Regrids

I am justly chastised by Jordan for "perpetuating the funny-serious binary." He's right: humor is more of a continuum, with the explicitly sidesplitting (and perhaps vulgar) on one end and the unintentionally funny at the other—not necessarily in a camp sense, rather that a "strong reading" is required to literally "see the humor." Oh, and I screwed up, Gary, I did mean to put your book (not YOU, not even all your poetry, just that book) as -x, +y. My mistake. No one describable as "the Lester Bangs of poetry" could ever be -y.

Here's another, perhaps equally tendentious version of my grid:

                                             Maximalist
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Beautiful——————————————————————————————————Sublime
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                                             Minimalist

This obviously leaves humor completely to one side, but it's a homologous x-axis in that it seems to have something to do with tone, which is closely tied to intent, as opposed to the y axis which is more empirically recognizable. What strikes me about this grid is how much of what I can loosely call postmodern poetry is weighted toward the sublime end. To invoke Kant in a literal-minded way, the sheer volume of avant-garde production (compared to the one book every five years or so model that seems typically quietudinous) (and which tends toward maximalism without being identical with it, since one can publish many many short poems) presents readers with the mathematical sublime, while the action of indeterminacy (still the major move in post-Language poetry, though I think poets like Jarnot and Moxley are choosing a more tangled, "metaphysical," even Donne-ian approach, which fascinates me) imitates the dynamic sublime in confronting the reader with the awesomely unlimited abyssal power of the signifier. Beauty is more often the obvious goal of quietudinous poets, but I'm always drawn to innovative poetry that demonstrates a commitment to beauty in sound and/or image: Barbara Guest strikes me as a n exemplary -x, -y poet on this new grid. Ronald Johnson's earlier poetry seems -x, +y (and yet he so often works by subtraction!); ARK is an interesting limit case because the monumental whole is +x, +y while the individual components, which don't really "add up" to anything but a sense of mathematical/cumulative awe, are exquisitely turned -x, -y poems.

I don't intend these grids as anything other than images of the provisional ledges by which I gain a toehold on the new poetry I come across. They are meant to come dialectically undone under pressure.

Mired


You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're
normal, but deep down you really just want to
strip off your clothes and roll around in
chicken fat.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla

Check out Deborah's gorgeous Queen of Chain poems, posted in response to my question about poetry based on Cremaster. I haven't seen the Queen yet, but I will on Wednesday. Come to think of it, Deborah's poems have always been Barney-esque; I'm thinking especially of Cremaster 2 with all the bees.

Also a belated blogroll welcome to the st*ar nosed mole.

Yow, customers!

I like Aaron's little dog grid quite a bit, though I can't quite "read" it. I can see it as an index of the image, with the different dogs suggesting different emphases: the lower right dog seems to represent allegiance to the experience of representation (with the flash preserved); the upper left dog is a version of pointillism; the lower left dog is cubist or perhaps simply the will toward abstraction; and so on. But how these little dogs speak to "the mind's ear" is unclear to me; I can't hear them barking. Gary's version is more of a black hole (remember that Disney movie from the early eighties, The Black Hole? With the faceless robots? Scary!) representing perhaps poetry's infinite ability to lightlessly absorb grids. Which can hardly be gainsaid.

Flipping through Clayton Eshleman's new book Juniper Fuse, enraptured by his use of this Hart Crane quote. It's from a prose poem, "Havana Rose":

And during the wait over dinner at La Diana, the Doctor had saiid—who was American also—"You cannot heed the negative—, so might go on to underserved doom . . . must therefore loose yourself within a pattern's mastery that you can conceive, that you can yield to—by which also you win and gain that mastery and happiness which is your own from birth."

A beautiful dialectic of mastery and surrender; a twentieth century updating of Wyatt's "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind."

Anthony Robinson joins my blogroll, and has some bones to pick about my little grid below. I already said it was subjective, but with that major caveat out of the way:

1) Feel free to put Chaucer on the grid, but the thing about most dead poets, especially the long dead, is that their historicity tends to trump this (obviously spatial) method of classification. I already know what Chaucer is "for," and don't need therefore to "place" him this way. Which doesn't mean I couldn't learn something from doing that or that it isn't kind of too bad that I can no longer read Chaucer "naively." The naivete of my little grid is, I think, its primary virtue and limitation.

