash of the equals sign in I = I.

Reading Andrew Joron’s prose, The Cry at Zero, which I brought with me as vade mecum. His hungerfor a beyond to the dead-end of social construction, his focus on the body as alocal instant of the cosmos. Neo-surrealism: insistence on emergence, the novum, the astonishing fact that lifearose from the unpredictable interactions of inorganic matter. Connectionsspawning in my mind with Quentin Melliassoux’s attack on "correlationism," thepostmodern doctrine that you can never discover or even approach X, only asocially and ideologically mediated viewpoint on X. His magnificently simpleexample of a form of knowledge that contradicts this: our knowledge of the worldbefore life, before a human or even merely biological sensorium existed. Speculativerealism: entertaining the possibility of a world that exists independently ofour knowledge and the beyond, therefore, of ideology. The winds of intellectualfashion are tending in this direction, which is reason enough to be cautious.But it is not surprising that I, long dissatisfied with the purely social andnearly nihilistic dispensations of postmodernism, would feel myself pulled inthis direction, which promises a non-dogmatic, un-idealist access road (ein Weg) to the universe.

Little face inside Bruce Nauman's Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984) at Hamburger Banhof.

Aside from Beuys I was most impressed by the variations onarchitecture and utopian construction on offer at the Hamburger Banhoff. Therewas a magnificent exhibition of Buckminster Fuller-esque globes or “biospheres”suspended by wires that filled the museum’s great hall by an Argentian artist,Tomas Saraceno, called Cloud Cities.Some of the globes you could enter, and climb up into and roll around in on theclear plastic floor suspended high above the ground, like the bouncy houses atstreet fairs that Sadie likes so much; she would have loved these. Some of theglobes are gardens, with plants inside, sometimes permitted to flourish theirlong grasslike leaves up and out the top of their globes.

Saraceno's Cloud Cities.

There were other utopian/dystopian dwellings deeper in themuseum. An Israeli artist, active apparently for just six years before he diedat a very young age, built ascetic model houses that looked a little likeminiature versions of the desert dwelling of Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen andAunt Beru. There was one model that you could go inside, made of white paintedwood, and inspect the tiny bunk, the little bathroom/shower, the kitchen whichwould have room, just about, for a single burner, with a skylight that the topof my head emerged from. Inevitably one imagines what it would be like toactually live in such microscopic quarters. And at the end of the long hall ofexhibitions a terrifying piece by Bruce Nauman, which I couldn’t help but find reminiscent of the HolocaustTower in the Jewish Museum. Inside a darkened hangar-like hall of the museum isa black structure, basically cross shaped, dimly lit by yellow brutalistsconces, with a grilled floor at the center where you can look down into asimilarly cavernous space or up through a hole to the Banhoff’s roof. Anintrinsically chill and lonely construction.

Graves of Helene Weigel Brecht and Bertholt Brecht.

Also of note was a film in one of the basements by an artistnamed Anri Sala, Dammi i colori(2003), in which the camera surveys an unnamed city, “the poorest in Europe,”which indeed seems to stand in ruins (Wikipedia tells me the city is Tirana, in Albania). However, many of the buildings we see arebrightly and idiosyncratically colored; this seems in some way credited to the work of our onscreen guide Edi Rama, a friend of Sala's, the mayor of Tirana, and an artist in his own right. People live in the direst poverty (unforgettableshot of an old man, in unaccountably purple pantaloons, stepping into a secondpair of trousers, conducting his toilette outside for all to see in a bitterlymatter-of-fact way) but surrounded by bright, almost Disney-esque colors. Color and ornament are seen attempting to supplement andmake up for tragic deficiencies in the city's infrastructure, making it one ofthe most incisive and moving commentaries I’ve ever seen on art’s desire to doreal work in the world, while never falling into the fatal gap in which artistsdeceive themselves into thinking that their artworks, merely by existing,actually accomplish this.

Exterior of Kunsthaus Tascheles.

Another night Donna Stonecipher took me to a Germanintellectual bookstore, Pro Qm, that was very nearly a parody of itself:everything clinical white, the customers and employees all serious and intentand intense, in severe eyeglasses, browsing through what is truly a remarkablecollection of books on art and social theory, many of them in English.Everything was expensive, much more so than in the states, so I refrained frombuying anything except for a cheaply printed paperback, Everything under Heaven Is Total Chaos. This is one of SlavojZizek’s favorite Mao quotations, which in full reads “Everything under Heavenis total chaos; the situation is excellent.”

Window, Kunsthaus Tascheles.

There was a talk there, based on a dissertationwith the imposingly simple title of Dichte:not referring to poetry but density, it was a work of urbanist theory. Apparentlyall dissertations must be published here, and of course the dissertation is justa stepping-stone on the way to the habillitationshriftand full professorship; Donna says there’s no such thing as a young academic inGermany. The talk was all in German so was interesting to me from asociological point of view, until standing on a hard floor for an hoursubtracted even that level of interest. Fortunately afterward there wasexcellent Vietnamese food and I got to know Donna a bit better. We talked aboutwhat I dubbed “the zone of inarticulacy” that she and certain other poets Iadmire (herself, Camille Guthrie, Sarah Gridley—not sure why this list isall-female) preserve for themselves: refusing or rejecting the growingimperative in our intellectual culture to explain oneself, to write criticism,to package your work in advance of its own imperatives.

A rare sign of Jewish life, near the KaDeWe department store.

Fountain outside KaDeWe.

This came up again last night when I went out for a verylate pizza dinner with a motley collection of expatriate artists andlitterateurs, most of them in their late twenties and early thirties, after theambassadorial launch of the first novel of a young Irishman, John Holten,called The Readymades. His verybeautiful American girlfriend told me that in art school she had been told thatone had two choices as an artist, the political or the exploration of one’s ownsubconscious. Reductive to the point of ludicrousness, the stark choice thuspresented does suggest something of the real terrain young artists are asked tonegotiate. And while there are clear paths and nearly automatic comradeshippromised by the first option, which in Clarice’s view tends to mean artaccompanied by or interpermeated with text,the second option is necessarily lonelier and for a visual artist must mean theoutright rejection of textuality (explanation, recitative, critique).

Monday, October 10,2011

Still there’s the shadow. Though I’m not religious, I’m notunaware of its having been Yom Kippur over the weekend, and there’s a realsense I have here of being unwritten into the Book of Life. Because real lifeis home where Emily and Sadie are, and my friends and my routine. Perhaps I’mnot the traveler I’ve dreamed of being. Or is it just Germany, der Vaterland, that has me feelingoppressed and low? Hard on myself. I expected something of this trip—some turn,some Wende—that, if it’s occurred,I’m not aware of it yet. Quandary and squandering—do they have the same root?

Lassitude. Acedia.

Graffiti at Mauerpark, Prenzlauer Berg.

Wednesday, October 12

Only now toward the end have I really been able to write, toaddress my novel afresh. I went back into the manuscript and started organizingthings a little, creating section breaks, filling in a good deal—thetransition, basically from when Gustave and M are reunited in Paris to theirflight to Cherbourg, where they finally make love that one and only time andshe tells him the story of her failed attempt to visit Auschwitz. Just now Iwas able to write again some more, a fair chunk of M’s story, as she tells itto Miklos, of her life just before and after Ruth was born, in Queens, forwhich I borrowed a few details of my mother’s biography, right down to the IRSjob. I don’t remember a lot of what I was told, so memory tips imperceptiblyinto invention, which is what I want, after all—it’s a novel.

Marx and Engels, together again.

So there’s that feeling of redemption that comes afterwriting, especially when it comes fluently and there’s more than a couple ofpages produced. Whether it will seem valuable when I reread—that’s of noconsequence, don’t look back, forward! It is a novel, it may not be a greatnovel, it will bear its flaws of sentimentality and structural inconsistencyand be downright puerile in spots, but it wants to be a novel and it will be,it will be my novel, and perhaps it will be only the first, or else I will bereleased by it, the achieve of it, and can go back to poetry with a clean andfit conscience.

View from inside Gedächtniskirche.

The novel. I want to believe I’ve crossed some tipping pointhere, that from now on it will just seem like a job of work, and fun, and notsome precious goddamn bit of china that I have to carry oh so carefully in veryshort little bursts, setting it down after just a few steps for fear of itscracking. If I can just go on like this, a little, at home, I can make my goalof a finished draft this year. Why the fuck not? It’s my novel, it goes on aslong as I say it goes on, I’m writing it. A certain amount of—I don’t know, surrender, is vital to any creativeproject, and I do want to respect certain rhythms, be open to chance,contingency, reality, as I’m writing. At the same time it’s nothing magical –it’s not a poem. And if I learn nothing else except that novels aren’t poems,it would be a very worthwhile thing to learn at last.

Paul's Boutique, Prenzlauer Berg.

Doors to Jewish Cemetery, Prenzlauer Berg.

Looking up Victory's skirt at the top of the Siegessäule.

Berlin

2011-09-22T21:39:00.002-04:00

Summer was very great, as Rilke said, but it's now over. My Duncan article is very nearly finished enough to submit to a journal, and I'm going to do it on or before next Wednesday the 28th. On that day I'll be boarding a Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, from there to Berlin.

Why Berlin? It's largely fortuitous: a friend who lives there has offered me the use of his "work flat" for two weeks while he and his family are traveling. I had been wanting to go to Europe this fall, since I'm on leave and have the time; my original idea was to revisit some of the cities that feature in my novel-in-progress: Trieste, Budapest, maybe Venice, ideally Ljubljana. Berlin was never part of the picture, but perhaps it will become part of it. Or I can use the time to get back in touch with poetry again. Or it will function as a kind of parenthesis, its own creature, which may or may not result in anything concrete. I have to give myself permission to do "nothing" there, if I can, or else the anxiety of constraint will be too great.

Berlin has loomed large in my imagination: the whole country of Germany was to me in my childhood a kind of mental wasteland, a no-fly zone of the mind, the site of incomprehensible historical horrors that, inexplicably, settled over my life like a fine, imperceptible ash. Because I'm Jewish; because my mother was born in Budapest in 1942; because both of her parents went to Auschwitz and, against all the odds, came back again. Then of course it's the capital of the Cold War, an atmosphere of hysteria and fear that lived in the background of everyday life for my generation, spinning off odd bits of pop cultural detritus like Red Dawn and Gotcha! (anyone remember that one? With Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino? Anyone?). Weimar Berlin, too, everyone's favorite Berlin, inseparable in my mind from the grinning masklike face of Joel Grey as the Emcee in Cabaret: decadence, delusion, death. And the city of history that I somehow missed as a callow college student in the years 1989 - 1991, unable fully to take in the dismantling of the wall between East and West, "free world" and Communism that had defined the entire structure of my world.

Growing up, I understood quite simply that Germany and German-ness, if not individual Germans, were synonymous with evil. I well understood from the movies that a German accent was always a sign of sinister intentions. My mother would not drive a Volkswagen, though it otherwise would have suited her quasi-hippie sensibilities. I often fantasized about visiting Europe but never once imagined Germany as anything other than a land of barbarism, even if it sometimes took comic form. (C.f. another ineradicable bit of 1980s culture.)

As I grew older and my interest in poetry deepened, along with new interests in critical theory and intellectual history, I began to find German intellectual culture completely indispensable. A litany of names--Kant, Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel--became the dazzling points of a constellation that had somehow, without my realizing it, guided my own sense of the almost ineffable, fragile connections I intuited between aesthetics and ethics. Then there were the German Jewish heroes that came later: Marx, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Freud, Mahler, Franz Rosenzweig, Rosa Luxemburg, and the whole Frankfurt School, with Walter Benjamin becoming for me as for so many others the diffidently charismatic secular saint of the 20th century. Germany was the indispensable nation of my intellectual maturity, much more so than the French theorists, though my primary allegiance remains with the poets and novelists of the English and American traditions.

But that childhood fear is still very much in me. And I wonder how and whether I will feel my Jewishness differently there, in a that has replaced Judenfrei with a bizarre nostalgia for the Jewish culture it eradicated. (My understanding is that, if I so choose, I can hear klezmer music in Berlin any night of the week.)

I go to Berlin as I would go into a trap: cautiously yet with mounting excitement, alive to the possibility of danger. Moral danger? Intellectual danger? Or just the danger of being ambushed by atavistic emotions, the fears I inherited somatically without realizing it from my mother, my grandfather, my own imagination? Whatever my expectations, they are sure to be in some way disappointed. It's the first European city I've traveled to that is not, I think, a museum; I will be struck there not by the immense age of things but by a more American sense of frenzy and newness, even as I constantly round the corner and find myself confronted with a survival of something older than an American can know.

Confronted with what's not quite American in me, I mean. My share in otherness--call it geekiness, call it Jewishness, call it poetry. I feel it in large gatherings (even, maybe especially, large gatherings of Jews) and at Christmastime, when I hear Hebrew (a foreign language to me) or have to be around people talking about sports (a foreign language to me). Something that I inherited from the historical experience of my mother's side of the family--call it fatalism, or the tragic sense of life, or a kind of mournful delicacy, or if you wish neurotic self-preoccupation--has always kept me a little apart from my own Americanness, whiteness, straightness, maleness. I'm a generally positive person, people who know me would agree, but I have a share in something very dark, something that tarries with the negative.

When my daughter wakes in the middle of the night she tells me she's afraid of "the black things" that she sees around her in the air. I know how she feels.

I'm going to Berlin to write, to be a tourist, to drink some very good beer and try the currywurst. But also on some level to meet, to confront, in waking life, die schwarzen Sachen, the black things.

The Poet's Novel

2011-08-19T11:32:00.001-04:00

My review of Ben Lerner's new novel Leaving the Atocha Station is now available on Jacket2: http://jacket2.org/reviews/poets-novel.

All Duncan, All the Time

2011-06-27T15:24:00.004-04:00

It is strange have been drawn so deeply into the work of a poet whom I found all but illegible until recently, except for a very few poems whose rhythmic or pellucid qualities overcame for me all the occult mumbo-jumbo, those which seemed to embrace a more tangible (that is, social) reality as opposed to wispy intimations of a Theosophical/Gnostic/neo-Platonic nature. That is, I appreciated the anthology pieces--"A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar," "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "Poetry, a Natural Thing," and most especially, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," which moved Emily and I so much that we incorporated into our wedding ceremony. But most of the time, I found Duncan's embrace of the mythic and vatic embarrassing where it wasn't incomprehensible.

The mythic dimension in the other modern poets I've loved has always raised for me the question, Bug or feature? In a 1989 interview with John Tranter, Michael Davidson makes a very intelligent distinction between his generation of Language poets and the concern of Duncan and others with "the numinous"--that sense that true reality was something unavailable to common sense:

I guess the idea of the numinous was translated in my generation into the idea of the ideological. The ideological was also something that inhabits everything, and produces things. Ideology is something that emerges in the unconscious to create, in a sense, a kind of political unconscious. And so, while the gods may be dead, but the ideology is there, and that is an informing power in poetry. And you can play with that, and you can work with that. That’s the difference, I think, between Duncan’s generation and ours.

This transference, if you like, from the numinous to the ideological takes on special resonance when processed through Louis Althusser's definition of ideology as that which "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (that's from "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"; a less-often noted but just crucial corollary to this statement is, "Ideology has a material existence"). Instead of the innumerable deities (Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, and so on) that populate Duncan's poems, the Language generation has capital, history, language, and other such theoretical-institutional entities whose reality is determined by their access to the social, rather than to some transcendent realm (though Bruno Latour is useful here in pointing out how, in what he calls "the modern Constitution," the social is itself often constructed as transcendent body).

Whatever names we give to the gods, the strategy of Marxist poets is, according to Davidson, fundamentally isomorphic with that of Duncan: both kinds of poet are "trying to establish relationships to an economy that you can have no control over, yet negotiate with it. But negotiation is another metaphor for a kind of field process poetry, it is your ability to deal with a power that is larger than yourself." This is how I've managed to read poets like Pound and Yeats and Stevens in the past, translating their mythic figures (whether adapted from neo-Platonism, the Celtic Twilight, or invented by the poet--the Canon Aspirin, et al) into nodes in a larger field of force that mapped or inscribed that poet's sense of the social totality.

Duncan, however, won't play along with this strategy; or rather, to be Latourian again, the cost of translating his mythic gods into ideological entities is too high a price to pay--you lose the poem. At the same time, he's wilier than he's been taken for, I think, in terms of his own stance toward myth. Remember that he didn't come to the occult like most people do, because their given gods have failed them: he was born to it (adopted by Theosophical parents who chose him according to his astrological chart) and, I believe, had something of the same stance toward his parents' mythological worldview as Joyce came to have to Catholicism. That is, as a narrative, a force, whose power and significance operates almost independently of one's belief in it (if anything, from a rationalist perspective, it appears that the more outlandish a religion's tenets are, the more unshakable its adherents seem to be).

Joyce is not a bad point of comparison to Duncan, actually, who references him with some frequency: one can read Ulysses as an attempt to broaden and complexify the field of reality available to an Irishman, not by "Hellenizing" Ireland as Buck Mulligan purports to do, but by forcing Catholic dogma, the liberal (Jewish) enlightenment, and Homer to interact with and press upon each other, no one field of numinousness more authoritative than any other. (It's a little bit like Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic novel, except it's the contention of mythic systems rather than persons that matters--or you could turn that around and say it's the person-ization of myth that gives Joyce's novel its matter.)

The gods are real, then, for Duncan; no one of them, however, is THE God. As he writes in The H.D. Book:

I have written elsewhere that I am unbaptized, uninitated, ungraduated, unanalyzed. I had in mind that my worship belonged to no church, that my mysteries belonged to no cult, that my learning belonged to no institution, that my imaginatin of my self belonged to no philosophic system. My thought must be without sanction.*

But Duncan is no polytheist: his Nietzschean feel for the eternal return leads him to construct a notion of myth by which certain eternal forces recur throughout history under different names and with different valences: "Christendom," for Duncan, seems to be a repression of primordial forces in Greek myth (Eros chief among them), forces which reincarnate in the transgressive "spirit of romance" of the troubadours and in heretical notions of Christ as Eros. Romance gets born again contra the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, and the flame goes on for Duncan in the twentieth century, transferred in a "rite of participation" to his hands from the writing of H.D.**

I see now that it's this sense of the historical in Duncan, however eccentric or esoteric, that has opened the doorway to my being able to read him in truer sympathy than I've managed before. It's also a question, in my case, of maturity: I am less embarrassed now by Duncan's indulgence in "magick" because I am less embarrassed by my own taste for high rhetoric, not to mention the kitschy pleasures of Dungeons and Dragons (reading Duncan is like leafing through the old Deities & Demigods), prog rock, tarot cards, and the other emblems of an adolesence spent searching for alternatives to an oppressive reality that did not correspond to the truth of who and what I felt I was or could be.

So I am newly (re)attuned to Duncan; and exploring, for my article, the rich and unexpected possibilities for a poetic ecology that his writing, in its radical inclusiveness and shrewd troubling of the immanent/transcendent distinction, may have to offer us. Something richer, and darker (Duncan's Freudianism, his nigh-Lacanian sense of the Real as something obscured from any single position or vantage point, his sense of disequilibrium and parallax), close to what Timothy Morton calls "dark ecology," is offered by Duncan's poetics, a greater intensity than what more literal notions of nature writing seem capable of bringing to bear.

But this is also personally important to me, a Rubicon in my own sense of poetics. Back of my long infatuation with Language poetry and the Frankfurt School is this older sense of reality as something occulted, and the vocation and ultimate high of poetry-as-making: world-building, cosmology. For this poet, Duncan raises the stakes immeasurably. And I stand willing to declare myself, though no initiate, as under the spell of Romance.

* I am perhaps unjustifably amused by the resemblance of this list to the contemporaneous litany of No. 6 in The Prisoner: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own."

** "Rites of Participation" (as the most widely distributed chapter of The H.D. Book was called) are NOT rites of initiation: again, one must read closely to discover how Duncan is never in fact guilty of what Olson accuses him of in "Against Wisdom as Such," that is, of "buying in" to a myth or belief system; he's too much the anarchist for that, too much the universalist.

Printer's Row and Other News

2011-06-02T11:35:00.003-04:00

In the very near future: Come hear me read from Severance Songs on Saturday, June 4 at high noon on the Arts & Poetry stage at the Printer's Row Lit Fest in downtown Chicago. I'll be followed by a poet named William Olsen, reading from a book called Sand Theory. Details here.

Speaking of Severance Songs, I'm very pleased to be able to point you to this review from Publishers Weekly that came out a little while back that calls the book, "Gorgeous, almost insistently allusive, and only infrequently overelaborate." I think I'm going to start marketing a new energy drink with that description.

In the not-quite-as-near future, people in or near Evanston can hear me take part in the RHINO Reads series at the Brothers K Coffeehouse, 500 Main St., on Friday, June 24 at 6 PM.

In the near past, there's this: a video of me reading as part of the Revolving Door series curated by Jennifer Steele and Jamie Kazay. The readings take place in a beautiful gallery on South Halsted not far from UIC, so this is a series you should check out. Thanks to Jamie and Jennifer for a great night!

I might need to rethink that shirt.

In other news, I have spent the whole of the month since Lake Forest College held its commencement ceremonies, setting me free from teaching responsibilities for a staggering eight months (for I have a fall sabbatical, let bells and clarions acknowledge), immersed in the very weird poetry and prose of Robert Duncan. For I am pursuing an intuition that Duncan, in his visionary anarchism, might offer a model for postmodern pastoral and ecopoetics that, in spite or because of his tendency toward abstraction and myth, has more power to bring about intimacy with otherness (what Timothy Morton calls "the ecological thought") than either empirically inclined poems (cognitive mapping of the eco-totality) or Heideggerian Romantic quietism.

You can see that spending so much time with Duncan has already had a deleterious effect on my prose style. But I am tied to the mast and must stay the course.

The Uncanny Relation: Modes for Ecological Art

2011-05-01T13:22:00.005-04:00

Alastor (Moody)

Timothy Morton has been very usefully tracking two major possibilities for ecological art over at his blog Ecology without Nature: the relational or constructivist versus "object-oriented ecological art." He goes into more depth on this division in a new essay, "The Dark Ecology of Elegy," which you can download and read from a link available here. In a move I find fascinating for its literary-historical depth, he aligns the constructivist mode of eco-art, which is fundamentally an art of cognitive mapping, with Wordsworth; the other mode, which confronts and tarries with the uncanniness of objects in their absolute otherness from us, seems to be aligned with Keats and Shelley at their strangest and most hallucinatory (as demonstrated by his rather brilliant reading of Shelley's "Alastor" as an inverted Wordsworth poem). He presents the choice starkly: "Here's the deal: do you want a detailed advertorial, a network dense with relations? Or do you need a shocking encounter with an alien entity, opaque yet vivid, illusory yet real, already there?"

In American poetry, the Wordsworthian mode manifests in the field poetics that begins with Whitman; gets developed with wildly differing ideological orientations by Pound, Williams, and the Objectivists; is newly theorized for the postwar era by Charles Olson; and manifests today in the work of what we might broadly term the empirical postmodernists. Kristin Prevallet's 2003 manifesto, "Writing Is Never By Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Poetics," is a touchstone document for this branch of ecopoetics, dedicated explicitly to "the pursuit of rationality" in an increasingly irrational age.

The postmodern mode of Shelleyan excess or the Keatsian uncanny has not to my knowledge been fully theorized within an ecological context; but certainly the "necropastoral" for which Joyelle McSweeney has become a forceful advocate is one of its strongest contemporary manifestations. If asked to find a lineage for this writing in American poetry (yes, I realize how provincial I'm being, but that is my area of expertise), I would pick out Emily Dickinson (as so often the great foil and other for her contemporary Whitman), Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Alice Notley. (You will notice this second lineage is more heavily weighted toward femininity and queerness, which is probably not accidental; I would also emphasize the importance of Rimbaud and Baudelaire.) The revelatory encounter with uncanny objects, bodies, and drives dominates this poetry, which is much harder to reduce to a program or politics than the relational mode; this is no doubt the core of its strength and necessity, in Morton's view.

It's much easier therefore to understand how the poets in the first group might be understood as ecopoets: the first group is obsessed with the objective and universal, with seeing even the poetic subject as just one more point in the force field free of what Olson calls "the lyrical interference of the ego." The second group's strangeness and capacity for critique derives from what its return to the Cartesian divide between subject and object (what the Shelleyan conceptualists Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman might be referring to with their cute new term, "the sobject"), which renders both positions strange and (in a literal sense inverting what Heidegger means by "dwelling") unsettling to each other.

My wish, as when presented with any dichotomy, is to dialecticize these poles and to ask whether Morton isn't being hasty when he disparages the Wordsworthian collage-mode as "database art," "viewed from a height and posted to teach you something you already know." Partly this is because I don't believe that most of us "already know" how dire the ecological situation has become; I think most us, I would even include myself, are climate change deniers in the sense that we have not adjusted our comportment in any meaningful way to suggest that climate change has become an Event in the Badiouan sense, something marked as true by our fidelity to it, a fidelity which must be lived on an almost pre-cognitive level.

That's why I return to the mark of the uncanny in Prevallet's mini-essays. While most of these essays are on the subject of poetics, the first one takes the form of a paranoid rant against "the age of the engineered apocalypse," which in the face of the sheer irrationalism of Bush's American flirts explicitly with conspiracy theory, so that Prevallet all but comes out as a 9/11 "truther." Prevallet's rhetorical and passional excesses in the first mini-essay are not easily subdued by her declaration of fidelity to investigative relational poetics in the second: "Instead of buying gas masks and digging underground shelters (or moving to Canada), I turn my rage and confusion towards poetry, the unacknowledged legislation of worlds unacknowledged, to reveal both systems of knowing (content) and structures of ideology (form)."

Prevallet's swerve toward and then away from conspiracy theory marks her, as does the little "Defence of Poetry" allusion, as a secret Shelleyan (himself a secret Wordsworthian, as Morton hyposthesizes in his article). Conspiracy theory, after all, is a mode of cognition nearly identical to that of a Wordsworthian, relational poetics concerned primarily with connecting the dots and teaching its adherents what they already know (just as the release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate will only deepen the certainty of the most hardcore of the so-called "birthers"). It's only in its conclusions (conclusions which are never concluded but which always restart the obsessive retracing of the conspiracy's contours) that conspiracy theory differs: it offers not relation but revelation, with all of the religious and apocalyptic overtones that that word brings to bear.

Conspiracy theory, while formally identical to the practice of field poetics, is therefore more truly aligned with the Shelleyan uncanny than what I'd like to reterm the Wordsworthian rational sublime. The systems "revealed" by conspiracy theory are not purely relational but themselves become uncanny objects of fascination. An uncanny poetics of relation, therefore, does not somehow rise above conspiracy theory by its claims of greater rationality; instead it offers what Morton, writing about "Alastor," calls "a noir ecology, in which we admit to the contingency of our desire rather than chastening it into invisibility" ("Dark Ecology" 268).

In a film noir there is always an investigator or detective who is "wised up," who "knows the score," but who then discovers in the process of his investigation his own profound implication in the evil that he has uncovered, an evil whose hold on him goes far deeper than whatever rational choices he has made. There is no explaining away the evil and no justice is possible in the ordinary ethical sense; the detective's ethics stand with (or against) his ultimate prototype, Oedipus, in choosing to live with his new, unbearable knowledge.

So I am not so much disagreeing with Morton as wishing to refine his conclusions and to determine possibilities for a noir ecopoetics, which does not sacrifice or abandon the relational-rational, but uses collage poetics to bring the uncanny and excessive "evil" of nature/the body/the drives into consciousness and then beyond consciousness. Otherwise I fear that the shock of the uncanny is doomed to become just another aesthetic effect, a delicacy for the strong-of-stomach and the connoisseur. There has to a be a role for the rational, even a humbled and supplemented rationality, in a poetics that is nonetheless not instrumental but re-opens the foreclosed world.

