Free Blurbs

The title poem of Jerry Estrin's Rome, a Mobile Home haunts me with the urgency of what it describes ten years after it was published:

17

Each no is a progress rendered by capital

A history of Kuwait, Bullion City

A history of pleasantness can be arranged

Stacks of stolen loot still steady our metaphysical Mercedes as
we zoom to the border still being carried away

Bullet holes in the glass of Iraq

A politics for the present

With its repertoire

This picture is on strike

Radiance floods from the ample white space of Lisa Fishman's Dear, Read which, as Brenda Hillman notes, "call up the traditions of Dickinson, Niedecker, and Riding." Emotional lineation, short sentences aglow, like a female Creeley stabbed by desire without guilt:

Fires

J. played guitar and sang. J. lay me on the kitchen counter,
made me see myself in shadow.
In the dark, J. sang and sang. In the light, J. sang.
First it was night when J. brought me home.
Then it was day. Translucent, I sang.

Yedda Morrison's Crop is a horrorshow of alienated labor reinventing itself as alien eros, a broadband indictment with "endless anonymous capacity for entrance," engaged, hilarious, an incitement, completely beautiful, and sadly unreproduceable here (by me).

Hung Q. Tu builds Structures of Feeling that plumb irony without smartassness, "Pure as the driven news," like clicking refresh a thousand times on a webcam covering a WTO riot. I'm struck by the sheer usefulness of this book: it's a guidebook for deportees to George W. Bush's America:

fly me to the moon fiscal Disney ride
ball club isn't in reference to stars
crisis centers alter ego put bombs to sleep
Bahrain
this kind of publicity you have to pay for

Or, from "More LBJ":

E-1, E-2, E-3 . . . items or atoms harem scare'em
palm dead ahead



Fonda the clan



showroom den (of iniquity)




everybody splashes their satellites in the Indian ocean



camouflaged spotter
magnified golfers
California wave
after wave



house dressed



"keep that away from me"
temptation



painstaking accidents
low hanging merchandise
cafeteria evolved
zero sum banter

What is Lisa Jarnot up to? Her Black Dog Songs (a gorgeous object before it's anything else, with a blurb from Stan Brakhage somehow confirming the book's status as an image) go car-camping in Gertrude Stein's K.O.A., bearing knapsacks-full of linguistic odds and ends that, she, MacGuyver-like, assembles in an instant into whatever's most needful—weaponized love poems, mass romantic destruction—with just her own bare hands, a mesmerist's broken watch, and the beguiling truth-lariat of syntax:

Indian Hot Wings
for George W. Bush

The chicken wing factory is lit up in flames
and the flames are the wings of the little hot chickens.

The little hot chickens are the lampshades of the night
glowing inside the burning of dawn.

The dawn light is chicken-light for little white chickens,
The chickens are white like the glowing of coal.

The coal light of chickens are the white light of chickens.
The chickens are burning and bright in the sun.

The sunlight and lampshades are brighter than chickens.
The dreams of the chickens are bright as the sun.

The chickens are filled with the hot coals of lampshades.
The chickens are burning, the chickens are done.

Wallace Stevens, thou should be living at this hour! But the creepiness is so often betrayed by tenderness, or perhaps it's the reverse. I'm going home to read this to my dog:

Greyhound Ode

Go to sleep little doggie
while the moon is still foggy
and the wild dogs all bark
by the light of the moon

by the moon little doggie,
under streetlights so foggy
while the wild dogs all bark
by the moon by the moon

at the waters so foggy
little dog little doggie
go to sleep little doggie
by the light of the moon.

Happy birthday, Jim!

It's later than I think.

Great things are happening downtown as I write this—a marvelous convergence of poetic and publishing energies. Two panesl this morning, both of which managed to do an amazing job of providing both macro and micro views of small press publishing, experimental poetics, and community building. They've all been so different. Joel Kuszai read a paper on how individual poetry communities might model themselves upon criminal syndicates, and suggested that the power thus achieved could, for example, be used to drive a corporate textbook publisher out of business. (It's nothing personal, it's just business.) Mark Weiss of Junction Press spoke extemporaneously about the experience of creating and running his one-man press, which has produced a number of remarkable border-crossing projects (quote: "When you turn a junction upside-down it becomes a boundary") representing the work of poets from Baja California (including blogworld's own Heriberto Yepez), Trinidad, Cuba, and elsewhere. Julianna Spahr, who I've long wanted to see in person, turned her experience at Buffalo and with Subpress into a kind of parable. In the first half of her talk she spoke of how the "heroism of a cold place" and a general obsession with male modernist writers was eventually countered by the magazine she and other women started there; in the second half she spoke of the utopian ambitions behind Subpress and its limitations as a model for collective publishing (1% tithe vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy, no one person actually in charge of advertising or distribution, unwillingness of poets to choose cheaper galley publishing format, etc.).

The second panel featured Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (two of the four editors of Pom-Pom, Jonathan Skinner (editor of Ecopoetics, and Brendan Lorber (editor and bandleader of the irrepressible LUNGFULL!). These guys were great. Jen and Allison spoke of their magazine's unique model of poems that only respond to other poems that have been in the magazine (a version of what Charles Bernstein calls "wreading"). Jonathan talked about his fascinating project to produce a magazine of poetry of the Outside, in the widest possible sense—I suspect he and I could have a lot of things to say to each other about pastoral. In fact at one point he made reference to the "complex pastoral" of urban writing, citing Brenda Coultas' marvelous Bowery sequence (first published in Ecopoetics, now available in her book A Handmade Museum) as an example. Brendan Lorber read a terrific essay which will be printed in LUNGFULL! 13 about the number 13 as an abstract symbol of fear, and this symbol's relationship to an older, matriarchal conception of society that existed before a period of environmental scarcity led to the rise of patriarchy and a system in which those at the top have a vested interest in artificially maintaining conditions of scarcity. These ideas aren't new, but he synthesizes them wonderfully into something that I think simply everyone ought to read. Perhaps it will be available at his website soon.

As I was listening to all this I was struck once again by the fact that Brendan, Jonathan, and I form a recognizable "type" of young white male poet, and that I probably have more in common with them than I do with 99.999999% of the human beings on this planet. I am attracted and repelled by them as manifestations of the same genus, led to magnify minor differences in order to preserve a notion of my own specialness. In their presence I get a little nervous, as if afraid that we might touch each other and disappear in a matter/antimatter explosion. Back home, I find that I'm comforted by the similarities while seeing the differences as much more profound than I had. What's similar about us is a manner, a comportment that mixes bemusement with determination. And the desire to make a meaningful life outside the debased corporate values that we're usually too immersed in to notice, as fish don't notice water. Which is of course a point of similarity that binds us to many kinds of people, all over the world—people whose fear, as Brendan suggested at the end of his paper, cannot last forever.

SPD Opens Outler in Ithaca, New York

That's what it feels like tonight—a huge stack of books that I've been ordering in dribs and drabs over the past eight months suddenly descended upon us today. In one stroke we've become the store with the finest selection of innovative poetry within a two-hundred mile radius. So come one, come all, to The Bookery and do a little browsing. Consider it a permanent continuation of the Small Press Culture Workers conference happening tomorrow. Y'all are just lucky that I'm broke, because if I had the money I'd buy all of these (except the ones I already had).

In strictly alphabetical order:

George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003)
Dawn Michael Baude, egpyt ( Post-Apollo, 2002)
Anselm Berrigan, Integrity & Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999)
Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002)
Ted Berrigan, So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958-1979 (Blue Wind Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nest (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge w/ art by Kiki Smith - Endocrinology (Kelsey St. Press, 1997)
Adrian Blevins, The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003)
David Bromige, As in T as in Tether (Chax Press, 2002)
Norma Cole, Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn, 2002)
Kevin Davies, Comp. (Edge, 2000)
Jordan Davis, Million Poems Journal (Faux Press, 2003)
Jerry Estrin, Rome, a Mobile Home (Roof, 1993)
Lisa Fishman, Dear, Read (Ahsahta Press, 2003)
Graham Foust, Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2004)
Nada Gordon, V. Imp. (Faux Press, 2003)
Arielle Greenberg, Given (Verse Press, 2002)
Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003)
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2004)
Katy Lederer, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002)
Aaron McCullough, Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002)
Bernadette Mayer, Jen Hofer, Danika Dinsmore, Lee Anne Brown, The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001)
K. Silem Mohammed, Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003)
Laura Moriarty, The Case (O Books, 1998)
Yedda Morrison, Crop (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Tosa Motokiyu, et al, eds., Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1997)
Jennifer Moxley, The Sense Record and Other Poems (Edge, 2002)
Philip Nikolayev, Monkey Time (Verse Press, 2003)
Bob Perelman, The Future of Memory (Roof Books, 1998)
Deborah Richards, Last One Out (Subpress, 2003)
Elizabeth Robinson, Harrow (Omnidawn, 2001)
Barry Schwabsky, Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003)
Steve Shavel, How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold (Verse Press, 2003)
Ron Silliman, N/O (Roof Books, 1994)
George Stanley, A Tall, Serious Girl (Qua Books, 2003)
Brian Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003)
Chris Stroffolino, Stealer's Wheel (Hard Press, 1999)
Sotere Torregian, "I Must Go" (She Said) "Because My Pizza's Cold" (Skanky Possum, 2002)
Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Atelos, 2003)
Hung Q. Tu, Structures of Feeling (Krupskaya, 2003)
Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn, 2003)
Hannah Weiner, We Speak Silent ( Roof Books, 1996)
Hannah Weiner, page (Roof Books, 2002)

Hurry in before I win the lottery and buy them all.

