Saw this tonight at Cornell Cinema. It stars a very young and beautiful Richard Gere, a nearly as beautiful Sam Shepard (though I was often disconcerted by an unexpected resemblance to Denis Leary), Brooke Adams (who in face and voice often reminded me of my first great movie crush, Karen Allen, aka Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and an uncanny young woman named Linda Manz who also spiels one of Malick's trademark elliptical voice-overs. Set in the mid-1900s just before the United States made its entry into WW I, it shifts tone continually from something resembling socialist realism to something more like a fairy tale (or rather, one of the more fairy-tale like episodes in the Bible, the Book of Ruth), and then in its last fifteen minutes or so becomes a kind of reprise of Malick's Badlands. Above all I can't help but see it as a masterful espousal of and meditation on pastoral, especially since Malick is the American director whose sensitivty for nature combined with intensity of sheerly visual perception (though this is to slight the complex and beautiful soundtrack) is unmatched. Much of the first half of the film is taken up with images of labor on a vast wheat farm in the Texas panhandle: the work is dirty, dangerous, and exhausting, yet there's a kind of beauty and joy to it and to being part of the landscape that all of Malick's characters seem to find infectious. Then the pastoral mode shifts into the domestic interior of Sam Shepard's character's mansion on the hill; another kind of interlude precariously balanced on the lie that Gere and Adams are brother and sister rather than lovers. (In a kind of artistically magnanimous gesture that I can imagine few other directors pulling off, this interlude is prolonged by the arrival of a miniature circus via prop plane.) Shepard's discovery of the truth coincides with the arrival of a literal plague of locusts, and then a hellish firestorm which ends in the violent confrontation that had been deferred only by the integrity with which the figures of the film composed themselves in their beautiful wind-haunted landscape. At the end, after Gere has been hunted down for the apparent murder of Shepard, Manz, something of a wild child (whose wildness is magnified by the strangeness and beauty of her voice-over) is deposited at a dance academy where we are given to understand she will somehow turn into the teller of this story, or maybe as she at one point muses, "I could be a mud doctor, checkin' out the earth underneath." Adams, haunted by her part in the deception and in love with two dead men, is seen boarding a troop train, transformed metaphorically into a black-haired Helen. But the film resists allegory in whatever mode—Biblical, classical, Marxist—even as it invites a kind of doubled awareness in the viewer, who has the leisure (the otium) almost unheard of in contemporary films to look and look and to discover mystery in its images.
One of the things that fascinates me about Malick's films (I haven't yet seen The New World) is how often they're spoken of as being "poetic," and how right that description feels. This quality is easier to define negatively: plot, characterization, and dialogue have diminished importance in the films I've seen. But to speak positively, there's a curious mixture of extreme precision (one reviewer has noted that Malick's close observation of the wheat harvesting process could easily belong to a documentary) with the mythic, a combination I can't help but regard as quintessentially Modernist. Myth and precision meet most immediately in the lingering shots of natural phenomena, and also in the silent, listening faces of the actors (in Days often shot from below, magnifying their stature). Then there's the voice-over, which imposes a single startling subjectivity over the action and more or less substitutes for the usual through-line of fiction films, plot. This is a literally de-dialogizing move: Malick thus moves toward the poem and away from the novel/narrative in an almost Bakhtinian sense, except that the language of his voice-overs is not that of Homer or any other epic narrator, but the fragmented half-savage consciousness of a teenage girl. (In Badlands, the narrator is a disturbingly affectless and morally obtuse Sissy Spacek, while in The Thin Red Line we have the diffused "epistolary" narration of various soldiers; the Homer-loving Colonel played by Nick Nolte seems countered in his desire for a heroic narrative by the distracted terror of his men, minute figures in the wandering seagrass.)

Does this have anything to teach me as a poet? Perhaps only that "the poetic" is not a catalog of means, or at least not only that, but also a desired stance toward experience, and the staging of resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the "true story" alike. There is also, it seems, a place for largeness and scope, and mixed contemplation of universals alongside socio-historical particulars. It's inspiring to think on. It reminds me that the process is the goal.

SOON Reads Soon

SOON Productions founders and local poets, Theo Hummer, Josh Corey, Karen Anderson and Aaron Tieger team up to present selections from their work on Friday, August 25th at 7:30 in the Poet's Corner at Bookery II, 215 North Cayuga Street, Ithaca, New York.

SOON Productions was formed in 2004 to support innovative and small press poetry in Ithaca. According to Aaron Tieger, "We are committed to bringing new poetic and critical voices from across the region and around the country to present their work in the community." You can find out more about SOON Productions at http://soonproductions.org/wordpress/index.php.

Theo Hummer earned an MFA from Cornell in 2004 and is now at work on a PhD. Her poetry has appeared in Sentence, Vox, and The Indiana Review and on the Verse magazine website, and will be included in the Best New Poets 2006 Anthology. Her first chapbook, The Parrot Bride, recently appeared from Anchorite Press.