2) Chaucer and Koch are both -x, +y. Do they have anything else in common? A more interesting comparison that comes to mind is Spenser and Koch; I'm thinking of Koch's book of apostrophes to abstract entities, which for me parallels the oddities that result from the extreme anthropomorphization that goes on with Spenser's allegorical figures. (Spenser is +x, +y though).

3) "Funny" and "serious" are for me entirely questions of tone. To be more precise, in the "experimental" work that I'm applying this grid to, the x axis describes the spirit in which logopoetic play, in all its varieties, is embarked upon. When Susan Howe etymologizes a word, she tends to be +x; when Lisa Jarnot structures a Steinian repetition of "little hot chickens," she's being -x. Which does not mean that the poem in which she does this has no "serious" or political intent. I'm tracking a particular effect (or affect) which helps me manage the ever-expanding library of contemporary poetry that I'm carrying around in my head.

4) I have no idea if anyone other than me would find this model useful. But I put it up because I'm curious about the means people employ to manage the sheer prolificness of the innovative poetry scene. When you attune your antennae to small press publishing, it's hard not to feel overwhelmed. I should point out too that I do not particularly favor any one of these vectors—there are poets in all four that I value. Plus the setting of bounds immediately creates a zone beyond bounds: poetry that defeats this mode of classification becomes immediately especially interesting to me. Jarnot is already complicated, as I noted below—and you can see how I've tried to domesticate her a little bit above; an unfortunate side-effect of systems-making, even a deliberately crude and rudimentary system such as this one. But I'm intrigued by poets who might dialectically confound these categories. Are there Baroque Minimalists? Austere Maximalists? The x vector seems more a question of that tone/intent distinction: funny writing for serious ends (the reverse is hard to imagine, except as parody).

I hope people will come up with/admit to their own grids and post them!

Here's the method of classification I tend to find most useful for contemporary poetry (apologies for the way your browser may screw this up; it's supposed to be a classic squared + sign):


                                             Maximalist
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Funny——————————————————————————————————Serious
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                                             Minimalist

Obviously this purely spatial model omits the question of history and lineage. But I sometimes wonder if we're all not a little too obsessed with history and lineage—why am I always grubbing around looking for parents (or better, grandparents)? Why my Anxiety to Proclaim My Influences? This little axis is a much better representation of the way in which I tend to "place" a given poet when reading their work. The historicism/lineage approach tends to come into play prior to this, when I choose a given magazine or book to read because it bears the traces of a history which I'm already interested in. But when I'm actually reading, somewhere inside my brain that poet gets assigned a point (a single poet may hit multiple marks of course, especially across a career). Michael Palmer scores +x, -y; a book like Gary's How to Proceed in the Arts is a -x, -y; hardcore langpos like Ron or Barrett Watten score very high in the x, y zone; Jarnot's Black Dog Songs is -y but highly motile along the x axis; and so on.

Not sure how much analysis this structure will bear, but it's a fairly accurate representation of my most visceral subjective judgments.

Finally took the time to make my blog less ugly. Now it has that icy feel that most people find so welcoming. I am sadly constitutionally incapable of figuring out what colors look good together, at least in blogspace.

Okay, maybe it's not really a good poem, and I didn't realize how old it was. I don't know why I should find myself in the position of defending Ploughshares, but check out the table of contents for their Winter 2002-2003 issue. C.D. Wright was the guest editor and poets I admire in the TOC include Caroline Crumpacker, Christopher Janke, Erin Moure, Brian Teare, and Liz Waldner (there's also some nonfiction by Eleni Sikelianos and a marvelously strange play by Thalia Field). So there.

Aaron's ruminations on Patchen and satisfaction have got me thinking. The attraction to a poet who's no longer on the avant radar reminds me of my own attraction to Delmore Schwartz's work—although Patchen's brand of creaturely affirmation is rare there. It's more the unabashed Freudianism linked with the quasi-Shakespearean language and the ethical handwringing that gets me—Delmore Schwartz as the Jewish Berryman.

The question of satisfaction might be rephrased as one of affirmation. One of the reasons I'm obsessed with pastoral is that I see it as being opposed to the (capitalist/patriarchal/war-ridden) world-as-given and thus profoundly negative; but it is also a positive representation of creaturely enjoyment and satisfaction (though not luxury). Patchen's poem is a perfect little urban pastoral that way. But I'm also convinced that the most interesting 20th century pastoral is found in the work of the Objectivists and their heirs--that the poem which prioritizes being over meaning is closer to the fantasy of natural fulfillment that pastoral represents.