The Anti-Anti-Accessible versus David Orr, or, Poetry as Perversion

2011-04-25T11:00:00.013-04:00

To me talking/writing about poetry is not about getting it, the one kernel of meaning; it’s about expanding my ideas of it, of opening the poem up, bringing in new connections. The poem doesn’t need to “resist” full interpretation because there is not complete interpretation – interpretations expand my idea of the poem. Joyelle placing Plath in her necropastoral space is very insightful, but it doesn’t close down my reading of Plath, it makes her poetry even more interesting.

*************

The kind of poem I want to read can seem mysterious and riddling when I’m twenty, and much less mysterious and riddling when I’m forty, but retains the capacity to astonish throughout. It is an adventurous poem that reflects the unknowable adventure that is life, and is full of the knowledge that only coalesces in hindsight, with experience. I, personally, don’t think of that as code. But if anything that interferes with literalism, that invites interpretation, or god forbid research, is figured as code, well then. I’m on the other side of that line.

The first quote comes from the latest in a series of posts by Johannes Göransson over at Montevidayo on the question of poetry and accessibility; the second from Ange Mlinko at Harriet. Both are part of a larger conversation sparked by the publication of David Orr's book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr, who reviews poetry for The New York Times Book Review, has produced a book seemingly designed to irritate actual poets and lovers of poetry (the unlovely but accurate phrase "poetry's stakeholders" comes to mind). Its efficacy in attracting more general readers to poetry remains to be seen. There are as of this morning 26 Amazon reviews of the book, mostly favorable, but as one reviewer I think rightly remarks, reading the book feels like stepping "into the middle of someone else's conversation." Another writes, "I would recommend this book highly for somebody who is 'sort of' interested in poetry." This "sort of" is at the heart of the book's difficulty, as it tries to stake out a middle ground between stakeholders (the denizens of what Orr calls "The Fishbowl") and the indifferent. Does this "sort of" really exist?

The question that the quotes above are concerned is one plaintively posed by another of Orr's Amazon reviewers: "Should poetry be such demanding, strenuous exercise?" Göransson's and Mlinko's answers to that clearly fall into the "Yes" category. Johannes has been unfolding an attack on the fundamental anti-intellectualism of Orr's approach in terms of the resistance he sets up to the idea that poems are there to be interpreted; they are instead there to be uncritically "loved," a sentimental approach curiously akin to the American discourse around children and childrearing, as if poetry cannot risk having its self-esteem bruised by critical reading. The problem with this of course is that we are never completely outside interpretation, just as we are never completely outside politics: the claim that poems need not be interpreted simply sets up the existing interpretive framework as the unmarked case, a "good" universal approach next to which all other approaches are particular, "academic," and "bad."

The general thrust of Johannes' critical enterprise is toward multiplicity: "interpretations expand my idea of the poem," for the idea of the "closed" singular interpretation of any given poem (what it "really means") is the mirror image of the notion that poetry is a beautiful mystery that we murder to dissect. Both ideological moves function to place poetry outside the bounds of what we commonly call "life": poetry becomes a standing reserve, a supplement to ordinary and multiple practices of living and reading, that is at once supremely important ("beautiful") and supremely irrelevant and unnecessary ("pointless").

Ange Mlinko, meanwhile, asks what's so bad about seeing poems as encoded or as riddles to solve. I've been guilty of this move myself; just the other day, I tried to encourage a couple of creative writing students who are both talented writers but skittish when it comes to poetry by telling them not to worry about meaning. Which leaves them with what? they might reasonably have responded. Sound? Mood? That's not nothing, of course, but they're right to be dissatisfied, and it's unreasonable of poets to expect that readers aren't going to at least initially approach poems as they would any other instance of language: as bearers of information and significance. Mlinko stands up for what we might call the erotics of encoding: solving riddles is a basic human pleasure, as the legions of folks devoted to Sudoku and crossword puzzles will attest.

It's instructive to compare the general thrust of Orr's book to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, "Against Interpretation," which ends with this demand: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." The erotic is a mode of the aesthetic in that word's oldest sense: aiesthesis, perceiving through the senses. Sontag attacks the priority that hermeneutics gives to content, what a poem "says," in favor of a critical focus on form: "a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art." That word "loving" is crucial. As Johannes put it in his first post on this subject, the stance that Orr seems to represent holds that the poem is there to be loved: "It’s uncorrupted by interpretation." The trouble here may be less the insistence on purity than on the hollowing out and de-eroticizing of "love"; a false antimony is set up between love and criticism, if not love and interpretation. Sontag, as I read her, is not against interpretation so much as she is against the rush to interpretation; the form of an artwork is there to capture our senses, to tarry with and not be taken for granted (in this respect Sontag's "form" is indistinguishable from Shklovksy's ostranenie).

Orr's version of this argument is immeasurably weakened by an absence of a sense of the erotic. In his account the pleasure provided by poems, even in his most moving example (of his dying father's fondness for a line of Edward Lear's), is fundamentally infantile. More seriously, neither he nor Sontag seem to allow for the possibility of an erotics of interpretation itself. It's not Johannes' ripest language, but when he writes that "interpretations expand my idea of the poem" I imagine a certain tumescence; when Mlinko writes that "the kind of poem I want to read has a snaking logic of underground caves and aquifers," here too I see an embryo expression of the erotic pleasure to be found in interpretation. That is, the polymorphously perverse pleasure of more, of the multiple, of the ever-ramifying codes and contexts that interpretation gives birth to over time. Ange suggests that poems become less "riddling and mysterious" with age and experience, but the reverse can be as true.

Put, finally, another way, I think as I do so often of Keats' definition of negative capability: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." I want to revise that slightly so that the "without" becomes a "before," and so that the "irritable" takes on a meaning closer to that of an itch that must be scratched, whose prolongation through Mysteries is itself a kind of pleasure, jouissance. And it's this erotic tension that the blandest theories of poetic engagement, like Orr's, sacrifice on the altar of accessibility.

"If they don't need poetry then bully for them. I like the movies too": so saith Frank O'Hara. Let's remember that for O'Hara "the movies" are not simply a Hollywood commodity (though they are, gloriously, that) but a sexual cruising ground (c.f. "Ave Maria"); by implication and association then poetry too is eroticized as something more than a matter of taste: it is a need, in the deep blues sense of, "I need you baby." It is a site productive of desire, perverse, leading nowhere but (pleasurably) astray. Whatever else it is, it certainly isn't "good for you." And it may only be in embracing its perverseness that poetry has any chance of obtaining the kind of purchase on its readership that I or David Orr might wish for it.

Radio Poetry

2011-04-17T21:11:00.006-04:00

Friends, readers, countrymen: lend me your terrestrial rabbit ears! For I am going to be interviewed live sometime between 9:15 and 10 AM CDT tomorrow morning (that's Monday, April 18) about my new book Severance Songs by host Alison Cuddy on WBEZ's daily newsmagazine show, Eight Forty-Eight. More than a little excited; more than a little nervous. Tune in! Those of you not in the Chicago area will be able to listen to a recording via a link that I'll provide later.

Happy Pesach! What will I say?

UPDATE: Find out what I said by clicking here.

fallow writing writing

2011-04-12T16:17:00.003-04:00

It's late in the semester and reserves are low. When I read for replenishment, instead I am stunned into what seems, by comparison with what I'm reading, the impoverishment of my own imagination. Lately it's Proust and Alice Notley.

Proust stuns me with his impossibly long and elegant sentences (in the C.K. Scott Moncrief translation), which unlike the recursive sentences of Henry James are laden to the brim with sensuous images. Proust's narrator is incapable of recalling any detail about his childhood in Combray without tumbling into unending digression about what, precisely, a given place or relationship felt like. There's a curious kind of paganism to this, visible in his long description of the church in Combray, which creates reverence in the narrator not because it offers any sort of channel to God, but because it grounds and orients, like Heidegger's Greek temple, the whole village and countryside, from which scarcely any vantage point can be found where the church steeple is not visible (and if you're too close to see it, you feel its presence). The procedure of the novel is of course located in the famous image of the madeleine, a humble sensuous object from which almost literally the whole seven-volume opus pours at the end of the first chapter or "Overture":

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

It's a search for lost time, to be regained or recaptured only after many hundreds of pages have been written; but it's also a novel about its own novelness, about the desire to write one and to become a writer. This is all familiar enough, I suppose, but up to this point I hadn't had the patience for Proust, hadn't seen what all the fuss was about; the prose seemed lugubrious and the book plotless; in narratological terms it's all catalyst, no kernel. (A kernel is an event which produces a turning point, in which an alternative to what has gone before arises; a catalyst amplifies or delays the action.) But now it seems the drama of writing, of sentences foraging for the precise texture of experience, is enough to hold my interest. The book has many other pleasures to offer in terms of realism: sharply drawn characters and character types, gentle to savage satire of French provincial mores and the fascinations of aristocracy, etcetera. But the pathos of going back, trying to give life to what's been lost (chiefly, I sense, the loss of the mother, whose life-giving goodnight kiss is the inaugurating event or non-event of the narrative), for this reader cannot be decoupled from the pathos of wanting to write. Proust, in short, is good if intimidating company for the would-be novelist; the very endlessness of In Search of Lost Time reassures me in the perpetual middle of my own manuscript that the search of and in language can be the point, can almost be enough.

So while I continue to pick at my novel there's no poetry to speak of, and in this silence poetry becomes more important and more impossible. I picked up Alice Notley's latest, Culture of One, and am almost nauseated by the sheer wild verve of the thing—"a novel in poems," it says on the back cover—it's almost too rich to digest. Notley's writing is unclassifiable, it's neither lyric nor narrative; the individual lines seem casual, even sloppy, and yet poem by poem I am overwhelmed by the sheer imaginative power she brings to bear on what seems at root a simple story about a lone woman, Marie, creating a "culture of one" (cleverly opposed to monoculture) somewhere in the desert Southwest, building and rebuilding a hut (Heidegger's temple again, or a parody of it) that some kid burns down as repeatedly, while a grocer and compulsive liar named Leroy, a dead woman named Ruby (wonderful noir name), and a pop star (Marie's daughter? Ruby's daughter), named Eve Love exist in some kind of triangle with her (I'm only a quarter way into the book so others might emerge). But what can you make of, what do you do with, writing like this?

The Book of Lies
Do you believe this stuff or is it a story?
I believe every fucking word, but it is a story.
Don't swear so much. Aren't we decorous? What
is a culture?
It's an enormous detailed lie lived in, wrought beliefs,
a loving fabrication. What's good about it? Nothing.
It keeps you going, but it institutionalizes inequality, killing,
and forced worship of questionable deities, it always presumes

an absolute: if no other an absolute of intelligence and insight.
The lore of certain people—men—what you're referred to.

This is Marie, thinking, though she wouldn't use this language;
this is also Eve Love thinking, though she's young enough
to bang her head against the wall thinking it: Marie would rather
reinvent the world for herself. This is Leroy thinking, who knows
more about lies than anyone. This isn't Mercy, or Ruby, or
the Satanist girl, or the girls, or their fathers thinking.
The Satanist girl almost thinks this; but she can't love
skepticism. It would make her cry. I, I don't think.
Except as a device. I think thought is a device. To get there.

Ruminative, essayistic, unliterary, clumsy: then it swerves, then it swerves again. Because these are poems they permit perhaps more easily than prose a kind of prismatic relation between the speaker and the characters, who occupy and then get kicked out of the "I" position, so that all and none of them speak. It's the purest sort of poetic heteroglossia (a contradiction in terms, some would say) that I've encountered. The imaginative freedom on display here is breathtaking, and hard-earned. It's not imagination in the sense of invention, but in the sense of being willing and able, line by line and poem by poem, to seemingly do anything, go on your nerve, say "fuck it," break rules I'm usually scarcely conscious of when reading "innovative" poetry (you won't find here many of the postmodern tropes and devices catalogued to devastating effect in Elisa Gabbert's essay, "The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry," found in The Monkey and the Wrench; you can read about these "moves" here). It's highly rhetorical, it's more about the sentence than the line, as befits a novel. It accumulates moods; reading it is like watching the pattern of light and shade all day in the desert, on a mesa, as clouds move overhead, and then someone drops something from a height and it's messy: a watermelon, a human head. I can't feel this freedom for myself, the freedom of what Notley calls disobedience, but I need it. Even if I am a man.

So I Think I Have Nerves of Steel?

2011-04-04T15:56:00.005-04:00

Sad you missed Charlie Sheen while he was in town? Well, have I got another trainwreck for ya:

The next installment of THE2NDHAND’s Chicago Nerves of Steel reading series, taking reading to new levels, skyrockets April 5 after 8 p.m. at Hungry Brain on Belmont.

Featuring:

**A Public service announcement by Bitches Gotta Eat blogger Samantha Irby
**Poet Joshua Corey
**Stand-up by Carter Edwards of the Upright Citizens Brigade
***& Novelist/Fiction Madman Davis Schneiderman

With music by Katie Knaub (expect more Harold Ray duets here) and Save The Clocktower, the latter a Chicago-based trio that merges electronics, live instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and catchy songwriting to create a pop/electronica blend. Check out their sophomore album Carousel or find them on Facebook.

Plonsker Residency Deadline

2011-03-23T14:53:00.003-04:00

Hey! Are you a brilliant writer of innovative fiction or hybrid prose under 40 who has yet to publish a book? Why then haven't you sent a 30-page excerpt of your manuscript in progress to be considered for the fourth annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize?

The postmark deadline is April 1. Winners receive $10,000, a two-month residency in Glen Rowan House on the campus of Lake Forest College, and (subject to approval) publication of their book by the &NOW Books imprint of Lake Forest College Press. There are no formal teaching duties associated with the residency. And there is no reading fee charged.

Click the above link for more details, and apply!

Hybrid Pastoral

2011-03-08T11:10:00.003-05:00

Reading Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and coming to certain provisional conclusions about his argument's implications for postmodern pastoral. The three spheres of critique or knowledge that Latour touches on are "naturalization, socialization and deconstruction" (5), which broadly correspond to the major divisions or disciplines of knowledge: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and literature/humanities (he also suggestively describes the realms proper to each sphere as "real, social and narrated" [7]). Each sphere of knowledge is carefully segregated from the others. And pastoral, it seems to me, can be an apt term for the utopian move away from the social: a retreat into the poetic to be sure, but Latour's configuration makes a pastoral of science visible as well.

At the same time, this attempt to segregate out the realm of social/political power, to enter into a zone of pure relation with language or with the nonhuman, inevitably has its social and political dimension. The renunciation of "politics as usual," is one of the strongest moves available to power—look at how Qadaffi is hanging on in part through his claim that he can't renounce power because he already has. After the coup that ended the Libyan monarchy, Qadaffi says, "I returned to my tent." (The infamous tent, incidentally, is a signifier of Qadaffi's Bedouin authenticity, and is also a zone in which he enjoys special sexual privileges—a perverse fulfillment of the pastoral escape from (sexual) mores tied to (re)production.) His unnamed sovereignty depends on its removal from the political and social sphere that he has done his best to eradicate, into the religio-pastoral narrative of "The Green Book."

Latour argues that the "work of purification" assigned to the division between humans and nonhumans, culture and nature, is made possible by the "work of translation" of hybrid networks—though to confront that connection between incommensurate ontologies is to undo the "Constitution" or "separation of powers" that is Latour's metaphor for the paradoxical configuration of purification and hybridity that produces modernity. I find this extremely useful in terms of explaining the potential of a postmodern pastoral, taking "postmodern" now in the literal sense Charles Olson gives it as what comes after the modern. Pastoral as traditionally conceived is a work of purification that is clandestinely also translation. Consider how the exiled Duke Senior in Shakespeare's As You Like It makes "sweet... the uses of adversity" by literally translating the nonhuman world into the terms of culture:

And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing. (2.1)

"'This is no flattery,'" the Duke says to himself about the elements, "'these are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.'" While many readers interpret this moment as Lear-lite—the Duke is persuaded by the elements that "what I am" is a mere mortal, no longer a king with two bodies but body alone—one could just as easily read the line, especially when juxtaposed with the "tongues in trees," as the restoration to the Duke of his royal identity by the nonhuman discourse of nature. The supposed purity of the non-verbal, non-social discourse of "feelingly" restores the Duke to his Dukeness. And certainly the course of the play suggests that the pastoral sojourn of the Duke and his court will return him to a sovereignty strengthened and refreshed by his experiences in the natural world.

Pastoral, then, is always a hybrid discourse. But its hybridity can be mystified or exposed, as a building's facade can conceal or reveal its structure. The postmodern pastoral that concerns me, a configuration of which will be presented by The Arcadia Project, exposes and plays with the dialectic of purification and translation, domination and emancipation. The latter refers to one of the central double-binds of modernity, by which domination of nature is supposed to lead to the emancipation of human beings-—yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer amply demonstrate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the domination of nature ends up reinscribed in social relations. This is the severed Gordian knot, in Latour's language, that we must "retie," imagining anew the collective that includes humans and nonhumans, with "society" describing "one part only of our collectives, the divide invented by the social sciences" (4).

Since poetry has as its very ground the imagination of subjectivity (on the individual/lyric level but as importantly the collective/epic level), poetry is uniquely well suited for rethinking questions of collectivity and representation. At the same time, poetry is the most "networked" form of literary discourse, given how a poem mobilizes its elements (lines, words, phonemes, morphemes) along multiple axes of sound, image, connotation, and allusion. Pastoral, that fusty old genre, becomes the deterritorialized territory most useful for thinking these simultaneously. Putting the complex into the simple, indeed.

Finally, it's surprising and pleasing to re-encounter the language of the "hybrid" in the context of poetry, no longer as the anemic hodgepodge of epiphanic lyric and Language poetry that is our period's most familiar style, but in this more rigorous and urgent sense. If "American Hybrid" represents precisely the sort of unmarked move that consolidates power beyond politics (or in the literary context, beyond criticism), the hybridity of postmodern pastoral represents something more volatile, because it absorbs the task of critique, or translation, into and against itself, producing in the most interesting cases poems that destabilize and subvert the subject-object positions that sustain domination.

Busy Week Ahead

2011-03-03T15:38:00.006-05:00

Two upcoming events to alert you to:

The Dust of Suns by Raymond Roussel

When: Friday, March 5 and Saturday, March 6 at 8:00 PM; Sunday, March 7 at 3 PM
Where: The Charnel House, 3421 W. Fullerton St., Chicago, IL

French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) faced almost universal incomprehension and derision during his lifetime for works that neglected traditional character and plot development in favor of the construction of elaborate descriptions and anecdotes based on hidden wordplay. While the premieres of his self-financed plays caused near-riots, admirers included Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos. who called The Dust of Suns (1926) “another incursion into the unknown which you alone are exploring.” Roussel never enjoyed the posthumous fame of his hero Jules Verne, but he has exercised a powerful fascination upon later writers including the French Oulipo group, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault and Michael Palmer. New editions of his novels and poetry are forthcoming this year from Princeton and Dalkey Archive.

Like much of Roussel’s writing, The Dust of Suns has a colonial setting. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle French Guiana, a convoluted treasure hunt unfolds. The Frenchman Blache seeks his uncle’s inheritance, a cache of gems whose location lies at the end of a chain of clues that includes a sonnet engraved on a skull and the recollections of an albino shepherdess. Meanwhile, his daughter Solange is in love with Jacques—but all Jacques knows of his parentage is a mysterious tattoo on his shoulder…

This script-in-hand performance of Roussel’s play, directed by John Beer with design by Caroline Picard, features an array of Chicago writers and artists. Performers include: Larry Sawyer, Sara Gothard, Travis Nichols, Monica Fambrough, Jamie Kazay, James Tadd Alcox, Suzanne Scanlon, Joshua Corey, Jacob Knabb, Jennifer Karmin, Samantha Irby, Lisa Janssen, Brian Nemtusak, John Keene, Judith Goldman, Jennifer Steele, Francesco Levato, Nicole Wilson, Jacob Saenz, and Joel Craig.

773.871.9046

ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE.

******************

On Saturday, March 12 at 7 PM, please come to The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square for a launch party for my new book Severance Songs. A celebration of the sonnet, my reading from the new book will be interwoven by readings of new and classic sonnets by a cavalcade of Chicago poets: Chris Green, Simone Muench, Tony Trigilio, Jennifer Karmin, Ray Bianchi, Kristy Odelius, Robert Archambeau, Larry Sawyer, Davis Schneiderman, and Joel Craig.

As its name suggests, the Book Cellar is both a terrific independent bookstore and a vendor of fine beers and wines, so it's sure to be a rocking time. The address is 4736-38 Lincoln Avenue and the phone number is 773.293.2665. Hope to see you there!

Theses on Visionary Materialism

2011-02-23T13:40:00.008-05:00

That poetry is a mode by which words are made present as things without ceasing to refer.

1.1

The rivalry between signifier and signified, the reader's being brought to that boundary, is a poem's happening.

That poetry is a subset of imaginative literature, in which the operations of the reader's imagination are brought to bear on the rivalry between mimesis and rhetoric, thingness and speech.

That there is reading and there is beholding or apprehending, and prior to both is judgment or a question. What kind of writing is it?

3.1

What kind is writing?

3.11

Men judge of things according to their mental disposition, and rather imagine than understand. (Spinoza.)

3.2

Reading or apprehending, what belongs to the reader has the name of an action: wreading.

That the boundary between word and thing, signifier and signified, rhetoric and mimesis is not a boundary in the sense that it indicates the presence of a dialectic.

4.1

For these seeming binaries are two halves of the word, or the sign, or the poem, that is itself multiple, more than halves/halved.

4.2

The boundary that makes a binary is itself an unbounded territory, a Möbius strip along which the wreader travels.

4.21

A reader of text cuts the strip, like the Gordian knot, an Alexandrian-interpretive expression of her will to power.

4.22

A beholder of the textual object cuts himself, an abject if not resentful abdication of interpretation to the mute power of things.

4.3

The boundary as Möbius territory is the monism of reading. Spirit and letter are not in dialectical tension but simultaneous positions on the strip. Line by line, word by word, the preponderance of spirit or of letter in the wreader's experience is purely local and momentary.

4.4

Poetry's monism does not predicate a holistic or organic relation between signifier and signified, poet and poem, word and Word, man and nature. It is possible to be visionary without being Romantic.

4.41

There are men lunatic enough to believe that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony. (Spinoza.)

That poetry is vision.

5.1

The vision is not the whole. (Adorno: The whole is the untrue.)

5.2

Vision bears the possibility of contact with the real.

5.21

Not in the sense that vision pierces the cloud of unknowingness, the cloud of ideology.

5.22

Not in the sense that vision splits the world into real and unreal, or the phenomenal and noumenal, or the real and the imaginary, or earth and heaven, or earth and world.

5.3

Vision is in history and is partly conditioned by it. A condition of its truth.

5.31

Vision does not mystify.

5.32

Vision does not unify.

5.321

The eyes of Robert Duncan did not focus on a single object.

5.33

Vision is local and material and historical. And:

5.34

Vision is a traveler.

5.4

Vision is natural insofar as nature is historical (evolution).

5.5

Vision binds the two halves of the Möbius strip. But in this case, two halves do not make a whole.

5.51

The two halves are like a whole in the sense that they offer the completest possible range of poetic action. Wreading.

5.512

But see 5.1, above.

5.6

The two halves make up a "whole" that is multiple. More and less.

5.61

Less is also more.

5.7

Truth is in the eye that measures this excess.

5.71

The eye that follows the line.

That vision is cognition, peculiar to poetry, or to any mode that presents an only apparent singularity.

6.1

A singularity of which we ask, What kind is writing?

6.2

Or which asks of us, What do you want from me?

6.21

Poetry is supposed to know. (Lacan.)

6.3

Wreading interrogates its own demand. That the poem be a whole.

6.31

It tarries, not just with the negative, but with the "more" a poem is or indicates.

6.4

Vision splits the poem, or is split by it. But is whole on the other side.

6.5

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such / many as a mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of. (Olson.)

6.6

But the impasse is this: poetry is only partly rhetoric, only partly mimetic. It wants to be part of the world yet exceeds it, quite literally, by halves.

That vision exceeds, by its nature, vision is excessive. The more than whole is the true.

7.1

The truest poetry is the most visionary, the most excessive.

7.11

This includes the excessively impoverished.

7.2

The baroque and multiple / the abject less-than-one: these are the modes of vision (of excess) of our age.

7.21

Poetry exceeds (succeeds) silence. (In Beckett, in Celan.)

7.22

Poetry exceeds (succeeds) its speaker. (In Rimbaud, in Pessoa, on Black Mountain, in Yasusada.)

7.3

A climate of vision includes poem, poet, wreader, and world. All instances of the local and historical in a relation that exceeds, without transcending, the local and historical.

7.4

A climate of vision is impure, may blur and mislead, must not depend on the esoteric.

7.41

The esoteric often mistaken for excess; the former at best a mode of the latter. It should not be the only mode.

7.41

That sense of the real, heightened, comes in meeting the Möbius strip. Negotiating excess without managing or recuperating it. Poetry is not an economy of anything but energy, potential, methodology.

7.411

The work of the morning is methodology; how to use oneself, and on what. (Olson.)

7.5

Eco (oikos, home) is prior to nomy (management, method, rule), as it is prior to logos.

7.51

What's prior divides the apparent whole of the poem into the multiple.

7.52

Home is an excess, like Being, and vision is a possible relation. It takes (more than) one to know (more than) one.

That poetry makes no thing happen.

That no plus the thing makes the world.

Goe, little booke

2011-02-09T14:44:00.002-05:00

So excited was I over the creative and intellectual implications of what I saw at the AWP that I forgot to mention the more elemental thrill of seeing and holding my book for the first time. It has not yet been officially published - that will happen on March 15. But I am planning a book launch event at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, Chicago, on Saturday March 12 at 7 PM. It's going to be a celebration of the book and of the sonnet, that persistent deformed and deforming little form, which my book plays with.

Persons interested in a review copy or events or suchlike can please backchannel me (corey[at]lakeforest.edu) or click here to contact Tupelo directly.

Excitable Retrospect: AWP 2011

2011-02-06T20:18:00.003-05:00

Back this afternoon from a condensed experience of DC, since I wasn't able to get there until Thursday night, like many many others affected by the snow. I've been going to this thing for the better part of a decade, now, but I'm still often surprised by how energized I feel afterward (and exhausted). Part of that is social: connecting with old dear friends whom I see infrequently enough that to encounter them is to reflect intensely on what you've been doing and who you've become since you saw them last. In my case that meant the usual suspects, Brian Teare and Richard Greenfield, who are beginning to enjoy a smidgen of the success they deserve (you owe it to yourself to click away right now and purchase a copy of Brian's rendingly beautiful new book Pleasure). But I also connected with older friends, from Montana days and even quite a bit earlier (weirdly, Marie Gauthier, the director of publicity for Tupleo Press, remembers meeting me when we were both in high school). And on my first night there I had a long chat with Evan Lavender-Smith that was the beginning of the weekend's personal theme: reconnecting and reintegrating old interests, selves, and projects. It's all of a piece: the poems, the criticism, the anxiety, the curiosity, the fiction. Which is another way of saying that I'm beginning to accept that I'm not getting any younger and the ride, though one-way, is radically cumulative. Nothing is lost, only discarded, and not even then.