Josh Corey is the author of two prizewinning poetry collections, Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), as well as the chapbook Compostition Marble, and mantains a popular blog on poetry and poetics at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com. He has been a Bookery II employee since 2003.

Aaron Tieger moved to Ithaca in 2004 from Cambridge, MA, where he was Poetry Editor at the magazine Art New England. In addition to numerous online and print publications, his work has appeared in the chapbooks Sea Shanties of Old Vermont (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), Merge Point (Anchorite Press, 2004), Days and Days (Pressed Wafer, 2004), and February (Fewer and Further Press, 2006. His blog can be found at aarontieger.blogspot.com. He is the editor of CARVE, a small magazine dedicated to innovative and under-the-radar poetry whose seventh issue has just been released.

Karen Leona Anderson is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop and the recipient of a Rotary Scholarship to New Zealand who has had work published in Jubilat, Verse, Indiana Review, The New Republic, Fence, Pleiades, and VOLT. She is currently writing a dissertation on poetry and science at Cornell.

Bookery II is the city's largest and oldest independently owned bookstore and is located in the DeWitt Mall, in the heart of downtown Ithaca. Open Monday through Saturday from 9 am to 9:30 pm and Sunday 9:30 am to 6 pm.

Exhaustingly improbable character names gleaned from scanning the September issue of BookPage:

Miss Celeste Temple
Cardinal Chang
Stratham Younger
Cordelia Blackburn
"Highly successful hotelier Faith McBride"
"headstrong, brilliant teenager Fiona Montgomery"
"FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast [and] his demonic younger brother, Diogenes"
"Entertainment jounralist Mick Sever owes his career to pop star Gideon Pike"
Moon Blake
Gemma Bastian

Blogging has fallen low on the priority pole as of late, not so much because of busy-ness as because of stress over anticipated busy-ness. To wit:

- Teaching Shakespeare to freshmen starting Thursday (the plays: Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale);

- Getting married (30 days remain);

- Beginning the search for an academic job;

- Finishing the sorely neglected dissertation.

That's a lot of a lot.

Still I'd like to record something of my impressions of Montana, especially the powerful nostalgia and sense of recognition I felt in Missoula and Helena, the two towns where I actually lived. Helena was where I picked up the pieces after the end of what had become a disastrous relationship, and after I found myself twenty-six years old with no career to speak of and no accomplishments save a dead novel in a cardboard box. I found a little furnished apartment just off the main street, which bears the melodramatic name Last Chance Gulch, licked my wounds, and returned to poetry after six years' absence. Certainly I was under the influence of Richard Hugo, whose work I'd first discovered while shirking my duties as messenger for an evil law firm at the New Orleans Public Library. And the landscape itself is a powerful influence, literally expansive after youth and young manhood in the East. In retrospect, it's clear I was also being influenced by a Helena poet who I worked with for a time at a guidebook publisher there, a man named Rick Newby. Last week I picked up his most recent book of poetry from The Montana Book Company just after breakfast at one of my favorite Helena haunts, the No Sweat Cafe. The book is The Suburb of Long Suffering from a local press, Bedrock Editions, and I was surprised by how good it was, how moving I found it. Surprised not because of any perceived deficiencies in Rick's earlier writing, but because I'd come to assume that my taste had evolved to the point of unrecognizability from that of the poetry reader I was ten years ago. Well, it isn't so: Rick Newby practices a sly, elegiac, thoroughly post-Modernist (by which I mean his sensibility has been woven and charged with the work of the modernists: painters as well as poets, and Europeans as well as Anglo-Americans) poetics that charms, pricks, and delights me. He risks sentimentality and also a surprising degree of Orientalism that he seems to get straight from Pound (there's a prose poem in here about how Jeanette Rankin, Montana's Congresswoman [first of her kind], was introduced via letter to Homer Loomis Pound, Ezra's father) but generally evades the charge through precision of imagery and careful attention to the Montana landscape in which he, his town, and European civilization are but precariously perched. Here's another prose poem—I find them the most quotable:

Montana Landscape Hypnotized by Solitude

for Peter Merts

The cast-iron stove gleams dull in diffuse light. The cobwebs, the antic breezes stirring curtains, the cattle rummaging in the tall grass. Nothing can capture the tranquility of this moment, not oils, not water-soluble resins, not the ready presence of a small camera tucked in a canvas bag and shuttered. It is so quiet you hear the squeak of a rabbit under the floor. Alert to your silence, a lover leads you to a cot open to the sun. Dare to shiver in this cool weather. In Japan, you encounter—erupting out of a bay—the snake-like profile of a sculptor's fancy. In your side yard, deer nibble, and a cougar glides through eucalyptus and lavender. Solitude is a savage word. Wear it faithfully, like a mendicant monk who dons his paper raincoat before setting out. Great cast-iron objects cast adrift on sand. Slim legs of a girlish firgure. Footsteps marching to the edge of continents. Verge of the sea. Gleam of seaweed. Rumble of breakers. Harsh wind. Tenderness at the knees.