I tend to find affirmation/satisfaction more readily in language that conveys lushness rather than that which attempts to represent a situation of satisfaction—such as Stevens' divine but near-meaningless lines, "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!" But then of course we're pushing past mere satisfaction into the realm of the sublime (the mathematical overflow of semantics, the dynamic power of sound). So "satisfaction" tends more toward the Kantian beautiful when it's in a poem—that which pleases universally without a concept. Within the poem it's more like the pleasing, since the speaker has an interest in his own sexual and gastronomic satisfaction. But as a representation culminating in the line "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful," it might be beauty.

No, I don't think satisfaction with the world-as-given is "allowed." But plenty of poets provide visions of a functioning microworld (based in the body but not in biopower) that implicitly rejects Ideological State Apparatuses, or the Deleuzian "segmentary," or total administration, or whatever you'd like to call it. The New York School poets were very adept at this; particularly O'Hara and Schuyler but I also see it in Barbara Guest and of course Ted Berrigan. I'm sure this list could be expanded. But again, I think the divide comes between a representation of direct, sensual satisfaction and language which pleases in this way—which is beautiful rather than sublime via indeterminacy or excess. Is "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful" a beautiful line? I think it might be for me if it weren't the last line, or if through some other means it didn't have to bear the weight of an epiphany, the solution to the riddle of the poem. I prefer my riddles unsolved—better, unriddled.

My lord, what's happening in Spain?

And as long as I'm talking about the news, RIP Spalding Gray. The news was as sad as it was unsurprising, especially after I read this. I saw him perform his monologue "It's a Slippery Slope" in Missoula about six years ago. He was always one of those artists who excited me because the seeming simplicity and directness of his approach made what he was doing seem radically new. I have similar feelings now about Matthew Barney, having seen Cremaster 3 last night. Wow, man. Of course there's nothing simple or direct about what Barney does in his films; they're as baroque and complex as an cut-up of Escher prints and Eraserhead would be, in full color yet. But I do get a strangely similar feel of the most direct possible access to the artist's unconscious—which is not to say there isn't a considerable amount of ironic and formal mediation, wildly on display in Barney's work and visible as visual discretion (the plaid shirt, the table, the glass of water) in Gray's. Seeing them in action gave me that feeling I get from the best poetry, a feeling called inspiration by any other name.

As near as I can tell, Cremaster 3 is "about" the aggression behind the masculine cabal that stands behind masculine/capitalist acts of creation, however beautiful the works themselves, such as the Chrysler Building, might be. Anyway. Astonishing images, some quite disturbing. Quite a bit of verbal humor too, in the credits and in the levels of "The Order." Has anyone written poems inspired by Barney? It seems too obvious an angle to pursue, but you could do a lot with the figure of Aimee Mullins (the beautiful model/athlete with no legs below the knee) alone. And there's two more movies to go!

My knee-jerk reaction to Ron's test is to try and find something interesting in Ploughshares. How about this? Wouldn't be that out of place in Kiosk, I'm thinking.

Ron's constant categorization of poetry into us & them (there seem to be multiple "usses" but only one "them") strikes me as an example of how what starts as a convenient method for winnowing chaff becomes an end in itself—it's the dialectic of enlightenment all over again. I myself am swayed by the names of authors, blurbists, publishers, and the look/feel of a given book, magazine, or website. There's just too much stuff being published to not do this. But I think it's my responsibility as a reader to extend the antennae a bit further, to be at least prepared to receive signals from other sources. The anonymous "test of poetry" is too artificial; far from directing my attention more to the text itself, both Ron and Zukofsky's tests return me to the compulsive catbird seat of identity establishment: who wrote this? Better I think to listen to the advice of friends (and I certainly count other bloggers as friends, at least for this purpose); and better to not entirely shut one's ears to the "official" culture, however maddening the episodes this exposes you to might be. I certainly don't expect to do without Lucie Brock-Broido just because she's published by Knopf (and has several times appeared in Ploughshares!), reviewed in the New York Times, and dissed by Ray McDaniel (though I grant he makes some valid and interesting points, particularly about the "anonymity" of Brock-Broido's own work—that is, the exclusion of the language and furniture of modernity). Which is not to say I'm interested in pluralism for its own sake: I think the energy mustered by partisanship is too valuable a resource to be squandered. I'm just more interested in partisanship for kinds of writing than in partisanship against other kinds.