Can't seem to stop feeling tired. This is one of those weird limbo periods—between the writing and the oral component of my exam. It's a long intermission and I can't decide if I should go out to the lobby for candy or if I belong behind the curtain with the stagehands frantically arranging the props.

Looking forward to Jane Sprague's conference here in Ithaca on Saturday. And this afternoon Larissa Szporluk is reading in the English Department. But part of me just wants to lie on the couch and watch daytime TV until it's nighttime.

Good news? Bad news? Who knew?

You are 40% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Selah is going to be reviewed next week in Time Out New York. Then on Monday, I'm going to be reviewed by my dissertation committee.

Little nervous.

The Same River?

Finishing the exam has left me in a fragmented sort of mood. Here are some choice selections from a copy of a shiny newish translation by Brooks Haxton of Heraclitus' Fragments—the last seems particularly apposite:

8
Men dig tons of earth
to find an ounce of gold.

10
Things keep their secrets.

14
Now that we can travel anywhere,
we need no longer take the poets
and myth-makers for sure witnesses
about disputed facts.

17
Pythagoras may well have been
the deepest in his learning of all men.
And still he claimed to recollect
details of former lives,
being in one a cucumber
and one time a sardine.

24
Hunger, even
in the elements,
and insolence.

31
Without the sun,
what day? What night?

32
The sun is new
again, all day.

38
Thus in the abysmal dark
the soul is known by scent.

45
The mind, to think of the accord
that strains against itself,
needs strength, as does the arm
to string the bow or lyre.

50
Under the comb
the tangle and the straight path
are the same.

52
The sea is both pure
and tainted, healthy
and good haven to the fish,
to men impotable and deadly.

58
Good and ill to the physician
surely must be one,
since he derives his fee
from torturing the sick.

59
Two made one are never one.
Arguing the same we disagree.
Singing together we compete.
We choose each other
to be one, and from the one
both soon diverge.

64
Though what the waking see is deadly,
what the sleeping see is death.

66

The living when the dead
wood of the bow
springs back to life, must die.

67
Gods live past our meager death.
We die past their ceaseless living.

69
The way up is the way back.

72
Moisture makes the soul
succumb to joy.

74
Dry, the soul
grows wise
and good.

77
A man in the quiet of the night
is kindled like a fire soon quenched.

82
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.

84
Goat cheese melted
in warm wine congeals
if not well stirred.

90
Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.

92
Although we need the Word [logos]
to keep things known in common,
people still treat specialists
as if their nonsense
were a form of wisdom.

98
To a god the widsom
of the wisest man
sounds apish. Beauty
in a human face
looks apish too.
In everything
we have attained
the excellence of apes.

105
Yearning hurts,
and what release
may come of it
feels much like death.

108
Not to be quite such a fool
sounds good. The trick,
with so much wine
and easy company, is how.

121
One's bearing
shapes one's fate.

128
A sacred ritual
may be performed by one
entirely purified but seldom.
Other rites belong to those
confined in the sodden
lumber of the body.

130
Silence, healing.

Done.

Instead of getting to work, I've translated the first Severance Song into French:

La mer qui sent comme d’autre déconcerte
et me bat. Là une chemise blanche flambant sous un blazer.
Là une robe d’été tourbillone dans le soleil d’avril. Les agents d’air
soulèvent et taquinent nos habits, ils dévoilent la masse sous la forme.
Une porte se claque et les arrêts de vent. Entièrement local est notre sens de la mer:
brume sur l’Adirondacks, orge brûlant sur les Plaines,
le brouillard se tapissant parmi les points rocheux de Big Sur.
Le sens de la forêt dans le sein, dans la narine:
la terre et le sapin c’est un peu de lumière
a dispersé sur les aiguilles qui sont aussi bleues que l’eau de javel.
Luxury and calm, son visage de renard, son corps, voluptuousness—
sensible des vêtements, l'amoureux synthétique
de la désobéissance de l'homme, mûr au bout, au langue—
le fruit me parlant, m’effrayé, dans un monde métallique avec nos habits.

And here's the original:

The sea that smells of another baffles
and batters me. There a white shirt blazing under a blazer.
There a summer dress aswirl in April sun. Agents of air
lift and tease our habits, disclosing mass in form.
A door slams and the wind stops. Entirely local our sense of sea:
mist on the Adirondacks, barley burning on the Plains,
fog crouching among the rockpoints of Big Sur.
The sense of forest within the breast, in the nostril:
earth and fir, a little light
scattered on bleach-blue needles.
Luxe, et calme, her vixen face, body, volupté
sensible of clothes, the manmade lover
of man’s disobedience, ripe at the tip, the tongue—
the fruit speaking me, afraid, in a world metallic with our garments.

Perhaps a more skillful speaker of French could let me know where I've gone wrong. Actually I know where I went wrong—deciding to write a dissertation. I kid, I kid.

Also new are dbqp: visualizing poetics, sodaddictionary part II (whatever happened to part I?), and Tom Beckett's Vanishing Points of Resemblance. If you're trying to decide which one to click on first, choose Tom's—he said nice things about one of my infrequent poetic forays over at the As/Is blog.

I know I had a bed here somewhere. . . .

This is why I still cling faintly to my hopes for a Dean candidacy (maybe Dean-Edwards). An acute diagnosis of our national pathology by someone paying exquisitely close attention to the language. Welcome to the blogroll, Black Spring.

They keep getting longer—twenty pages now with no end in sight. I may have to save my discussion of Gertrude Stein for another occasion and leave the stage to Lawrence and Woolf.

Bed. . . where's the bed?

Two down, one to go. My whole body aches. Somebody tell me when it's over.

Here's a flower for you from Mr. Louis Zukofsky:

Charlock per Winkle

A skein bottoms them together
brassy core crux fiery yellow
fourpetal fivepetal salver blue solitary
winkle spinggreen wellwintered leaves bright
trails creep white thyme times
fieldmustard with myrtle dogbane minor
quillet praises lacquer truemustard ox-beef
weeps uncrossed charlock bluer-winkle

Lose the 'Stache, Bro

Evidence I'm not working:


You are Allan G. Johnson! Surprise, you're a man!
You're also a radical man that talks about
patriarchy, male privilege, misogyny, gender
roles, and what the role of men in a feminist
movement should be. You're willing to call men
(including yourself) on privilege. We love you!


Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Aaron McCollough, a gentleman and a scholar, has written back to me about the conversation on Humanophone and smoothed the rough waters of contention. More on this topic later, but now I have to go to sleep, wake up, and write my second "A" paper.

The Boy Who Cried "Blog!"

I've discovered a new blog that is sophisticated and readable (both in terms of its content and its form as webpage), Janet Holmes' Humanophone. She has a lot of interesting opinions about poetry and is an editor of one the most interesting university poetry presses, Ahsahta. But I'm distressed to have discovered it in the context of a reaction to my commodification-and-narcissism-anxiety post that accuses me of ingratitude and cynicism. Holmes' reaction (I found it very weird to see myself referred to as "Corey," but I suppose that's the convention; in any case, what's good for the goose is good for the gander) is perhaps understandable given that I seem to be setting up editors as egoistical cultural commissars asking writers for a kiss on the ring and twenty-five bucks. That's certainly offensive to anyone who does the invaluable and often thankless labor of small-press publishing, and I apologize to her and to anyone else who got that impression. I'm less willing to apologize for the anxiety I feel about the currency of recognition that I as a poet trade in; I think it's ungenerous to assume that because I have in fact received a great deal of recognition for a "young" poet that I should just shut up and enjoy my UPS ground-rate halo.

What I was trying to address in that post is the perdurability of such anxiety even for the fortunate and how the contest system might partly function as an "imaginary" reduction of that anxiety in the short run while adding to the sense of real disempowerment experienced by the submitting poets in the long run. I don't have a good alternative to contests, and I know that they make it possible for more books to be published, which is of course a good thing. The Barrow Street contest that I won is about as good as it gets, I think: there was no favoritism (I've never met Robert Pinsky and he's even rejected some of my poems in his capacity as poetry editor of Slate), the book is beautiful, and all the entrants get a copy of the winning book (hopefully not all of them will end up in used bookstores but hey, that's distribution too). What I think is more honorable, though requiring greater self-esteem on the poet's part and considerably greater financial resources on the publisher's part, is the old-fashioned mode of publication whereby you query a publisher and they read your manuscript and perhaps choose to publish it without fees or prizes. Without enclosing a fee with the manuscript the poet has nothing but the bare conviction that their work is good to justify their bothering a harassed and overworked editor with it; without a prize at the end (or the likelihood of making more than a pittance from sales) the poet is forced to confront more directly his or her motives for getting published in the first place. The publisher is more closely in contact with the work he or she is publishing, particularly because the intercessory "famous judge X" variable has been removed. One of the best solutions I've seen, which I've already mentioned, is the poets published poets model of subpress. Another good solution might be to charge a reading fee but to do the judging yourself. I'm very grateful both to Barrow Street and to Mr. Pinsky, but the fact that I didn't work with him at all in the publishing of Selah feels a little odd. I am indebted to someone I've never met; instead of the sense of community I might have discovered working with him, elder to ephebe, I am simply interpellated as an "emerging poet" by Mr. Famous.