Looking now at a bigger stack of books acquired at the book fair than I'd planned on acquiring; it's all the fault of Coffee House Press, which had a Crazy Eddie moment on Saturday and offered up everything at the table for $5/copy. Wishing it were as cheap and easy to buy time to read them all in. Another highlight include the "Leaping Prose" panel put on by Peter Grandbois, Carol Moldaw, Kazim Ali, and the grande dame of paratactic fiction, Carole Maso. The conceit of the panel was taken from Robert Bly's 1975 book Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (a book I remember taking from my mother's bookshelf, very much part of my inheritance from her). It's not always easy for me to take Bly seriously; I've never thought there was much bottom to the "Deep Image" movement, and even the subtitle is cloying, shirking the real work of building a theoretical argument (and this is leaving out the whole unfortunate Iron John business). But Grandbois and the others did a good job of adapting Bly's "idea" about associative leaps in poetry as a technique fully adaptable to the task of narrative. There were moments when I thought I detected a tone of--well, not sanctimony exactly, but a little bit of eat-your-vegetables from Grandbois' part of the presentation. When avant-gardistes attack the "flow" of the "fictive dream" of conventional fiction as requiring the reader to take a passive, consumerist stance toward what they read, wanting to "escape" and be "swept away" (and I'll admit I've used this rhetoric myself in the past), there's often a degree of implicit Puritanism. As I grumpily Tweeted at one moment, "I don't want to read paratactic writing because it's good for me. It must offer pleasures as acute, if less voluptuous, than hypotaxis." Certainly it's clear to any reader of this blog that I take pleasure in writing hypotactic prose, and that I love an elaborate sentence, sometimes to the point of straining punctuation and syntax. At any rate, I seem to be at a point conducive to the questioning of pieties and bonnes pensées. The convert's fervor that I felt ten years ago when I was discovering the New Americans and Language poetry and cultural materialism for the first time is beginning to fade.

Grandbois did make some casually provocative assertions: he said that modernist fiction was preoccupied with epistemology--how we know our own lives--whereas the leaping prose he wanted to sponsor is ontologically oriented. Shit happens, and the reader is left to orient herself in relation to the narrated events or elements; literature becomes a mode then of object-oriented ontology. That's all familiar enough for me to question it, less from the point of view of logic than from my own attractions and compulsions. I've been reading more and more Robert Duncan, and am becoming fascinated with his arguments on behalf of rhetoric--the ways in which he complicates a legacy of modernist poetry that, it seems to me, is precisely opposed to Grandbois' claims about modernist fiction. Pound, the Objectivists, et al. Their preoccupation with clear hard images, aversion to "dim lands of peace," and so on, assert an ontological desire, a notion that a poem like The Cantos can somehow accumulate enough significantly arranged details to spontaneously combust into a new metaphysics. Duncan's ontological yearnings are grounded in something no less wacky, but harder for we postmoderns to swallow: myth and the esoteric. Rhetoric, though: I'm interested in it, I'm less persuaded than I've been in the past about modernist insistences on poems as objects and things and machines made of words. I had gone so far in the other direction that for years I've been reading poems without any concern for their meaning or message at all; pure intoxication of sound and association was what did it for me. There may have been, probably was/is a secret kernel of meaning, but intuiting its presence was enough; I felt no desire to crack the code or plant the seed. That's changing. The poetry I desire now has a relation to rhetoric and argument, albeit a fractured or tortured one. That's why Jennifer Moxley and Alice Notley are rising stars in my personal firmament. And there's some other connection between rhetoric and myth that my re-immersion in Duncan and Olson is teaching me. Olson's word muthologos--"what is said about what is said"--captures this not-quite-concept perfectly.

Back to the panel. My qualms about the possible Puritanism of parataxis were largely assuaged as the panel's real subject and motive became clear: bringing poetic strategies and stances to fiction writing--a subject near to my heart. (Carole Maso has an essay whose title says it all: "Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose" and which includes what is for me an aspirational phrase for my own fiction: "a necklace of luminous moments strung together.") Carol Moldaw talked about her book The Widening, which dislocates temporality and pronoun reference so as to meditate on the adventure of a teenage girl's sexual awakening. The frighteningly prolific Kazim Ali spoke of approaches to prose that dislocate the framework of expectation that we bring to it, citing as examples Gertrude Stein (yes of course) and Willa Cather (more surprising) and John Steinbeck (!) as writers who have only just begun to be read, because we are only just beginning to break out of the "read" we have on them. (That quick labeling and pseudo-interpretation that's really a dismissal, a put-down: oh we know all about that, no need to actually read it.)

Maso's talk was the most lyrical, as you might expect: she spoke of her desire (this is a close paraphrase) to honor what's illegible, what passes through us without a code. (Aside: isn't that pure Platonism? Romantic idealism? Experience, consciousness, being, whatever you want to call the "subject" of writing: doesn't a statement like Maso's turn that subject into something inaccessibly a priori, noumenal, an at-best absent presence? Why has it taken so long for me to figure these things out? Olson: "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties.") Another nice line of hers: "In novels, anything can happen. Even things that have already happened." A pledge of the novel as a space for maximal freedom, with the aspiration "to traverse the abyss of time, to undo damage." (That notion of damage, trauma, again, seems weirdly Platonist: a trauma is an experience that has happened without happening, trapped in the past, an underwater rock diverting and contorting what flows around it; and the only way to undo trauma is to (re)live it, through fiction or dreamwork [Traumwerk].)

Another peak AWP experience was hearing the Chilean dissident poet Raúl Zurita, with his translator Daniel Borzutzky (and publisher Joyelle McSweeney, and respondent Monica de la Torre) read from his searing book Song for His Disappeared Love. As organizer Johannes Göransson inimitably put it, “This is like getting Neruda to the fucking AWP. This guy spent 6 weeks in a shed being tortured following the Pinochet coup.” The poem takes the reader to that shed, in wrenching rhythmical verses that seem flung up against a witnessing landscape of sand and sea and mountains. Zurita's body is shrunken and twisted by illness, which only seemed to enhance the prophetic power of his voice, like smoke with lightning forking through it. A reminder, if reminder were needed, that poetry for much of the world is a precious and depletable imaginative resource and not just an ornament for overeducated hipsters. Zurita, though known as an experimentalist, is very much a Romantic: twice he referred to his belief that there are experiences of pain and suffering that cannot be put into words, and that this is the Inferno of literature; that there are experiences of happiness and ecstasy that similarly resist language, and these are its Paradiso; and writing itself is a Purgatorio, betwixt and between these inexpressible zones of experience. It's a beautiful and again weirdly Platonic thought.

These thoughts are barely formed, but there are even more cloudy and ineffable ones coming--having to do with narrative, and the visionary, and the "beyond" of poetry. I think Oren Izenberg's new book is going to be important, and also Cary Wolfe's What Is Posthumanism? Will report as things move, and change.

Arcadia Ego, or: We Have Always Been Pastoral

2011-01-31T14:30:00.006-05:00

Joyelle McSweeney continues to elaborate her theory of necropastoral in her latest post, a summation of the necrotic yet vital qualities she identifies with that "defunct, anachronistic, dead, imperial and imperialistic literary form." I think that's a fair characterization of how pastoral has been used—there is most definitely a pastoral ideology "contrived to represent separation, quarantine, timelessness, stasis, protection from upset and death." At the same time, it's an inherently unstable genre, which has demonstrated self-consciousness about its own project from the beginning. Consider the first of Virgil's Eclogues, in which two shepherds talk about current events. One has become a refugee, his land seized by the state to be given to demobilized soldiers; the other has, through his poetry, won at least provisional reposession of his land through the direct intervention of the sovereign, whom he has caught in a nostalgic mood:

In Rome I found the young man in whose honor
We sacrifice at our altars every month.
He said, "Go feed your flocks as in the old days;
Herdsmen, raise your cattle as you used to."

(David Ferry, trans.)

The uncanny quality in this eclogue is the absence of jealousy or political friction between the dispossessed Meliboeus and that fortunate senex Tityrus; "It's not that I'm envious, but full of wonder." The dialogue becomes Meliboeus' elegy for the life with flocks and fields that he will know no more, and ends with Tityrus' invitation to linger for at least one more night as his guest, for, "Already there's smoke you can see from the neighbor's chimneys / And the shadows of the hills are lengthening as they fall. " Et in Arcadia ego: not just physical death, but social and economic death, are part and parcel of the pastoral experience, and Tityrus has no guarantee that "the young man" in Rome won't change his mind tomorrow about his status.

This possibility is elaborated in the ninth eclogue, which essentially retells the story of the first from the dispossessed shepherd's point of view. "A stranger came / To take possession of our farm, and said: / 'I own this place; you have to leave this place.'" To which his interlocutor, the naive Lycidas (whose name Milton will take for his great pastoral elegy of that title) responds:

But I was told Menalcas with his songs
Had saved the land, from where those hills arise
To where they slope down gently to the water,
Near those old beech trees, with their broken tops.

"Yes, that was the story," Moeris replies, "but what can music do / Against the weapons of soldiers?" And once again elegy, that nearest neighbor to pastoral (and isn't "pastoral elegy" very nearly a synonym for "necropastoral"?) takes hold as the two shepherds sing sorrowfully of a land that seems always already lost: "Time takes all we have away from us." The master poet, Menalcas, who was powerless against political violence, remains offstage in this eclogue, like Godot; "The time for singing will be when Menalcas comes" is the poem's last line.

It's impossible to read these poems and feel assured of pastoral as the perfect fantasy of the locus ameonus or virga intacta that it presents itself as in its most ideological forms (the Marlboro Man, for instance, though of course even his iconography has become infected by death). Consider, too, Leo Marx's characterization of American pastoral in particular as the conjuration of a "middle landscape," ideally situated between a hostile wilderness and the corruptions of capitalism. But his book The Machine in the Garden is a close examination of how the boundary between the two is actually a wavery and porous line. Its iconic scene is an excerpt from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebook, in which a forest revery is interrupted, then reconstituted, by the sound of a locomotive thundering not so very far away.

In Deleuzeian terms, a pastoral poem deterritorializes or rhizomes (if that can be a verb) the landscape it reflects, but the most interesting such poems don't close the loop through an authoritative reterritorialization. Instead the represented landscape remains open, infected if you like, by the visible passage of the reader's desire to flee complexity/multiplicity/the city/death. McSweeney's necropastoral, in my view, is valuable insofar as it's an updating of the pastoral to be responsive to the most current environmental conditions (taking late capitalism in this sense as the environment or "climate" of contemporary poetry). I'm especially interested in her notion of necropastoral as a means of processing (or maybe "confronting" is a better word) "contamination," both in its ideological senses (the racist pastoral fantasy of the anti-immigration America First crowd) and its biochemical one. As Joyelle puts it, "the necropastoral is the toxic double of our eviscerating, flammable contemporary world, where avian flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, toxic contamination via industrial waste, hormones in milk, poisons leaching out of formaldehyde FEMA trailers, have destroyed the idea of the bordered or bounded body and marked the porousness of the human body as its most characteristic quality."

I wonder if Joyelle has read any Bruno Latour, who has introduced the concept of the "quasi-object" to ecological thought: a social "object" which is also kinda-sorta a subject, of which toxic entities like hormones in milk are pardigmatic examples. This would be the darkest example yet of necropastoral, in that it parodically achieves the reconciliation between subject and object, self and other, human and nature, that is at the root of the pastoral fantasy. The (contaminated) body becomes indistinguishable from its (contaminated) environment. It's difficult to be sanguine about this from the perspective of normative environmentalism, but it's exciting allegorically, as a means of imaginatively contesting fundamentally undemocratic fantasies of purity (something ecology at its most misanthropic is fully capable of manifesting).

Fourier Series - The Movie

2011-01-29T11:45:00.003-05:00

I am nigh-ecstatic to be able to direct you to this "kinetic translation" of my book Fourier Series, designed and programmed by its publisher—nay, its wizard—William Gillespie of Spineless Books:

Fourier Électronique

Yee-haw!

Also, this is a good time to announce to all who might care that I will be at AWP in DC next week. There are a couple of Tupelo/Severance Songs related events of interest:

Tupelo Press Off-Site Reception

Petits Plats Restaurant
2653 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington DC 20008
(202) 518-0018
www.petitsplats.com

Join us at Petits Plats (close to the conference hotel) for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and short readings by a few of our 2010/2011 authors. Join us in a toast to Tupelo's authors and staff for eleven years of dynamic publishing!

Friday, February 4
6:15 - 8:30 pm

With short readings by (in order of appearance):

Ilya Kaminsky

Nancy Naomi Carlson

Daniel Khalastchi

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Ellen Doré Watson

Kristin Bock

Michael Chitwood

Kazim Ali

Rebecca Dunham

Stacey Waite

Dan Beachy-Quick

Joshua Corey

Megan Snyder-Camp

Please RSVP for this event:
Send an email with the number in your party to mgauthier@tupelopress.org.
Please put "AWP Reception" in your subject line,
and feel free to bring a guest.

I'll be signing advance copies of the book at the Tupelo Books table on Saturday at 11:30 AM, alongside Megan Snyder-Camp whose new book is called The Forest of Sure Things.

Joyelle McSweeney's Necropastoral

2011-01-15T15:52:00.002-05:00

As you might suppose, I'm completely fascinated by Joyelle McSweeney's recent posts on "necropastoral" up at Montevidayo. It's a little unclear to me as to whether she's talking about pastoral as an always-already uncanny undead genre, outside and yet adjacent to the polis ("the temporal and geographical sureties of the court, the urbs, the imperium itself"), or if she isn't suggesting a sub- or paragenre called necropastoral, with its own distinct aesthetic characteristics. The former seems to be the case in her original post, while the fascinating post on Sylvia Plath suggests the latter, and might lead in a direct line therefore to the necropastoral aspects of gurlesque.

It makes perfect sense to read Plath's Ariel as a kind of parody or burlesque of the pastoral, when the latter is constructed as the reservoir of "natural" values. I'm especially struck by the image of the infant's mother dissolving into the ambient environment in "Morning Song"; Joyelle calls it "a total mediumicity in which Art moves from the infant to the speaker, from the infant into the material surround, creating the body of the poem." This "mediumicity" seems very similar to Timothy Morton's notion of ambience as the tendency of environmental writing in general to "re-mark" the boundary between subject and object, transgressing that boundary even, without ever erasing it. For Morton the Freudian "oceanic feeling" or the Emersonian transparent eye-ball with its ecstatic "I am nothing, I see all" seems to be fundamentally ideological, not an erasing of the barrier but a manifestation of the subject's desire to swallow the object whole. For Plath, I imagine, the poem read as pastoral highlights how that genre has been gendered as a playground for the inviolable masculine subject but strips the feminine object-subject bare; the mother-speaker of the poem is dissolved by the infantile demand that she become the feminized object-atmosphere of "nature." The subject here is swallowed by her own object-hood, "cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown." And the poem, and the book as a whole, is a luridly violent rebellion against the demands pastoral makes for women to become more-and-less than human, more-and-less than sexual, more-and-less than alive.

I'm reminded of Lisa Robertson's "How Pastoral: A Manifesto" and her claim there that "I needed a genre for when I go phantom"--phantom in this context bringing us very close to Joyelle's necropastoral (though it's a notably less embodied sort of word, and there's a definite aesthetic distance between the cerebral, even Apollonian necropastoral of a book like The Weather or The Men versus the Dionysian variety embraced by Plath and the poets I associate with the gurlesque. But I need to think more about the larger, rather seductive claims Joyelle seems to be making about pastoral in general. Necropastoral seems rather more specific than "postmodern pastoral" or even "avant-pastoral," the terms I've grown accustomed to playing with; it would seem to go beyond a pastoral that merely foregrounds its own artifice, the better to play with the tradition of turning nature into a standing reserve for sovereign authority and cultural norms. Is it a zombie pastoral, the pleasure of the walking dead in devouring brains, the hypersublime viral pleasure of mindless multiplication, unlife, earth without world?

You Villain Touch; or, the Body of Genre

2011-01-12T13:18:00.005-05:00

In my first meeting with this semester's starry-eyed Introduction to Creative Writing students, I played a little game where each student shares a word that they like and another word that they despise. It's a functional icebreaker and, as far as the favorite words go, also serves as a simple diagnostic tool, dividing the class roughly into the aspirational (words like "hope" and "individual") and the ear-driven ("indubitably" is the one I recall). The negative words are more interesting. After three different students independently came up with "moist" (a word that occurred last semester as well), I began writing down the disliked words on the board:

moist
crusty
secreted
slice

Another disfavored word that I didn't write down sums the rest up, both sonically and in terms of meaning: grotesque. Each word is heavy on sibilants and, except for slice, hard C and T sounds. And each describes an object failing to maintain its boundaries, spilling liquid (moist, secreted), crumbling (crusty), or dissevering (slice). Words that conjure disintegrating bodies. Words that make your flesh creep—a phrase that in itself conjures that crucial aspect of the grotesque, the uncanny aliveness and strangeness of your own body, which is coterminous yet refuses to play along with the social and psychological boundaries of the self.

Thinking a lot today about the grotesque as a genre, or anti-genre, in light of various books on my radar. In the senior seminar I'm co-teaching this spring with Davis Schneiderman, our chosen texts are William Gillespie's new novel (but perhaps I should borrow Geraldine Kim's coinage, Povel), Keyhole Factory; and the much-noted anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics. I'm also reading the brand new collection edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (in which my esteemed colleague Bob Archambeau has a useful essay on the Victorian pretensions on the can-poetry-matter crowd). Last but not least, a book that does not yet exist but which G.C. Waldrep and I are slowly laboring into being: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. All these things form a constellation in my mind on the question of boundaries in American poetry, and in poems themselves.

Touch me not: one of the early warnings, or irresistible come-ons, in the English literary tradition, when it comes to touching:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

This famous sonnet of Sir Thomas Wyatt's, an imitation or riff on Petrarch's "Rime 190" is widely understood to be an allegory about the poet's desire for Anne Boleyn. It's a poem about impossible pursuit, partly because pursuit is barred by the power of the sovereign (Caesar, aka King Henry VIII) and the Ovidian transformations of Boleyn, who takes the form of an animal (a deer, "an hind") but also, in the poem's most famous line, something even more uncatchable: "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind"). The poet yearns to touch, catch, and "hold" the elusive beloved but she is "wild for to hold, though [she] seem tame." To hunt this hind means to risk "running wild" in the sense of total dissolution of the self; for the revenge of the sovereign must be total in nature. Wyatt's social death, his death at court, would precede his inevitable physical death should he be caught in the act of sexual treason. The power of eros becomes the eros of power, with this difference: unable to assume the power of Caesar (itself a power greater than any single body can contain), the power of touch threatens annihilation; and yet such touch, clearly, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

In the American tradition there's overt celebration of touch, mingling, pressing the flesh, but this celebration masks a profound ambivalence. Walt Whitman is surely the poet laureate of touch and its Dionysisan tendency to blur and bend the principium individuationis:

Mine is no callous shell;
I have instant conductors all over me, whether I pass or stop;
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy;
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

From that "harmlessly through me" (implying a fundamental stability of self: "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am") we pass quickly to touch as peak experience, the jouissance of "about as much as I can stand." And the section that follows is even darker:

s this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself;
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me;
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger;
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

The sentries desert every other part of me;
They have left me helpless to a red marauder;
They all come to the headland, to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors;
I talk wildly—I have lost my wits—I and nobody else am the greatest traitor;
I went myself first to the headland—my own hands carried me there.

You villian touch! what are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat;
Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me.

Many commentators see this moment in the poem as a moment of masturbation and not the nigh-unbearable contact with another's flesh. But this is nearly irrelevant to the larger question of the power of "villain touch" to destabilize the self and threaten it with foundering. Je est un autre, as Rimbaud says, and one's own body (Whitman's queer body) may be as "autre" as another's.

Or as Jeff Goldblum's mad scientist puts it in The Fly, "The flesh makes you crazy."

Flash forward a hundred years to the Confessional poets. And when I think about what's most compelling about their work, what makes them sexy--there's no better word--it's not the dubious glamour of insanity ("My mind's not right") but the ways in which Berryman and Lowell and Plath admit the treacherous terrain of tremulous bodies in contact with other bodies into their poems. Consider for example Berryman's own "touch me not" poem, "Dream Song 4":

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact that her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. -- Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls. --

Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.

The seemingly indifferent and self-possessed object that is the desired woman's "compact & delicious body" has the effect of shaking Henry's always precarious subjectivity all to pieces; "fainting with interest" (the first word suggests a Keatsian "swoon"; the latter word suggesting that we are very far from any Kantian idealized aestheticiation of the body-object; Henry's interest in her is decidedly culinary), he is torn between the violently opposed actions of "springing on her" (closing the absolute distance between subject and object) or "falling at her little feet" (abjectifying the self while placing the beloved on a properly Petrarchan pedestal, an action which notably sustains rather than terminates her inaccessibility). Villain touch in this poem is all mental, all fantasy, but it's still powerful enough to shake this speaker apart, calling his minstrel-doppelgänger Mr. Bones into existence in the final strophe, a mark of Henry's habitually split self. "There ought to be a law against Henry / ...there is." It's Henry's identity as transgressor, as transgressed, as divided by painful (erotic or deathly, or both; see "Dream Song 382") contact with others, that makes him and The Dream Songs so memorable.

The question of genre and the comparative fleshliness or bony spiritualization of American poetry connects, I think, directly to this question of contact between subject and object; or in broader national terms, the divide between democratic melting pot and xenophobic nationalism. Of course it was Lowell who gave us the metaphor of "the raw and the cooked"' in poetry, that is so weirdly apt to this question of the role of the flesh, the grotesque and carnivalesque. Lowell meant, broadly, the "raw" poetry of Ginsberg and the New Americans versus the "cooked," more traditionally formal poetry nurtured by the New Criticism. He was referring primarily to poetic form, but as with any strong metaphor, the vehicle of raw and cooked can overpower the tenor of form and bring poetry, abruptly, into more or less sublimated contact with the flesh.

I am tempted to be contrarian here and to argue that, just as Berryman and Lowell are more preoccupied with the raw terrors of embodiment than you might expect, so too is a poet like Ginsberg surprisingly concerned with bodily integrity and the construction of an impermeable subjectivity: the egotistical sublime. The phrase of course evokes John Keats and his notorious characterization of "the camelion poet" as boundariless, permeable body: "A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body." And Ginsberg, who demonstrates Whitmanian sympathy with others in "Howl," does not go so far as Whitman does as to risk dissolution; his "I" exists in ambiguously distanced relation to "the best minds of my generation" who engage in Dionysian ecstasies of gay sex and drugs, and which only comes back into the poem as self-in-touch-and-at-risk with the appearance or reappearance of Carl Solomon: "Ah Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe and now you're really in the total animal soup of time." That's a terrifically ambiguous phrase as far as Lowell's metaphor goes--total animal soup, isn't that somehow raw and cooked? When we are "in the soup" we are in chaotic contact with the heterogenous, and in danger of being eaten besides! But it's Carl who's in the soup, not Ginsberg, who steps back in the second section for his jeremiad against "Moloch" and who only fully inhabits the poem as an I that is "with you in Rockland / where you're madder than I am"; but that repeated phrase, "I'm with you in Rockland" only serves to reiterate the speaker's separation from the "madder" Solomon, who only threatens actual contact "in my dreams" at the poem's conclusion: " in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across / America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night." To my cottage: a strikingly pastoral image evocative of Yeats and Pound in Ireland or, perhaps more pertinently, the person from Porlock who's arrived just in time to prevent Coleridge from dissolving into the total animal soup of "Kublai Khan."

I see that I've yielded to temptation; I see also that pastoral has come up, as I knew it would. Because pastoral is that fantasy of subject-object, culture-nature reconciliation, though in actual pastorals the supposed reconciliation is firmly on the subject's terms (as in Romantic and Transcendentalist pastoral) or more rarely the object's (as in the Objectivist pastoral of an Oppen or a Francis Ponge, "taking the side of things" [Les partis pris des choses]). One might say that an anthology like American Hybrid takes a pastoral position by constructing a wishful "middle landscape" between raw and cooked poetries (editor Cole Swensen, curiously the only of the two editors engaged by the critics in The Monkey and the Wrench, calls it "a thriving center of alterity"). We can imagine a hybrid itself as "raw" or "cooked," with the "cooked" end of the continuum implying synthesis and blending, while "the raw" preserves the individual identities of its components in what I envision as a lightly dressed salad. In general the anthology's critics see it as a cooked anthology that's pretending to be raw--that it represents a re-inscription of white mythology, constructing an imaginary exterior (and superior) to the fraught and intrinsically political zone of contention that is po-biz, from which so many poets and critics regardless of aesthetic position seem to want to escape.

What has this got to do with that villain touch? Everything, if the yearning for touch ("Contact! Contact!" Thoreau cries) weren't always in the Western tradition countered by fear of touch, by our dim or acute suspicion that our boundaries, our bodies, are porous and penetrable. ("Secure our borders!" the Tea Party cries, which like all such movements seeks not political power but the end of politics as such, not just "politics as usual.") To identify with the porous and penetrable is to take a step toward the grotesque (consider the drag queen), inverting powerfully gendered and hierarchical assumptions about who gets to be a speaking (lyric) subject. When young women speak from the uncanny position of the object, as in the gurlesque; or when flarfists make deliberately bad-tasting animal soup out of kitsch; or when the writers associated with New Narrative (I have in mind a loose confederation of largely Bay Area authors, the sons and daughters of Kathy Acker, many of whom are represented in Biting the Error) tell baroque stories of desiring machines and bodies-without-organs; or when almost anyone takes the trouble to translate poems written almost anywhere else in the world (the most intimate and intimidating form of poetic touch, it seems, for American readers)--then we are exploring and exploding, without dreaming of erasing, that terrifying and seductive boundary, permeable and mortal as human skin.

Olson again crystallizes things for me, return us to "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 (withheld)." "No Greek will be able / to discriminate my body"--Olson rejecting the philosophical tradition of humanism running at least from Socrates to Descartes, reducing his body to res extensa. "I have this sense / that I am one / with my skin." A sense refined, I think, by Olson's experience among the Maya, whom as he told Creeley seemed to hold their bodies differently from Americans: "it's so very gentle, so granted, the feel, of touch -- none of that pull, away, which, in the States caused me, for so many years, the deepest sort of questions about my own structure." The return to the body--or not the body, but a body, what a body, Olson's gigantic body, Maximus, mountainous locus of difference. It's easy to read the last lines of this poem as the return of the egotistical sublime, but:

Plus this—plus this:

that forever the geography

which leans in

on me I compell

backwards I compell Gloucester

to yield, to

change

Polis

is this

The landscape (the landscape!) exerts its pressure on Maximus, "leans in" on him, transmits through him a compulsion on Gloucester, not because he is artifex, Mussolini-manque, but because he has a citizen-body, and to be such a transmitter, in contact, on that boundary between self and other, subject and object, well. "Polis / is this."

Black Mountain Days

2011-01-01T09:48:00.006-05:00

The former Studies Building. Photo taken December 30, 2010.

Happy New Year. Back from a week in the environs of Asheville, North Carolina, where we enjoyed a family vacation commune-style with two other families. When not playing with the kids (five of 'em, ranging in age from a few months to seven), I immersed myself in Black Mountain College lore, visiting the tiny storefront museum in downtown Asheville, reading memoirs by Fielding Dawson and Michael Rumaker, and, on the last day, visiting the site of the college, now a summer camp for boys.

Black Mountain College has loomed large in my imagination since I first learned of it when discovering the perplexing and generative tangle that is the work and life of Charles Olson. Like so many American experiments in utopian community, it combined high idealism with wild impracticality; the students and faculty there tried to combine living off the land with the life of the mind, but the latter usually won, so that the place seemed to be perpetually and continually falling apart practically from the moment of its founding by radical educator John Andrew Rice in 1933 to its ignominious unraveling in 1956. There's an affecting anecdote about the days of the college's decline, according to which a wealthy benefactor was supposed to signal whether or not he was going to save the college by sending an airplane over the campus; students and faculty supposedly stood in the fields for days, waiting. Whether or not the story is true, it exactly parallels the story of Charles Fourier's days waiting every afternoon for years after lunch for the wealthy benefactor he'd advertised for to appear, making his dreams of the first utopian phalanstery a reality. Needless to say, these benefactors never appeared; we're left only with the pathos of the frail wishes of these artist-visionaries, hoping against hope that some angel of capitalism would appear to rescue them from--well, capitalism.