At the beginning of the seminar he taught last semester on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Prof. Peter Hohendahl said that he believed Adorno had become a "classic," by which he seemed to mean a text that no longer directly engaged our intellectual environment (it was no longer an "intervention"), but rather had become part of that environment's foundations, the necessary backdrop for understanding that which was not yet classic (he seemed to imply that this was the status of Habermas' text) and which was still active in the struggle to make/understand our world ("how everybody is doing everything," in Gertrude Stein's parlance, which incidentally goes to the root of the too-easily effaced Aufhebung between making and understanding). I believe a collorary to this proposition is that one may take two basic approaches to reading a "classic": reading it as background, as intellectual history, as a secondary source to a more primary (that is, contemporary) text; or one may engage it directly by reading it "against the grain," which is to say "close reading"—treating the text as a literary text. Literary texts themselves may be read as classics—I take any straightforward explication of, for example, what Eliot and Pound were up to in The Waste Land as a "classic" reading; they may also be read against the grain, which is probably ninety percent of the Eliot explication industry (New Historicist readings, postcolonial readings, and so forth). The problem that I'm experiencing now arises from trying to write about texts which have an undeniably "classic" status for the post-avant community (Oppen, Zukofsky, Olson, Johnson) but are still virtually unknown to the literary community at large (represented synecdochally in this case by English departments). A fair amount of interpretive labor is still required on my part simply to understand and explicate what someone like Oppen was up to: I have to distinguish objectivist from symbolist modes of writing, explain the often negative presence of the political, trace the influence of Heidegger, etc. But a large number of poets and a smaller number of critics have already more or less internalized all this stuff: they have been influenced by Oppen, often in fundamental ways, without having mustered the kind of large-scale critical investigation to transform him into an acknowledged classic. I guess I'm talking about the unfinished labor of canon formation, which becomes especially problematic in the case of writers (and their self-appointed descendants) who seek to undermine the hierarchical and institutional structures that make canons possible in the first place.

This is the sort of problem that disappears if you look at it from the right angle, and this angle is easily accessible to me when I wear my poet's hat: it's enough to me to intuit and respond to the nearly astral influences shed by a canonically "unknown" (unknowable?) poet like Ronald Johnson without producing a treatise on his poetics. But my other hat, that of the literary scholar, is really only fun to wear when I'm able to assume a text's classicness so I can skip the labor of explication and go right to the kind of speculative improvisation that reading-against-the-grain encourages. It is my continued and perhaps naive hope that it's posssible to do this sort of writing as a scholar, footnotes and all. Certainly a large part of the pleasure I've already derived from my dissertation research ("research" never seems like quite the right word, since I'm not delving in archives; it's almost more like a highly disciplined variety of daydreaming) comes from reading texts against the grain of their "classical" context: when I turn Lawrence into an Objectivist or locate a momentary rejection of Christian transcendence in Eliot's Four Quartets I get a lovely little frisson. It's also true that the status of these texts qua classics means that I can do what I like to them without fear of "damaging" them or inhibiting their canonicity; this might even be my explicit goal. But when I write about Johnson, I do want to enter him into the canon, or at least a canon: I want my reading to lead to further readings. This might be a fundamentally different critical task, requiring other faculties than those the clever graduate student generally relies upon. It's probably no coincidence that the best writer on Johnson I've been able to locate is Guy Davenport, whose style is erudite without ever being academic, and whose essays invariably make me want to read whatever writer he's discussing, be it Johnson or Archilocus. This genre of writing is closer to the review than it is to the critical essay. But what does it mean to write a "review" of Discrete Series or RADI OS? A willful travesty of temporality in answer to the travesty of these writers' having gone unreviewed in their own time?

I am starting to put together a little essay on Johnson's ARK, and perhaps thinking of it as a review will provide me with the elbow room that I fear treating him as an undercanonized classic will deprive me of.

New work is up at the elegant webzine 42opus.

Hear, hear Yingpow's eloquent defense of blogging, and, more importantly, her expression of the general American loneliness which I would argue besets poets all the more strongly because they are unwilling or unable to drug themselves out of feeling it the way most folks do. Nobody gets to "be a poet" without living with the pain of a limb in perpetual thaw. I've had the good fortune of institutional support now for years after finishing my Montana MFA, which has given me time to figure out a strategy for living as a poet (also time to run up thousands of dollars in debt, but that's another story). I wonder if it would be possible to teach the stuff I've picked up in a directed way—perhaps the best an MFA program could do would be to foster an atmosphere in which people felt safe enough to express these concerns and fears. Must think more about this.