The most remarkable work in the book is the title poem, which is among other things a pastoral meditation—I shouldn't be so surprised to realize that my interest in that genre dates back to Montana days, but of course it does. The imagining of Helena, a small (but it appears to be growing with dismayingly rapid speed—subdivisions everywhere, and I saw this also near Missoula and in the Flathead Valley) state capital in what most people wouldn't hesitate to call the middle of nowhere, as a suburb comes to seem apt, as suburb itself seems perfectly to describe that which is defined by its separation from the urban, traditional home of a polis which is nowadays nowhere to be found, just as no one is willing to define themselves as anything other than "middle class." Newby's suburb of long suffering is inhabited by strangers and wanderers: the Great Emperor, now seemingly in retirement from his career of domination and violence; the Strange Ones of Rose Alley, who represent the always only partially domesticated Other to be found in so-called open societies; Anna, a painter and the speaker's muse; and Newby's favored persona, the Man in the Green Loden Overcoat, alternately protected and isolated by his fears, his lusts, his aloneness. The poem's melancholy pleasures seem to me to come close to that synthesis of social formalism—the thinking-through-fragmentation of the contested place of subjectivity—and the poetics informed by myth that I have given the unsatisfactory and tentative name of wisdom poetry. It's good now to express my apreciation for Rick's work, and also to discover, as I did with Hugo, that strong impulses toward innovation can be found in the work of poets who some might dismiss as avatars of masculine quietude.

More later, maybe.

Montana

The view from our B&B just outside Glacier National Park.

Bob Baker and me outside the Liberal Arts building at the University of Montana.

Me and Emily and a friend in the main quad at the U of M.

Emily looking sassy on a hike in Glacier.

A passing mountain goat.

A Columbian ground squirrel is more interested in the camera than his larger friend.

Smoke plume from the Red Eagle fire, which was burning in the eastern half of the park.

I am subdued by Henry, the child of Emily's friend Cheri, who lives in Whitefish and guided us on a float down the North Fork of the Flathead River with her partner Dave.

The trigger for our trip was the wedding of my cousin Daniel to a lovely woman named Bethany from Livingston, MT. Here two of Daniel's dogs, Moses and Timber, wait for the ceremony.

Bride and groom. They'd carefully selected August 12 because it had only rained twice on that day for as long as they've been keeping records. Well, August 12, 2006 was the third day.

After the ceremony.

Unearthly evening light in a horse pasture near where the wedding took place.

A view of Yellowstone National Park.

An elk in Yellowstone.

View from Inspiration Point overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.

Yellowstone deer.


Two more elk (I think) near the entrance to the park at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Home. Tired. Scrambling to put my syllabus together for class, which begins next week. Tales of my travels anon.

I've had nothing to say thus far about the carnage in Lebanon and Gaza and I still don't really have anything to say, except that I am disgusted and horrified daily. It's difficult to orient myself in the narrow field of available positions that I find in the media and blogosphere. It seems to me that Israel is double damned for slaughtering civilians and for pursuing a strategy that has no chance of long-term success. But I'm hardly pro-Hezbollah, either: the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the likes of Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah is blood-curdling. It's hard enough to be an American and thus implicated in the imperial adventures that Bush & co. have led us into; to be a Jew in addition only amplifies that sense of existential disgust. But I am American and I am a Jew. Both of those identities are at historically associated with some of the most precious human values: why, then, are their most vociferous partisans so keen to discard any value other than might makes right, us versus them?

Flying to Montana tomorrow for ten days vacation, culminating in the wedding of my cousin Daniel in Livingston. Ten days goodbye to all that. While in Missoula I hope to meet the other Montana Josh that I'm aware of and hoist a beer at the Union Club. And then north to Glacier and later south to Yellowstone, to stare at creeks and mountains, bison and bighorn, and let the big big sky cover everything and everyone.

An obituary for Patricia.

Been too hot and distracted to contribute to the conversation on ethical poetry that's been evolving in my comments box below. In addition to getting our wedding invitations printed and sent, we're preparing to travel to Montana on Saturday for almost ten days' vacation, the climax of which shall be my cousin Daniel's wedding in Livingston on the twelfth. Sad that I won't get to see Patricia as I'd originally hoped to do.