The memoirs of Dawson and Rumaker are very different. Dawson's Black Mountain Book is fragmentary, impressionistic, animated by grudges, particularly against Olson himself, with whom Dawson had a falling out subsequent to his days as a student at the college (Olson apparently resented his representation in a previous book of Dawson's about his experiences at the college, the rather wonderfully titled An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline). The Rumaker book does a better job of conveying what it actually felt like to be a student at the college, in spite or because of the fact that it's more conventionally structured as a portrait of the artist as a young man, the author much tougher on his young, directionless, unformed queer self than he is on those who surrounded and instructed him. The portrait of Olson that emerges in Rumaker's book confirms for me my own fascination with the man: like Richard Hugo, the imaginary mentor of a much younger self, he was a gigantic man, alcoholic, sloppy, bruised and bruising, casually sexist, and yet tremendously sensitive, delicate even, obsessed with playing the role of Big Daddy yet arguably more a nurturing figure, androgynous or mother-like. Wanting to be the Master and yet enacting daily for his students, and now his readers, the struggle to become the master, embodying in his own towering flesh and towering Maximus the gap between human and universe.

Somehow I'd gone all this time without hearing Olson's voice, in spite of the many recordings available. But I was stunned by my encounter with these all-too-brief videos of him reading. Here he is reading "The Librarian" in March, 1966:

"Who is / Frank Moore?" Love that. And here he is again:

As one blogger correctly remarks, "His voice is like lightning dragged through smoke." And that accent! It makes him much more homely to me. The videos don't quite convey his size, but they do get a lot of his physicality across: the big gestures, the little smile, the violence with which he opens that bottle (of wine? of beer?) before reading "The Librarian." The blackness of those eyebrows. The shamanic confidence and charisma of his declamation of the poems, which nevertheless continue to convey the partial, rough, unfinished quality that fascinates and sometimes repels me when I read them. Everything the man ever wrote is closer to field notes or correspondence than it is to finished essays or poems (but his actual notes and letters, with the exception of the Mayan Letters, are almost unreadably gnomic or else saturated by the hipster lingo of his day ("you dig," for "you understand," etc.), not unlike Pound's letters). When it works, that rough notational quality transmits the materiality and immediacy of Olson's materials, presenting a marvelously democratic continuity between stimuli inner (personal history, memories, emotions, psychology, and crucially, his own oversized body) and outer (the history and landscape of Gloucester, the Yucatan, the writings of Melville, letters to the editor, etc., etc.). Riding the margin between imwelt and umwelt, populating that margin with his own musical imagination, making us recognize the strangeness and freshness of where and what we are. At its best, Olson's writing dwells in the zone that Thoreau found at once sublime and inhospitable: "The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"

This re-encounter with Olson has me resolved to make him central to the Environmental Writing class I'll be teaching in the coming semester; I believe and hope that, as difficult as his writing can sometimes be, that even dead he can be a charismatic teacher, showing by the example of his words (and through the odd and compelling little documentary about him, Polis Is This, featuring narration by John Malkovich, of all people) and, even more, the example of a man thinking and reaching and assembling, in motion, live so to speak, how a writer can respond to space and place in a kind of simultaneous ecstatic layering of everything one knows and can find out about it.

**********

Coming in March!

Severance Songs
Poems by Joshua Corey

Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky

$16.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-932195-92-7
Poetry

Publication Date: March 2011

In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of alternately fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone.

Advance praise for Severance Songs:

“Joshua Corey’s book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . It is indeed the suppleness of the poet’s voice, in concert with his loves, fears, and the voices that he has ‘stood upon,’ that makes Severance Songs such an extraordinary volume.” — Paul Hoover

“In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these ‘culpability cantos’? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden’s threshold where ‘reaching builds on reaching.’ Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are ‘knotted to one another’s possibilities.’ The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out.”
— Elizabeth Robinson

“These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness, . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess ‘the shipwreck of the singular’ in the maelstrom of the many. . . . (T)he poem is a skipping record of the effort ‘to be less alone,’ ‘to find an algorithm from inside mortal eyes.’ Yet the song itself is implicated, as is each citizen, in the mendacity and the war against meaning, since there is no ‘outside.’”
— Michael Palmer, from “On Joshua Corey” in Conjunctions

Joshua Corey was born in New York City, grew up in northern New Jersey, and graduated from Vassar College in 1993 then earned an M.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. He was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University in 1999, and received his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 2007. He is the author of Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003), Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), and two chapbooks: Compos(t)ition Marble (Pavement Saw Press, 2006) and Hope & Anchor (Noemi Press, 2007). He lives in Illinois and teaches at Lake Forest College.

from Severance Songs:

Thrash metal from a passing car dates

as a means of aggression—sap in blades

answers a human’s humid sprawl. So eyes seek
a line of hills where napalm walked. Anniversary

forswears the details in a triptych, foresees
the third as an artificial lake hemmed
by red dams surrounding creeping mists

into which civilian legs go scissoring.
A made thing, a view of delving, an ack-ack
trembling the Palestine Hotel. Of the earth,
of this foundry, I hew cold knowledge
by handle. At peace I do piece-work, at war

I warehouse for wiser generations
these culpability cantos, weary to put down.

Novel History

2010-12-15T15:22:00.005-05:00

Another semester has come and gone, and I find myself besieged with projects for the winter break. My third book, Severance Songs, is in press and will be released by Tupelo in March (though I'm hoping to have copies to read from in time for the AWP conference in Washington, DC at the beginning of February). GC and I are making progress with The Arcadia Project: our table-of-contents in progress includes some stunning poems which will form, I believe, a new and necessary constellation. Anthologies don't really create anything new, of course, but they can call new attention to what's already there. I have hopes that we will be directing new readerly and critical attention to the burgeoning intersection of innovative, lyric, and environmental poetries.

Then there's the novel, always the novel, proceeding in fits and starts, at times to my eye an incoherent assemblage of narrative odds and ends, at other times suggesting a pattern, even a depth, trompe l'oeil-style. It takes the form, both narratively and in its writing, of an investigation of the past or pasts. Its key chronotopes include: Paris, 1968; New York City in the early Seventies; upstate New York in the mid-Seventies to early Eighties; Vienna just before and after the Great War; Budapest in the Thirties and Forties; present-day Rome, Trieste, Ljubljana, and Chicago. Right now I am immersing myself in novels of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (as magnificent as I'd heard), Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, Sandor Marai's Embers. The Dual Monarchy is an old fascination of mine: I find its atmosphere of an empire built on liberal values in irreversible decline compelling and all-too-relevant to the situation of contemporary America. It's also a key component of the tragic story of the struggle of European Jews to assimilate into Germanic culture, a struggle whose tragic outcome has had a powerful if oblique impact on my own life as the son of a Jewish mother born in Hungary in 1942, whose own parents survived Auschwitz, who seemed to spend significant stretches of her own life imaginatively reliving the suffering she herself was too young to remember. Now I follow, as if in her footsteps. It's a path I've often followed in my poems; I am trying to see if narrative can get me any closer, any more intimate, with the central mystery of the life I seem compelled, if not condemned, to relive.

Writing history presents many opportunities and traps. In the class I took with him at Naropa this past summer, Laird Hunt called it "the hobnailed boot problem": the details that writers weave into their historical fictions end up calling way too much attention to themselves as desperate or feckless attempts to render the world of the past. This is especially notable in those writers who, however deep their historical research, seem unable to imagine human behavior as being itself profoundly inflected by the otherness of the past. Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is one example of this: in spite of the little homespun details about Griet's manner of dress or the kinds of work she does in the kitchen, the novel's language is the sort of degree-zero plainspeak that marks the book as the movie-in-waiting that it is. A more recent example is Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge, a project with some similarity to my own: Orringer imagines the life of her Hungarian-Jewish grandfather when he was a young man, working as an architecture student and graphic designer in the years leading up to and during World War II. Her research is meticulous and she gets many historical details right, yet I never believed for a second that her hero thinks and speaks as a man of his time and place. The problem is exacerbated by her choice of third-person limited narration, putting us close inside Andras' consciousness; that consciousness is so ordinary, so purely reactive to the dire historical events that even a moderately informed reader sees coming from miles away, that it drains away the sense of a living organic world (the goal of mimetic historical writing) and forecloses the possibility of creating the sense of the past as other—another country, as L.P. Hartley (who?) put it.

It's that latter form of historical writing that interests me, and that is both the goal and modus operandi of my own attempt at fiction. The strangeness of the past, and the unknowability of a (m)other's consciousness, met by an urgent need to imagine these things: that's the entire drama of the book. My research is necessarily casual, unmeticulous, intuitive, because I don't pretend to know what can't be known--what it felt like to experience the past, or to be this person--even as I and my narrator(s) are hell-bound to make the attempt. The research I've done is partly factual, but it's more the mood and texture of these vanished worlds that I seek to construct through scraps serendipitously assembled. You could call it a Proustian project, except the Madeleine in question is one I've never tasted; rather, I have to imagine what it is as well as it what it tasted like. Citizen Kane, that greatest of shaggy dog stories, comes to mind: "Rosebud," like Eliot's notes to The Waste Land, explains everything and nothing. It's the pursuit of Rosebud that makes the story, just as every detective story is at its most compelling when the hero is farthest from solving the mystery, but lives immersed in half-fathomed clues, surrounded by witnesses and suspects and femmes fatale, hard up against the limits of his knowledge and of his own character.

For this writer, the pressure of otherness has to manifest through and in language: through the energy of diction, of music, and through the unspooling and hyperextension of syntax. The long, wandering, obsessively cadenced sentences I've been writing do more, I hope, to present that urgent pursuit of history, and the texture of a mind in contact with mystery, than any particular details of tramway stops in turn-of-the century Trieste or the style of whiskers worn by a mid-level official in the service of Franz Joseph ever could.

Hunting Is Painting

2010-11-29T14:07:00.006-05:00

I am very pleased to announce the official release of the first book by the very first Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer, Jessica Savitz's Hunting Is Painting. Here's what I said about Jessica's work last year:

There were a number of challenging and exciting manuscripts submitted for the first annual Plonsker Fellowship at Lake Forest College, and it wasn’t easy to choose among them. But the manuscript submitted by Jessica Savitz, with its arresting declarative title, Hunting Is Painting, leaped from the pile with its deeply and authoritatively strange configurations of lush lyric language that comes close, often, to the condition of song in its use of refrain and repetition; like Gertrude Stein with a larger vocabulary. The poems follow the rigorous logic of the book’s title, a metaphor or allegory of “gun as microscope,” or as she declares with horrifying and truthful matter-of-factness, “Slaughtering the animal / Was like freeing him with a knife / From a little trap.” The hunter’s attributes of ruthlessness, canniness, and respect for one’s prey, formulate the book’s remarkable aesthetic, which concentrates its attention on facts—of personal biography, of animals and their habitats, of artworks and artists—and bring them suddenly into higher resolutions, new configurations. Some of the poems remind me strongly of Whitman in their readiness to empathize with fellow creatures, human and nonhuman. At the same time there’s a predatory fierceness that startles and clears the eye, so that this poet is one who can recognize that “the dying arrangement is a living being” (“dying and animate / to direct light, or to create privacy”). With sharp, sometimes appealingly goofy wit, the poems confront us with the necessary violence of sensemaking: we kill what we notice, and what we do not. But our gaze preserves the objects of the world even as it pierces them, and they in turn pierce us. I get news from these poems about our condition, and about the price artists are all too willing to pay for a snapshot, a painting, or a poem. They innovate upon their own necessity, and bring us closer to the real.

A year later I can affirm that the book is odder, more beautiful, more whimsical and affecting than I first found it. And it has wider ranging subject matter: one of my favorite sections now has to do with the happily doomed love affair of a couple named Snodgrass and Cleo. It's a treat, any way you slice it.

The book is distributed by Northwestern University Press and it's also available on Amazon. Interested would-be reviewers should backchannel me.

And: this is a fine opportunity to remind writers under forty of fiction and hybrid prose that the 2011 deadline for the fourth Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize is April 1, 2011. The judge will be Kate Bernheimer, prolific author and editor of a remarkable anthology of fractured fairy tales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, available now from Penguin Press.

Collaborators with Reality, Part Two

2010-11-14T15:09:00.011-05:00

The future, like the past, belongs to poets who perform the self, who metastasize their corporeality, shame, and will-to-power on the page. When younger women do it we call it the Gurlesque. When younger men do it we don't have a name yet, but the men are there: Anthony Madrid's ghazals and now there's Nick Demske by Nick Demske, both of whom foreground their own names as a sort of body to stand outside of, ex-statically. Here's a little video of Madrid performing (as you'll see the word "reading" is just plain wrong) a poem from his manuscript The Getting Rid of What Cannot Be Done Without at Myopic Books:

Put aside the page and close your eyes, Madrid. Bring us into the presence of the oracular, the medium, the stance of he who testifies to something beyond. A stance that's never (only) ironic.

*

The public has always responded to the writer's personality, or the performance of that personality, and writers have always done a striptease with how much or how little of the "authentic" self and its experience can be located in a given work. The Romantics, broadly speaking (Goethe-Wordsworth-Byron through Dickinson-Whitman) can be defined at least epiphenomenally by the performance of persona, though the grandiosity of the High Romantics has become impossible except ironically. It's Low Romantics like John Clare, combining precision of observation with a performance of abjection and self-consciousness that gets linked, appositively, to the objects of that perception, that offer a way forward now.

*

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

*

Poets are no longer famous, yet they go on performing personality, just like the ordinary "stars" of reality television. Some of them still lay claim to craft, subject matter, something to say, like the contestants on Top Chef or Project Runway. The purer breeds (Real Housewives, Jersey Shore) stand seemingly naked in "the nothingness of scorn and noise, / Into the living sea of waking dreams" to delight and scandalize us. Poets like poems are disposable (but recyclable) commodities. Poems interrupt the prose of life (as the formatting of poems in The New Yorker has always taught us), indistinguishable from cartoons or advertising.

*

The difference between poetry and reality television is that reality television is popular.

*

Warhol's Marilyn Monroe silk screens and his Double Elvis work as metaphors because their images are so common in the culture that they can be used as shorthand, as other generations would have used, say, the sea. Marilyn and Elvis are just as much a part of the natural world as the ocean and a Greek god are.

—David Shields, Reality Hunger #240

But the gods have not returned, as nature has not returned. Celebrities no longer have the iconicity they once had, any more than poets do. (High Romanticism = the Hollywood studio system. Low Romanticism = straight to video.) As Warhol predicted, everyone is equally (un)famous, equally (un)worthy of performance and attention. Romantics of all stripes mine our nostalgia for a glamor, heroism, gods, nature that the individual, even a famous individual, never can possess. (I wish I was Cary Grant, said Cary Grant.) As Schiller says, the sentimentalisch poet always defines himself by self-conscious difference from the naive poet. It doesn't matter whether or not naive poets actually existed. We have had to invent them, as we have invented media to which we deform and conform our lives. Because mimesis, like the sublime and beautiful, is not a quality of objects or artworks. It is a faculty of the self.

*

When I say "collaborators" I mean the decentering (as opposed to the death) of authorship, the defederalization of the author. But I am also thinking of >épuration légale, of those French women with their heads shaved in 1944, marching in ignominy to social death past jeering crowds, bearers of the shame of collaborating with power, sleeping with the enemy, doing what it took to survive.

*

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Collaborators with Reality

2010-10-25T21:45:00.004-04:00

It's been a curious sort of October. On the second I quietly turned forty. It wasn't meant to be that quiet - Emily had planned a secret party for me - but I fell ill with a nasty case of strep throat and spent two weeks in bed, hardly able to swallow or speak, watching the first two seasons of The Rockford Files, reading nothing, writing less, teaching not at all. Now I'm recovered and back at work, thinner, taking a look about me, taking stock of various projects.

More and more I'm aware of, without quite succumbing to, the crisis of confidence in literature which has been rumbling under the surface of the culture since at least the NEA's infamous 2004 "Reading at Risk" report, now in full-blown panic mode with the advent of e-books and the rapid decline of models of literary distribution based upon copyright. This past weekend the British magazine Prospect published a think piece by Tom Chatfield, "Do Writers Need Paper?" It's an elegant bit of hand-wringing, notable for how archaic the laments of nominally successful writers quoted in it are; one Lionel Shriver is quoted saying she has "a conventional authorial life: I get advances sufficient to support me financially; I release my books through traditional publishing houses and write for established newspapers and magazines." She worries that should "electronic publishing takes off in a destructive manner… the kind of fruitful professional life I lead could be consigned to the past." Am I crazy for thinking that sort of "professional life" is already in the past? How many literary writers--heck, how many writers of thrillers and potboilers--make a comfortable living from writing alone? The notion of literary writing as a "profession" seems positively quaint, worlds away from the idea of vocation (with its accompanying whiff of monklike devotion to chastity [originality], obedience [aesthetics], and poverty [poverty]) that functions for me as the necessary veil between writing and the grim progressive specialization that alienates every function of life from every other function.

I digress. As many have observed, the old model of authorship is crumbling, and success is no longer measured in sales but in the size and vibrancy of the networks writers and readers are building together, connections counted in terms of page views, Facebook friends, and the size of one's Google (to use the awkward, vaguely phallic noun-phrase adapted by Keith Gessen in his appropriately titled novel All the Sad Young Literary Men). And as Chatfield observes, the waning of literature as we've known it has hardly meant an end to narrative and storytelling; it's just authorship as we've known it that is dying: "Today, in an age of collaborative media, most of our grandest, most popular narratives are the products of team efforts: from sprawling television dramas like The Sopranos to the latest Hollywood movies or hit videogames." Increasingly, according to Chatfield, the long labor of single authors is being supplanted by collaboration. The writer's garret has been supplanted by the more sociable writer's room familiar from TV shows like 30 Rock, not to mention the writer's workshop (though that may, ironically, be where the myth of the lone genius author makes its very last stand).

It is increasingly fashionable to say that even those of us who are not primarily collaborators - the writers of poems, stories, novels, essays - do not work alone. I am reading David Shields' manifesto Reality Hunger, a compilation of quotes that makes the implicit argument that to remain relevant, writers must seize the means of appropriation and bring larger and less digested chunks of "reality" into their work, shunning the tired artifices of fiction, whose reality-effects are all worn out. Shields lists an interesting constellation of artworks that suggests the porous boundaries of the new genre or anti-genre that he sees forming (the term he seems happiest with is the "lyric essay" associated with John D'Agata, whose statements are cited liberally throughout Shields' book):

Jeff Crouse's plug-in Delete City. The quasi-home movie Open Water. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Joe Frank's radio show In the Dark. The depilation scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Lynn Shelton's unscripted film Humpday ("All the writing takes place in the editing room")..... Curb Your Enthusiasm, which--characteristic of this genre, this ungenre, this antigenre--relies on viewer awareness of the creator's self-consciousness, wobbly manipulation of the gap between person and persona.

You get the idea: these are fundamentally fictions that trespass on the real, that rely for their aesthetic effect on the viewer's consciousness of manipulation (and yet that really was Steve Carrell's chest hair getting ripped out, yowch!). Of course you've noticed that all of Shields' examples thus far come from non-literary media. He gets on shakier ground, in my opinion, when late in this section of the book he finally starts talking about the written equivalent of this sort of reality-performance:

The appeal of Billy Collins is that compared with the frequently hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren't; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone's "real life" (even if the author constantly reminded us how fictionalized that life was). At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, I know all the moments are "moments": staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. I find I can listen to talk radio in a way that I can't abide the network news--the sound of human voices waking before they drown.

Billy Collins? Really? Is that the best example available of a poet who satisfies the new craving for "reality"? It seems to me a long, long distance between Collins' easy-listening poetic and the highfalutin' T.S. Eliot allusion that Shields ends this passage with. And yet Collins is one of the few genuinely popular poets out there, and Shields' manifesto craves and ratifies, more than reality, what is popular. (He could easily have swapped titles with Steven Johnson, whose book is called Everything Bad Is Good For You.) Collins comes off as only slightly more educated Joe Sixpack in his poems; there's just enough erudition and self-consciousness in there to make his readers feel smart, while at the same time the slapdash quality that makes this reader wince is a pleasing mark of the poet's "authenticity." Shields' attack on fiction (notice the snide implicit assault on the postmodern "self-conscious apparatus" of writing that is untethered to "real life") can sound uncomfortably close to an assault on imagination itself.

Yet the man is on to something. What he calls "reality," to take a cue from Wallace Stevens, is really just another level of imagination, except that what's crucial to this antigenre is its arousal of and dependence on the reader's imaginary participation in the work. It's a kind of bait-and-switch: the overt, self-conscious presence of the meta in these works creates the illusion of something incontrovertible and real that the meta qualities of the work floats intangibly above, as metaphysics presumes physics. These shows and texts pull open, to a greater or lesser degree, the suture between authenticity and artifice and invite their audiences to fill the gap, to take pleasure in a sort of sublime. I say "sublime" because the reality effect Shields is after depends on the indeterminacy of the suture: pure documentary with its adherence to verifiable fact is incapable of arousing this emotion, which as Kant tells us depends on the defeat of the understanding and what he calls "vibration": "a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object" (Critique of Judgment, Section 27). We feel reality's presence in the work, but that presence is unquantifiable (if quantified and found wanting the resulting disappointment is titanic; c.f. James Frey, who comes up for frequent discussion later in Shields' book).

There is then a connection to be drawn between the devolution of literature as we once understood it, a semi-autonomous realm of authors whose ownership of their work was sufficient guarantee of its authenticity (and look how much aura clings to authorial names like Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett), and the rise of the paraliterary antigenre that Shields celebrates. Though his celebration strikes many readers as a capitulation, we must take seriously the nexus that Shields' book unfolds between the transformation of literature on the genre level and the transformation of the field of the literary as such into one more facet of an increasingly level media landscape in which the lines between producer and consumer become ever more blurry. The question for writers now, it seems, is whether to join Shields at the barricades of the lyric essay and memoir; to fight a residual action, harkening back to the heroic artifice of authenticity that bears the name of modernism; to write genre fiction (more popular than ever); or to surf the wave, captured by no single authorial identity, finding opportunity in crisis without yielding too quickly to cynicism, curmudgeonliness, or the reality bandwagon.

My intuition suggests, however, whatever paths open or close to individual writers in the next twenty years, that collaboration - in myriad forms - is here to stay, and will be at the center of art's vitality going forward. For artists themselves now assume the role of the "pieces of reality" that compose what continues to be the most compelling and versatile legacy of the twentieth century: the collage.

The Burning Typewriter, or, Elif Batuman Strikes Again

2010-09-15T11:24:00.003-04:00

Elif Batuman has amplified her criticism of the discipline of creative writing (which I've written about before) in a review-essay that she, or more likely her editors, snarkily titles "Get a Real Degree" (elsewhere on the LRB site the piece is given another polemical label: "Down with Creative Writing"). The book under review is Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (though because Batuman is writing in the London Review of Books she reviews the British edition, which means she gets to use the effete yet somehow sinister Anglicism "programme"). McGurl, one gathers from the review, has come to praise rather than to bury the creative writing programs that are now at the center of what used to be called "American literature"; Batuman, however, sharpens the critique more or less implicit in her wonderful memoir of book-induced delirium, The Possessed. The review's title says it all: the MFA in creative writing (she and McGurl focus myopically on fiction, sigh) is implicitly less "real" than the PhD in literature that Batuman herself holds. I, of course, a perennial student, hold both; and I often scrutinize the two, wondering which has done more to illuminate, form, and deform my life.

Batuman's piece gets to the heart of the tension between the two modes of approaching literature and the literary: a literary scholar comes to value historicization and contextualization above all else, and when reading a novel tends to focus on the ways it was influenced and generated by other novels. Self-expression is ancillary to the task of scholarly writing, and there's also the assumption that literature, and the criticism of literature, is a collective enterprise, an ongoing conversation. Lit begets lit, as crit begets crit.

Creative writing students, on the other hand, value self-expression, originality, and "creativity" itself, displaying what McGurl calls "not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but … a commitment to innocence." PhD's are sentimental, in Friedrich Schiller's parlance, and MFA's are naive (an idea pithily expressed in the title of D.G. Myers' book on the history of creative writing programs in the U.S.: The Elephants Teach. That's another bit of snark, expressing the notion that having actual writers teach writing is like having elephants teach zoology).

Batuman's problem with this, aside from the anti-intellectualism and puritanism of the position she ascribes to creative writing, is that it leads to mediocre fiction. There are fascinating observations in her piece classifying the major strains of contemporary American fiction, and the ways in which suffering and being an outsider have been made paradoxically central to the task of writing for the "authenticity" they bestow - McGurl is brilliant on this, apparently, turning the workshop bromide "find your voice" into an imperative to "find someone else's voice," with William Styron's ventriloquism of Nat Turner as the paradigmatic example. There's some meaty stuff in the middle of the essay, and no doubt in McGurl's book, that make both worth reading.

But what I found most compelling about her argument is the claim that workshop culture has produced a remarkable improvement in literary technique (which McGurl compares to the strides made in the 20th century by athletes and technology), and yet the books that contain so many brilliant, limpid, and evocative sentences aren't any good. This isn't McGurl's claim: he thinks that fiction-writing in America is now at an unprecedentedly high level, and the problem is the combination of overproduction and a deficit of readerly attention. But I find Batuman's claim much more convincing: there's a void at the center of the MFA program that we might call "content"; its absence turns technique ("craft") into an end in itself, and does nothing to challenge the solipsism that every American takes as his birthright, but which is fatal to the task of producing literature (the term Batuman the PhD emphatically prefers to "fiction"): a profound imaginative investigation into the real conditions of human existence, always historicized (i.e., possessed of the means of tracking origins, changes, and consequences over time) if not necessarily "historical" (c.f. James Wood's attack on "hysterical realism").

This "content" needs other sources than "experience" (with the most "authentic" of such experience being the suffering of the marginalized): it means the disciplined study of history, geography, and other social studies, and it means the full-hearted embrace of great books. There's a keenness, voracity, or desperation in that last which I'm not sure can be taught, but I did find my PhD studies facilitated my overpowering curiosity about books rather more than my MFA workshops did.

Still, I'd like to say at least one word on behalf of the innocence that Batuman so eloquently criticizes. I do think creative writing needs to be taught differently; my own experience has shown me that a creative writing class that incorporates substantial quantities of reading, and which engages specific content (as my Environmental Writing class does) is richer than a course devoted to a particular genre and its techniques. But practicing writers, especially the important group (a minority, surely) who don't teach, ought to have the right to renounce the task of being village explainers. You do need to study, or devour, literature in order to make your own. But you owe it to no one to make articulating your particular practice any sort of priority, though the rewards for doing so are as ample as they are superficial.

I've spent so much energy, much of it on this blog, on sorting and classification, to the point where I can't read a poem without sorting it into its particular literary-historical bin: this is post-Language, this is post-Confessional, that's nth-generation New York School (like Cypher says about the Matrix: "all I see blonde, brunette, redhead"). I'm addicted to tables and graphemes and other means of placing and locating texts. And I've painstakingly acquired the habits of scholarly writing, which insist that you not write on a given poem or author without familiarizing yourself with "the literature" on that subject - "literature" here losing its sublime qualities and taking on nearly the dead sound with which corporations and salesmen employ that word.