Saw the first two movies in Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle last night. Very intense, very David Lynch in Eraserhead mode. (I wonder if they can be said to have mutually influenced each other.) My favorite moment comes at the end, when (a surprisingly effective) Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini leans down from the stage to inquire of the mysteriou Fay, "Madam, what is your discipline?"

What indeed.

So I'm standing there in the polling booth, looking at all the switches, and I realize: I don't want to vote for Edwards. He's just as weasely as Kerry is on gay marriage and Iraq; he just doesn't have as long a record of weaseliness. Who is the candidate who most closely represents my own views (short of a complete restructuring of our government into a parliamentary system)? Who is the candidate who won't do any damage to the eventual nominee (Kerry), yet who just might push the party a bit further to the left if he can bring some delegates to the table? It's Kucinich. It was Kucinich the whole time.

I voted my heart and it felt good.

Need a narrative to sustain me now. Drifting among pieces of poems from Norma Cole, Lisa Fishman, Rosmarie Waldrop. Brief scalding baths in their intelligence. But I spent most of the evening finishing a novel by Charles Baxter, Saul and Patsy. A book of modest ambitions, I thought as I was reading it, but it turns out to be yet another response (less bloody than most) to the Columbine massacres. A satisfyingly miniature world. So many novelists depend on the construct of the village to make their plots work: a limited number of characters mattering to each other. But how many of us still live in villages? Maybe we all still do and what dissatisfies me about these works (and most fiction) is how it doesn't pay the right sort of attention to how nowadays we make and will our villages. Blogland the obvious example, though the Buffalo-listers (won't you stay home tonight?) decry us as boutiquists to their public square, which somehow in their rhetoric manages to combine the virtues of manfulness with vulnerability. We are all vulnerable enough already, I think. It bores me. The problem bores me. No: not the problem, but its setting. An insufficiency of foil.

Rosmarie Waldrop, from her poem "In a Flash" in Love, Like Pronouns:

1
There were fragments. I was born.
It was not justified. I
learned: the impenetrability of bodies.
But a penetrating look? To "surge
before." To haggle ill-equipped.
And "that other" opposed to.
Desire. I was calm between my selves.

Reminds me of the beginning of Clark Coolidge's At Egypt: "I came here. I don't know you here." Brilliant. The givenness, the inheritance, of position. This goes back to what Gary was saying about marking. Which has sent me back to Bruce Andrews from the library today. I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up. Exactly. or, Social Romanticism. Yes. Writing is fighting is the already holey body, hiding the reader's face in its sleeves.

Barney's Cremaster cycle has come to Cornell Cinema this week, and it sounds like I'm ready for it.

Reading Nada and Gary's great epistolary epic Swoon again here at work, and I thought I'd share with you the ten things Nada wants (or wanted) from a relationship:

1) resonance
2) mutual adoration
3) mutual respect (to include trust)
4) levity
5) shared time
6) shared tasks (some concept of our common good/common goals?)
7) world expansion
8) stimulation (intellectual, physical)
9) mutual curiosity
10) freshness

This is a pretty damn good list. But I wonder if I would put the same things in the same order. "Resonance," however, is deep and mysterious enough to be at the top of anyone's list, I should think.

Incidentally, whatever mystery "Jane Dark" wants to preserve by her pseudonym has been pretty much given away by her. Just click on the "nominally my boss" link over here. But a pseudonym (heteronym?) may still possess the residual value of deferring (differancing?) identity-in-general when it no longer conceals identity-in-particular. Hm.

An addictive read, Swoon. Aside from the happy ending, one thing I like about it is that it takes the form of an actual epistolary dialogue. I love reading writers' letters, but you usually only get to read the Great (Wo)Man's letters and not those of his/her correspondents.