This search for community is part of the reason I feel I must reject the priestly convictions of one of the commenters on Holmes' original post, Aaron McCollough. I don't want to reprint it without his permission, but I think what he says pathologizes my "paradoxical desires" (for transcending the system and for being rewarded by the system), rather than recognizing that this pathology is a reaction to a paradoxical system. Again, to go back to Nick Piombino's "Blogging and Narcissism" post, these are actual social problems that turn into psychological problems. McCollough's solution seems to be that one should accept one's role as unacknowledged legislator and opt out of the system entirely. On the one hand, I have some intuitive sympathy with the notion that poetry's value derives precisely from its economic valuelessness. And if I were to publicly embrace this notion while furtively applying for every fellowship and prize in sight I would indeed be guilty of cynicism. But the context for my original post was that even if poetry has no economic value, it does have cultural and social value—and in that respect, the system we have for producing poetic value (and the relations of production of poetic value) looks pretty damn capitalistic. You can try to opt out of capitalism by going to live on an island or farm and producing only what you need, but how are you going to get the land in the first place? It's impossible for an individual. It's also difficult to envision a working "cultural revolution" through which cultural recognition is distributed from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. But I think recognition is the currency of culture (read Allen Grossman on poetry and the production of personhood) and so the best solution that I've been able to come up with is to pool that recognition with the loose community that I've found—partly in academia, partly here on the web. Which is why I wrote that troublesome post in the first place: I was responding to the pain and anxiety of "my people," which I too have felt. That's why blogging has become so important to me and to so many of the poets who I admire: bit by bit we're changing our relations to the means of producing recognition.

I hope it goes without saying that I write this in the spirit of dialogue, of expanding community, and more in sorrow at being misunderstood than in anger at either Janet Holmes (whose taste in poetry appears to be strikingly similar to my own) or Aaron McCollough (he has a gorgeous poem here at the Ahsahta webpage for his book, Welkin.

Nonetheless it appears that I am pushing a program—just look at the texts I've chosen to provide readings for the upcoming semester, the Postmodern American Fiction and Postmodern American Poetry anthologies, both from that most postmodern of textbook publishers, W.W. Norton. Not that I hold any brief for postmodernism: I love John Berryman too, and have a sneaking admiration for the early Lowell too. (Roethke I could never get into for some reason, but his buddy Richard Hugo had enough mojo going on to drag me all the way to Montana for my MFA, while he was dead, even). If there's any particular bandwagon that I can claim to be aboard, it's probably good old fashioned Modernism proper, a tent big enough to contain D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein (if you stretch the canvas a little) and descendants as diverse as Ronald Johnson, Fanny Howe, Kathleen Fraser, and Cole Swensen. I'd like to hold a brief for Tony's "WHOLE HOG," and I'm no more interested in he is in meaningless pluralism. But these things are situational. The creative writing powers-that-be at Cornell are on the conservative side, aesthetically speaking, so I feel obligated to provide a counterforce in my teaching. I try not to indulge in polemics, nor do I encourage my students to burn Billy Collins in effigy. But I do what I can to open their eyes to what I think of as the still-concealed soul of twentieth century American poetry that the Hoover anthology offers us a peek at. Opening is the primary metaphor for what I want to do as a teacher. If someone were to enroll in my class who was conversant in Language poetry but had never bothered to read Plath and Wilbur, I'd send them in that direction. But for now that just doesn't seem too damn likely.

If and when I get to the point that I'm leading MFA workshops, I will have to consider different strategies. I don't want to be a mouthpiece for the avant garde, or even for the mongrels if they ever assume the dignity of a school. Knowledge is the only thing I can speak for without ambivalence is, which is why I heartily second Tony's suggested reading material. The poets I respect the most are the ones who are thinking through unavoidable because historical questions (even the sublime is historical), which means you've gotta know your history. All of it. Gee, I guess I am getting on the WHOLE HOG bandwagon. It's just that I think passionate advocacy of the work you love and think is important (including, of course, your own) is likelier to be amplified by such global knowledge rather than decreased. Not that I myself am close to having such global knowledge. But I will when I'm finished with this exam! You betcha.

I am happy to have discovered Typo Magazine.

I am even happier to have discovered this honest piece of railsplitting on the mongrelization of poetry and the supplanting of the mainstream/avant cold war (instead I gather we wll have a World Wide Web War Machine cut loose from all existing states, i.e. academia and the hilariously simultaneously Quietudinous and Obscure New Yorker and APR) by blogland's own Tony Tost.

Viva la revolucion!

And proof that James Tate lookalikes and Michael Palmer lookalikes can get along, after all.

A bad sign. . . or is it just a bad signifier?


You are Louis Althusser! You tried to bring
together structuralism, Marxism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Your brilliant analysis of
ideology and the state is still widely
influential. You murdered your wife, were put
in a sanitarium, and lived the last decade of
your life alone before dying in 1990.


What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

One down, two to go.

Deep in the examination soup.

I wonder if Jonathan is also listening to Charles Mingus' "Tijuana Gift Shop (Breakdown)" at this moment.

I want to lift my head up from Herbert Marcuse a moment to put in a plug for my friend Brian Teare's astounding book, The Room Where I Was Born. It's a heartbreaking read, a dazzling grenade of autobiography, fairy tales, Southern gothic, gay eroticism, Catholicism, kudzu psychoanalysis, and the inextinguishable, inextricable forces of poetry and love. There are remarkably presencing scenes and narratives here, but also always a spirit that questions the premises of narrative and the difficulty of tellng the truth about one's experience. The experiences he has to process in this book are painful, even lurid, and their sheer density is matched by language that raises (lowers?) that experience to the level of myth. But that critical spirit I mentioned is never far behind. In a way the book's cover captures what I'm trying to say: a photo of a tree and its roots, the trunk above the title (like a movie star or director) and the roots (the key grip, the gaffer, the guy who does bullet squibs) beneath it. Only here it's the black and tangled roots that are the myth, while the upright tree is the luminously critical spirit of the survivor/poet. It might also be a phallus: there's some hot stuff in here, whatever your personal orientation.

Here's a little taste; one of the poems called "Circa":

when the split began
inside the thought; when

the idea—family—
turned against itself,

was it father put
his spirit in a bottle?;

or mother wished him there,
a genie in reverse?—

either way he drank
and gave his fist his wife

enough to knock her up
with lullaby: tree-top

and rock-a-bye and broken
bough: from it fell

a child unbidden. She slept
for years—he found her mouth

a house and with the child
climbed inside—for years

she dreamt and this was marriage:
her long tongue a husband.

Her mind among her child—

Bleak wit skewers into myth and the strange logic of prepositions or their absence: "gave his fist his wife" "knock her up / with lullaby: tree top" "among her child." And Brian Teare is not a man afraid of semicolons. "I write out loud your sexed and crowded mouth." Check it out.

The 'A' exam has more or less begun. For the next ten days I will be writing three 20-page papers in which I attempt to wrangle the four hundred or so definitions of pastoral that I've come up with into something semi-coherent, with particular regard to the work of Lawrence, Woolf, Stein, Oppen, Zukofsky, Olson, Bunting, and Ronald Johnson. Theorists in my blender include Marx, Habermas, Marcuse, Adorno, Lukacs, Lacan, Empson, Althusser, Heidegger, Raymond Williams, and Peter Burger. The elusive figure posed by Vergil in his Eclogues stands behind it all, launching into eternity his fantasy of a space beyond politics and economics where only nature—sex and death—troubles the shepherds. Actually there's plenty of politics in the Eclogues, but they're always a force from the outside over which song may or may not have an effect. Here are some of the most famous and important lines from the Ninth Eclogue, in David Ferry's translation:

LYCIDAS
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.

MOERIS
Yes, that was the story; but what can music do
Against the weapons of soldiers? When eagles come,
Tell me what doves can possibly do about it?

Hire some eagles of their own, I guess. If you're an Iowan and you're reading this, I hope you go caucus for Howard Dean tomorrow.