It occurs to me that "fully ethical" poetry might in some circumstances be better described as wisdom poetry. Curious the binary that sets up: "ethical" is cool and intellectual, while "wisdom" is warm and mystical, inclining maybe too quickly toward the likes of Kahlil Gibran, as Gabe suggested. I like wisdom because for me it has a sense of investment in the bodily—there's something overly Cartesian about ethics. (And I'm also thinking of how, in Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate character attributes, and you use the latter to determine whether your character notices something unusual, say, or to tell if another character is lying.) Real wisdom comes with thinking as a body among other bodies, and it also means thinking the past in such a way as to redeem it—to liberate the energies that historical trauma turns into bruises and contusions. To my mind that has something to do with the thinking of futurity that Benjamin Kunkel talked about in his essay on the memoir in last week's NY Times Book review, and which was also a topic in his magazine's "American Writing Today" feature that I blogged about a few months back. You can find a good summary in today's post at Long Sunday.

Anyway, as far as poetry goes, I agree that you can never abandon form and constraint without abandoning the terrain of poetry altogether. I'd just like to feel through to the significance of content a bit more quickly in my own writing, or at least some of my own writing: I reserve the right to simply fool around and see what develops, which is maybe only permitting language itself its own wisdom.

Reading quite a bit. Two sides of the pastoral manifest in two recent acquisitions: Paul Naylor's Arranging Nature (nicely reviewed here by Hank Lazer) and Gary Lenhart's The Stamp of Class. The one is a Romantic, downright Ronald Johnsonian excursion of the self into nature—but Naylor always maintains a kind of ethical reserve, sensitive as Adorno says we must be to natural history, which is the history of suffering that humans have inscribed on nature (in the same fashion that Kafka's torture machine inscribes prisoners). And yet nature promises someday simply to be, as lyric promises the rounded personhood that eludes most of us day by day and minute by minute. Can't quote the most gorgeous parts here because of the formatting, but it's a book I'm looking forward to going more deeply into. As for the Lenhart book, it's an engaging survey of American poets' engagement with class; among other issues, he looks at how rural and working-class poets have been fetishized for their supposed connection to the natural, which is of course the pastoral gesture par excellence as described by William Empson. That train of thought has brought me into closer contact with the work and life of John Clare, who features prominently in recent scholarship on poetry and ecology (I'm thinking particularly of Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth and Angus Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry). But Lenhart's poets are, after an initial chapter on the eighteenth-century English poets Stephen Duck and Ann Yearsley, variously American: Whitman of course, and Williams, but also Marcia Nardi (infamously assimilated into the good doctor's own Paterson) and David Schubert (subject of a lovely essay in Ashbery's Other Traditions), and chapters on Melvin Tolson, the New Americans, Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, and Diane Wakoski, Eileen Myles, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, and Tracie Morris. Lenhart's concern, of course, is to establish and historicize the subjectivity of working-class poets; but he can't do that without also talking about how they've been used and abused (when not simply ignored) by the patrician literary establishment. (It does not seem irrelevant that every scholarly book I've linked to in this paragraph, including Ashbery's, was published by Harvard University Press except for Lenhart's, published by University of Michigan Press.) This too is important for my thinking about pastoral, which usually exploits the "natural" but which can also work to liberate the voices of those who have been history's objects—trees and humans alike.

Wisdom, futurity, redemption. Lenhart quotes a fragment of David Schubert's that seems relevant:

A ghastly ordeal it was. In
Retrospect, I am no longer young.
Wise, sad, as unhappy as seeing
Someone you love, with whom life has
Brought suffering, or someone you
Have nothing in common with, yet love--
Unable to speak a word.

If when I say this I weep, it is not
Because my heart has turned into a
Lachrymose commentator; the
Discus thrower's still
There--the shining one, quick. It is because
In my moment of rejoicing, I
Thought that one who has suffered with me shall
Rejoice. There was no
One. Not one answered.

Of suffering, who wants to be reminded?

Perhaps the best description of the heroism demanded from readers and writers of lyric poetry available.

Dreamed last night that I was riding a bicycle and Bogie was running alongside. A sweet visitation. I picked up his ashes from the vet hospital yesterday. They are startlingly white, wrapped in plastic and then encased in a small wooden box. About one pound total. We're going to scatter them this weekend with some friends.

Grief changes what I want from poetry. The mystic strain that I'm usually both repelled and fascinated by suddenly speaks to me more clearly, even pragmatically: Duncan, Rilke. The elegy-world (Rilke's "Welt aus Klage"), search for consolation. Of course mourning a dog is simpler and in some ways sharper than mourning for a person. The relationship is much purer, or at least so it appears to the human being. We don't know what dogs truly feel—we just hurl ourselves into a good guess. Leaving behind: me, wag.

Change of content. Like Gabe (linked to above), I felt Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs portended some kind of sea-change; yet I tried to assimilate it into my idea of "social formalism." Not entirely unvaluable, but beside the point if Gabe is right that we need to think content in a new, "fully ethical" way and to stop fetishizing aesthetic forms. Forms are the hard thing we need to articulate the soft, but isn't the soft the goal? Vertebrate vs. invertebrate. I'm going to be looking now for poems that enlarge inner horizons, or that make useful contact between inner and outer. I'll let you know what I find.