On the cusp of forty, I'm losing interest in this mode of approaching literature, though it's become an ingrained and necessary professional habit (I am, after all, a teacher). There's no pathway back to "innocence" for me, and I'm not sure I'd take it if there were. But I do think it's possible for there to be a dialectic between innocence and experience (Blake surely believed this, and there's also Paul Ricoeur's notion of "second naivete" - thanks to Bobby Baird for mentioning him). I must believe that the mediated historico-literary experience I acquired as a PhD student can be overcome and sublated and integrated into that original, word-drunk voracity that no one taught me (my mother taught me), and that it might be possible to say or make something that I can't explain - so deeply rooted must it be in the most comprehensive modes of experience - but which magnetically attracts, above and behind and beside the hard-won tricks of technique, a content imbuing truth, humor, and wisdom.

2010-09-14T22:37:00.002-04:00

Something to write and not writing it at the other blog.

Announcement: The 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize

2010-09-06T14:26:00.003-04:00

Lake Forest College is pleased to recognize José Perez Beduya as the winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, now in its third year. He will be in residence on the campus of Lake Forest College from February 1 to March 31, 2011, where he will work to complete his winning manuscript, Throng. He will receive $10,000 and, upon editorial approval, the finished book will be published by the &NOW Books imprint of Lake Forest College Press, with distribution by Northwestern University Press. He will also take part in the Lake Forest Literary Festival and offer a series of public presentations while in residence at the College.

The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is awarded to an author under forty years old with no major book publication. This year the winner was selected by guest judge and poet Jennifer Moxley from a field of six finalists chosen by the editors of Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. Ms. Moxley’s latest book is Clampdown (Flood Editions, 2009), which has received enthusiastic reviews in such publications as Ploughshares and The Nation.

Born in Manila, Jose Perez Beduya earned his BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines and his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. His work has appeared in High Chair, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Lana Turner, and Boston Review. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Scholarship at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Jose resides in Ithaca, New York, where he works as a writing tutor for a community college.

Of the winning manuscript, Jennifer Moxley writes, “Jose Perez Beduya’s manuscript-in-progress Throng intelligently layers literary, political, and spiritual registers into a subtly moving work. Throughout Beduya’s manuscript, a shimmering subjectivity—sometimes singular, more often plural—emits an intermittent signal, coming in and out of view like some mysterious lost 'other' flashing a pocket mirror against the sun in hope of rescue. Historically and geographically displaced, the desiderata of this gentle 'we' yet remains the interconnection between human beings. It is common now in poetry to condemn what’s wrong with the world. This makes sense, since so much is so. Less common are songs of spirit and of the existential urgency that does not fade even when everything else is broken.…. His control of form guides the reader into hearing his music while he carefully unfolds the lyric event of each poem.”

The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is made possible by a donation from a local philanthropist who was impressed by the College’s recently established publishing enterprise, Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. The previous winners are Jessica Savitz, whose poetry book Hunting Is Painting will be published in October 2010, and Gretchen E. Henderson, whose work of fiction Galerie de Difformité will be published in October 2011. The series editor is Joshua Corey.

Emerging writers interested in applying for the 2012 residency—in prose or mixed cross-genre—should send a curriculum vita, no more than 30 pages of a manuscript in progress with a separate cover page, and a one-page statement of plans for completion to: Plonsker Residency, Department of English, Lake Forest College, Box A16, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. The author’s name should appear only on the cover page of the manuscript sample. Submissions must be postmarked by April 1, 2011 for consideration by editors Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey. The guest judge will be announced in the coming months. Please send direct inquiries to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: Plonsker Prize.

The 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize Finalists and Semifinalists:

Winner: José Perez Beduya, Ithaca, NY – Throng
First runner-up: Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Southbury, CT – Registers Vanishing
Second runner-up: Mary Hickman, Iowa City, IA – Totem

Finalists:

Geoffrey Babbitt, Findlay, OH – Wind on a Hook
Amaranth Borsuk, Pasadena, CA – Handiwork
Claire Elisabeth Donato, Brooklyn, NY – Off to the Nervous Museum

Semifinalists:
Julie Phillips Brown , Ithaca, NY – The Adjacent Possible
C.M. Burroughs, Pittsburgh, PA – The Vital System
Ryan Downey, South Bend, IN – MAW MAW
Steffi Drewes , Emeryville, CA – untitled
Katherine E. Factor, Idyllwild, CA – Many Had Parasols
Nina Budabin McQuown , Brooklyn, NY – Cruise Ship
Sara Nicholson, Philadelphia, PA – untitled
Robert Ostrom, Brooklyn, NY – Stands Outside
Catherine Theis , Chicago, IL – The Fraud of Good Sleep

Postmodern Pastoral: John Cage

2010-08-05T17:55:00.007-04:00

"During that opening performance, I had seen and heard more acutely and complexly than ever before during a programmed aesthetic event. Very little of what had taken place was in a descriptive or referential relation to the natural world, but when I thought of how it had engaged my attention I could only liken it to watching ocean waves in infinite variety spuming against rock on the coast of Maine, or sky and water becoming one in the heat and stillness of a South Carolina low-country afternoon, or even moving through the endlessly interesting medias race of humanity in downtown Manhattan."

"Master of Nonintention"

"Cage wanted his art to introduce us to the pleasures of nature and everyday life undistorted by domineering ego. His motive, like John Dewey's, was fundamentally environmental: if creature and environment become separated, both die. Almost all of Cage's work, if actively engaged within the terms its structures suggest, directs audience attention to the ambient context in which it takes its time and place."

Cage: "The fifth paragraph of Walden speaks against blind obedience to a blundering oracle. However, chance operations are not mysterious sources of 'the right answers.' They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego's own experience...."

—Joan Retallack, introduction to Musicage.

Miramare: the blog

2010-08-02T23:53:00.003-04:00

In a misguided effort to make procrastination more efficient, I've launched a second blog devoted entirely to the journey of my novel in progress. Come to Miramare and see the sights.

Call for Work: THE ARCADIA PROJECT

2010-07-21T23:09:00.002-04:00

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, photographed in 2008.

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless there’s a subway handy or a record store or some sign that people do not totally regret life.

–Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Scheduled for publication by Ahsahta Press in May 2012, and edited by Joshua Corey & G.C. Waldrep, The Arcadia Project seeks to explore the relationship between the postmodern and the pastoral in contemporary North American poetry.

In the twenty-first century it is only a short leap from civilization and its discontents—from the violent inequities of the “global village”—to the postmodern pastoral. Postmodern and pastoral: two exhausted and empty cultural signifiers recharged and revivified by their apparent antipathy, united by the logic of mutual and nearly assured destruction. With gas and food prices climbing, with the planet’s accelerated warming, with the contraction of our cheap-energy economy and the rapid extinction of plant and animal species, both the flat world of global capitalism and the green world of fond memory are in the process of vanishing before our eyes. As Frederic Jameson once remarked, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” It is to that question of imagination—dystopian and utopian—that this anthology addresses itself.

Any work in English by writers working in North America that addresses the pastoral in a postmodern idiom, vocabulary, or context, or vice versa, is welcome. Please send up to 15 pages of poetry, in standard electronic format (PDF, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .wpd) to Joshua Corey & G.C. Waldrep at postmodernpastoral@gmail.com. Previously published work is acceptable; please provide acknowledgments or a publication history in that case. Deadline: 9/1/10.

Please feel free to forward this call to others, post on your blog, etc. We look forward to reading your work.

On a Sunday

2010-07-18T16:25:00.004-04:00

Trained it down to DePaul's Loop campus this morning to take part in a panel, "Why Writers Should Blog," alongside Tony Trigilio (whose surrealist Shimmy's Blog, co-authored by his half-feral cat, is a treat - check out Shimmy's little one-act play in which the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore show debates the hygiene of fired General Stanley McChrystal) and Jac Jemc (whose Rejection Collection humorously congregates and comments upon the rejection letters she's received). Here's an extremely loose paraphrase of my semi-extempore comments:

Blogging Is Dead; Long Live the Blog

Not too long ago, I could think of no good reason that writers shouldn't blog. At least, not writers who were interested in actual contact with their readers and with other writers - who sought many of the most immediate benefits of publication without having to go through the filter of an actual publisher. But earlier this year Harriet, the blog administered by the Poetry Foundation, announced that it was discontinuing its old format--inviting a diverse group of poets on a rotating basis to blog whatever was on their minds--becoming instead a sort of poetry news aggregator, the 1010 WINS of Parnassus. Part of their reasoning behind this move was that all the "action" in poetry commentary was now taking place on Facebook and Twitter. The blog, they strongly implied, was dead.

It's true that nowadays, a lot of the most interesting discussions, provocations, and manifestos that I used to read on poetry blogs now happen on Facebook. Many of my poetry acquaintances have either abandoned their blogs or simply post much less frequently. But there are obvious problems with the Facebook model of social media, particularly as applied to literature and literary community. Facebook is the ultimate gated community, and what gets posted there is visible only to one's friends; at the same time, the very meaning of the word "friend" has been perhaps permanently diluted by the site. This was brought home to me during the conversations around the "Rethinking Poetics" conference held at Columbia University earlier this summer. It stirred up a great deal of conversation and controversy among participants and non-participants alike. But you weren't going to hear some of the most interesting discussion of the conference unless you were on Facebook. It fell to those attendees with blogs, or access to friends' blogs, to take the conversation into the actual public sphere, where it belongs.

Blogs used to be akin to both the front and back yard of one's literary house. In the front yard you'd make statements to the world at large about who you were and what you were about: there you'd display your topiary animals, your pink flamingos, flaunt the lack of a lawnmower, or what have you. The backyard - the emails and comments streams blogs generate - was where you'd host your barbecues and parties, though unfortunately increasing amounts of energy have had to be spent wrestling with or ejecting one's most unruly or obnoxious guests. Now Facebook is the backyard, for invitees only, and the parties are more civilized and sedate. But what's going on in the front yard? Who's sitting on the porch swing? Who's brewing up a pitcher of lemonade or sangria to offer to one's neighbors, or opening their literary house to those necessary strangers of literature, the readers?

As Gertrude Stein once said, "I write for myself and for strangers." And Facebook makes a poor substitute for the salon she and Alice B. Toklas curated together at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Blogs are for the self - and for strangers - in a way that Facebook can't be. Now, I don't blog as much as I used to, largely because of the demands of teaching and parenting. And no form of new social media has replaced, for me, the task of writing poetry and fiction - the old social media by which one communicates with the ultimate strangers, the great dead writers of the past whom one has loved, and readers unknown and unborn. But blogging has come to feel, in the new context created by Facebook and Twitter (both of which I take full advantage of), less ephemeral than it was - somehow closer to print, or at least to newsprint.

Tony's talk stimulated and confirmed some of these ideas: he called his blog a kind of "performative notebook," which I thought an enormously resonant description. From the beginning, of course, this blog has been a notebook, as its tongue-in-cheek title implies. But it's a notebook in public, written "live" in a way that one never writes for print, for an audience of friends and strangers. There's a marvelous tension between the idea of the notebook - such a solitary creature - and that of performance, which always involves bodily display. There's a high-wire quality to it that's scary and attractive. Finally, we hit upon the useful idea of "the bloggy" - which is to say that blogs are a genre unto themselves, a medium with its own possibilities, a material that resists the writer in characteristic and interesting ways. Blogging for me has long ceased to be ancillary to my writing practice, and is instead a practice in its own right, for its own sake. And in that context blogs are still very much alive.

*****

After the panel, I drifted over to the Art Institute, taking full advantage of my faculty discount to make that amazing museum an extension of ordinary life. Yet a visit there can't help being an event. Notes from a visit to the Modern Wing:

"Abstract Painting"'-'Gerard Richter 2000. From Donna & Howard Stone Collection. Totally gray without being pure gray, like strip layered upon strip of duct tape with intervening lighter grays.

Janine Antoni - Amercan b. 1964. "Mortar and Pestle,"'1999. A photo of a tongue licking an open eye. Can't tell the sexes of licker or licked. Humorous homage to Un Chien Andalou.

By same artist: "Caryatid" (2003). Life-sized photo of woman standing on her head with top of head in vaguely Asian blue and gold vase. The vase itself, broken, stands sculpturally beside the photograph.

Photo in light box by Jeff Wall with a name and image straight out of a Tom Waits song: "Rainfilled Suitcase" (2001).

Katharine Fritsch (German, b 1956). "Ghost and Pool of Blood" (1989). Disturbing sculpture of a white-shrouded, not quite human figure standing before a red pool with what looks like a syrupy consistency.

"Sound&Vision"'- exhibition taking its name from the Bowie song.

Sublime, terrifying video installation by a French artist, Pierre Huyghe, "Les grands ensembles" (The Housing Projects) 1994/2001. Two residential towers in a foggy snow-strewn landscape, with bare Beckettian trees, their lights flashing and syncopating in rhythm with a driving electronic beat. (I mis-typed "a driving"'and my phone turned it into "androgynous.") The buildings are models and you can see it's a sort of diorama, particularly when the trees shake in the wind. But it seems to communicate something lonely and apocalyptic and darkly witty. I wish I could write a poem as simple and yet layered, pregnant, haunted.

Pomo pastoral: John Baldessari's "Songs: 1. Sky/Sea/Sand, 2. Sky/Ice Plant/Grass"' (1973). Photos of a red ball tossed in the air, the photos arranged on the wall to become notes of a musical score. The lowest notes show the balls on the sand of a beach; for the highest notes, it's midair.

On my way out up the stairs I pass a very large canvas by Georgia O'Keefe, "Sky Above Clouds IV," inspired by airplane travel. Reminds me of how Gertrude Stein's sense of landscape was inspired by plane trips, looking down at the earth and seeing Cubism. The info card says the painting has often been compared to Monet's water lilies.

The path to Michigan Avenue passes through Impressionism. Bonjour Gauguin, "Why Are You Angry?" Van Gogh's postman with the luxuriant beard. Ongepotchket mix of furniture with the paintings creates the sense that post-Modern Wing the main museum has become an afterthought. There they are, the lilies themselves: Monet's transcendental myth of light. Haystacks, cathedrals, London. Hello Toulouse-Lautrec, how gaudy and interior you are this afternoon. Harald Sohlberg, you Swede, what are you doing here? Your eerie "Fisherman's Cottage" with its dark foreground of trees foreshadows Magritte. Seurat, pass by, you died young. White-skinned bathers. Where have you gone, John Singer Sergeant? You are like Renoir without as many illusions. A Monet seascape dispels the illusion of multiple picture planes. And out to the grand staircase and the muggy street.

AWP F

2010-07-11T23:22:00.010-04:00

A psychedelic barn-raising.

This past Friday afternoon I got into my car and drove for far too long a time into the middle of pastoral nowhere: the Smith family farm west of Madison, Wisconsin. There I took part in what the organizers, Austin Smith and Mike Theune, call the first annual Arena Wisconsin Poetry Festival. After drinks and food in the house up the hill across the road, we all gathered in the barn for three rounds of poetry readings, featuring Matt Guenette, Chip Corwin, Bri Cavallaro, Meg Johnson, Patrick Moran, Andy Gricevich, Christine Holm, Seth Abramson, Brooks Johnson, and yours truly, as well as others. You'll note that list is awfully short on women, which was the festival's major shortcoming. But aside from that it was a helluva good time.

Austin Smith kicking off the Festival.

Austin is the very young and exceptionally gracious poet who came up with the idea and convinced his parents (his father Daniel is also a poet) to invite several dozen poets from around the upper Midwest to come and read and celebrate. As Mike Theune (the other major organizer) observed, it was a rare opportunity to create a real sense of the local in poetry, while at the same time extending the reach of what "local" means. (Can Chicago be local to Arena, Wisconsin? Apparently it can.)

Mike Theune, the evening's other instigator.

Mike was in rare form that evening (though he did punk out on the small hours hillside campfire that took place afterward - I wish my camera had been capable of capturing the Milky Way stretching overhead). Ubiquitous and gregarious, putting everyone at their ease, he helped make up for Kent Johnson's unfortunate absence by reading a typically scabrous and satirical poem Kent had written about Dean Young and his imitators to us. Later, he and Chip read some hillarious collaborations they'd written together based on the notion of the "purity test" that Tea Partyers supposedly want to administer to Republican candidates.

Austin channeling Robert Bly.

Apparently, Austin had written to Robert Bly (a Wisconsin resident) inviting him to the festival, and had received a nearly illegible but gracious note in reply, along with a poem to be read. Austin did so, in one of Bly's trademark vests. It was one of those moments in which parody and homage blend inseparably together in a kind of Mobius strip.

Andy Gricevich reading.

One of the highlight readings for me came from Andy Gricevich, whose work I hadn't been much familiar with previously but who rocked the house with an understated sort of sound poetry that simulated tuning across radio stations - if those stations were playing a mix of pop music, political theorizing, and existential dread. Other readings that stood out for me were those by Pat Moran (who read from a long sequence that riffs off of the character Harry Lime from The Third Man) and Seth Abramson (I'd never read his poetry, being more familiar with his indefatigable blogging persona, but the poems he read were dark, funny, and disquieting)

Brooks Johnson reading.

I was most startled by Brooks' reading. Brooks happens to be the son of Kent Johnson, and he's a recurring character in Kent's recent poems (see for example Kent's marvelous, unnerving collection Homage to the Last Avant-Garde). He has a goofy and unprepossessing affect when you talk to him, but at the podium he dug down into something fierce, funny, and uncompromising. It turns out he's another Chicago poet, living on the West Side where he helps to run the Mid-Coast Free School, an outfit which offers free classes to the community on subjects as diverse as yoga, "Government Aid and You," and Jacques Lacan.

Austin and Daniel Smith, two of our hosts.

It was a lovely community to suddenly be a part of, if only for a few hours: a genuine Temporary Autonomus Zone or poet-shepherds' pastoral (though there were some unidealizable elements, like the mosquitoes). It renewed my desire to take root more deeply in the Chicago literary community. The upcoming Printers Ball will offer one opportunity for that, but for the most part events like this are rare. It's the steady, slow accretion of connection that counts for the most and lasts the longest. And this was certainly a reminder of the reality of geography, and the almost magical effect of being in a group of others with only night, wind, and cows outside.

Parnassus, the morning after.

The barn by day.

The fields behind the barn.

Hayrolls.

Fenceline with butterfly.

Your humble blogger. Not shown: 101 mosquito bites.

Believe It

2010-07-03T16:07:00.003-04:00

You ask me if I believe it well of course I don't believe it. You ask me if I said it I never said it nor do I believe it nor will anyone believe I could have said such a thing. Even if I said it I said it without subscribing to it which is a form of withdrawing credulousness. Only because you ask me did I say that I might have said it. What you ask me to believe I don't believe and furthermore nobody could believe it and nobody would believe and nobody will believe it you can count on that believe me. Well I have my doubts. Well don't you believe me?

The Trial

2010-06-30T21:58:00.003-04:00

She tried to forget him. He tried to forget that she was trying. She tried exercising more. He tried drinking less. She tried her friends' patience talking about trying to forget. He tried not talking to his friend about her. His friend tried not to listen while thinking about her in different contexts. First one, then another. She tried adjusting her routine: her path to work, her lunch order, the treadmill at the gym next to the treadmill where his friend works out. He tried not to become alarmed at the thickening texture of his trying. His friend tried to avoid his phone calls. She tried not to feel guilty. He tried to get used to hanging up the phone before voice mail came on. He tried to get used to evenings. He tried not to feel ashamed when he saw his friend holding her hand on the street. They tried not to see him staring. He tried on a pathos. She tried on a remorse. His friend didn't have to try, for he was always successful at anything he did.

From a Notebook (July 2009)

2010-06-28T11:44:00.002-04:00

Thought versus the senses. Religion reconciled them, or rather put the senses in service to a prescribed thought. Philosophy versus aesthetics and poetry. Philosophers are perpetually on guard against the seductions of poetry, against metaphor, against taking the world of the senses for the only ground, which obscures truth. Poets are not so guarded but trespass exuberantly, willing to turn any turn of thought or discourse--any language, even and especially philosophical language --into a trope. to aim at truth must poetry then be tropeless--that is, not poetry? It must obey its own law. Yet I'm tantalized by the possibility of a tropeless imagination. Badiou calls it mathematics.

Digression on a (male) fantasy of writing: Betty Blue. In which the animalistic young hero Zorg drives a big machine and has wildly sublime sex with a beautiful young woman while filling an endless series of black notebooks with--what? The muse Betty finds them, types them up, finds a book in them--a novel. And all Zorg has to do to enjoy his success thereafter is smother poor mad one-eyed Betty with a pillow.

The dream there is that writing shall be indistinguishable from life, a life lived abandoned from responsibility to anything but the moment, the sensation. Erotics of the pen, its motion. The labor, the editorial intervention, is given over to a female other, and it drives her mad.

Energy and melancholy. Energy of melancholy. Melancholy as economy: the four humors are systems, an apparatus, for the management of human energy. Melancholy concentrates--the sanguine transmits--the phlegmatic stores up--the choleric broadcasts and scatters. Lisa Robertson: "the little drama of sensitive /expenditure."

Put the question differently. Can poetry be laicized? The fundamental religious impulse is to turn life into allegory: reality is displaced in the name of the divine, the ineffable, the unperceived. Poetry can try and return our attention to matter--to things--yet these things take up numinosity simply by being indicated, as a boat takes on water. But why should poetry be different from other structures of thought and feeling? All the modern languages claim to discover the operations of the not-directly-perceivable. Marx: capital. Freud: the unconscious. Darwin and evolutionary biology: the selfish gene. Badiou suggests that poetry creates a space for choice between and among imperceivables--that is, it creates subjects--through subtraction (Beckett) or multiplication (Pessoa). It's the angle of engagement that matters.

Not then a poetry (or a fiction) that excludes mimesis but which tests it through estrangement (ostranenie), through deliberately "unnatural" (what follows) arrangement, narrative, syntax. Syntax is where the action is--in existential terms, it's where decision happens. The syntax of the novel is called plot. The novel tests representation without abandoning it, though less rigorously perhaps than an Oulipian constraint or procedure would. Ideally I produce something--call it "decisionality"--for the reader without subtracting every readerly pleasure.

Book Return: Notes from Naropa

2010-06-23T00:51:00.012-04:00

Outside the Allen Ginsberg Library at Naropa University.

For one solid week I took leave from my family and from my identity as poet to be a student in Laird Hunt's fiction workshop at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program. I arrived on Sunday afternoon filled with a mixture of excitement and nigh-existential nausea, such as I imagine afflicts secret agents. What would it be like to begin at the beginning--to sit at the seminar table and not be running the seminar--to be an unknown quantity in a tight-knit and storied community--to have so many poetry friends and acquaintances on the faculty while I went as a paying customer?

View of Naropa's front lawn, with a rather splendid tree.

Reader, it was glorious. Having checked my ego at the door, it was delightful to meet my fellow students around the ultramodern, coffin-like table in the shiny new Administration Building, and simply be one of them. I was happy to not be the oldest student in the class; there were quite a few twenty-year olds (a talented, ambitious, articulate lot, I hasten to add--like the best of my own students) but I was not the only one in his thirties and a couple of folks were in their forties. And looking around the room, especially once the class got going, I realized the benefits of taking a creative writing class as a full-fledged adult. I was not there to discover who I was, but what I was capable of doing. There was no vertigo, no posturing--I'm glad to say there was very little of this from my classmates, either. We got right down to business.

Laird Hunt and Julie Carr.

The workshop was excellent, not least for its being a workshop in a truer sense than usual: the emphasis was not on critique, but on producing new work. We read bits of the things we were writing, but the point was not to correct or polish this writing (or to grandstand opinions about it) but simply to hear it--to have a sense of the others were writing, and the immensely varied ways in which we were responding to the prompts and assignments. The title of the course was "Histories"; here's the description as it appears in the catalog:

Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Jesus of Nazareth, and Calamity Jane have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works of prose. We’ll examine texts like Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to explore that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl, posits the historical as its grain of sand. Students will produce their own writings for consideration and helpful critique.

I had had a sense, from his fiction and the little I knew of his biography, that Laird Hunt would be the ideal teacher for a poet trying his hand at fiction, and the gamble paid off. He spends a lot of time with poets--he's married to one--and has a deep appreciation for poetry, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing and the particular resources I as a poet might bring to writing a novel. My taste in fiction is very compatible with his: I revere Sebald and early Ondaatje, and though I hadn't before encountered the Saterstrom book I was drawn in by its unusual form, or forms.

Brian Kitely introduces the next reader with understated savoir-faire.

"Histories" isn't for me the most compelling title for a fiction course; if I had any doubts about choosing it, it's because I don't think of myself as someone who is particularly interested in historical fiction. I would much rather engage with noir or SF. But the class reinvigorated the genre for me; it was approached in such a thoughtful way, and of course the model texts on offer were incredibly rich: in addition to the titles above we also looked at excerpts from Patrick Ourednik's Europeana, Toni Morrison's Beloved (such a strange book, such an unlikely candidate for mainstreaming, yet there it is, fully canonized), Lorine Niedecker's poem "Lake Superior," and one ringer: Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (a not-bad movie but from the looks of the prose utterly bogus and banal).

Jaime Enrique reads from his forthcoming novel about the life of Cervantes.

One of the most effective exercises Laird gave us was designed to confront us with what he called "the hobnailed boot problem"; that is, the often false-seeming or distracting images and details that writers of historical fiction toss into their writing to create that sense of the past. While we did some freewriting on a scene from the past, Laird intoned a few keywords that we had to wrestle with, though we weren't required to incorporate them into the text: "goblet," "Catherine of Aragon," all that great old Medieval Times-type malarkey. I much approved of his general technique as a teacher, which was to get us writing and then to throw a monkey-wrench into the process designed to momentarily estrange one from the task of assembling a mimesis and be confronted by what we were writing as language, material for working and reworking.

I am increasingly convinced that the most interesting fiction is not that which produces the most vivid representation of reality, but which puts mimesis in tension with words and the systems native to words (sentences, paragraphs). One of the books I devoured when not in class, though Laird didn't assign it, was Ronald Sukenick's Narralogues: a loose, sometimes irritating collection of stories with a provocative thesis: that fiction should not be considered as a mode of mimetic art at all, but rather as rhetoric. The goal of this rhetoric, furthermore, is truth: not Platonic truth (which representation will always fail to produce) but truth nevertheless (Sukenick deliberately allies himself with Plato's old enemies the Sophists). A novel is successful not because it represents reality accurately but because it persuades you, not necessarily to any action but of the truth-content of the novel's form. I find much to recommend this theory; not only does it provide a better or more interesting description of what some of the greatest fictions accomplish (Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Woolf and Kafka come to mind) but it brings fiction closer to poetry.

Jennifer Scappetone introducing her "Pop-Up Opera."

While all this was going on--and while I was discovering that my novel is in many senses historical, from its evocation of May '68 in Paris to its preoccupation with the theater of memory--a ferment of talks and readings, as well as a dozen other workshops were happening. Really, when I was researching the various summer writing workshops out there, there was nothing else to compare in terms of the diversity, rigor, and sheer creativity of the faculty: Charles Alexander, Junior Burke, Julie Carr, Linh Dinh, Steve Evans, Thalia Field, Ross Gay, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Laird Hunt, Stephen Graham Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Joanne Kyger, Jaime Manrique, Jennifer Moxley, Jennifer Scappettone, David Trinidad (and that's just for Week One!). Many of the people on this list are acquaintances and friends, and after some momentary hesitation on my part I was glad to find myself included in a number of intensive and convivial gatherings.

A purple pair: Jen Scappetone and the legendary Anne Waldman.