Tony makes an excellent point from the editor's point of view—a small, new, or otherwise marginal magazine or (probably less often) press has to submit itself to writers whose status as Authors reverses the usual hierarchy. As someone who has now had the very pleasant experience of being solicited (as sexually coded a word as "submission") for his work a few times, I perhaps should have been more aware of this dimension. But I still haven't internalized my own Author-ity and to some degree I hope I never shall. Because I too dream of an end to hierarchy's humiliations. The best alternative to artistic capitalism that I'm aware of is the example of subpress, a genuinely socialistic affair. Of course the press itself and its products must go on to compete in the same value-free zone that the rest of us do; the books don't, for example, distribute themselves. Still, it's a heartening example of poets seizing the means of production in a spirit of cherishing—of assisting each other to their individual flourishings. And of course the collective nature of subpress does not dictate that they are all producing cookie-cutter work; far from it. My old Vassar classmate Camille Guthrie's book The Master Thief is as different as could be from Hoa Nguyen's Your Ancient See Through. But of course even subpress can't help but feel like a closed and exclusive club to an outsider. As far as I know they have made no provision for members beyond the original 19. This is less a defect in subpress than it is a sign of how very difficult it is—perhaps impossible—for any single poet or single group of poets to get outside the economy of humiliation. We are left for the moment only with the consolations of friendship and affiliation—the remaining vestiges of noncommodified life.

"[T]he rage and shame of wanting to do something this badly"

What is it that is so humilating about desire—about being seen desiring? Are we really all supposed to pretend to be self-sufficient little automata, strong and silent? For some reason I think of the persona Clint Eastwood adopted in most of his Westerns: grim, ironically contemptuous, yet somehow having everything delivered to his hand without his having to ask. Women and emasculated men (like the dwarf in High Plains Drifter) are drawn solicitously to this "Stranger" as if his pronounced erasure of all desire and affect functioned like a vacuum they were compelled to try and fill. It is a grotesque fantasy of independence, an indirect confirmation of our fear and need. The strangest thing of all is how attractive we can find a figure of pronounced and unapologetic appetite: Falstaff, Zorba, Donald Trump. They, especially the last, are also grotesques, but representative of a kind of liberation—from the class-bound strictures of good taste, if nothing else.

Anyway, Stephanie's audition, and the agony of deadlines and rejections have all led me to reflect on the terrifying unseemliness of selection in the arts. Instead of the marketplace, where no one ever apologizes for wanting to sell you a car or a Coke (maybe they should!), we have auditions and submissions (hearings and knee-bendings), seemingly unmediated scenes of judgment paid for in the coin of abjection: I want to be published by your press, I want to be in your play. We are caught in relations of production that imitate the hierarchical modes of capitalism without the medium of an unrestricted market in which our shameful need for recognition can dissipate unnoticed. The most popular alternative is to become your own cultural capitalist by starting your own press, magazine, theater company, etc. Then THEY will bow to YOU. By the way, I think one of the reasons the poetry contest paradigm is so successful is precisely because it introduces money into the equation. When I wrote $75 in checks yesterday I was covering over the presumptions I've made about the value of my work with the value of something we all understand—greenbacks. The exchange value represented by a contest fee—you pony up twenty-five bucks and we'll read your manuscript—mystifies what otherwise occurs when we submit our work to a publisher, which is the conversion of our poetry's aesthetic "use value" into a counter that we're trying to exchange for recognition. The fee mediates this like a fence (not like Fence), keeping our poetry and our desires safely separated. The suspicion most poets are prey to that their work isn't any good—that is, that it has zero exchange value in our culture—is placated by the exchange of cash. I'm not begging for anything, I'm just buying a lottery ticket—that is, engaging in a fantasy of recognition ("fame" and "riches") that is answered on the other end by a cash prize ($1,000 to $5,000). Money is the fetish on both ends of the process that protects us from having to actually submit to the market, trying to sell a product that has literally no value.

In some ways I'm rehashing Nick's compelling post on blogging and narcissism: "These are essentially actual social problems, not individual psychological problems, but these intense social problems for writers can easily and do frequently become psychological problems." (I have piratically abandoned Nick's line breaks; I realize he's trying to break down the distinction between prose and poetry, but I find prose broken into lines very hard to read.) Perhaps the best we can do is remember that these are social problems: it's not our fault that this is the system. Which doesn't diminish our responsibility for trying to change it. Blogging is one way out: at the very least a conversation like this helps, as Shanna has remarked, to spread those obscure feelings of humiliation around and so dissipate their force.

Delighted by the experience of reading the titles of the poems in Jordan's new manuscript (my favorites include "HOW TO GET STARTED, HOW TO KEEP GOING, HOW TO STOP," which strikes me as a kind of answer to Gaugin, "SPRING IN THIS UNDULY MOSHPIT COMPARISON CHART," and "THE EARTH IS SUSPICIOUS"), I thought I'd share my own. This is the TOC to what I sometimes think of as Selah's brother (sister?) manuscript, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma:

A Threat of Courtiers
Noonday Demon
A Letter to the Body
The Woods
Britons Never Will Be Slaves
The Treatment
Stage Blood on the Mouths of the Eumenides
Abramowitz
Ingram Frizer
Here I Am in the Forest
Un Chasseur de l’Hôtel des Étoiles Aveugles
A Forest, Children, the Darkling
The Bright Attenuated Image of Our Fame
Abramowitz and After
History of the Present Idea
A Jest Falls from the Speechless Caravan
Agave Agape
True Difficulty
Desire. Facsimile. Fate
L’Enfer Est d’Autres
Fog Said
Private Life
On Our Imperfect Knowledge of Void
Sycorax
Loose Birch
It Is Painted, Her Motion
A Fine Romance
The Language Works Extremely Well
The Kitchen of Francesca and Paolo
Lateland
No More Marriages
Fathomcant
Dissolved Soviet
History of Flight
North, Miss Teschmacher
A Pilgrim’s Progress
Ars Hollywood
Alternatives to Ohio
Landscape with Gettysburg Address
Candidacy
The Sweepers
The Glooms
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Caliban’s Orchestra

One thing I sometimes wonder about is how and why some poets decide to provide only what I think of as section titles in their tables of contents. Michael Palmer usually does this, Norma Cole has done it—it's a pretty "avanty" thing to do. In some cases it seems organic enough. My third manuscript, Fourier Series, has a TOC like that, because I want each section to be experienced as a single movement. These are not the quatres mouvements from Fourier's book of that title, but they do derive from my very literal attempt to overlay his theory of the passions onto the map of the Western U.S.:

Four Corners
The Five Senses
The Affective Passions
The Mechanizing Passions
Manifest Destiny

C'est tout. I suppose I've answered my own question: TOCs of this nature help to unify the sections of a book into something tighter, more chapterlike. Still I sometimes detect a whiff of snobbery around the practice, as if there were nothing more bourgeois than a simple list of individual poems with individual titles. Mais oui, c'est la guerre.

Krauts!

A slow night at the Bookery. Browsing through various Germans. A quote of Walter Benjamin's that deserves to be more famous: "Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience."

This blog turned one year old yesterday.

Here are some bits of Novalis' "Misecellaneous Remarks":

6. We will never understand ourselves entirely, but we are capable of perceptions of ourselves which far surpass understanding.

9. Our entire perceptive faculty resembles the eye. The objects must pass through contrary media in order to appear correctly on the pupil.

10. Experience is the test of the rational—and the other way round.

16. We are near to waking, when we dream we dream.

25. Modesty is very likely a feeling of profanation. Friendship, love and piety should be treated secretly. We should speak of them only in rare and intimate moments, and reach a silent understanding on them—there is much which is too fragile to be thought, and still more too delicate for discussion.

29. I cannot show that I have understood a writer until I am able to act in his spirit, until, without diminishing his individuality, I am able to translate, vary and change him.

70. Our language is either—mechanical—atomistic—or dynamic. But true poetic language should be organic and alive. How often one feels the poverty of words to express several ideas at a blow.

86. We usually understand the artificial better than the natural.

104. The art of writing books has not yet been invented. But it is on the point of being invented. Fragments of this kind are literary seed-houses. True, there may be a barren grain among them. But meanwhile, if only a few germinate . . .

The end of his "Monologue":

But what if I were compelled to speak? What if this urge to speak were the mark of the inspiration of langauge, the working of language within me? And my will only wanted to do what I had to do? Could this in the end, without my knowing or believing, be poetry? Could it make a mystery comprehensible to language? If so, would I be a writer by vocation, for after all, a writer is only someone inspired by language?

From his "Studies in the Visual Arts" (1799):

475. On the sensation of thinking in the body.

477. The poet borrows all his materials, except images. . . .

481. Everything visible cleaves to the Invisible—the Audible to the Inaudible—the Palpable to the Impalpable. Perhaps the Thinkable to the Unthinkable—. The telescope is an artificial, invisible organ. / Vessel. The imagination is the marvellous sense which can replace all senses for us—and which is so much ours to command. If the outward senses seem to be ruled entirely by mechanical laws—the imagination is obviously not bound to the present and to contact with external stimuli.