I was saddened to learn last week of the passing of one of my teachers at the University of Montana, Patricia Goedicke. It was kind of a shock, even though she was in her seventies and frail-looking, because I saw her every year at AWP cutting it up on the dance floor. It was in her workshop that I first met some terrific poets and terrific people—really an exceptional cohort—that includes Deborah W. Pattilo, Cat Meng (who just lost her beloved cat, Winnie—it's been a tough couple of weeks!), Nils Michals, Ken White, Sarah Gridley, and of course Richard Greenfield and Trevor Toland, who were bacheloring it up with me in Vegas last weekend (details NOT forthcoming—sorry, Deborah!). Patricia was a passionate and inquisitive teacher who modeled poetry as a serious business for all of us and who took a distinctly maternal pride in our poems and accomplishments. We didn't always see eye to eye aesthetically when I was a student, and in fact we had many arguments—but in hindsight I wonder if she was trying to nudge me down the more experimental path that I did eventually follow. Her own poetry is sharply observant, attuned to the rhythms of human relationship, risking the sentimental and only sometimes succumbing to it; plus she had a keen interest in biology and cognitive science which I'm only now beginning to appreciate. By way of saying farewell, I'd like to share a poem of hers from her 2000 collection of elegies for her husband Leonard Robinson, As Earth Begins to End:

What Holds Us Together

is almost nothing, a little
surface tension at the edges.

Inside ourselves, but how?

Two blood bottles,
weak capillaries in pajamas

rowing across the night.

Into whose arms, the
self says,

will I permit it, at last
let myself go, trust others

to receive me when I'm dead?

By day we irritate each other, unwitting.
At breakfast, say, over burned toast.

By night, over the black potholes
of the snores between us I reach out

for you and find only
a piece of bare, unfeeling

forearm. This flesh

I touch so carefully in the dark
ignores me, in its sleep

indifferent, cold, unknowing
as the cold hiss of the ocean

and who we are is buried in it.

I know you'd mother me
forever, and I you,

but here, at the end of everything
we know

as waves spill themselves on the beach
in foaming avalanches, crackling

stone suckles stone. Even the kindest

words scrape against each other like seashells,
flesh, kneecaps, numb lips

nearly raw now, almost ready to break up,

crumble themselves into that loud
nameless energy we must return to

and can't, not yet,
nervously tying our pajamas

as tight as we can against the taut
temporary skin

of the bodies we tremble across the world in.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in or commented below with their condolences about Bogie.

Got back yesterday morning from Las Vegas, of all places: in spite of what happened, I decided to go ahead with the bachelor party I'd planned with my friends Richard and Trevor months before. It was a good time, though needless to say none of us won anything playing slots or blackjack. Acting on a tip, on Saturday we dropped in at the Riviera to check out the annual convention of The International Society of Poets, aka the jokers at Poetry.com. If you're not familiar with this organization, they're notorious for inviting submissions of poems, then accepting every one of them, no matter how dismal, and writing back to the author as "Dear Published Poet" and fleecing them for all they're worth by selling them expensive yet cheap-looking copies of an anthology that will contain their work but will only be read and purchased by the hundreds of other gullible souls who paid to be included. Other modes of exploitation include plaques, tote bags, laminated wallet cards, and the conference itself, which costs $595 to attend, not counting hotel and other costs. Every attendee receives an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry statuette, plus there are "workshops," an appearance by American Idol Ruben Studdard, and the main event, a chance to become Poet of the Year and win $20,000 (presumably this part has to be legitimate—the society claims to award $100,000 in prizes every year, which they can easily afford given how many people must be paying for anthologies, self-published books, and knick-knacks—for example they'll print 100 copies of a 60-page or less book for $1,285).

The conference resembled nothing so much as a fourth-rate, Bizarro AWP. The Riviera's convention center is dull and dingy, and security was lax, so we could walk right in. Immediately we saw a book table with W.D. Snodgrass meeting and greeting folks. There's no telling if Snodgrass's endorsement of the conference is cynical or criminally naive—maybe he thinks he's being democratic by reaching beyond the academic audience, but the crudity of the exploitation seems too obvious to miss. David Wagoner is the other poet I'd heard of who's bolstering the ISP's reputation with his own credibility: shame on both of them. We saw a workshop which appeared to consist of several hundred people listening to the speaker read off "powerful words" that had been submitted by the audience: I heard "beautiful," "savior," "rich," and "success." Another room held a book fair in which the poets (who each wear a nametag that says POET on it) sat somewhat glumly behind tables that displayed the aforementioned self-published books, laminated cards, etc. Most of them appeared to be working-class types, ranging in age from twentysomething (only a few of those) to sixtysomething and up. The poems on display had a certain dreary family resemblance: a lot of prose broken up into centered lines, a lot of Jesus, and a surprising number of references to poetry itself as a kind of synonym for creativity, inspiration, and soulfulness. It would be easy to laugh at these folks, but mostly I felt sad that their search for some kind of recognition had led them to buy into what amounts to a pyramid scheme. Of course many argue that AWP and the MFA business is also a pyramid scheme, with hopeful students providing the funds to support the few of their number who will actually get teaching jobs. There's a kernel of truth to this, especially if you preoccupy yourself with the financial view, but of course there's a lot of potential value to be gained from attending an MFA program aside from the professional credential. It is, after all, a form of education—the education on view at Poetry.com hardly seems worthy of the name, and in fact, the organization's survival depends on its victims' ignorance. The poets at that conference would do themselves a lot more good to create local writing and reading groups, and to publish their own magazines and chapbooks (you could do a kickass chapbook for twelve hundred bucks). I can't fault them for wanting to write and publish—they're no different from me in that respect. But it's a shame that that desire has turned them into the prey of heartless opportunists.