Still in a bit of a post-exam drift. Today I started to read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and then put it down again. Two books of poetry that I seem to be perpetually rereading at the moment are E. Tracy Grinnell's music or forgetting and Sally Keith's Design. (My friends Karen and Jerry are visiting Sally in Rochester this weekend, actually). The book I'm reading most attentively (in the conventional beginning-to-end sense) is The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell's manner is a little irritating at times, a little fusselly (sorry, couldn't resist), a little arch. But it's a must read if you're interested in modernism. I'm struck most by his claim about the intense literariness of the War—how, thanks to the absence of TV and radio, literature and literacy were enjoying an intensity of prestige that had been and has never again been equalled. A sick but unmistakable sense of nostalgia washes over me when I read this. Media is, quite literally, a means of connection. There's a distinctive pleasure to be found in connecting with one's culture, particularly when that culture has produced something you can almost wholeheartedly embrace (for me lately and surprisingly it's been hip-hop: the Black Eyed Peas, Outkast, and the Grey Album--believe the hype). But there's a particular intimacy of connection (and how much of this intimacy derives from its exclusivity?) to that found in print, particularly poetry. I recognize the world of Swoon as being the world I actually live in, though to find oneself outside it contemplating it obviously puts that perspective sous rature. Swoon,, or the Grinnell or Keith books, make up for what they lack in immediacy quite literally: in their mediacy, their particular sensual and intellectual (no. 8) way of conveying weltanschauung, which is ultimately more compelling and necessary to me than the "message" being conveyed.

In other words: just now down the hall from the Bookery, a saxophone player at Moosewood was playing "I Just Called (To Say I Love You)." The only call we ever want to hear, right? But can we hear it when, as now, it comes served between thickest slices of aural cheese? "Only connect," sure—but are you willing to accept the charges?

Yesterday I was on an intellectual high, aided and abetted by a very strong, very large cup of Gimme! coffee (really the consistently best coffee I've ever tasted). I decided it was time to stop dodging Derrida. I haven't made a sustained attempt to read him since I was at Montana ("White Mythology," Spurs, and assorted bits and excerpts from Margins of Philosophy). But reading Spivak's wonderful preface to Of Grammatology has helped me realize how much he is in the deep background of everything else I've been thinking since I started grad school; I ignore him at my peril. Right now I'm struck by the resemblance between Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's differance; I suspect that many large volumes on this subject have been written and will continue to be written. Naturally I started trying to fit him into my notion of pastoral—is the Virgilian locus amoenus a site of bricolage from which the dream of "engineering" is deferred? I fear I must sound impossibly naive. But still I'm looking forward to reading the whole book. I also devoted part of yesterday to reading Ronald Johnson and forming some ideas for how he fits into my dissertation; in some ways he represents the telos of modernist pastoral as I'm defining it.

But that was yesterday: today I'm a slug. I was up late commenting on student poems and after I got home from teaching found myself unable to do more than read the article about Lyle Lovett in the new New Yorker and futz around gathering the materials for a certain notorious remixing of rapper X with pop group Y. I usually feel guilty about this sort of thing, but damnit, in this case copyright law is standing in the way of art. Now I'm going to bliss out listening while thumbing through Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which somehow seems appropriate enough.

It Figures

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

The mysterious Jane Dark joins the blogroll. I've also decided to push Edwards instead of Kerry. I think the first John is the one the Republicans are really nervous about. And let's face it: in this culture, a long record of almost anything appears to be a liability in electoral politics. It may take one handsome Southern boy (who can at least speak in complete sentences) to defeat another.

I think Bush's gay marriage amendment might backfire on him. Kerry is on the right track when he says it's a distraction from Bush's appalling domestic record. Either candidate just might have a shot if he simply doesn't lie there like a dead fish in the face of the Republican vitriol machine.

Why hasn't anyone ever told me what a terrific magazine Chicago Review is? I picked up the new issue in New York and it seems to be just about everything I've ever wanted in a literary magazine. The poetry is of a very high order: so far I 've read the work by Camille Guthrie*, Ed Roberson, Stefanie Marlis, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Joan Retallack, and Karen Volkman (her sonnet project, which I imagine will be a book one of these days, fills me with wonder and envy). In addition to the poem there's a very moving essay/talk by Michael Palmer, "Poetry and Contingency: Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought." There's probably no poet of his generation that I admire more than Palmer, and I think a lot of the poetry in this issue is touched by his aesthetic: a profoundly ethical wit rendered in sparsely musical and suggestive language, like headlights flashing through a window to make the bedroom strange. There's also some interesting looking prose by Gerard Roth and Viet Dinh, and a couple of other essays I'm looking forward to reading, particulary Joshua Weiner's "The Apprenticeship of Dr. Williams." There are many reviews, including one of Jennifer Moxley's The Sense Record, a book with which I have become somewhat obsessed. She's one of the rare contemporary poets I'm aware of whose sensibility, whose difficulty, resembles that of John Donne: her muse is not indeterminacy but a rage for the syntactically accurate poetic process. (I'm getting a similar vibe from Elizabeth Willis' more playful Turneresque.) Best of all is the blog-like "Notes and Comments" section at the very end, which includes a brief memoir of the late Stan Brakhage, a review of a Max Beckmann show at the Tate Modern in London, Andrzej Stasiuk's reflections on Poland's membership in the so-called "coalition of the willing," and some charming reports on poetry readings in Chicago by Matthias Regan, John Taggart, Michael Heller, Trevor Joyce, Tom Raworth, Jennifer Walshe, Mark Salerno, and Lisa Jarnot. All this for just six dollars! Sign me up!