485. Our body is part of the world—or better, a member: it already expresses the independence, the analogy with the whole—in short the concept of the microcosm. This member must correspond to the whole. So many senses, so many modi of the universe—the universe entirely an analogy of the human being in body, soul and spirit. The former the abbreviated form, the latter the extended form of the same substance.
     I should not and will not on the whole act arbitrarily on the world—that is why I have a body. By modifying my body, I modify my world. By not acting upon the vessel of my existence, I likewise indirectly shape my world.

486. The tree can turn for me into a flame burgeoning—man into a flame speaking—beast into a flame walking.

487. Everything perceived is perceived in proportion to its repulsive power. Explanation of the Visible and the Illuminated—by analogy to sensible warmth. Likewise with sounds. Perhaps also with thoughts

Friedrich Schlegel now. "Critical Fragments" (1797):

4. There is so much poetry and yet there is nothing more rare than a poem! This is due to the vast quantity of poetical sketches, studies, fragments, tendencies, ruins and raw materials.

16. Just as a child is only a thing which wants to become a human being, so a poem is only a product of natrue which wants to become a work of art.

27. The critic is a reader who ruminates. Therefore he ought to have more than one stomach.

33. The overriding disposition of every writer is almost always to lean in one of two directions: either not to say a number of things that absolutely need saying, or else to say a great many things that absolutely ought to be left unsaid. The former is the original sin of synthetic, the latter of analytic minds.

57. If some mystical art lovers who think of every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then "wow" would be the best criticism of the greatest work of art. To be sure, there are critiques which say nothing more, but only take much longer to say it. [Someone please tell me the German for "wow."]

65. Poetry is republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which al the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote.

85. Every honest author writes for nobody or everybody. Whoever writes for some particular group does not deserve to be read.

89. Isn't it unnecessary to write more than one novel, unless the artist has become a new man? It's obvious that frequently all the novels of a particualr author belong together and in a sense make up only one novel.

100. The poetry of one writer is termed philosophical, of another philological, or a third, rhetorical, etc. But what then is poetical poetry?

Finally the last sentences of Benjamin's essay, "The Storyteller":

For he is granted the ability to reach back through a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but much of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to what is most his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to relate his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.

Breaking the Montana Mold Department

The filiation games continue. . . :


You are Arthur Rimbaud - a vital, cannon-changing
poet with a flare for tantrums. You tend to
write in a fever, and have a liking for the
disordered mind. Do't expect people to
understand you, for you are ahead of your time.


Which Dead Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sign Me Up. . .

. . . to be a Mercurist, which is a school of poetry that Shanna is apparently planning to induct me into on behalf of the only actual living Mercurist, Mr. Daniel Nester. Yet I'm not so sure I should be included in the Pop Culturist genus of which Mercurist and Queenist are species and subspecies. I just don't think my actual poems have what you could call a pop sensibilitity. Hm, let's see what else is available on her list. Well, I appeared in one of the last Frequency Series readings so like Shanna I might be a Frequentist. I hope I'm not a Disingenuist, though I love the name. No Flarfist certainly... Post-Avant sure, but that's even broader than a genus in my opinion, it's a phylum or even a kingdom. I'm a fan of the New Brutalists but I don't quite believe in them—like Tinkerbell they only exist if you clap for them and wish hard. Maybe I'll be a Poeticist. That means a poet who thinks it's important to formulate (and keep formulating) a poetics for him or herself, but who is not particularly interested in party affiliations. So there.

Some great stuff in the latest American Letters & Commentary, including a contribution from yours truly that might have Mike Snider calling me a brother Sonneteer. Many poems that I've read so far stand out for me: work from Becka Mara McKay, John Schertzer, Claudia Keelan, Rosmarie Waldrop (the last two are particularly heartbreaking and thoughtful elegies for 9/11 and the American reaction to it), Jeff Baker (funny and dark), Peter Henry (this is terrific but ends a little lamely), Christina Mengert, Michael Dumanis (I met him at Bread Loaf in 2000—I should send him an e-mail), Shane McCrae, Ray McDaniel, Cole Swensen, John Greenman (a prose piece called "The Cowboy Poet" that I as a former temporary Montanan especially appreciate), and others I haven't gotten around to reading yet. A high value on wordplay generally in these poems, or else a certain kind of extended logopoeia, by which I mean a play with context and counter-context that goes beyond the individual word to the culture or cultures suggested by particular phrases and syntaxes. Maybe that goes without saying in logopoeia. For an example, here's a scarifying piece of work by a poet named Linh Dinh:

Eating Fried Chicken

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times
When I'm eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes—
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.

But I'm not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That's not generally available to mankind.

(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)

And no doubt that's why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill one's lungs with gun powder and smoke.

That's such a fine piece of engagement—not socialist realism or anything Sartre would recognize (and deplore)—instead I mean an alert and outraged listening to the gap between how we'd like to think of ourselves and the way we too often are, as it might be expressed in our ordinary language. I dig it, is what I'm saying—and I consider myself warned.

Yes, Exactly Department

From Allen Grossman's "Of the Great House":

Beautiful poems, like flowers! Beautiful
Poems—like webs, like seas working, like
Wind webbing black water blown flat with gray

Flowers of the foam. Beautiful poems risen
Against the granite cliff in waves, exploding
The flinty shingle upward through the high

Window of the tower light. Beautiful poems
That I vowed, darkening the world,
Thronging the Avenue with the sweet sanity

Of profound tone, blind beautiful poems—
My servant animals, hunting the object of
Desire equal to mind's desire of an object—

Ringing and ringing through the midnight house,
Like an harassing phone call: Who is there?
Breathings only; and, behind that, the obscure

City of perpetual cry, whose citizens are
All mute, all dying, all enraged—
Beautiful poems. Beautiful, beautiful poems.

I've been enjoying Waggish Reads Proust, a blog called to my attention by Harlequin Knights, which I've belatedly added to my blogroll. Waggish reads Proust so that you don't have to. Actually, of course, it makes you want to. I haven't gotten any further than halfway through "Swann in Love," which I was really enjoying last summer. But Adorno intervened.

Humpty Dumpty Department

From Martin Corless-Smith's poem "Nota" in his book Nota:

The authority I give to OR is always a subset of AND.

Any description of that which is becoming is thought inferior to a description of that which is.

Truth is a fiction of expression. It is the myth of the eternal in the World.

What the lyric says is not simply that I am going to die—but that to whomever reads this I am dead.

Otium cum dignitate

Matter though independently real is dependent for meaning on its relation to Spirit.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are sisters—a lovely traveller at night
who might a taste of dying rape
a peep a piece of light hole
Champion all lame

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Romanticism is the companion of Materialism.

I love this kind of thing.

I'd put in a comments feature to make it easier to answer questions like the foregoing, but the last time I tried that my blog got real ugly. I'm not sure I can afford to make it any uglier.

Someone explain to me the whole "books received" thing. I mean, I did "receive" a little flurry of books back in November but mostly I have to buy the books I receive, or check them out of the library. Whaddyall mean by that?

Continuing my roundup of what's happening in blogland, let me direct you to this astute commentary by Dale Smith on the neoconservative (I think it's time to move this term into the literary realm where it belongs) attack on Yasusada that appears in the most recent issue of The Believer.

Congratulations Nada and Gary! If you haven't yet read one of the great literary love stories of the last century, you must pick up a copy of Swoon and catch up with it.

I'm a sucker for happy endings.

Back from two quiet days in a cabin forty minutes south of here, surrounded by woods and with a working fireplace. It was lovely the first day; the second day we began to get antsy, urban creatures that we are. But we did enjoy watching Freaky Friday on Emily's new PowerBook.

I'm linking to a couple of new blogs, the Poetry Hut Blog of Jilly Dybka and Jason Stuart's sodadictionary part II. I'm grateful to Jilly for calling my attention to an interview with Cornell's own Ogaga Ifowodo. Ogaga is a poet, lawyer, and activist who got his MFA at Cornell and is now enrolled in the PhD program. A hell of a nice guy who's survived political oppression the likes of which only enemy combatants and Immigration detainees have experienced in this country. That's a bit of sarcasm: Ogaga has survived things I can barely imagine. His aesthetic isn't mine, or anything close to mine. But as Ammiel Alcalay has remarked in the interview that concludes his book, from the warring factions, language of subjectivation that looks trite to someone raised in an atomized, individualistic culture can be thoroughly radical in the mouth of someone whose notion of selfhood is more collective. Ogaga speaks truth to power and has paid a price for doing so, and I have infinite respect for that. He's also prolific as hell.

Somehow I can justify submitting poems to Poetry for myself. It was once as central as it claims to be, and so many fundamental poets, American and otherwise, made critical appearances there. It's the name: I won't cede the ground of poetry to any single camp. Without abandoning a necessary degree of skepticism, I'm hopeful that the Lilly gift will eventually become meaningful to poetry and not just Poetry. Or rather, that there should no longer seem to be such a gap between them. Besides, I take a certain perverse pride in having both Poetry and Can We Have Our Ball Back? on my resume.