You can find more info on the scam here.

Bogie

Bogie was much sicker than anyone realized. He went to the vet three times this week for lethargy and lack of interest in food, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong. He seemed much better on Saturday and went for a longish walk with Emily and me. That evening, after we got home from Richard and Brian’s reading (which was terrific, I should mention), we found him almost immobile, breathing shallowly. We took him to the Cornell Animal Hospital emergency room at midnight and, after less than an hour, he went into arrest and died. We won’t know why until the autopsy and we may not know then either.

Bogie was about nine years old—he was maybe ten months when I first got him at the pound in Missoula, Montana in early 1998. He was a dear companion to me and later also to Emily, living together with us in our house on Pleasant Street here in Ithaca for three years. A wise and playful animal who almost never barked: everyone who met him loved him. He enriched our lives immeasurably.

Goodbye, Bogie. Thank you.

This blog will be quiet for a while.

Some great comments on the fiction vs. poetry post below. I've been a little too distracted to participate in the conversation: Bogie's been ill with some mysterious ailment all week. We're going back and forth to the vet and trying not to worry too much. Brian, who got into town on Wednesday, has been a great help, as well as a great sport about spending his vacation with a couple of worried pet owners.

Speaking of Brian, it's time for me to remind you about the reading tomorrow at 7 PM at the State of the Art Gallery here in Ithaca. Featuring:

Brian Teare, author of the award-winning book The Room Where I Was Born and the startlingly gorgeous chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown, and

Richard Greenfield, author of the amazing and well-received book A Carnage in the Lovetrees and a new manuscript, Tracer, which hopefully will find book form sooner than later.

Also, here's an article about SOON that appeared in our local paper yesterday, along with an interview with Brian.

This post from John Latta has me thinking about poetry vs. fiction again. More specifically, a paragraph of commentary by Edmund White, worth requoting here:

Here’s an admission: I sometimes wonder why people bother with poetry. After all, the best novelists (Proust and Nabokov, to name just two) offer the reader page after page of language as precise, as unpredictable and as ravishing as the language of any poet—and the novelists simultaneously make their local delights serve larger structural or thematic ambitions (the generation of suspense, the play of ideas, the revelation of character, the depiction of society, the weaving of a thick, tragic sense of duration). In great fiction the language is not only satisfying in itself, but it also fulfils larger purposes of design: it is sculptural, in the round, gestural. Fiction makes a world, dense and social. Or, to change the figure, in poetry words are like notes from a flute, the tracery of a tune, whereas in fiction words are like notes of a symphony orchestra—compositional, the integers of a giant calculus.

I say all this, at the risk of seeming philistine, in order to demonstrate that I’m no friend to poetry unless it is indispensable to me, unless in does something no prose could emulate.

This is from an essay on James Schuyler, who obviously by White's lights must be offering that something indispensable and un-emulatable. Anyway, I value White's paragraph because it's such a succinct defense of fiction along the axis of—what? call it simply quality of language—and so is the perfect double to my objections to fiction. In other words, to tweak White's metaphor a little, I prefer listening to chamber music over symphonies because I can hear the individual instruments better, and pick out subtle patterns. (And a string quartet is capable of breathtaking feats of narrative and world-building, but perhaps I push the metaphor too far.) Also, it's impossible to imagine a symphony that could improvise with any success: you need a single instrument or small group to do that. In short, the symphonic seems overdetermined and unsubtle when compared with the lyric, yet no one would deny that the lyric is incapable of achieving sublime and overwhelming aesthetic effects.

White's account also neglects the powers of poetry to integrate themes and social density over the course of a series or a book or a career. I find the social formalism of a poet like Rodrigo Toscano or Ed Roberson much more compelling than what I imagine to be their novelistic equivalents, if only because they both incite and leave room for thinking, whereas it seems to me the continuous immersive flow intended by most fiction repels or retards thinking as it sweeps the reader along his or her desire to find out what happens next. This is to leave aside what is still the major territory for lyric poetry: the exploration of an individual subjectivity. The novel can do this too, but such novels can feel thin or obsessive if they don't do some of the other things we traditionally expect from them: character development, plot, settings and descriptions.