On Not Rethinking Poetics

2010-06-16T20:16:00.007-04:00

This is a week I've devoted to the possibilities of prose, and I am animated and inspired by a diverse constellation of texts, including:

Ronald Sukenick's Narralogues: Truth in Fiction, acquired today, which in its introduction provides the most liberating theoretical approach to fiction that I've ever encountered, and which does a far better job of articulating my discontents and hopes than I have. Briefly, Sukenick argues for fiction as a mode of rhetoric rather than a mode of mimesis, a linguistically self-conscious investigation that seeks to persuade the reader of its truth. It's an inclusive and exciting definition that brings the work of fiction much closer to what I've always thought of as the work of poetry.
Jeremy M. Davies' novel Rose Alley. The prose is ferociously funny and alive. Check out this excerpt to see what I mean.
Two classic texts on the iPad: Ulysses, natch; in honor of Bloomsday I sat down this morning and reread most of the Lotos Eaters chapter. Charlotte Bronte's Villette has also been giving me a great deal of pleasure. Here's Lucy Snowe, the narrator, reflecting on her mental disposition: "I seemed to hold two lives--the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter." What is a writer but someone who insists on merging those lives?
Roberto Bolano's Antwerp. Yes, yes, I know, you've heard enough about Bolano. But this is an extraordinary book, just 78 pages long, the first fiction he ever wrote and therefore very close to poetry. Each chapter is just a page or two in length, consisting of highly paratactic sentences that gradually evolve a sinister narrative or narrative-feeling about sinister goings on at a low-rent resort in Spain. As a back page blurb has it, "Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Bolano's fictional universe: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment that his talent explodes." Apparently Publisher's Weekly decried the book's publication as opportunistic dregs-digging, but I think it's a minor masterpiece, evocative of dread. In Sukenick's terms, it's a persuasive argument for Bolano's terrifying and elegiac vision of the dream that is literature. "Strange necromantic joys," indeed.
Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters. I've only just begun this but it looks to be another hallucinatory sui generis narrative that plays, with a high degree of lyric intelligence, with the ideas of the monstrous and the cyborg (a la Harraway) in particular relation to the fate of Laloo, an immigrant from Punjab/London/here/there. I might assign it for my fall Frankenstein course.

Even as I fall happily down the rabbit-hole of prose, finding it at once closer to poetry than I'd hoped and stranger and more diverse than I could have imagined, my attention is diverted by talk about the "Rethinking Poetics" conference just concluded at Columbia University. Much of this talk, alas, is happening on Facebook, which only serves to reinforce the urgency of the central question that the conference seems to have raised among participants and non-participants alike: who is the poetic "we"? (I can't help but be reminded of the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto surrounded by Comanches; the Masked Man says, "Looks like we're in big trouble," and Tonto replies, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?) Put another way, is there a usably coherent "we" that encompasses all the strains of contemporary innovative poetry, academic and non-, regional and conceptual, abstract lyric and flarf?

A number of conference attendees, and quite a few people who didn't attend, have complained about a sense of exclusion; I won't speak to that, since I wasn't there. (For the reports of some people who were there, see Kasey Mohammad's post-conference thoughts and John Keene's beautifully digressive "poem-report." Hopefully a few more reports will emerge from behind the Facebook firewall soon. ADDENDUM: Stephanie Young has posted a lengthy and heartfelt report that, among other things, takes on Facebook directly: REPOPORT.) But I am interested in this question of "we," especially given this week's experimental immersion in a prose reality that has created for me a temporary sense of distance of poetry and my identity as poet. I am here, really, to try and grow that identity, to make it unruly, so that "poet" and "writer" infect and inflect each other.

Sukenick, or one of his characters, makes the following claim:

"There is no outside any more. Electronics have done away with that kind of spatial metaphor, and even temporal conceptions essential to an avant-garde movement have been annulled in the electrosphere. On the Internet it doesn't matter where you are or when you are."

This is a little too simple--as noted, much of the conversation and complaint about the conference is happening on Facebook, within a virtual network that you have to be "inside" to even be aware of. But it does seem highly relevant to the anxiety that some of the conference's critics are expressing. There is still a lot of institutional energy and cultural capital concentrated in what we can't help but continue to call "the School of Quietude," but it's dissipating fast; a stream of that capital flows steadily into "our" coffers, and yet there's a sense many of us have that the whole game is up. Universities may not exist in their present form for much longer, and seem to be shedding their capacity for the accumulation and distribution of capital nearly as quickly as Big Publishing has. Ironically, the more corporate these institutions become, in a series of moves rationalized as essential for their survival, the less influence they have on our attentions and appetites. The "inside," in other words, is as archaic a category as "outside," though individual insiders and outsiders persist.

There is a fellowship of sorts among poets of the former outside (a phrase as empty and redolent as "post-avant), but is it a community? Individual friendships and affiliations are more persistent and powerful, it seems to me, than the "we" at present, and that may not be a bad thing. "We" has been defined, perhaps inadvertantly by the shutdown of the Poetry Foundation's blog, as something that happens on Facebook, where the pronoun becomes as wavery and false as the word "friend" once it's become a verb. I have Facebook "friends" who don't speak to each other, but who might nevertheless catch glimpses of each other's comments and activities through the medium of the virtual "me." This can be awkward at times but it's real as the social is real.

"Demented and sad, but social." The Facebook "We" of poetry is not, thank God, poetry. There are other forms and modes of filiation, and contra Sukenick, place and region are still important and vital. It is incumbent on me, I believe, to build stronger connections with my fellow Chicago poets, even as I remain part of a larger thing (cosa nostra?) without geographic boundaries and, hopefully, with ever-weakening boundaries as defined by class, ethnicity, education, etc. Readings and talks and panels, academic or non, continue to be crucial, though as Thalia Field suggested yesterday the truest companionship is in the work. And I can be friends with poets who don't share my particular poetics (hi, Chris!), and I can be socially awkward with poets I deeply admire. There are multiple strands and crossings, and arguing can or ought to be compatible with liking. Arguing and liking are both life, values, poetics.

Back to prose, for a few more days anyway. Let poetics take care of itself, and let poets take care.

Technical Difficulties, or My So-Called E-Life

2010-06-10T10:28:00.007-04:00

First, an announcement: if you read this blog, you probably have a brilliant manuscript of poems lying around. Dust it off and send it to Apostrophe Books for their open reading period. They're reading manuscripts between June 1 and August 31. Read their submission guidelines here, and check out the brilliant books they've published by the likes of Catherine Meng and Johannes Göransson here.

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I've been Twittering for about a month now, and find that it in no way replaces blogging or any other long-form writing. The big discovery has been less in creating my own tweets--though the 140-character limitation does appeal to my interest in constrained literature--and more in following the tweets of others. It's fascinating to move out of the "friends" paradigm of Facebook into a much wider world, so that tweets from institutions like WBEZ and the Poetry Foundation are cheek by jowl with tweets from Sarah Silverman, HTML Giant, Bookforum, and Roger Ebert. I like how much more open it feels than Facebook, plus you don't have the creepy privacy issues to worry about.

The other recent digital innovation in my life is the iPad. The rap on the iPad (aside from worrisome questions about the suicide sweatshops in which they're manufactured) is that it's only useful for consumption, rather than production--not only that, but you're consuming within the airtight digital economy regulated by Apple. The first part of this critique is overblown: the iPad is more than functional for light emailing, Twitter, et al, and if I were to spring for a separate keyboard I could happily write on the thing. I would just need a better stand than the crappy strip of plastic that came with the neoprene case I bought at Best Buy--don't make that mistake.

What I have thought hard about is the viability of the iPad as an ereader, and the question of electronic books generally. So far, reading books on the machine is a mixed bag. I don't mind the backlit screen--the iBooks app presents prose beautifully, and Amazon's Kindle app does nearly as nice a job--plus the Kindle has a much greater diversity of books available, including scholarly books which are non-existent in the Apple-controlled universe. But an average price of $10 seems far too high to pay for a virtual book that you can't lend out and can't even be sure of keeping for more than a few years, given the rapid evolution of digital platforms (plus there's the possibility, even the likelihood, of censorship to contend with).

The iBooks app is, at present, hopeless with poetry: when I downloaded a sample of John Ashbery's Notes from the Air all the lines were inexplicably double spaced. A program like iBooks is premised upon the fungibility of prose: each "page" of the book you're reading is subject to radical transformation based on the orientation of the iPad (a single big page like that of a hardcover or two smaller pages like those of a paperback) and the size of the font you choose (this also increases or decreases the number of "pages").

The Kindle app did a somewhat better job of preserving the look of the poems on the page. But the poems with the longest lines presented some awkward rollover issues mitigated only by turning the page into landscape mode (and I am sentimental enough to be attracted to the way iBooks simulates the look of a printed page, which the Kindle app is less successful at doing). The most serious drawback to either platform, however, is the general unavailability of books from small presses: if your primary access to literature comes only through the big New York publishers you hardly have access to literature at all. (There is also a very limited selection of books in translation, but this is hardly a problem confined to e-readers.)

That said, the iPad is proving to be an ideal device for reading poetry: not poetry books as such, but poetry in electronic form. It is far more intuitive and intimate to read poems published in electronic journals such as Action, Yes (check out the latest issue, btw) on the iPad than it is with a laptop or desktop screen. I've never liked reading poems on the Web before--the endless scrolling with mouse or down arrow is distracting and clumsy, and the horizontal orientation of computer screens is ill-suited to the vertical energy of most poems. But scrolling through poems on the iPad in vertical orientation feels as natural to that medium as turning pages is to the medium of the book. It's also brilliant for PDFs, which I've never enjoyed reading on screens and usually have to print out in order to really engage with them. Poetry books and chapbooks in PDF form (such as Tina Darragh and Marcella Durand's collaboration Deep eco pré) are accessible in a new way, and that speaks of very exciting possibilities for the electronic publication and distribution of poetry. Ultimately ebooks and epoems will become their own media, not simply a means of transmitting an experience inevitably different from if not necessarily inferior to the experience of print.

There's a lot of talk these days about the changes that the Web might be making to our brains, turning us all into ADD hunter-gatherers of data and disattuning us from the long rhythms of textual immersion that many critics associate with that perennially dying nineteenth-century literary form, the novel. I do worry about the culture of distraction and the effects it might be having on my own brain. I live a thoroughly wired life: multiple laptops, an iPhone, now the iPad. I am never out of touch with the hive mind. This isn't so much a problem with writing: for better or worse, I am now a thoroughly hypertextual writer, at least when writing here or producing academic prose. I flip constantly back and forth from the document I'm writing to web pages and PDFs, in a peculiar halfway state of mind between research and distraction. But it is harder for me to concentrate on books than it used to be. And one of the reasons I began writing my novel in longhand, I now realize, was to get away from the distractions of the Web. I write poetry on paper for much the same reason. Perhaps the fiction or poetry I could write on the computer wouldn't be worse than the writing I do with a pen, but there is a difference, and I don't know how perceptible that difference might be to readers.

I do my best and most concentrated work in coffee shops and other busy places: the effort of tuning out the aural and visual stimuli of other people helps me attune to the task at hand. In a private space like my office at school I become hungry for stimuli, and so waste what feels like hours with politics blogs and YouTube. It's possible that the new diversity of Internet gadgets might actually help me in this regard: in my office, I could disconnect my computer from the Internet and keep the iPad handy for any Web searches or emails I needed to write. Then the computer could once again become a simple tool for writing, as opposed to an irresistible nexus of stimuli, and the iPad would be more like the stack of books I usually have at my side when I'm writing something.

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This will probably be my last blog post until I land in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday to take part for one week in the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (man, that's fun to type, though I really think it would be more progressive of them to change it to Embodied Poetics). I'm taking a fiction class with Laird Hunt; it will be strange and I hope energizing to be a student again after all these years. After that I'll be spending a week in Arizona (should I bring my passport?) with family before returning to Chicago and the secret poetry project I'll be prepared to reveal at summer's end.

Aqualung

2010-06-01T09:31:00.006-04:00

What it comes down to - my extravagant claim that "only poetry can counter the Big Lie of power" - is the peculiar status of poetry's medium, words. They are not material, though they have the material properties of sound, appearance, and history. Nor are they wholly conceptual or transparent vehicles for reference. This is what makes it possible for poetry to do more than describe--to go beyond the judicious study of the reality-based community. Poetry creates connections in language with the potential to restructure perception and to stimulate new thinking. If the language of empire is lethally performative--turning the disaster in the Gulf into an interesting technical problem with its own anesthetizing vocabulary ("top kill," "junk shot," "relief well"), or the Gaza flotilla raid into "military acts of defense"--poetic language performs deterritorialization, creating new configurations which invite thought, perception, realization.

Marcella Durand puts it more eloquently than I do at the conclusion of her essay "The Ecology of Poetry," found in the anthology I am currently devouring, Brenda Iijima's eco language reader:

Most other disciplines, such as biology, oceanography, mathematics are usually obliged to separate their data and observations into discrete topics. You're not really supposed to link your findings about sea birds nesting on a remote Arctic island with the drought in the West. But as a poet, you certainly can. And you can do it in a way that journalists can't—you can do it in a way that is concentrated, that alters perception, that permanently alters language or a linguistic structure. Because poets work in a medium that not only is in itself an art, but an art that interacts with the exterior world—with things, events, systems—and through this multidimensional aspect of poetry, poets can be an essential catalyst for increased perception, and increased change. (124)

Durand claims for poetry the territory that my Lake Forest colleague Glenn Adelson calls "hard interdisciplinarity": the blending and blurring of interdisciplinary lines of study and knowledge-production in a rigorous and demanding way. At the same time, poetry is itself a discipline, preoccupied as Durand says with "systems" made up in language:

Experimental ecological poets are concerned with the links between words and sentences, stanzas, paragraphs,, and how these systems link with energy and matter—that is, the exterior world. And to return to the idea of equality of value, such equalization of subject/object-object/subject frees up the poet's specialized abilities to associate. Association, juxtaposition, and metaphor are tools that the poet can use to address larger systems. (123)

It's not a coincidence that Durand's claims for poetry, which are nearly as extravagant as my own, are linked with ecology, which is or ought to be the interdisciplinary discipline of our time. Poetry and ecology fit well together because both investigate systems and systematicity without themselves being systems, using specialized tools that are neither wholly empirical/material nor wholly theoretical/conceptual.

But ecology, like poetry, has a problem: in spite of its interdisciplinary character, it's still, well, hard. And the ecological narrative seems to have all but foundered in recent years, as persuasively argued in a controversial article, "The Death of Environmentalism," available for perusal at Grist.org. Ecology and environmentalism have not persuaded the mass of people of the essential truth of interconnectedness; they have not undone the poisonous, fundamentally pastoral narrative of "nature" as something outside of and separate from us. Whether you see "nature" as something to be exploited, managed, or protected, that implicitly hierarchical structure of separation is the crumbling pillar that upholds our entire technological civilization. The myths of the wilderness and the garden, then, are just as limiting and destructive to the new thought we need as the countervailing narrative that makes ecology (literally, "home knowledge," oikos logos) a sideshow to economy ("home management").

The title of this post refers to another Jethro Tull song; I'm not interested in the lyrics this time (about a dirty old man leering at schoolgirls) but the old-fashioned name for an oxygen tank for underwater exploration, which makes it possible for creatures of air and land to experience another element. A modern aqualung is a rebreather, which Wikipedia tells us is a more efficient and economical form of breathing equipment that recycles the user's own breath while adding oxygen to the mix; this creates less "noise" in that the user generates few bubbles, which on the one hand is less disruptive to marine life and permits closer observation, and on the other hand is useful to military commandos because it allows them to approach the enemy undetected.

Poetry, then, is a kind of aqualung or rebreather, recycling available words and discourses while adding something new and potentially life-giving to the mix. It enables the ecological thinking that we so desperately need now. It makes, in spite of postmodernism, the rediscovery of depths possible. And, I maintain, it's this kind of thinking with/through/to "things as they exist" (Zukofsky, "An Objective") that can counter the discourses of power.

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The dark coincidence of my turn to Leslie Scalapino and her recent passing has not escaped me. I'm saddened that my rediscovery of her work must take place without her actually being and writing in the world.

Merrill Gilfillan, from The Seasons

2010-05-24T12:18:00.002-04:00

"But this is where I place it, the earliest determination to write poems: a nearly wordless feeling of potential convening, glimpses of the two axials of language interbraiding: the horizontal (the simple recounting, that redemption and testimony within the meditative matrix and course of the mothertongue) and the vertical (the cut of the words in formation above the head where words were not seconds before, the songspur and sonics in the wings of meaning."

Thick as a Brick

2010-05-20T00:01:00.003-04:00

Reading one of the thorniest and most interesting exchanges in Firestone and Lomax's Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, between Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino. (A modified excerpt from the correspondence is available here.) It kicks off with a 2004 letter from Scalapino in which she tries to explain her own poetic practice and how it relates to a subject which has not lost any urgency since that long-ago election year: "the relation of writing to events." That deceptively simple phrase encapsulates the question/declaration perennially phrased as "Poetry makes nothing happen" (Auden) / "No one listens to poetry" (Spicer) / "Can poetry matter?" (Dana Gioia, et al) and two more recent responses to the same anxiety: Stephen Burt's gently deprecating "Art vs. Laundry" and Alan Davies' fiery "The Dea(r)th of Poetry" (it doesn't surprise me to learn that Davies' father was a preacher). I also have in mind my colleague Bob Archambeau's recent
posts on the Cambridge Poets and the exaggerated claims sometimes made for the political efficacy of their work. Elsewhere this anxiety gets expressed in vitriol directed toward MFA programs / Internet culture / youth. But the Goldman/Scalapino dialogue suggests an alternative to codgerish despair on the one hand and triumphant insularism on the other.

In the course of their correspondence, Goldman and Scalapino touch on the infamous remarks on "the reality-based community" that Ron Suskind elicited from an anonymous high official in the second Bush administration, worth requoting here:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I still get a chill from the barefaced arrogance that radiates from what Goldman calls "the (psychotic) state of self-grounding, unpuncturable, unrevisable self-confidence in Bush's cohort." It's pungent evidence, if more evidence were needed, of the ethical bankruptcy of postmodernism in its purest forms, akin to the news about the Israeli army's incorporation of the theory of Deleuze and Guattari into their urban warfare strategies.* But the response to this is not, cannot be any sort of return to first principles, enlightenment-vintage or otherwise. There is no democratic instrument for the imposition of values; only individuals can be motivated to recall themselves to thinking, and only individuals can choose to enter the bonds of solidarity that can bring about change.

The preoccupation of writers and intellectuals is or ought to be that function that writing is better equipped to perform than any other art form: to recall readers to the act of thinking. Scalapino makes that point in her first letter to Goldman. She first draws a distinction between what she sees herself as doing and what "the poets near to me" (aka the Language poets) were doing: trying "to consider relation of 'being' to history.' On the one hand, events one does (and events in the world) are not the being (are not one). On the other hand, 'to fall out' of these events in the world… is not to be at all, not to have ever been."

"Being," then, stands in history without being of it, yet to step out of that history—to take the observer's position—is to not be at all (one's being may be at its most ideological when one does not act). That's the moment in which poetry becomes the poetry that makes nothing happen: the poet observes, stands outside, and describes:

Descriptive language is an example of "falling out of" (or never having been in, always separate from) one's own motions described there. Such as: to describe events or to reference ideas already in place or to discuss other people's ideas, rather than one's writing being the act of thinking, an action that would also be an invention occurring there. Sometimes poets (I noticed this in the 80s) would reject even writing a thought process (at all), taking this for descriptive rather than the act of thinking.

This is an incisive critique of what Charles Altieri calls "the scenic mode" in American poetry: a poetry that describes the world, however elegantly or with whatever degree of rueful poignancy, does not bring any pressure of thought on the world; it is not "an invention occurring there." For Scalapino this "invention" takes place on the level of syntax, a form of movement different from yet related to—in a non-representational way—the movement of bodies, which is the ground of action and history. "I wanted the writing to be that gap: the writing being life, real-time minute motions (physical movements or events) but being or are these (minute motions) as syntax (not representation of the events)." She defines her poetic syntax alternately as "a sound-shape which is… creating alternate interpretations" and as "memory trace or conceptual shape."

The strangeness of Scalapino's syntax (a brief example) keeps pushing the reader away from representation or narrative and into the multifoliate gap between writing/being/representation/history, a gap which under ideal circumstances we are led to think our way into and through and out of. But here is where I re-encounter Spicer's "No one listens to poetry," because that syntax is under such pressure that it either defies comprehension or becomes purely formal (it's the same thing), so that the truth-content of the poem eludes the reader. This is where, for me, lyric comes back into the equation: beauty or buzz can seduce the distracted reader into entering that gap between word and world—that vibrating force field unique to the poetry that dislocates speech and representation. And yet I'm cognizant of the danger that the field itself, its hum, can become mere sensation—that my default mode for responding to a poem, even a "difficult" poem, is aesthetic delectation. Thought comes later, and—I'll be honest—sometimes doesn't come at all. The poem can resist my intelligence wholly successfully, and I'll still enjoy it, as long as it stimulates me not to thought (hypostasis, noun-state) but to thinking (the only verb that connects being with becoming).

Scalapino's practice, like almost everything avant-garde, is a mode of collage, which emphasizes the disordering or de-hierarchizing of elements over the magpie bricolage of unlike elements. It's a bit like the difference between atonal music's dethronement of melody—which can sound like the untrained ear like an attack on music itself—and the DJ's mash-up that renders familiar sounds strange (what Danger Mouse did in The Grey Album) and turns unfamiliar unmusical sounds into something you can dance to (D.J. Spooky). It's a mode of what I call intensive collage—it breaks inward—as opposed to extensive collage. To put it another way, collage is a mode of deterritorialization, but whereas extensive collage in the mode of Pound and Olson is often didactic and reterritorializing, intensive collage at its purest maintains multiple possibilities as multiple, so that any strong interpretive move made by the reader toward "meaning" is to miss the point, which is to be in the thinking that makes the poem. Scalapino writes:

It means that anything occurring impinges on and alters everything else—equally effective in the sense of large and small are part of the context. There's no hierarchy (in existence), though it occurs socially created and created by animals, authority does not derive from it. The writing enables one to see that and be 'without' it. A poem can be a terrain where hierarchy can be undone or not occur (in the writing), but obviously the writing does not make it not occur in the world. So, its subject is also the relation of conceptual to phenomena, conceptual being an action also. Yet even proposing conceptual non-hierarchy frequently meets with great resistance (usually).

What has this got to do with the relation of poetry to events? Perhaps only that that relation is thinking, a mode of cognition that, as Heidegger suggests, is very close to the poetic, and fundamentally different from the discursive language that envelops "judicious study of discernible reality." It may be the only hope that people without power—subjects or subalterns of empire—have of anticipating, resisting, and reimagining the violent redescription of the world. Though it should go without saying that this imaginative and de-hierarchizing mode of thought is insufficient without actual political action, actual solidarity, actual resistance. But how can the latter take place without this work of the imagination?

Put another way: only poetry can counter the Big Lie of power. We've lived through a decade in which reasonable and intelligent and empirically acute people—God bless 'em—pointed out as strenuously and as often as possible that the emperor had no clothes. And it seems to have done almost no good at all. All we got were some scathingly accurate and politically ineffectual descriptions of a reality that the empire had already moved on from, just as Bush's Rasputin said.

It may seem that I'm falling into the trap of according an importance to poetry entirely disproportionate to its actual infinitesimal influence in the world. Maybe I am. But it's my hope that the poetry of collage, of deterritorialization, really is in spite of everything capable of becoming an avant-garde in the literal sense: the leading edge of discourse-formation, of new imaginative possibilities for the arrangements of words and—if only by analogy and allegory—social arrangements and structures.

And yet I can't content myself with the belief that it's enough that this stuff gets written and that the same people who write the stuff read it. I dream of a wider readership for poetry without compromise with the bugbear of accessibility. Some of the other writers and critics I referenced in my first paragraph have contributions to make to this possibility. I do think that if there were more and better poetry criticism out there it might build a bridge to the many highly literate people out there who read everything but poetry. Alan Davies calls for a rigor and candor in poetry criticism that is undoubtedly lacking at the moment (though I wonder if he's spent much time with The Constant Critic or the wonderfully in-depth reviews published by The Nation. Davies' essay evokes a 2009 discussion at Mayday, "Some Darker Bouquets," in which Kent Johnson and a host of interlocutors debate the role of the negative review in poetry. By far the best solution on offer, I think, is not Kent's proposal of anonymous reviews (who would write them?) but encouraging non-poets to take up the task; poetry needs the robust community of critics that nearly every other art form can claim. But this is a circular argument, for what will induce those non-poets to read poetry intensively and seriously enough to critique it? What will induce them to get some skin in the game?

The title of my post refers of course to one of my guilty pleasures: the eponymous prog-rock concept album released in 1972 by Jethro Tull. Written and performed with tongue firmly in Ian Anderson's cheek, the album features deliberately abstruse, pretentious, quasi-sensical lyrics that were one of my first introductions, as a teenager, to the living possibilities of poetic language. I have always been haunted by the title track, which manages to evoke both of the Lears (the King and Edward):

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.

My words but a whisper -- your deafness a SHOUT.

I may make you feel but I can't make you think.

Your sperm's in the gutter -- your love's in the sink.

So you ride yourselves over the fields and

you make all your animal deals and

your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

I feel this is as eloquent a statement as any of the dilemma of the artist who wants his audience to think, but whose means of doing so—the sensuality of materials like words and narratives and musical notes—are incommensurate with thinking. The energies of the "you" addressed by the singer are dismembered and sterile, and the discursive knowledge of "your wise men" cannot capture how it feels to be thick as a brick—to be in the gap between being and becoming, the gap of not-knowing. How it feels—because this thinking, this conceptual activity that collage writing demands of the reader, is a feeling. The trouble is, to most readers, it feels an awful lot like feeling stupid. Whereas those of us who have habituated ourselves to these forms dare to be stupid (to pull another déclassé musical reference out of my hat) and feel not-knowing as an exhilaration, an ecstasy that returns us, momentarily, to being.

Poetry must be in a desperate situation indeed if I'm turning to Jethro Tull, right? But my point is that people want to feel something when they read, and that poetic thinking is a feeling—is an aesthetic experience in its own right, akin to the sublime. One is in the presence of the ungraspable, your deepest imaginative powers—the Romantics called it Reason—stretched and exercised by the experience. The extensive poem—remnant epic—puts us in contact with the terror of connection—makes perceptible the logic of the world (of capital) that our media are designed to distract us from, without necessarily succumbing to the logic of paranoia and the conspiracy theory. The intensive poem, whose logic is fundamentally lyric, connects us with something more elusive; like Eliot's shred of platinum it catalyzies a reaction between body and soul, feeling and thinking, being and becoming.

And yeah, parts of that album are frigging sublime, and I stand by that.

* For a poetic reflection on this phenomenon see Rachel Zolf's new book Neighbour Procedure, the title of which, I learn from Vanessa Place's review, "refers to an entry technique deployed by Israeli soldiers in which Palestinians are forced to break the walls inside their neighbor's houses, allowing the soldiers to move laterally between houses." Among other things, this concept puts a new and chilling spin on the title of one of my favorite Kevin Davies' poems, Lateral Argument.

Cinematic Prose and Its Posthuman Other

2010-05-01T15:26:00.004-04:00

In one week Lake Forest will hold its commencement and I'll take off my professor's hat for the summer. A few weeks later, in June, I will become a student again for one week at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program. Partly, I'm doing this for pedagogical purposes; it's been many years since I took part in a writing workshop and now that I teach them, I'd like to re-experience what it's like to participate in one. Mainly, it's to "come out" further as a poet who writes fiction, into a critical space that will, I hope, suitably problematize what fiction is and help me to understand just what it and I can do for each other.

I have hopes for this workshop's providing a doorway into the study of fiction, or at least of writing that includes the fictional, that will not simply reproduce the mainstream aesthetic. One of the writers I might study with is Thalia Field, quoted in my previous post, and she's come up with a useful bit of shorthand for that aesthetic that she calls "cinematic prose." At the same time I have no wish to reproduce the affectless postmodern collage aesthetic that I've encountered in my initial forays (though I do often find that work compelling, especially at its most abstract and Asperbergers-esque, as in the work of Lydia Davis or Tao Lin).