This may seem like a dreary topic for New Year's Eve, but I promise you that drink and festivities do in fact lie ahead. Farewell, 2003. In many ways it was a good year for me. But I hope that the larger nightmare it has been for the rest of the world is almost over.

So give 'em hell, Howard!

A useful clarification from Gary on the question of disruption—one which carefully amplifies the meaning of the term so that the notion of a "disruptive poetics" becomes a contradiction in terms. The contextual and historical nature of disruption is made much clearer by his latest remarks, though: where you're coming from entirely determines your judgment of how disruptive a thing is or not. Barrett Watten, to use one of Gary's examples, was certainly disruptive to me when I first encountered him—my educational background up to then had persuaded me that the only "experimental" poetry worth noticing was that of the Beats, whom I dismissed as naive, sloppy, and jejune. There was no room on my map for someone like Watten: I had to get used to the idea of him, and Language poetry generally, before I could actually read him. The poetics, the new map, had to be assimilated before I could make any sense of the poetry itself. Which doesn't speak very well for my capacity to react like the ideal reader sometimes hinted at in the statements made about those poetics: someone who accepts, who yields, who completely opens to the work, not finding it any more or less "strange" or "difficult" than a Shakespeare sonnet or a Burma Shave ad. These statements, which "empower" the reader to understand Charles Bernstein while taking away his or her ability to make sense of NBC news, have always struck me as disingenous in their effect, though not their intent. Nonetheless I myself find myself paraphrasing this idea with my writing students, urging them to abandon all their usual props and contexts. As if I myself were capable of doing this—as if I've ever been able to bring myself to just look at a painting in a museum without studying the little printed card next to it! (I usually do refuse the recorded exgesis that you hold to your ear, though.) But we keep exhorting readers to discard their need for ground to stand on and see freshly, probably because we so strongly desire to do this ourselves. Yet so much of the game of poetry, the intellectual part, the interest, comes from logopoeia: the foregrounding play of etymological context in one's poetry. Naievty is always faux and unconsciousness has to be interpreted by consciousness. I've been reading too much German aesthetics, I think.

Still you have to applaud a statement like this one of Josef Albers', which I find in the beautiful coffee table book that we're selling here: Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (edited by Vincent Katz; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). It seems entirely applicable to the way I want to teach poetry. He said this in 1928:

To experiment is at first more valuable than to produce; free play in the beginning develops courage. Therefore, we do not begin with a theoretical introduction; we start directly with the material. . . .

The most familiar methods of using [materials] are summarized; and since they are already in use they are for the time being forbidden. For example: paper, in handicraft and industry, is generally used lying flat; the edge is rarely utilized. For this reason we try paper standing upright, or even as a building material; we reinforce it by complicated folding; we use both sides; we emphasize the edge. Paper is usually pasted: instead of pasting it we try to tie it, to pin it, to sew it, to rivet it. . . .

Our aim is not so much to work differently as to work without copying or repeating others. we try to experiment, to train ourselves in "constructive thinking." . . .

. . . an essential point in our teaching is economy. Economy is the sense of thriftiness in labor and material and in the best possible use of them to achieve the effect that is desired (22-23).

Well, that last bit could go. Baroque excess often leads to the palace of wisdom, or at least freshness. But the fundamentals are very sound. I do wonder though what might constitute the "edge" of language.

I'm struck by the question of classification that Gary has raised, partly in response to the perennial division of post-avant vs. School of Quietude that Ron has again reaffirmed as pertinent to the case of Marianne Moore. Whereas Ron posits what he must see as two reasonably coherent traditions (or at least SoQ is coherent, to the point of being ahistorical; its "Other" seems to vary according to period, from Pound's Modernism to Objectivism to Projectivism to the Beats to the New Americans to the New York School to Language Poetry, etc.), Gary distinguishes between the distinguished and the distinguishers: many of us carry potentially paralyzing "maps of poetry" around inside us and work to expand the borders of whichever map we think is best; but another breed "force us as readers & poets to completely rethink it"—it I suppose referring both to existing maps and the territorializing impulse that is the transcendental precondition for mapping in the first place. It's an anxious-making distinction for the likes of yours truly, who against Ms. Moore's advise has gone to pursue a PhD and who is therefore necessarily obsessed with this kind of mapping. There is no particular tradition whose borders I claim to be expanding, Meriwether Lewis-style; but this may simply mean my actual position is undertheorized and my ideology covert.

To even think this way reinforces my sense that I am probably not one of Gary's "disruptive" poets, and this makes me sad. In spite of the technocratic lineages that have become available since Mallarme, I like most people can't help but think of poetry as being at heart this fundamentally disruptive activity that "force[s] us to rethink what we thought we already knew"; and by a kind of metonymy this seems to require one to have a kinship beneath the skin with the visionary likes of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Blake. This is romantic nonsense to a degree: the practice of poetry may have a kinship with the systematic derangement of the senses in its effect, but that doesn't mean you personally have to blow your brains out with chemicals. Nothing in Gary's post suggests that the contemporary poets he mentions are personally cut in such a Romantic mold. But there does seem to be something intrinsically Romantic about the notion of a poetic force so strong that "you simply have to make room for it, regardless of how you imagine the world to have been composed previously." That kind of writing isn't experimental, at least not in the white lab coat sense: it seems in Gary's formulation to be something innate, a kind of charisma (the OED says: "A free gift or favour specially vouchsafed by God: a grace, a talent"). The word "commitment" does suggest other possibilities: it makes me wonder about cases of poets who begin in a tradition, perhaps even achieve success in that tradition, only to make a decisive break. Whitman and his place in poetry comes to mind, as Lawrence wrote:

Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman, nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the end of the great high-road. And lots of new little poets camping on Whitman's camping ground now. But none going really beyond. Because Whitman's camp is at the end of the road, and on the edge of a great precipice. Over the precipice, blue distances, and the blue hollow of the future. But there is no way down. It is a dead end.

A dire formulation, to be sure. Even if Lawrence's pessimism is misplaced, Whitman's path, or any teacher's path, leads us to just another camp, however strange. But listen to what the man said:

I am the teacher of athletes;
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own, proves the width of my own;
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

You can't destroy the teacher until you have accepted the teacher, at least for a time. There's some hope for me then, and for all of us who've learned it by book. But you can't simply choose this kind of commitment, any more than you can choose to have your work read by the standards of another period. This is our moment and we can't make that moment any bigger or smaller. I struggle so hard every day against the myths of the giants of old. Let there be no more giants if that means tyranny—but not all charisma is evil. We need it—it's the beginning of something. Charisma, confidence, commitment—opens a way. More: it makes ways imaginable.

Here is what I wrote in response to the Nader survey that Ron called to the attention of the Poetics List:

Folks:

There is much that I appreciate about Mr. Nader and his politics. However, as a Democrat with socialist leanings I feel that we are in a state of emergency in this country. The actions taken by the Bush administration since September 11, and even before it (such as their catastrophic environmental policy) have been ample proof to my eyes that there would, in fact, have been a significant difference if Gore had prevailed in the 2000 election. He bears most of the blame for his failure, but Mr. Nader played a part. I think that third party candidacies are and will probably continue to remain meaningless except as spoilers given our winner-take-all system; if we had a parliamentary system in this country I would feel very differently. You will not easily persuade me that a Nader candidacy will have any real effect beyond siphoning votes from the Democratic nominee, and I cannot support this. I will consider supporting the Green Party on a local level; I think grassroots organizing for the Greens could in a generation's time create a powerful third party or else recall the Democrats to their roots. But a presidential run is premature and potentially disastrous. In fact, the disaster is more than potential; it is ongoing. I urge you to desist.

Sincerely,

Joshua Corey
Ithaca, NY

Needless to say, I urge you to click on the survey link and fill it out for yourself.

I hope everyone's been having nice holidays. We're enjoying the vast stretches of parking on our street, normally crammed with the overpriced vehicles of Ithaca College students. Now you could park RVs on our street. We did nothing yesterday, which was delightful. Emily lit candles and said the prayer; I watched. Raised by Unitarian Jews who saw nothing objectionable about Christmas trees and who didn't teach me a lick of Hebrew. I'm a man without a holiday.

Today I'm settling into my daily routine for winter break: 1) Sleep later than is good for me. 2) Walk dog later than is good for him. 3) Go to coffee shop and drink powerful coffee and read about German aesthetics or Olson's essays or something to do with pastoral--surely more than is good for me. 4) Come home, have lunch. 5) Futz around with computer, maybe submit something to somebody. 6) Go to bookstore and read more, more, more.

Next week Emily and I are going to rent a cabin in Spencer for a couple of days for New Year's. It's only about 45 minutes away but it feels like the deep woods. All we really want is a fireplace, especially now that it's turning cold again. For a while there everything was melting.

Mea culpa, Nicole.

Fab online journal Tarpaulin Sky has just published some poems of mine. By sheer coincidence another Ithaca poet, Fred Muratori, who I shared a stage with at Jane Sprague's West End Reading Series last July, also has work in this issue. And there's a prose poem by a poet named Danielle Dutton called "S&M" that kicks major ass. Beth Anderson, Ginger Knowlton, Heidi Peppermint (mm, ginger and peppermint), Zachary Schomburg, and a painter named Rebecca Silus are also featured with excellent work. Check it out.