* It seems that every couple of years I get in touch with Camille and her husband Duncan Dobbelmann (two very talented poets), then lose touch again. Camille and I once shared an Academy of American Poets prize back when were at Vassar together. If by chance you have her or Duncan's e-mail address, would you please let me know?

Back from NYC and New Jersey, where I gave readngs at the Ear Inn and the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, where my mother was once a member and my dad and stepmother still are. I feel more than a little ambivalent about Unitarianism, given that I identify as a (secular) Jew, but it was a very important place in her life and it felt right to read there. Some of the women who had been part of a poetry group she'd led were there for the reading, and they said sweet, moving things afterward—one described my mother as a "poetry shaman," which sounds about right. Sometimes I imagine that my life as a poet is my mother's afterlife. In one sense at least, that's literally true.

Both readings went very well (you were missed, Shanna—but I will indeed see you at AWP). But in some ways the most memorable evening was Friday night, when Emily and I, two of her best friends, and their boyfriends, went out on the town in Brooklyn. Almost everyone had something to celebrate: I had passed my A exam; Jen and Rachel both had new jobs in the film industry; Rachel is five months pregnant and her partner Al couldn't stop beaming about it; and Emily was recently promoted at her job. We went to a brand new restaurant in Cobble Hill called Blue Star, where Al and Rachel are friends with the chef, a manic Deadhead with a genius for what I can only call gourmet white-trash cooking (example: a delicately fried pastry filled with macaroni and cheese served with garlic mashed potatoes). He wouldn't let us order anything; instead plate after plate of delicious seafood and three bottles of wine came without our asking. I enjoyed oysters for the first time, and king crab, and lots of wine. Afterward came another first time: karaoke at the Hope and Anchor (our host: a transvestite named Kay Sera) where I tore into Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" like I had been born to sing it. You hadda be there. Maybe now I'm ready for Dan's karaoke big time—but I do think a hefty minimum amount of alcohol will be required.

Here's something I wanted to post as a comment to the discussion of reviewing that Aaron is continuing at his blog—but my comment was too long, dagnabit:

Hey Aaron—just wanted to say that I do agree with you about the value of a "cultural materialist matrix," aka history. What one ends up arguing with is the Ptolemaic effect of the reviewer's perspective becoming the central organizing principle of that matrix. I guess I'd like to see critics be a little more dialectical about their own stances. The polemical bent of most critics tends probably from the paranoia you speak of (something I am certainly not immune too)--and perhaps there's also a tradition in cultural criticism of fighting tooth and nail for "your side" and leaving the more judicious judgments and syntheses for those who come after you. I find myself wondering here, in my formalist way, if there might not be a useful distinction between the "review" and the "review essay." The latter would leave more room for pontification and tendentiousness (in the best possible senses of those pejoratives), while the former would commit itself to a more intimate encounter with the work itself. But obviously you can't be that neat--every book comes encased in a context or "scene." Once you start noticing the difference between a book by FSG and a small press book; once you know more about the "good" poetics of blurbist A versus the "bad" poetics of blurbist B, you can't ever go back. After such knowledge, what forgiveness, right? Gotta go now, but I'll keep thinking about this.

Thinking about Ronald Johnson, as so many other folks are doing these days, I came across this piece, "Hurrah for Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets". It retrospectively becomes the source for the name of my teaching blog, too. I will point my students toward it. Some wonderfully aphoristic sentences: "Content finds Form, as a leopard prey"; "Face the sun, your shadow will be sharper"; "Let sound gender sense"; "Learn to use words first—later you'll have ideas"; "Sometimes the hand has an eye in the palm, as the American Indians remind us. Grab a frontier!"; ". . . Pound, H.D., W.C.W., Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and Lorine Niedecker all leave you on your own horse, but teach you how to ride"; and—I will dedicate this one to my friend Richard—"Be an enthusiast."