The other class I might take will be led by Laird Hunt; I love his novel The Impossibly for the way it plays with noir conventions while inventing an abstract narrative language that constantly deflects the reader from simple identification with its narrator. Though that narrator does happen to be another affectless, Aspergers-esque figure, there's a baroque quality to the lacunae in the thriller plot that he unfolds for us that suggests something more interesting is going on than postmodern minimalism. That and what little I've seen of Hunt's other fiction suggests an appetite for something more heightened--what I think of as the operatic, which is another alternative to the cinematic.

Why we must resort to analogies with performance genres to get at the new in fiction is another question that Field perhaps is best equipped to answer, since her own hard-to-classify writing blends aspects of the essay, the poem, fiction, and most significantly, theater. In one interview pertaining to the "lyric essay," she notes that if you read her work "solely from the point of view of the essay, you might find it lacking. In the same way if you approach it as a story, or certainly as a poem, you would find other things lacking." Yet I can attest that there's nothing minimal about Field's writing; she too is a practitioner of narrative baroquely Swiss-cheesed baroque by lacunae and digression.

In her Context interview (a periodical produced by the great Dalkey Archive Press), Field articulates a compelling defense of hybrid or cross-genre work, taking from John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” the idea that “language can refresh form (naming) by prioritizing nonconceptual freedom rather than ideas which precede perception.” She defends postmodern fragmentation as an ecological imperative: “Cut open to expose the human-centered narrative for its arrogance and ignorance, the complex impartiality of the world without cinematic point of view makes for disorienting, broken, beautiful frames.”

Notice how the word “frames” preserves some analogy to cinema and visual art, even as Field criticizes “cinematic point of view” for the way in which it reinforces the ideology of the rugged individualist that filmed narratives deploy. I am reminded of possibly my favorite of the five remakes of the 1967 short film The Perfect Human that Jørgen Leth directs under constraints imposed by Lars von Trier in The Five Obstructions: “The Perfect Human: Brussels.” This is the remake that Leth makes without actual constraints (or to put it another way, without von Trier’s malicious yet useful mode of collaboration), as punishment for having broken the rules in the previous version, “The Perfect Human: Bombay.” It’s an elliptical noir that deploys certain tropes of the thriller—a mysterious man on a mysterious mission, an equally mysterious and beautiful “woman,” hotels, rendezvous, evening dress, sex—while eliding and eluding the thriller plot. Its most salient feature for this discussion is the voice-over narration, in which an unseen man speculates about the film’s hero, “the perfect man.” “Who is he? I would like to know something more about him. I have seen him smoke a cigarette. Does he think about fucking?” These questions focus the viewer’s attention onto the cinematic tropism unfolding before his eyes: it is enough for a camera to follow a man through city streets and into a lobby where he asks the clerk if he has any messages for us to identify with and invest in his singularity, his protagonism (try this even more unwieldy coinage: protagon-organism). The literary device of the voice-over (which any film student will tell you is a sign of weakness, a crutch that breaks faith with the codes of visual storytelling) breaks the very “perfection” that the film, qua film, pursues.

If film can transgress its own form in pursuit of truth by incorporating the literary, Field seems to suggest that literature must dissociate itself from the cinematic if it is to break from its compulsive anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. “Cinematic prose contains consistent scale, in space and time, and the human figure, whether in close-up or establishing shot, predominates. This aesthetic holds because ultimately we don’t spend a lot of time in the awareness of our world without ourselves as tragic heroes of it.” Instead, she suggests that "Revising our obsession with domestic psychosymbolic tragedies (set on the literary equivalent of Hollywood “soundstages”) could shake the narrow focus and force us to listen differently" to "paradoxical, poly-vocal, cacophonous" stories.

To keep this in a literary frame, you could say that Field advocates a poetics of heteroglossia over monoglossia, and that what takes her beyond Bakhtin is her desire to incorporate not merely non-literary elements and voices into her writing, but also the nonhuman. A heteroglossia of the posthuman exceeds, I think, the bounds of any cinema unless that cinema abandons narrative or even representation (think of Stan Brakhage). A radical materialism, it would seek to embody discourse (making social production discernible and available to critique), and discover discourse in the body (human bodies, animal bodies). It's no wonder that Field's second book of unclassifiable but visually poetic pieces is titled Incarnate: Story Material.

The "cinematic prose" analogy fascinates me because my own fictional investigation began with wondering what it was, exactly, that a prose fiction could do that wasn't at this stage in history a belated form of cinema. My protagonist, or one of them, is a deliberately flat, "perfect" character, very much an object for the imaginary omniscient camera to track through the plot. I am not myself ready to abandon the realm of domestic psychosymbolic tragedy; I hope rather than suppressing that element to heighten it, pushing again toward the operatic, which I would define as a mode that explores opportunities for heightened feeling, for excesses of feeling to match the excesses of language that attract me. For I am simply not a minimalist (nor am I a Buddhist practitioner of non-attachment, as Field is). As much as I admire Beckett, I imprinted early on Joyce, lovely tenor, who certainly remains inexhaustibly "paradoxical, poly-vocal, cacophonous."

It seems then, as ever, I am caught somewhere in the muddy middle between romanticism and materialism, even in my fiction writing; skeptical of humanism but not ready to embrace my inner cyborg either. Perhaps the best I can hope for is that my ambivalence will defend me from received wisdom of whatever stripe. In the meantime I'd like to borrow Field's motto, "Hello, friendly edge!" Whether or not I take her workshop, I feel she's already taught me quite a bit.

Ethic-Aesthetic: Thalia Field

2010-04-30T23:12:00.000-04:00

TF: Is nonaction an art? A technique? A practice? Maybe it’s simply more of a discipline, in the ethical sense. Can I allow my work to emerge without overinterfering with it, fabricating my ideas about it, growing attached to outcome, the very future of it? Can I let it become what it is, despite the fragments, nonsense, new-sense, noise? It’s simple: don’t force things. Don’t have a Big Idea. In life as well as in writing, can I minimize unnecessary interference, unnecessary aggression? Can I open myself up beyond my own comfort? Can I abide with allowance and impartiality, two disciplines of nonaction?

The Truth and Life of Myth

2010-04-27T17:13:00.003-04:00

This past Saturday I made it down to the School of the Art Institute to catch the tail end of the Robert Duncan Symposium. It's apt, I think, that they called it a symposium rather than a conference, because the point seemed to be to celebrate and reflect on Duncan more than to criticize him. I was only able to attend the last pieces: Michael Palmer's poetry reading, and a conversation between Peter O'Leary, Joseph Donahue, and Nathaniel Mackey. But it was more than enough to stimulate a great deal of thought and reflection on my part.

On the back of the Symposium program was placed this quote from the essay from which it took its title, "The Truth and Life of Myth":

The surety of the myth for the poet has such force that it operates as a primary reality in itself, having volition. The mythic content comes to us, commanding the design of the poem; it calls the poet into action, and with whatever lore and craft he has prepared himself for that call, he must answer to give body in the poem to the formative will.

I have a lot of resistance to Duncan, which centers on my resistance to myth and magick and the occultist claims he and his circle were inclined to make about poetry. I'm too much a child of the Enlightenment not to be repelled by the figure Duncan cuts as a seer: he really puts the mystification into mystic. Yet I find many of his poems profoundly moving, and even appropriated "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" as an epithalamium to be read at my wedding, recentering the quest it describes for originary creative power (which necessarily brushes up against darkness and the demonic) inside that most mythic and everyday of ritual constructs, marriage. So profound ambivalence is what I carry into any encounter with Duncan as bearer of the part of the Modernist tradition that engages most profoundly with myth and hermetic knowledge, as opposed to the Modernism of cultural critique and collage which I find a far more congenial site of engagement.

Ron Silliman, an anti-Duncan if ever there was one (really, the entire Language tradition is against Duncan), once wrote perceptively if polemically about how the hermetic knowledge that Duncan and his circle used as an armature for poetry had been supplanted by Silliman's generation by Marxism and post-structuralism. And it was thinking about this, as first I listened to Palmer read and then to the conversation with Mackey, that has helped me to articulate my discomfort and fascination with the place of myth in poetry. For the poet, myth is a form of capital, and too often the Modernist engagement with myth has looked to me like a form of primitive accumulation, given that form of capital acquisition's reliance on enclosure. That is, the desire to create a hermetic circle, open only to initiates, has the effect, intentionally or not, of excluding those with no knowledge (literally, no investment) in the fate of Osiris or who Aleister Crowley was or ritual sacrifice in ancient Sumeria or whatever. It all seems impossibly remote from how life is actually lived. And, if you're at all invested in a materialist worldview, it seems less like a quest for reality than an escape from it, a shying away from the forces of social production that actually make the world.

But of course myth is not the only form of poetic capital, and the discourses of post-structuralism, as Ron observed, make a dandy sphere of hermetic knowledge penetrable only by initiates; as my colleague Bob Archambeau (who provides excellent coverage of the day I missed over at his blog) remarked this afternoon, the major difference is that abstractions like difference assume the role that myth reserves for the gods. And there are generational differences; in his conversation with Mackey, Joseph Donahue remarked that in Michael Palmer's work there's a layer of irony calling attention to the gap between the world of myth and the disclosure of reality that myth promises, whereas Duncan's writing is an irony-free zone. (This also explains my preference, when the chips are down, for Jack Spicer, and my sense that ours is a fundamentally Spicerian moment.)

Post-structuralism is the received mythic structure of poets younger than Palmer, many of whom are disturbingly uncritical about it; at least, that's how I'd describe the post-Language crowd. Frank O'Hara, on the other hand, freely mythologized his own life, offering a charismatic model for poetry's relation to myth that has similarly become encased in irony for the nth-generation of New York School practitioners (a practice that goes hand in hand with the ironic mythification of pop culture—though you can't ironize capital, and references to Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the 1980s can be just as effective and exlusionary in establishing one's cultural bona fides as Pound's use of Greek and Chinese characters).

The poets who still engage with myth qua myth are harder to assimilate into groups, which is one of their strengths: here I think of Olson-indebted poets like C.S. Giscombe and Dan Bouchard, and Duncan-inflected poets like some of those prominently featured at the symposium: Mackey of course (whose great contribution comes in reimagining and restructuring the Modernist appropriation of African myth) and also Peter O'Leary. If I had to choose a mode, I'd say Olson's archeology of morning is a more attractive model for the process of assimilating myth into poetry than Duncan's hermeticism. But there's no question in my mind that Duncan wrote better poetry.

There's no getting away from myth, then, or no evasion of allegory, to shift to the term that the conceptual writers have sent buzzing into my head for the past several months. One is always working with some felt (if often untheorized) structure of knowledge and feeling that poetic language rises from and intersects, like a net taking shape around something unseen in deep water; a thing that in its hiddenness, its occultness, is at least homeomorphic with the Real ("a primary reality in itself, having volition"). What I ask of a poet is not that he or she explain myth, but that its force be fully felt: if I can't get a theoretical discourse around it (that's what makes me most comfortable, but who wants to be comfortable?) then I want to feel, for lack of a better word, the myth's authenticity for that poet. Or as I tell my writing students, Don't write about any gods you don't actually believe in.

What follows are some less organized thoughts based on the notes I took during the reading and subsequent panel discussion:

John Tipton introduces Palmer, telling us, "A Michael Palmer poem is not received," and quotes a phrase of Gadamer's characteristic of the poetry: "the questionability of what is questioned." (I hear in this an echo of Duncan's definition of "responsibility" as "Maintaining the ability to respond.") Talks about how, like a famous photographer of industrial sites whose name I didn't catch, Palmer can arrange banal images in a way that we can "hear" and so make us think about them. Speaks of Palmer's next book, to be titled Thread.

Michael takes the stage in brown shirt and brown suit. Begins with some poems that incorporate subtle bits of rhyme, which I love. English rhyme can help retrieve his poetry from the sense it sometimes gives of having been translated from the French. Reads a poem with a personage named "the Master of Rochester." Ashbery? This intuition seems confirmed by a prose poem, "L'Agir," that addresses Ashbery directly.

Hearing Stevens in the surprising words "dudes" and "squeezebox."

A gorgeous poem "After Hölderlin."

"Madman with Broom." Drily: "A poem about the Bush years. You remember them. Great times, they're gone." The central image is of a man trying to drive away crows with a broom – "realist crows," Palmer says, a phrase from Stevens' dreadfully titled poem "Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery."

Here's "Poem against War" in its entirety: "She raises both arms / to free the clasps binding her hair"

Funny poem called "Traumgedicht" featuring a dream of Gustav Mahler in a café listening to… Gustav Mahler. Nudging the speaker: "It's so much deeper than Strauss, don't you think?" I never really noticed this preoccupation of Palmer's with masters and mastery before. Of course he himself is a master.

"lodestar, lexicon, labyrinthos"

"It is the role of the lovers to set fire to the book."

Does Palmer put air quotes around mythic images as well as banal ones? The word "pentacles."

Now Mackey, Donahue, and O'Leary take their seats. Mackey is advertised as a man who speaks in complete paragraphs. A phrase from Olson, via Mackey: "I care for a field of discourse: call me tantra."

They discuss the "high style" in poetry and how Duncan sought to reclaim it. William Carlos Williams, who did so much to speak up for the American vernacular and against the "catastrophe" of appropriating European discourses and structures, nevertheless resorts to the high style more often than you'd suspect. And Duncan, as Mackey says, sometimes recognized a need to come down from his "high hypnagogic mode."

(High style. Masters. Is it a will toward monoglossia? Is that where myth becomes capital, a form of power and domination? I think of The Education of Henry Adams and "The Virgin and the Dynamo," which I taught as the last text in my nineteenth-century American literature class. About how Adams claims that the mythic figures of the Virgin and Venus have no force for Americans, but evoke at best only an empty sentiment. A feeling to be consumed, not a force for production (thinking of his claim elsewhere that the Virgin essentially caused Chartres Cathedral to be built). By contrast the dynamo, modern technology: but Adams sense of its "moral force" is surely anachronistic, all the more so now that we don't even have mythic machines, like the dynamo or the steam engine, to confront as emblems of our own alienated majesty. As Adams says, the world of the new science is "supersensual"—not supernatural.)

Instead of narrative in poetry, the world-poem, world-making. "A better word for story as far as Duncan goes would be fate." (Does myth-based poetry engage directly in world-making, sidestepping or subsuming narrative? Foregrounding the machinery of meaning-making, turning allegory into atmosphere, that which pervades and rises, supersensually, from the ground of language?) Mackey: "Paradoxically, the world-poem is a broken poem. That guarantees its truth." "Incident" as a link to story but not itself a narrative.

Mackey on serial form, as practiced by himself and Duncan: it's a form of apocalypse, an ongoing revelation and uncovering, always incomplete.

Mackey: Poetry as "prophylactic," that which makes it possible to encounter and handle terrifying truths. Which connects obscurely back to a connection Donahue tried to make earlier between the high style and "ecstasy.

(Poem as armor? Can only be justified by the worthiness and power of one's opponent. A knight in shining armor is ridiculous and out of place with no dragons in the vicinity.)

Mackey bringing African myth into the field of American poetry, Modernist poetry. (It seems that an ethnopoetic myth has more urgent reason for being, given the leveling tendencies of a white-operated culture industry.)

(If myth is played with, as Mackey seems to be suggesting—played the way a jazzman plays his horn, in the spirit of improvisation and collaboration—that might be a way round the problem I formulated earlier: myth as capital. That is, the gift economy, or potlatch. Creative destruction.)

(But myth is always collapsing into kitsch. Which at least removes the mask. Camp and kitsch may be the best means we have of encountering capital in the cultural field and discovering/declaring that the emperor has no clothes.)

[UPDATED 5/3/10]

Late Adopter

2010-04-26T11:11:00.003-04:00

Yes, you can now follow me on Twitter @joshcorey. This is an experiment that I mean to try for a few weeks and then I'll assess whether it serves a purpose that complements this blog and its own obscure purposes. As I'm no doubt not the first to observe, the 140-character limit is a tantalizing sort of constraint, ideal for producing tweets that operate for all intents and purposes like lines of poetry. And yet the "turns" between lines are collaborative: the sidebar at right deceives in presenting only my tweets. What seems more native to the experience of Twittering is absorbing whatever I might have to say as one among a cacophony of voices that the consumer, not the producer, controls.

So far on my own feed I mostly have institutions—NPR, the Times, the Poetry Foundation—as well as a few easy-to-find prominent individuals like Susan Orlean. (So far I've resisted Ashton Kutcher.) But my own Twittering will probably not come into its own until I'm "following" a suitably eclectic mix of other Twitterers, some of whom will no doubt be engaged in their own quasi-poetic and quasi-critical experiments.

From Denver

2010-04-11T22:52:00.002-04:00

Wednesday:

Arrived today, made very welcome. The air is thin and the light is hard.
Immediately run into Mark Tursi and Johannes Göransson at the hotel. Beers around the corner at Leela's. Topics include: small-press publishing, reading fees, Jennifer Moxley is our Tennyson, Mark Levine's poetry, guilty pleasures, Romanticism, flarf.
Go up to hotel room. Come back down from hotel room.
Thai noodles with Richard Greenfield and, briefly, Carmen Gimenez Smith.
The Omnidawn/Ahsahta reading at the Magnolia Ballroom. Open bar for first hour. Sit with Richard, Dan Stolar, Dan Beachy-Quick. Seemingly dozens of readers in quasi-alphabetical order; last only to the end of G. Richard has become a very strong and confident reader. Sneak out after his reading with Sarah Gridley.
Second dinner at overpriced Italian place with Sarah Gridley. Topics: overpriced wine, rush matting, family, dissatisfaction with poetry, old friends.
Midnight double scotch with Christian Bök, Jon Paul Fiorentino, and assorted Canadian comrades. Topics: Christian's "Xenotext Experiment," my "Poem for the Inaugural Poem," Jon's "Stripmalling," favorite Canadian versus American cities, the United States as greatest/worst country in the world.

Thursday:

Breakfast with my chair and colleague Davis Schneiderman. Topics: our respective paths to academia, Ithaca, NY, William S. Burroughs, the challenges of getting enough protein when you're a vegetarian. (I had bacon.)
A little late to 9 AM panel on integrating wireless technology and social networking into the poetry classroom. Read all about it: http://networkedpoetry.wordpress.com. I most like Eric Baus' idea about exposing students to poems through audio recordings, preferably multiple versions, before they read the poem, as a way to break away from poem-as-inviolable monument.
Assorted characters at bookfair, too numerous to list here. Buying very little as yet. Susan Schultz gifts me with a desk copy of Hazel Smith's The Erotics of Geography when I remark that I might want to use it in my senior seminar next year alongside The Writing Experiment. Shanna Compton sells me a copy of Bloof's latest, Peter Davis' Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! which made me laugh out loud. They're prose poems that are kind of like the voice-overs to other poems. Here's one in its entirety:
Poem Addressing My Past, Current and Future Students Who Are Sufficiently Interested in Our Class to Check Out My Work

I hope you learn something from this poem and the powerful, mystical way it concludes!
Noon panel, "Women & Nature, Thirty Years Later: Our Evolving Otherness." Stay only long enough to hear Sarah Gridley's lyrical essay on Simone de Beauvoir and Medusa. Dodge out to other noon panel, "Poetry and Memorability." Stay only long enough to hear Paul Hoover conclude a talk on the poetry of memorability (beginning, middle, end) and the poetry of forgetting (middle, middle, middle). How even the latter—Language poetry for instance—has trouble not producing metrical, memorable lines. Am reminded of this when I return to the bookfair and encounter Johannes again along with Kasey Mohammad, where the conversation somehow turns to the David Lynch version of Dune, and I realize that free verse, et al, is simply an ingenious way of preventing sandworm attacks. To break the pentameter, that was the first heave of Muad D'ib.
Attend bizarre smackdown between Tony Hoagland, egotistical humanist, and Donald Revell, ascetic desert father, at panel with the misleading title "Poetry After the '00s: What Comes Next?" It was supposed to include Stephen Burt and Laura Kaischiscke, but instead turns into debate between two poets who seem mostly unqualified to talk about "next." Hoagland is pluralistic in a sneakily dismissive way, acknowledging the tremendous energy of contemporary poetry but coming down hard on the side of poems with tones that communicate "existential weight." He thinks the purpose of poetry is to bring the reader to presence. Revell comes across as a Christian Buddhist; for him the "new poetry" can't exist yet or we can't recognize it because it's going to take us beyond the human to "the other shore." Could be talking about nirvana, is really talking about Jesus. There are a few worthwhile aphorisms (Revell) and bits of repartee (Hoagland):
- Revell: "As long as we don't say anything, Tony and I always agree." Hoagland: "That's so postmodern!"
- Revell: "Humanity is one of those experiments that didn't quite work out." "What is humanity except a genre?"
- Revell : "Most poems are rearranging the furniture in the Norton Anthology." "What is a line? it's a turn. It's a conversion. If you are not willing to be converted, you are not able to write line two of your poem." "'I remember poetry! It sounded like this!' Which is what most poems are…merely the memory of poems." Hoagland: "Poetry isn't born from the history of poetry. Poetry is born from our suffering."
- Revell: "Anthologies are a form of suffering." "No Christian believes in tragedy. You cannot have a tragic world-view and faith. It all has a happy ending." Hoagland: "I'm looking for a happy middle."
- Revell: "We are so attached to the conversation, so attached to the canon, so attached to the métier, when simply we are called to let go. I happen to believe there is another shore…. We're not going to get there by clinging to the old conversations. Suffering is for schmucks! Stop it! Stop suffering, please! I have to read it!" Hoagland: "There's a bin here for crutches and eyeglasses!"

It's all quite strange. Revell comes across as a "posthuman" (he even uses the word) and could be interpreted as saying, "All poetry is flarf." He quotes Endgame: HAMM: We do what we can. CLOV: We shouldn't. His position is indisputably the more rigorous and ethical one. But he's a Christian, so I don't quite trust that he's credible when he says that we don't know what the new is. It's not the void he's pitching for—he wants to empty poetry out so that his Emersonian faith can come rushing into fill the vacuum. Hoagland's position is therefore the more "human" one: given a choice between nothingness and something, he'll choose something every time. It's bathos. Both these guys are asking poetry to disappear in some sense, to reveal either something or nothing—other than poetry. Why can't it just be poetry? "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

More Thursday:

Acquire a few books at the book fair, but mostly keep my powder dry. Finally meet Jeffrey Levine and Jim Schley, my new publisher and editor respectively, at the Tupelo Press table.
Attend Tupelo Press Tenth Anniversary party and reading, shake lots of hands. Read some poems. Fill up on hors d'oeurves. Resume a chat with Tess Taylor that we first began at a Poetry Society of America shindig in New York in 2003.
Wind up evening at hotel bar where I run into David Lau and Kasey Mohammad. Topics: conceptual poetry, Notes on Conceptualisms (insufficiently rigorous or enabling fiction?), Lana Turner. Early to bed at 11:30.

Friday:

Foggy, hazy mind in diamond-blue Denver sky. Coffee helps. Attend panel on queer translation with Brian Teare, making a fool of myself beforehand mistaking Nathalie Stephens for Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Stephens and Timothy Liu are the panelists and John Keene is the moderator; Jen Hofer doesn't show. Fascinating and labyrinthine discussions of translation as a kind of metaphor for desire—what's "lost in translation" can be equated with Lacan's La relation sexuelle n'existe pas. That is, one desires to cross the gap between languages but it's what gets lost in that gap that endlessly regenerates that desire. I meditate on the value of queer sexuality as a mode of consciousness that plays with the manufactories of desire rather than simply accepting their products unquestioningly off the assembly line. What would a queer heterosexuality look like?
Hang out at book fair. Chats with G.C. Waldrep, Paul Foster Johnson, Janet Holmes, Rachel Loden (who generously insists on giving me a much-coveted copy of Dick of the Dead gratis). Sit at Apostrophe Books table and pretend to be a publisher for a while. Run into my old student Emily Capettini, now in the creative PhD program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Attend insufficiently memorable panels.
Awful dinner at Johnny Rockets. It's all Richard Greenfield's fault.
Attend WILLA reading at Denver Press Club. It's a worthy organization and the set-up is promising: burlesque dancers, roller-derby girls working security, and feminist poetry. But the place is overcrowded and hot and stuffy and most of the first poems are just plain bad. Escape at intermission, regret not hearing Lara Glenum, Cathy Park Hong, Carmen Gimenez Smith, a few others.
Encounter Zach Schomburg and Noah Eli Gordon tearing up the open mike at the Mercury Café. Can't tell if they're being ironic or not.
Maybe it was tonight I had that conversation with David and Kasey?

Saturday:

Somehow up in time for the Flarf vs. Conceptualism showdown panel, by far the most entertaining official event that I attend at this year's AWP.
- Kasey's intro: flarf and conceptual poetry are the poetry we deserve. Rattles off the numerous critiques of both movements. Claims that they are working to "recycle" the innovations of the historical avant-garde, "because the first times, they didn't take. The opposite of damage control—they try to do the damage that didn't get done before." But it's hard not to get absorbed by the poetry-industrial complex—"It's like fighting the Blob—you plunge in your fist and soon you're just part of it. After all, here we are." Flarf is controversial because it asserts centrality. Conceputualism is suspect because it approaches "relevance." Quotes Unforgiven: "We get what we get. Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
- Vanessa Place's paper is killer: "Notes on Why Conceptualism Is Better Than Flarf." A few gems:
  - "Flarf is a court jester. As such, it is still a member of the court."
  - "Flarf is a one-trick pony that thinks a unicorn is another kind of horse."
  - "Flarf still loves poetry. Conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery."
  - "Flarf wants to be funny." "Conceptualism wants."
  - Flarf engages the amygdale, conceptualism the cortex.
  - "Flarf is a whoopee cushion in the world of the new and old lyric poetry. Conceptualism is a fart."
  - "Ron Silliman likes flarf. Ron Silliman does not like conceptualism."
  - "Flarf looks like poetry." "Poetry looks like conceptualism."
- Mel Nichols next. "Cute Gone Wrong," referencing Sianne Ngai's "Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." A book called Journey to the End of Taste, about disliking Celine Dion. "Flarf rocks harder than conceptual writing." Kind of a parody of a paper presentation—she talks about what she's going to talk about instead of actually talking.
  - Cute = helpless. Perceptions of vulnerability contribute to perceptions of cuteness. Big eyes, floppy limbs, small voice, wobbly head, etc. Extreme youth, harmlessness, helplessness, need. We are hardwired for cuteness.
  - Cuteness as what flarf messes with, confusing our aesthetic response. Rob Fitterman: "Don't make it new. Just make it fucked up." The combination of the cute and the horrible.
  - Rod Smith poem "Widdle Biddy Bong Story" – baby talk to a parakeet that parodies "I Know a Man."
- Matthew Timmons' presentation is an inimitable and unrepresentable performance. I like this phrase: "The new friction surface modifier." Compares Flarf to Renaissance Faires. "Conceptual writing has been defined by Kenneth Goldsmith as, 'Writing.'" It's all tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss, I think.
- Katie Degentesh talks about vampires versus werewolves: which has more control over its dark side? "Hooking up with a vampire is fun, disgusting, and vulgar." John Ashbery, Kevin Davies, the young Auden, rumored to be vampires."One of the purposes of vampirism is to defeat and render irrelevant close reading." "Shifters hate vampire and vampires hate shifters." So flarf as vampirism and conceptualism as lycanthropy? Or is it the other way round?
- Christian is last. Talks about Kenneth Goldmsith and his essay that argues that flarf is Dionysian and conceptualism is Apollonian. "Being somewhat lazy, I have decided simply to read you that essay by Kenneth Goldsmith…but using the techniques of flarf, albeit in a more advanced and rigorous manner." Paper title: "Flarf! Arf Arf Arf!" Another inimitable performance but:
  - "We imagine that a bottle of cleaning fluid must be totally fucking clean inside!"
  - "I steal the letter M because it seems like the letter M must weigh the most."
  - "I write a few sincere lines, and then I have to make fun of them."