It probably doesn't need saying that I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan. Grew up with the books, became thoroughly involved with the movies. I feel actual grief now that I've seen Return of the King and have to stop traveling with those characters, as I have more or less since I first saw the preview for the first film while goofing off at my dot-com job in 1999. Along with all the raves there's been some backlash: I found this Caryn James article both typical and baffling. Aside from the anecdotal evidence of my girlfriend Emily's love of the films (and she's never read the books), I was struck by this sentence: "The well-calculated hype and exaggerated praise (the New York Film Critics Circle last week voted "Return" best picture) has obscured what the series really is: an FX extravaganza tailored to an adolescent male's fear of sentiment and love of high-tech wizardry." This runs wholly counter to my experience of the films, even as I freely admit that experience is rooted in lingering adolescent maleness (for an NY Times article on that topic click here). The movies are an opportunity to absolutely wallow in sentiment, even as the latent homoeroticism (very much present in the books) goes practically undisguised to our cynical eyes. In fact they're all about love, and not just the romantic heterosexual variety that provides the only compensation for women like Ms. James (in the admittedly irresistible figure of Viggo Mortensen). The movies celebrate friendship and filial love (such as that between Merry and Pippin, Eowyn and Theoden, and the triangle of Boromir, Faramir, and their father Denethor) as well as a love for a country and a way of life. Of course the absolute evil of the Enemy (nasssty orcsis, as Gollum would say) is more than a little problematic and, I hope, should prevent the films from being treated as simple analogs for the war on terror (as some have tried to do). George W. Bush is no Aragorn, that's for sure—not only does he do all his ass-kicking by proxy, but he possesses none of the latter's humility or capacity for introspection. Man, do I digress. My point is that the movies are as crammed with sentiment (if not as sentimental) as any "chick flick," and much less afraid to cop to that sentiment than, say, the male bonding we see in a John Wayne or Mel Gibson movie is. And the love these characters have for each other make the spectacular battles matter in a way they almost never do in movies (the closest most of them manage to come to having an emotional justification for violence is the very cheap one of revenge), which has the effect of pushing the special effects into the background, where they belong. When I gasped at the spectacle of the giant siege machines laying into the walls of Minas Tirith, my emotion wass underlaid with anxiety for the welfare of the characters (in spite of my knowing the ultimate outcome). When Frodo fled from the giant spider, I share the feeling of the woman sitting next to me who cried out, "Run, Frodo!" Most of all, I was moved by the pivotal grouping of Sam, Frodo, and Gollum: Frodo's need to believe in Gollum's redemption, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary; Sam's deep, suffering loyalty for the friend who has moved past his understanding; and Gollum, whose slimy need is part and parcel with the remnant of humanity visibly flickering in his CGI eyes. In that central triangle the film achieves its truth content, becoming ambiguous and conflicted in a way the larger story of a battle against absolute evil could never be.

Now it's all over and I'm in holiday shopping hell, at the nadir of imagination where people keep buying Rumi calendars and copies of The Da Vinci Code. At least tomorrow the days start getting longer.

Here is a response to the scurrilous attack on Kent Johnson in the latest issue of The Believer. Perhaps they'll print it in their Snarkwatch section, perhaps not:

Venue: Your esteemed magazine, December 2003/2004
Author: Michael Atkinson
Title: "Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!"

You want to talk about snark? Look no further than your own pages, in which Mr. Atkinson deliriously takes on any number of academical straw men, hooting at the notion that Language might speak us rather than the other way around--as if such theories didn't always take into account as their main premise that we are socialized into a pre-existing language. It's easy to mock the "death of the author" premise--I am sure the author of the piece is alive and well and staying very far from New Mexico indeed. But Atkinson seems wilfully ignorant of the fact that authors and readers don't meet each other in some kind of democratic dandelion field: up until very recently you couldn't be an author without being anointed as such by someone with the means to print and distribute your work. Institutions and publications like the Academy of American Poets and American Poetry Review are constituted by their power to turn Joe Schmoe, or Araki Yasusada, into an Author to Be Recknowed With by Those That Care--a group Atkinson grumpily and marginally counts himself a member of. He writes that "the Yasusada verses are not literature anymore." But what made them "literature" except the authorization of an outfit like APR? And does the attachment of the name of a "literary author" which happens to correspond to the name on someone's cultural credit card, guarantee that their writing will not be "motivated by sardonic smugness or misanthropic disdain"? Out of the literary pool, Charles Baudelaire! Go back to your cliff house, Robinson Jeffers! No spleen, please--that could never be "true" (the scare quotes are Atkinson's) "to any genuine emotional experience."

I happen to believe that the Yasusada hoax was nothing less than a piece of performance art--a genuinely avant garde act because the object of its critque were those same authorizing institutions that made its own "authorization" possible. Yasusada's work makes us think as well as feel. (And yes, I do happen to think that the poems themselves have aesthetic merit.) Of course, this can only happen to its fullest extent if the hoax is revealed, and there's a great deal of evidence to suggest that Yasusada's eventual unmasking was all part of the plan. Atkinson writes that "Literature is our record of being, and to defraud it is an act of nihilistic mutiny." Stirring words: but to proclaim literature to be some immortal repository of "our" values is one of the oldest strategies of the cultural conservative, by which he attempts to persuade us that the record of his being is or should be ours. Elsewhere in the article, Atkinson writes of the high modernists (who, despite their thorniness and difficulty and, yes, "nihilistic mutiny" must be recuperated for "our record of being" or the whole house of cards will tumble) that, "in breathlessly witnessing a feat of brilliant daring, we long to glimpse the big brain at the controls, to see how different he or she is from us." This is the same author who writes "I know some women who only read women, and I can't think of a single reason why they should do otherwise." Because in spite of all his high talk about community and our being, Atkinson cannot imagine a mind or self truly different than his own and the idea of people crossing demographic lines, much less pretending to be dead Japanese Hiroshima survivors, appears to make him woozy. Joyce, et al, "were silly like us," to quote Auden, and the privilege bestowed upon their big brains to unsettle our notions of the "literary" (and, in so doing, to change or challenge the borders of community, which are always guarded by gatekeepers of one sort or another) is not withdrawn simply because it would make the narrow-minded more comfortable. Atkinson claims to write on the behalf of readers, but readers need no defense from Araki Yasusada or Kent Johnson. It is the self-appointed guardian of the narrow strait of "literature" who must bite at the flea, and glance around fearfully, and bark as the caravan passes him by.

It's Dan Lin, one N. That's final. Read a poem of his over at AGNI.

Finished my grades and my paper on Heidegger and Adorno and their theories of the artwork, which concludes with a consideration of Charles Olson. Now I have nothing to fear but waves of holiday shoppers. Yes... we DO have The Da Vinci Code! Gurgle.... choke....

Boy, this blog is ugly now. Can't figure out how to get rid of that hideous orange stripe. Links are more or less back, though.

I've been forced to change my template in order to get my site up and running again. Will restore blog links, etc., someday soon.

That's all for now except to note that the latest issue of Poetry is obsessed with the Isaiah Berlin's old saw about the fox knowing many things and the hedgehog knowing one big thing. The phrase is applied to both Nemerov and Jarrell and probably pops up in one of the poems too. It's A Very Special Issue of Poetry: The Hedgehog Issue.

Posting into more of a void than usual because Blogger won't acknowledge the posts. Makes a person feel a hint of existential despair, or maybe that's just a fluctuation of my standards. First Poetry doesn't look so bad. Then looking through some more promising magazines just makes me tired. If you can't be Rilke, why bother?

Someday someone will read this. Is it you?

Still can't get my posts to appear!

This month's Poetry seems slightly improved over the old ones. Reginald Gibbons has a reasonably sharp "Confession" by Reginald Gibbons, a nice meditation on Robert Lowell and the current disastrousness by John Koethe, a rhythmic little number from Rebecca Black, a Dean Young-ish piece of apocalyptic whimsy by Matthew Doherty, and even something post-avant looking by a Christine Garren (such a staid magazine that anything even close to page-as-field, that hoary old innovation, looks fresh). Still, the magazine has a whiff of the mausoleum about it. Somebody suggested they should use their millions to start giving the magazine away free, an idea I like. If they must be editorially stodgy they could at least choose a radically democratic means of distribution.

I've tried to add comments and a couple of new posts to the blog, but so far, nada. (And not the Nada we all love.)

Trying to add comments....

I'm told that Dan Linn (whose name I misspelled below), one of the happily unexpected purchasers of Selah at St. Marks last week, is actually a friend of Emily's friend, the esteemed poet Amy Whitney (who herself bought a copy of the book while I was on duty at the Bookery yesterday). The wheels go round and round.... Dan, if you're out there, send me an e-mail and say hi!