My lord, you simply must have a look at—and a listen to—this. Way to go, Tony!

It is of course possible to be both ABD and a broken man. Still in recovery, but stay tuned.

A few changes to the links at right are visible. Adieu, Howard. Hello, John. I will probably never be as excited about you as I was about the Mad Doctor, but you've got to bring the one who knows how to dance.

I'm also extending a warm welcome to Aaron McCullough.

And I will remind you that I'm reading at the Ear Inn this Saturday at 3 PM. Details are available by clicking here.

S + 7

Allegro

But

Dissymmetry

My orals are this afternoon. When next I blog again I'll be ABD or a broken man. See you then!

Okay, you're probably sick of hearing about the damn review by now, but you can finally read it online as a PDF right here or at Barrow Street.

Finally got my hands on an actual live copy of Time Out New York today. The review is blue! Page 74.

I am increasingly impressed by the nuanced and thoughtful writing being done over at Gary Norris' Dagzine. Some of the same issues that have concerned me in recent weeks, especially the role of the market in poetry publishing, the latter being a category he emphatically wants to expand to include blogging and other non-print means of publication. He also dismantles the Jeff Menne review of Richard Greenfield's book that I called your attention to yesterday. Gary's perceptions are razor sharp, though I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions. I think Menne's attempts to "place" Richard are well-intentioned and preferable to the style of reviews (such as those common to Poetry) which simply assume in an un- or underspoken way both the book's place in an (invariably hierarchical) tradition, not to mention the reviewer's authority to define that tradition. Perhaps as usual the solution must be a dialectical one, in which the reviewer practices a kind of "full disclosure" of both the book's and his or her own relation to the larger poetry world as they understand it, without (this is the tricky bit) allowing that triangulation to dominate their reading of the text. This requires, among other faculties, a sense for the ways in which texts (I would almost say this is the baseline requirement for "good" writing) resist being so triangulated.

It's a lot to ask from a reviewer, which is one reason I've resisted taking up that task in a formal way. Which of course shows how I've come to understand the blog, or at any rate this blog, as a constitutionally informal space. Other poetics blogs with a more formal edge (I'm referring of course to Ron) come under attack on a fairly regular basis I think in large part because they offend other bloggers' sense that blogging shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's a mistake. Blogging like any other medium or form carries with it certain guiding connotations, just as the sonnet carries with it connotations of argument and erotic pursuit, whatever its actualy content. There is a dailiness to blogging in its purest form that mitigates against its being an ideal transmitter of "finished" wriiting—but that doesn't keep Ron and now, I think, Gary from using it that way, and using it very effectively. Myself, I think I will stick to what you might call advanced blurbing—little linguistic snapshots which will, I hope, provoke a few of my readers to buy them. I don't plan on blurbing books I don't like—that's why I call it blurbing. Almost a homonym for blogging, blurbing is a much-despised medium (the review of Selah this week begins with a complaint about blurbs). But a really good blurb is ideally situated to do the kind of work I think is demanded of the reviewer: the name of the blurber commences the act of triangulation, while the text provides an (never the) entryway into the book being blurbed. And sheer proximity (by being on the back cover of the book in question) both demystifies the "objectivity" claimed by the Poetry-style reviewer and also prevents the blurbist's take on the book from reifying the book itself—because the book is right there to be opened and read. Of course the blurbs I do here won't enjoy this advantage; the best I can do is link to where you can buy the book in question. Which is what I and all blurbists want: for my readers to support the poetry that I find exciting and necessary.

Please read this insightful review of Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, brought to my attention by New-Brutalist-in-Chief James Meetze by way of consigliore Catherine Meng. The review implies that I'm a New Brutalist by association, or rather that Richard is by associating with me. A thing that makes you go "Hmmm."

Look for me and Richard along with poetry superstars Nils Michals and Brian Teare in Chicago next month.

In other news, I'm getting ready for my big February reading at the Ear Inn. Verrry exciting.

Waves of goodwill are flowing from Pleasant Street tonight toward wherever Sarah Goodyear lives. (The link takes you to a review of the collaborative effort of Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks.)

It perhaps bears saying that I am the sole author and instigator of the free blurbs. I'm thinking of making this a regular Cahiers de Corey feature.

Selah has just received its first review, in no less a publication than Time Out New York—and it's very, very good. I'm ecstatic. The review's not available on the web yet, but I'll post a link when it is.

Woo-hoo!

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.