Q&A. Aaron Kunin questions Vanessa as to what she means by allegory. Allegory = reference to extra-textual narrative. Radical evil: a poetics that is an affirmative will to evil toward poetics itself. Another Q for Vanessa: conceptualism addresses a fundamental absence. Using Lacan. Absence of meaning/signification, desire for same. There's something that's not there: ideally the person who reads the text enters that space and puts its (?) desire into the work. The thing in the poem is not what satisfies—radical evil asks, "How can I take that thing away from you?"

Good stuff.

Books, books, books. I can't write down all the titles because I haven't unpacked my suitcase. Especially pleased, though, to have acquired John Beer's miraculously titled The Waste Land and Other Poems (aren't you jealous you didn't think of it first?) from the Canarium table; a sheaf of essay chapbooks from Ugly Duckling Presse; a pile of beautiful Wesleyan hardcovers, deeply discounted, by Brenda Hillman and Roberto Tejada and Rae Armantrout and Kazim Ali.
Lunch with Sarah Gridley, then we hike over to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the flarf/conceptualism reading—it's not Sarah's thing at all, but she's curious. The reading is less satisfying than the panel—it comes off as something of a refuge for smug hipsters, though Christian's sound poetry is always delightful and it was amazing to hear Christine Wertheim, whom I think of as a visual poet, do uncanny, jouissance-inducing moves with her voice. Argue about its relevance and value with Sarah all the way back to the hotel instead of attending the rooftop party for flarftinis.
A well-deserved nap.
Cab it out to the Plus Gallery for the Possess Nothing mega-reading organized by Richard and Mark. The stand-out readers are Johannes (reading from A New Quarantine Will Take My Place), Gordon Massman (talk about queer heterosexuality! reading from The Essential Numbers 1991 – 2008), and Abraham Smith, an electric hopping presence (reading from a book I regret not purchasing, whim man mammon). Afterward fall in with Johannes who insists on "famous tequila shots" and leads a small group of us, pied-piper style, to the Whiskey Bar. I wander off and meet Mark and Richard for late night fish n' chips at a pub.
Home to bed at the semi-reasonable hour of 12:30. Up today at 6 for the flight home.

I Go to the AWP

2010-04-07T08:57:00.002-04:00

Leaving this morning. Looking forward to seeing old friends. Sporadic reporting may follow.

The Possessed, or: Creative Writing and Curiosity

2010-04-04T22:10:00.002-04:00

Elif Batuman's new memoir is compulsively readable and entertaining. But this is not a review, any more than my assessment of the book's physical properties was a review. Instead, it's a personal response to something from the book's beginning, and something close to its ending.

In her introduction (which you can read a version of here) Batuman writes of wanting to write a novel after graduating from college, and the choice she faced between the disciplines of creative writing and scholarship (specifically, comparative literature). She dismisses MFA programs "because I knew they made you pay tuition, and go to workshops. Whatever reservations I had about the usefulness of reading and analyzing great novels went double for reading and analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me" (17). But she does apply to go to an unnamed "artists' colony on Cape Cod," which I imagine was probably the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and is accepted. When she visits, she has the following conversation with the program's director:

"What will you do if you don't come here?" he asked. I told him I had applied to some graduate schools. There was a long pause. "Well, if you want to be an academic, go to graduate school," he said. "If you want to be a writer, come here."

An invidious choice if ever I heard one (for more on reflexive anti-academic sentiment see my colleague Bob Archambeau's recent post on his appropriately-named-for-the-purposes-of-this discussion Samizdat Blog). But it's Batuman's response to that logic that fascinates:

I wanted to be a writer, not an academic. But that afternoon, standing under a noisy tin awning in a parking lot facing the ocean, eating the peanut-butter sandwiches I had made in the cafeteria at breakfast, I reached some conclusive state of disillusionment with the transcendentalist New England culture of "creative writing." In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer's formation. By what mechanism, I found myself wondering, was it bad? Conversely, why was it automatically good for a writer to live in a barn, reading short stories by short-story writers who didn't seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?

The blindingly accurate phrase "transcendentalist New England culture of 'creative writing'" transported me instantly back to the summer of 2000 and the weeks I spent as a "scholar" at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where it indeed seemed that breathing the self-consciously rarefied air breathed by a klatsch of more famous writers we all crowded around with plastic cups of wine in our sweaty hands was the acme of all imaginable felicity. Zing! Of course Transcendentalism has its roots in Puritanism, as Batuman intimates in an account of her investigation into the series Best American Short Stories, referring to "the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of 'craft.' She continues:

I realized that I would greatly refer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: "Show, don't tell"; "Murder your darlings"; "Omit needless words." As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.

This explains far better than I've ever done my own visceral dislike of craft-speak, even though it often finds its way into my own mouth, since undergraduate writing students do start out with "bad habits" that they need to overcome (but needless words, et al, tend to be symptomatic of a single bad habit: the failure to acknowledge the absent presence of the reader, whose imagination must be imaginatively and imaginairily engaged by the writer). I would have liked to see Batuman explore what seems the logical extension of this critique of "creative writing": that literary criticism embraces "telling" and "darlings" and "words," that it gets drunk on them, that it articulates a vision of literature as pleasure.

She doesn't quite do that—and how could she, given how literary study is taught and practiced today? But she does show the backdoor into a theory of literature as intellectual pleasure. Because lit crit is not only fundamentally collaborative—with every scholar's work self-consciously built upon the edifice of hundreds of others—but the heart of its project can be described not just as writing but as research. More fundamentally, what's behind research is curiosity, which I believe to be the single most fundamental attribute writerly attribute after a basic intoxication or preoccupation with words. And as her survey of a couple of numbers of Best American Short Stories reveals, curiosity is the pleasure most foreign to creative writing as Puritan practice: "Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or a hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things." Zing again.

The Puritan prejudice against curiosity rigorously conceived—that is, as research, as intellectual practice, is an attitude I've encountered frequently. While an MFA student at the University of Montana, I had the same conversation again and again with fellow students in bars and coffee shops. "I don't care about any of this academic shit," they'd say, peering deeply into an amber glass. "I just want to write." A few of these rugged individualists, those not too deeply sunk in primary narcissism, might then ask me, "So what's with the Derrida? Do you really understand that bullshit?" Or naming Professor X, whose lecture that afternoon had taken in a broad swath of the history of literary Romanticism in the English and German traditions, "I just can't understand what the hell he's talking about or why I should care. I mean, he's brilliant and all, but what's it got to with writing?" Which was my cue to look down into my own glass and mumble something.

"I don't know," I might say. "It's interesting."

No zing for me, but double-zing for Batuman. And then triple- or quadruple-zing: "reading short stories by short-story writers who didn't seem to be read by anyone other than writing students"? If the palpable scorn in this line doesn't wither the die-hard fiction writers out there, who have things like agents and movie options now and again, how is a poet supposed to feel?

Which takes me to the bookend. Batuman's book consists of essays interlaced with a longish memoir, "Summer in Samarkand," that's cannily broken into three parts so that we can take a break from a long fish-out-of-water story—an account of the author's quixotic attempts to study the Uzbek language and literature in the titular city while enduring innumerable misunderstandings and cultural enigmas. The essays it's interlaced with are highly entertaining: one on an Isaac Babel conference at Stanford (an institution where I've done time, so those scenes are especially vivid to me); one that purports to investigate the murder of Leo Tolstoy; on a bizarre "House of Ice" built in St. Petersburg in 2006 as a replica erected in 1740 on the orders of the grotesque Empress Anna. But "Summer in Samarkand," along with the final essay, "The Possessed," holds the key to the book's thesis, which is that the study of literature can be as generative of good writing as the "study" of life so long romantically prescribed by New England transcendentalists and Hemingways manqués. This is an idea that I've long-embraced, though I've rarely found it as well articulated and defended as here, and without the sense of apology that flavored my responses to my macho MFA-mates. I recognize Batuman as a member of the tribe: creatures of literature and our own unquenchable curiosity about it, down to our very bones.

But we don't agree about poetry, or at least not any more. After her summer in Samarkand, surrounded by mysteries of personality and behavior that poor translation cannot fully account for, Batuman writes that "I almost entirely lost the ability to read poetry. It was like a language I didn't speak anymore. What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half-understanding." She goes on to quote an observation of Tolstoy's on reading poetry in translation:

Without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind—unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing, but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented, and many cases in which I believed the real poem was better than the imaginary one.

What Tolstoy describes in such dreamy fashion is, I believe, really a skill. Poetry demands of its readers a version of literacy that's the near-neighbor of illiteracy: its obscurities (which might be as minimal as the artifice of meter and line breaks; as we know, the obscurities of poetry have no known upper limit) license the reader or demand of the reader that she give up, at least for a time, "deciphering" the words in front of her in favor of the "different meaning" or "invented" poem that spontaneously arises. You have to be either an expert or—it nearly amounts to the same thing—lack all the expectations that ordinary educated literacy installs in readers. A good poem offers not communication but communion and imagination. It asks the reader to become, at least for a moment, the writer or the breather of the poem. It inspires.

Batuman's experience of the Caucasus "cures" her of this knack for poetry, so close in its way to an illness—aphasia maybe, or maybe just another form of narcissism. She turns away from "poetical meanings conjured out of associations and half-grasped words—the beauty of things that don't appear on the page" toward "huge novels." And not just any novels—in "The Possessed," in spite of that essay's title, she declares herself a Tolstoyan and not a Dostoyevskyan. She explains this distinction rather charmingly after a reading, as reported by Cynthia Haven: "Dostoyevsky is the literary equivalent to theater, with 'allegory intensified 10,000 times.' Tolstoy is the stuff of movies, with costumes, elaborate scenery, and orchestral score. She falls for Tolstoy. 'Tolstoy is girlie—he wouldn't like my saying that, but he's not here anymore, any more than the Uzbeks are.'"

My takeaway is that she values Tolstoy for his explicitness—for the way in which he puts everything on the page, questing to make himself understood by the reader as completely as possible, while providing lushly lived in details, characters, and scenes for the reader to romp among. Tolstoy is the opposite of poetry, since so much of the action for poetry is conceptual—it happens in the reader's head, an action taken, and communication of anything whatsoever is a secondary or tertiary goal. Dostoyevsky offers a sort of middle ground, maybe, given the hyperallegorical character she ascribes to him. It's interesting that her book and its final essay take their titles not from Tolstoy but from Dostoyevsky's most enigmatic novel, which she explains rather brilliantly as being about the empty center that holds/fails to hold its characters and their increasingly demented actions together, the enigmatic Stavrogin.

I won't repeat her argument here. But as a poet who's taken up with the project of fiction, I certainly feel that Dostoyevsky offers a more conducive writerly terrain than Tolstoy does. Certainly, more than Tolstoy, he breaks all the Puritanical creative writing rules: he tells and tells, he uses five words where one would do, he's acutely interested in psychology and uninterested in the tenets of realism, and he's curious. His novels are intensively researched investigations into human character, thought experiments in the highest sense of the word. They're messy, they don't always make sense, the rhythms of their plots are mysterious and sometimes uncomfortable for the reader whose first question of any novel is always And then what happened? They're nothing like poetry if we think dichten = condensare. They're everything like poetry if poetry is the patterning in language of the half-grasped, the half-understood, which the reader must grapple with and experience and never quite complete. The act of reading such texts stimulates and exalts one's own curiosity.

The pleasure of finding things out. That's my creative writing program. I am still working to construct a pedagogy, as well as a practice, based upon that. I'm grateful to Elif Batuman for helping me come a step closer to that.

Reading on Sunday at Myopic Books

2010-03-25T22:12:00.002-04:00

Larry Sawyer has asked me to step in at the last moment and join Carrie Olivia Adams at Myopic Books in Bucktown on Sunday. Come by at 7. I'll be reading some of the things collected in my latest manuscript, The From.

That's Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, 773-862-4882.

Visibly Relieved

2010-03-22T22:12:00.005-04:00

As the preceding post obliquely suggests, lately I've come to feel my perennial crisis of writing—doubts about what to write, how to write, whom to write for—has crossed over into a crisis of reading. That is, do I write to be read? Or do I myself even want to read at all? Yes, of course I read, constantly, habitually, compulsorily—blogs and books, status updates and student essays, thumb endlessly through literary magazines or the shelves at Barnes & Noble looking for something, I know not what, except something to go on with/for/about. But one of the aftershocks of the literary festival has been new thinking about the literary object as conceptual sobject (subject/object): not something to be read but something to be sited/sighted, like a piece of visual art or a performance, unconsumed if not unconsumable (no object, textual or otherwise, resists commodification). And I realize on the one hand that conceptual writing functions for me, as fatigued reader, like Wittgenstein's philosophy, showing the fly out of the fly bottle. And on the other hand that taking that step is antithetical to all my training and habits and desires.

Some of this thinking has been spurred by a paper that Vanessa Place has shared with me—something she presented as respondent to a recent conference on the poet-critic—on the poetics of radical evil or apoetics (not to be confused with the Charles Bernstein book of that title). Coupled with this is the equation of radical evil with radical mimesis ("Radical mimesis is original sin"). Gertrude Stein is the starting point for such a poetics: a rose is a rose is a rose, but it cannot be read, only encountered. I don't want to quote from an unpublished paper, but there's a similar point made in Notes on Conceptualisms, when Place & Fitterman inscribe the continuum of pure conceptualism versus impure conceptualism/the baroque, both of which can be construed as attacks on reading. In pure conceptualism, "one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work," and of course a text such as Goldsmith's Traffic is almost literally unreadable. The baroque's "excessive textual properties" do not produce, strictly speaking, an unreadable text, but they do "defeat" reading ("these are strategies of failure")—at least, we can presume, "readerly" reading.

It's hard now for me to pick up any book or magazine and not, having read a fragment of it, put the book back down, having thoroughly encountered it as an object, with my need to "read" it muted or extinguished. It's always already rereading. Is this a sort of mental decadence? Or a desire to push through, to let go of, my own old ideas of mastery—the godlike Author I've secretly hoped to become, a desire that has not vanished with my belief in such Author-ity.

Put another way, why write if not for Master(y)? If not for the Big Other? I stand in Lacan's shoes, in Place's shoes, looking out at the audience deadpan. What do you want of me.

More and more I realize that my project—in the novel, but not just in the novel—is to tell a story but also to look at story. The fundamental starting point of Miramare was the thought, What can a novel do that a film can't do better? If the answer is, Nothing, then a novel might at least be the proper means for examining that infrathin difference between a mode of narrative that depends on looking and a mode of narrative that depends on listening. That margin, that infinitely narrow gulf, is to be encountered.

I write for myself and for strangers.

More and more fascinated with the image of writing, the image of reading. The resistance of both modes, a nearly unique resistance, to filmic representation. Even sleep is more interesting to the camera—provides more potential access to the Real. What can we do with the image of a writer, a reader? Nothing that we can('t) do to the poem or story s/he reads/writes.

My title comes from a Liz Waldner poem, as quoted in a review of her latest book over at the Constant Critic:

Lecture

Fire
Is the slave
Of the visible;
The visible
Is shackled by
Our eyes.

When at night
Your eyelids fall—
You must believe me—
The book beside
Your pillow sighs,

Visibly relieved

There's a pathos there: the (s)objects of the world exhale with relief when no longer subject to our scrutiny. But also a crucial reminder that seeing is prior to reading.

What's beyond reading?

Or to put it another way, What does the reader dream about?

I want to look at that.

Poetry Is Blue: Brief Descriptions of Material Properties

2010-03-21T15:53:00.006-04:00

Barnes & Noble Sherman Plaza, Evanston, IL, 21 March 2010:

Progeny of Air, Kwame Dawes. Peepal Tree Press, 1994, reprinted 2003. Price in pounds. Matte cover, predominant color note: blue. The book is small though not pocket sized unless you've got giant pockets. Maybe 7 by 4 inches and a third of an inch thick. Top of each page slightly darker than the rest, ring-around-the-collar style. A slightly ragged serif typeface, clearly computer rendered, squished in spots. The ink has a slightly ghosted, unsaturated quality. Pages of average thickness, rough grain. Back cover author photo shows a tight black-and-white but really blue-and-white closeup: glasses, facial hair, lips parted, hands at cheeks, looking down as though reading. What is this book doing here?

Mean Free Path, Ben Lerner's latest. Big, glossy blue, shows handling. Inside white space luxuriates around a clear hard serif typeface. 66 official pages and some extras. A comment card, TGIFridays-style falls out on the cafe table. A sort of bookmark. Smooth pages with a faint taupe coloring, deceptively impervious. No author photo but six emblems appear on the next to last page: Amazon.com, The Point, Golden Lasso, Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington State Arts Commission. And Copper Canyon's own logo in the upper left corner followed by their explanation: "The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: 'word' and 'temple." If it's accurate to read left to right the "word" looks like a lowercase "i"; the temple is a man in a hat, possibly drunk, gesturing obscenely at the "i."

Where's the Moon, There's the Moon, a hardback by Dan Chiasson. Glossy black dust jacket, wider than a novel but no taller, much thinner. The actual cover's paper, green with blue spine and the Borzoi Books imprint a literal imprint, communicative to the fingertip. The relative whiteness of the page seems identical to Lerner but now I am starting to see or imagine a faint brownness to the top of each page of every book I look at. The typeface is large and clear. The author in the photo on the right inside jacket flap has trees behind him and confronts the camera frankly, handsomely, with wavy hair slightly askew and an open-necked polo shirt, enough of the right arm visible to guess that it's hooked at his hip, Whitman style. Near the bottom of the page the borzoi returns, abstracted to the point of flight: a green gull with a tail.

Shoulder Season, Ange Mlinko, Coffee House Press. A frenetic painting or painted collage gleams under the cover's gloss; an indigo stripe discreetly marks its territory at the very top. Typeface startlingly large, making the poems easily available one imagines to the elderly and eyestrained. Poem titles all caps in a typeface made to resemble a stencil; somehow more Caribbean-looking than Dawes' book. Paper really isn't white, is it? The typeface is Erhardt, designed by a Hungarian; Mlinko too is Hungarian; I am a half of a Hungarian Jew, which is immaterial. Three logos on the last page: National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Target.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929 - 1940. Cambridge UP. Massive gray hardcover with pastel black and white image of the artist as a young man, lettering white and pastel blue. More blue on the back; this cover shows wear already. The physical hardcover is black and satisfying textured and pointillist to the touch with gold lettering on the broad muscular spine. Inside pages bright, slick, thin, feels somehow foreign. Distance from title page to first letter (address suitably to Joyce, dated 23/3/29 from Kassel, Germany): one quarter inch. Distance from conclusion of last letter ("Love to you both & to Tom. / Sam") to endpaper: one third inch. Heavy fucker. Type of the letters seems too big; type of the voluminous footnotes, too small.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. FSG's fish rendered cartoonishly by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, along with the rest of the cover, which is mustard yellow, matte, easy to grip in one hand. Thin coarse pages, indifferent print job indicates the disposability of this book, inversely proprotionate to the sales it is likely to generate. Covered with cartoons of Chaz's trademark worried-looking neurotic New Yorkers, some of which are reimagined as Russians. Nobody looks Turkish but what does Turkish look like? Author photo on first page, cropped black hair, looking down and away from camera to show off her profile, her sexy blade of a nose. The pages already have a slightly wavy quality to them: they will absorb moisture easily. Nowhere close to white.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets, Wave Books. Deep blue with white flecks as befits the title, which I first misread as "blurts"; initial excitement at combination of inelegant name with elegant volume now faded. Handsomely printed on thick paper, feels tight in its spine, almost as high in quality as a Coach House book. Numbered blocks of prose discreetly bordered with whiteness. No photos of any kind. A mute flawless illegible object like the monolith in 2001, its cover may not be intended to be but nevertheless is representational of stars.

Mark McMorris: Entrepôt

2010-03-11T23:37:00.006-05:00

Say then that it is true that I play chess
to spend my life between two parts of a word
the son and the sens, the hesitation of a cleft
palate with orchids singing in the cracks.

These lines resonate throughout Mark McMorris' new book Entrepôt, exploring the ethics of poetry as a deformed sort of speaking ("cleft / palate") with what the last section of the book calls the "Zero Orchid"* growing in the space between music and meaning, signifier and signified. As characteristic are sentences beginning "Say then" or "Say that"; these poems constantly circle back on and call attention to the idea of poetry as saying, as language that performs and stipulates. Calls attention, too, to poetry's provisionality, to its remnant aura of the sacred, of shamanistic saying. This poetry proposes worlds, as Stevens' does, and as with Stevens the world and the poem that evokes it depend on each other, are balanced precariously. (Q.v. "Connoisseur of Chaos.")

The other poetic presence that hovers its wings over this book is Michael Palmer, who provides a blurb and seems a likely candidate for the book's chief interlocutor: a series of poems throughout it bear the title "Letters to Michael." Much of Palmer, too, comes out of Stevens, though he's a Stevens for whom imagination owes an unpayable debt to reality, rather than the other way around. There's a similar ethical rigor on display in McMorris' book, along with a dazzling range of classical references that heighten the Classic feeling of the poetry itself—another quality I associate with Palmer and with the late, "philosophical," Apollonian Stevens.

The imagery is light-filled, of an Attic grace, but stained by more recent, New World history—of Jamaica and the Caribbean, and of this decade's wars. An untitled poem in the book's first section, "The Mirror Says," is one of the most powerful and moving poems on war and the civilian-poet's stance toward that war that I've ever read. But the speaker of the next poem imagines himself a soldier, who is ambivalently involved in the work of empire. A postcolonial poet like McMorris must surely be more skeptical of utopia than the next poet—after all, he's from there, an island permanently marked by lethal nostalgia (Wikipedia tells me that Jamaica has three "counties," Cornwall, Middlesex, and Surrey, and that when Elizabeth Windsor says or does anything on behalf of her dominion she's to be referred to as the Queen of Jamaica).

But McMorris is up to something more complex than critique of empire. It's not so easy, after all, for any poet to ban utopia from his lexicon. And so one of the book's sections, and one of its longer poems, is titled "Auditions for Utopia," and in one part riffs off of the fantasies elaborated by Gonzalo in Act II of The Tempest (a central reference point for any Anglo-Caribbean writer). "The thing about utopia is that you can't / decide to live there, and if you're there, / you're still on the other side of a barrier" (55). This follows a description of a spontaneous dance by a young boy, which seems to me another Stevens allusion, this time to "The Idea of Order at Key West." Whereas the singer in the Stevens poem enacts the poet-utopian's "rage for order," her song "arranging, deepening, enchanting night," the dancer is deliberately separated from the poet—as much, one suspects, by the poet's education and his condition as visiting exile as by the boy's refusal of "order":

The boy was content to dance himself
bizarre and unreachable, as he seemed
to us, almost invisible, in touch
with secret chords and the generations.
He did not have a name. The dance
passed through the slash of the waves
to become a visible present tense
wholly of action in that small frame. (56)

This book is aware of a possible relationship between the utopian yearnings of poetry and those of George W. Bush, and that both forms of utopianism have the power to do harm. "The mind is an emperor. Or the mind is subject / to decree from obscure parliaments of language" (50). Whence legitimacy then? Those "obscure parliaments" are surely a nod to Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators," but one might as well say "unelected." Stevens told us that the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream, King Death, finale of seem. Like Derek Walcott, McMorris has had "a sound colonial education"—that's from Walcott's great early poem "The Schooner Flight"), but unlike Walcott, McMorris doesn't confidently declare that "either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." Poetry itself is as much or more McMorris' subject as politics, and he makes the reader aware of that on a formal level, compiling rich and strange abstractions with lines like "orchid in the hair of the wave," "Plethora of polis miasma," and by a characteristic trick of enjambment that there ought to be a name for. I'm speaking of lines that break the syntax radically at the end of an enjambed line, even as other lines function more normatively, with enjambment a hiccup rather than an encounter with the void. Here's an example:

Like touching a girl you've been in love with
forever, and having her touch you back
the mind-body problem succumbed to delirium. (28)

Sometimes he capitalizes the beginning of the line following the enjambment but just as often, as here, he doesn't—it's as though a bit of ghost punctuation floats between "back" and "the mind-body problem" (an em-dash, maybe). It's hyper-enjambment, a double insistence on the integrity of the line, that functions as a kind of tribute to what can seem an almost untimely faith in poetry, and in eloquence. I've chosen the next passage almost at random to demonstrate McMorris' capacity for sheerly beautiful writing:

The tongue imitates the leaf. It falls
like rain over the garden, like a wound
of wings beating sunlight, or a swan
climbing to the sky's blue pages, to write
an elegy for withered things, falling
like nothing to blossoms, porous to sunlight.

("Gadji Beri Bimba," 67)

Writing like this is so luminous—or dazzling, pellucid, shimmering, stunning, choose your own back-of-the-book cliché—that it's almost a parody of itself. McMorris tries to salvage the merely beautiful by putting it in tension with other forces: in many of the poems that means politics, but in this case, the title of the poem comes from Hugo Ball and one of its epigraphs comes from Baudelaire, so that the Apollonian register McMorris seems most at home in is contextualized with the Dionysian spirts of dada and the poete maudit. The poem touches ground again in the political, where the nonsense syllables of Ball become the backdrop for the dance of Josephine Baker, and then is beautifully broken, twice, by visual collages of words traced with actual marks and lines, creating some much-needed friction with words like "lemon," "cathedral," "salt, "hiatus," "orchid," "flaneur," "syllable." Still: so beautiful! So pure! So irrelevant? Or is this beauty useful after all as beauty always has been, as a line of flight that curves us out from and back to a world of injustice and terror?

McMorris enters more territory more congenial to our cynical age with a sequence of sonnet-like poems that again collides the poet's utopia (this time, the utopia of Modernism) with the realities of colonial life: "Little Dog with Bananas." That's Gertrude Stein's dog, of course: "I am I because my little dog knows me." But the speaker of these poems turns that around, beginning each poem in the sequence with, "In fact, the little dog knows me not at all." The speaker of this poem (which is the only poem in a section titled "Collage") remains conscious, in spite of his obvious mastery of the scope and depth of European modernism (Apollinaire is another presiding spirit), of his otherness to the Modernist project: an African face is an instrument and not a subject to the likes of Stein and Picasso.

If your little dog doesn't know you, does that constitute a refusal of mastery, or just the inability to access it? And yet McMorris writes masterfully, is a master, a classicist at heart, a Modernist after all, if après le lettre; less sentimental than Derek Walcott and certainly less romantic, yet for all that a striver after the main chance, a Great Poet. And my heart leaps to discover him (this is the first book of his I've encountered), and yet I wonder if there isn't something fundamentally anachronistic about the whole project. And then I wonder if that anachronism, like all that useless beauty, isn't in fact the book's cunning, and its way of answering a desperate need harbored by the distracted and scattered readers of poetry.

* Any talk of orchids reminds me of this little exchange between General Sternwood and Philip Marlowe in the 1946 version of The Big Sleep: "Do you like orchids, Mr. Marlowe?" "Not particularly." "Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption." The failed patriarch Sternwood rails against the excessive sexuality of his youngest daughter; Marlowe/Bogart is slower to commit himself, unable to resist the sexual excesses of meaning that flower between himself and Lauren Bacall—though for my money, the sexiest part of the film comes in a seeming digression, the abbreviated seduction of what IMBD names only as "Acme Book shop Proprietress" played by the astonishingly gorgeous Dorothy Malone, last seen on screen as a buddy of Sharon Stone's in Basic Instinct.) What's this got to do with McMorris? Only, I think, that the orchid, that excessive flower, that petit objet a, represents something like McMorris' strike zone: the perfect pitch between sexy son and the conceptual burden of sens that he tries to steer his words between. In other words, that he might in spite of all his Apollonian and masterful tendencies be a writer of the baroque after all.