Barrow Street has corrected the price of the book to $14, incidentally, so you can now buy it from them or from Amazon. Dealer's choice, though I suspect it might come quicker from Barrow Street. For some reason Amazon is taking one to three weeks to deliver. No picture, either. Grr.

The holiday season is upon us. I never feel more Jewish than this time of year. The bookstore has suddenly become crazy busy, which is good for business but bad for busyness. I second everything that Jim has to say on the subject.

Can't believe I posted without a word on today's Big News. But what is there to say? Saddam's capture is unequivocally good news for the Iraqi people. However human and sad he looks in the photos, he has committed monstrous crimes and must be punished for them. I hope he gets a fair and public trial. That said, the politicial boost this will give Bush saddens and infuriates me. People, Saddam's a bad guy, but he's the wrong bad guy. In fact, it's not about bad guys. It's about systemic repression and injustice on a global scale. Wake up!

Preaching to the converted, alas and alas.

Same mixed feelings about the good economic news: a genuinely good thing that obscures our vision of the profounder evil.

The snow is falling....

The snow, it blows. Actually, with no particular place to go, like the songs say, it's nice to sit here and plan a mug of cocoa while the white stuff is general all over Ithaca. I'm back and it's been a whirlwind. The reading went very well—you couldn't wish for a more posh space to read poetry in than the National Arts Club. Good turnout, many people left clutching copies of Selah and Barrow Street and Western Humanities Review. Richard Howard read first in his trademark red-framed Coke-bottle glasses. He's a very entertaining stage presence. Jacqueline Osherow read after a break, and then me. I think I'm getting the hang of using a mike. People were very nice afterwards; I met Timothy Liu, Sharon Dolin, Kathleen Ossip, and Stephen Cramer, emerging poets all (well, Mr. Liu has fully emerged, I think). But the real thrill came the next day. After a fairly disastrous first meeting between Emily's dad and stepmother and my dad and stepmother, and a recuperative viewing of the expanded first chapter of Lord of the Rings at the Loews on 42nd and 8th Avenue, I made my usual pilgrimage down to the St. Mark's Bookshop. There, I was accosted—I believe accosted is the word—by a young man holding a copy of my book that he'd found on the shelves—I didn't even know the book was on shelves yet. His name was Ted Mathys and he was/is a poet (he has three good prose poems in the latest Fence and he was a fan. And he bought the book and had me sign it. More incredible than this was another poet, Daniel Lin, happened to be nearby, and he bought the book and had me sign it, leaving St. Marks with a single copy on their shelves. You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. It was a genuine rockstar moment and fulfilled most of the secret fantasies I've harbored since I first attempted a novel in the sixth grade. What to do for an encore?

Well for one thing, there's a reading at the Ear Inn coming up: Saturday, February 21st at 3 PM. Mark your calendars, New Yorkers: there's no avoiding it. You will hear me read eventually. Bwa-ha-hah!

Oh me. Oh my. I promise to get back to substantive commentary in the not too distant future. Yes indeedy.

My book is finally available for purchase from Amazon, where it is mysteriously $.95 cheaper than it costs from Barrow Street's website. Go figure. Also go figure why it has a 1 to 3 week availability. Hopefully that will improve very soon.

Reading in NYC Wednesday

In spite of being sick as a dog I promise to be well in time for this event on Wednesday, December 10:

Fifth Anniversary Barrow Street Party - - - and a celebration of the Winter
2003 issue...

Please join us...!!!

Readings by Jackie Osherow, Richard Howard, and Joshua Corey

Suggested donation:
$25 includes copy of the winter 2003 issue
$15 for contributors

7:00 PM
National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York, NY

Did you know Percy Bysshe Shelley's grandfather was born in Newark, New Jersey?

Stay off the roads, you snowy ships at sea.

From Duncan's first letter to Denise Levertov in June 1953, "An A Muse Ment":

            song of the languagers
What are the signs of life? the breath, pulse,
  the constant
sloughing off of old disguises in
  creasing, increasing—
Notes— to hesitate, retract:
  step by step— to be idiot-awkward
  with it— to take care
by the throat & throttle it—
  bottle that genius
for mere magic or intoxic
  vacation.
it is sober he stumbles
  on truth? Hell, no—
this he sober gnaws
the inconsequential
  eternity of his skull.

His appetite is not experimental.

If it's not too late I'd like to second Tony Tost's self-nomination for the editorship of Best American Poetry 2004. His taste is impeccable.

Got a cold, but I'm here at the Bookery anyway. Enjoying the slightly surreal experience of sitting behind copies of my own book, on display in the impulse-buy zone at the back register here. A middle-aged man buying a card picks up a copy, starts browsing. Do I tell him? Do I don't tell him? I tell him. "You must be very excited," he says. "Yes!" I say. He's still browsing. He puts it back. "Maybe I'll come back for it," he says. I don't want to put the poor guy on the spot. "We'd be delighted," I blurt. We. Well, we would, wouldn't we?

My sickness seems to discharge me of my usual obligation to do some serious work while I'm here: Adorno or whatever. There are some new books I've ordered for the shelves to browse through instead. Silliman's Tjanting has arrived (and I'm so intrigued by his anointment of Lisa Jarnot today. I'm a Jarnot fan myself, but what has she got that, say, Jennifer Moxley hasn't got? Her fearless ear, perhaps—while I've found Moxley's The Sense Record to be one of the most involving and provocative books I've read this year, I'm not going to that work for her sense of melopoeia. What a long parenthetical), as has the correspondence of Levertov and Duncan. Right now I'm leafing through Joe Sacco's new graphic novel about Sarajevo, The Fixer. And drinking lots of Gypsy Cold Care tea.

Denken durch Dichtung

"At times when we believe we are studying something, we are only being receptive to a kind of day-dreaming."
                        —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I used to be a much more unconscious writer. Only my ear, tuned inward to the thousands of books I'd uncritically absorbed, guided what I wrote. I did very little thinking about my writing or what I've learned to call "my poetics." Asked the meaning of a poem I'd shrug and say, "Hey, I just work here." A number of undertheorized notions helped to determine the decisions I made while writing. Rhyme was good but internal rhyme was better. Couplets are more beautiful than quatrains. A poem exists to unfold one or more striking images. Banish cliches. Syntax should be regular unless a linebreak or rhyme demands otherwise. "Prose poetry" makes no sense. The poem should conclude with an epiphany, a reversal, or else dovetail neatly into the beginning. All poems are love poems—or to put it another way, praise is more challenging than negativity. A poem should be beautiful. Poetry = beauty.

The critical attitude which led me to reject these doxa came gradually to me as I began my first grapplings with literary theory (Derrida, Foucault, Said, Nietzsche), and accelerated once I began reading poets working outside the narrow Levine-Hugo-Wright axis I'd defined as "contemporary poetry" (Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, C.D. Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido). I was 27 years old when this process began, so I'd already been writing for a while: poems, plays, screenplays, my Romeo & Juliet vs. Queen novel. So these notions, that I'd gathered who knows where—from reading and re-reading the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry?— were not quickly or easily dislodged. Even now they remain as the deep background which I write against, or toward almost helplessly. Couplets are more beautiful. Of course, "beauty" is now a suspect category and the role of negativity within the most authentic poem of priase is much clearer to me. Probably my sense of being a more critically reflective writer is tied to my growing interest in syntax as the engine of language estranged from communication (which is poetry in one direction and jargon in the other). I'm re-inventing the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E wheel in some ways, of course, and struggling against the fact of my belatedness as each member of a rising generation must do. One must figure these things out for oneself—at least I must. I can't and couldn't be told. Still, I hope my consciousness of syntax and the dialectical knot of logopoeia that it provides access to will save my students a little bit of time. And I mustn't overestimate that critical consciousness I've acquired. "Maturity" always dates itself six months down the line.

Bachelard: "When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection."

Deep in Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen (buy it!). Feeling of admitting too much when I say how deeply I understand it. We grew up in neighboring worlds, still live in them.

Back from Nantucket where the wild wind blew. My girlfriend has two nieces, one of whom is in love with me. We're going to run away together. She's three.

As of today there are now forty-eight Severance Songs. A book! But I'm going for an even sixty. It might be time to get into prose. I feel the sonnet form (usually but not always unrhymed) that I've been working in has become perhaps too instinctive. It doesn't offer as much resistance as it once did. Maybe I should start writing Petrachan sonnets with an octave and sestet. In Provencal.

Received: Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies (speaking of prose), Sara Veglahn's Falling Forward, Juliana Leslie's Pie in the sky, Nick Moudry's A Poem , a Movie & a Poem, Oska Pastior's Many Glove Compartments, Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen, Kent Johnson's The Miseries of Poetry (a haunting hoot), and, edited by Norma Cole, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. I don't usually "receive" books (I have to buy them) but lately I've been lucky enough to do so, usually by exchanging a copy or two of Selah. Still don't know when that book will have a distributor, but I hope those of you ordering copies from Barrow Street are getting them.

More later perhaps when I'm safely ensconced behind my counter at the Bookery.