Nevertheless, as a writer, the novel tempts me: but is it because I long for symphonic effects or for the increased prestige and listenership that accrues to symphonies? Symphonies are Romantic: you are unquestionably in the presence of (at least an attempt at) Great Art, and the completest possible rendering of Spirit. I don't sneer at such ambitions, or see them as mere nostalgia for a more unified, nineteenth-century-style culture; I'm just trying to tune in to my own signals through a great deal of static. The largest ambition is to express not just one's own Spirit, but the Spirit of the Age. What's the right medium for that? And how to foster the peculiar combination of arrogance and humility required for the task? I think it's a moral duty to find the largest possible scope for one's artistic ambitions—to push whatever talent one has as far as possible. But how does that imperative intersect with what readers want or need? Maybe it doesn't. You write for yourself and for strangers, like Stein said—relying on the power of the and to suggest a sympathy, a common ground.

If Jed Rasula is right to think of "poetry as ecology in the community of words," then the patch-corridor-matrix model of landscape ecology might be most useful not in describing individual poems, but as a non-hierarchical representation of, say, the mosaic of American poetry. So we have numerous aesthetic patches, sometimes with regional inflections, and innumerable corridors that serve as connectors (between the DC and the San Francisco scenes, maybe, or between Language poetry and the New York School) but also as barriers, and perhaps most interestingly, as habitat—aesthetic territory in its most minimal and attenuated sense. The matrix, then, would be addressed by questions like "What's American About American poetry?"—what is shared, if anything, besides geographical and historical circumstances, by these patches—what makes them a mosaic?

Weapon of Choice

You can go with this, or you can go with that: Compos(t)ition Marble is now available for ordering from Pavement Saw! Just click on the link to go get it.

Fascinating SCT lecture by Eric L. Santner yesterday called "Neighbors and Other Creatures." Santner's a professor of German Studies at the University of Chicago and he does inventive and imaginative critical theory with the history of monotheism, Freud and psychoanalysis, Jewish theology, German idealism, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Holderlin-Rilke-Celan, and divers other texts and topics. His lecture focused on the implications of the commandment from Leviticus to "Love thy neighbor" and on how the Other agitates us to the degree we are unable to navigate or integrate our own otherness. I was very interested in his last book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, and I'd like to read his latest, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. If people express interest in seeing my lecture notes, I can post 'em.

Beginning to investigate the field (pun intended) of landscape ecology, so that a term like "ecolage" can be a little bit more than a metaphor when I use it. It's really interesting to learn a new technical language, especially one that has rich implications for poetry. I've got a tome by one of the leaders in the field, Richard T. T. Forman, out from the library: Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. I probably need a more introductory text, but I'm learning a lot notwithstanding. The idea of the land as a mosaic is obviously very suggestive given my project of reconciling pastoral with the modernist practice of collage: Forman's theory derives from the view of landscapes that can be provided from a height, such as from an airplane, which makes it sound very technological and perhaps more about manipulation than deep ecology. But what it actually is is a highly pragmatic ecological approach, one which recognizes the impact humans have on nature and tries to find ways to work with that rather than devoting energy solely to wilderness preservation, say. Much of the first chapter is devoted to explaining the spatial units by which landscape ecologists study the land: there's a wonderful diagram that's reminiscent of the child's game of describing where they live as (for example), "Pleasant Street, Ithaca, New York, the United States, the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe." The three principle spatial units that Forman identifies for studying landscape are called patch, corridor, and matrix. A patch is "a relatively homogeneous nonlinear area that differs from its surroundings"; this could be a meadow, a stand of trees, a wheatfield, or a tract house. A corridor is "a strip of a particular type that differs from the adjacent land on both sides. (Corridors have several important functions, including conduit, barrier, and habitat.)" A matrix is "the background ecosystem or land-use type in a mosaic, characterized by extensive cover, high connectivity, and/or major control over dynamics." This is the hardest one for me to understand but I gather the matrix is what makes a particular landscape seem coherent as a landscape, despite the diversity of its mosaic of patches and corridors. There are a lot of echoes from aesthetic theory here. At one point Forman quotes another ecologist as saying, "Form is the diagram of force," which sounds like a variation on the Shaker expression that Guy Davenport once went to town with. And Forman explicitly compares this model of perception with aesthetic ones: "The patch-corridor-matrix model has analogues in other disciplines. Point, line and plane are fundamental concepts in art [here he cites books by Kandinsky and Klee) and in architecture."

It is tempting to look at Ronald Johnson's writing through this lens, especially given my belief, expressed here, that ARK is a view from above, a mosaic of modernism, Americana, natural phenomena, and Oz. But one has to be a little cautious when thinking analogically—it's a mode that comes very naturally to me, but it can be difficult to maintain an argument with it. Anyway, I'm excited to be coming to grips now with actual ecological theory (many ecocritics seem to have a hazy, transcendentalist grasp of the term ecology) and relieved to discover that it's not so technical I can't grasp it.

A sonnet from Ed Roberson's latest, City Eclogue, part of the Atelos project, proves that social formalism is hardly incompatible with lyric:

Urban Nature

Neither New Hampshire nor Midwestern farm,
nor the summer home in some Hamptons garden
thing, not that Nature   not a satori
-al leisure come to terms peel by peel, not that core
whiff of beauty as the spirit. Just a street
pocket park, clean of any smells, simple quiet—
simple quiet not the same as no birds sing,
definitely not the dead of no birds sing:

The bus stop posture in the interval
of nothing coming, a not quite here running
sound underground, sidewalk's grate vibrationless
in open voice, sweet berries ripen in the street
hawk's kiosks. The orange is being flown in
this very moment picked of its origin.

What I've seen of Roberson's work so far has a very clean, straightforward feel, inviting complexity and political dimension through subtle formal gestures, like the colon at the end of the octet that introduces an invisible ambivalent turn toward a celebration of what is laced with melancholy over what has not yet come to pass ("the interval / of nothing coming"). The nostalgia of eclogue has a cutting edge here ("nostalgia" meaning literally the pain of return), containing the kernel of a revolutionary wish. But there's also pleasure in the detail and in the memory of/wish for nature that persists in this urban "pocket park": a blade of grass with a subway handy.

Thomas Fink has a detailed review of the book you can read at galatea resurrects #2; you can also read my short review of Shanna Compton's Down Spooky, reprinted from CutBank.

Glorious weather, Ithaca at its best. Hope it will keep up for the weekend—I understand Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman are coming to town. I learned this from a woman named Christine (I didn't catch her last name) who's attending the School of Criticism & Theory conference up at Cornell this summer—ran into her while walking Bogie in one of the gorges.

For those interested, here are my notes on the Brent Hayes Edwards talk I went to on Monday:

African proverb on the back of the shirt of an audience member: "He who offers his head for the breaking of a coconut should not expect to eat from it."

Edwards is an engaging, soft-spoken, and dapper presence. His talk's title, "Come Out," turns out to entirely lack the queer subtext one might expect. He begins with a discussion of the work of Ed Roberson, specifically a serial poem titled Lucid Interval as Integral Music, which has a structure similar to that of Spicer's The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether: a poem on the top half of the page is separated by a line from other text—sometimes fragments, sometimes white space, sometimes a poem in itself—that comments on or emends what's above the line. Edwards: "Upper voice is the poem, lower voice is a singing under or a singing through," a voice of mourning addressed by the "preacher." Edwards talks about the concept of the lucid interval as a moment of sanity that emerges from a general background of madness—an experience of oscillation. Roberson speaks of trying to put as many "keys or cues" as possible into the work. Mentions zeugma, a word shared by two or more syntactic units. Edwards: "Ignescent associations between things."

Foucault: madness is forbidden language—submitting language that follows a recognized code to another code. Madness "sketches the empty form from which the work comes." Edwards criticizes Joseph Conte's Unending Design for not delving deeply enough into the musical sources of serial work.

Spicer: "You have to be tricked into" serial form and not know what you're doing. Spicer in Vancouver urging poets to learn from popular songwriters like George M. Cohan. (Jack Spicer, song and dance man!)

History unspoken—Robeson's sense of powerful unacknoweldged forces shaping his world as he grew up in the 1940s. From here Edwards segues into a long discussion of the "Long Hot Summer" of Harlem in 1964 and the highly prejudicial and misleading serial newspaper coverage of an incident of police brutality in Harlem that eventually escalated into full-blown riots. Media creation of a sinister whites-hating gang, the "Blood Brotherhood." Serial form of the newspaper allows the build-up and accumulation of rumor and innuendo until it bursts. Racialized violence constructed as serial, as all the contemporary articles on the '64 uprisings referred back to riots in the 30s and 40s, creating what was happening as a moment of repetition.

Langston Hughes was a newspaper columnist for the New York Post (this was before Rupert Murdoch, obviously) for many years, including 1964. In his columns he created a character named Jesse B. Semple, whose adventures were eventually collected as The Simple Stories. Semple as a kind of "barstool theorist." Column devoted to the riots in which a female character is beaten and loses her $40 wig at the hospital—warns other ladies not to wear their wigs if they go rioting. Subtle redefinition here of criminal riots into political uprisings.

Scenes from a strange film based on a strange book, The Torture of Mothers, a reconstruction of testimony by accused rioters and victims of police brutality (Ruby Dee appears in it). Serial accumulation of testimony with dashes of insight (mentions Reznikof). Steve Reich made a tape loop called "Come Out" that used a phrase from the testimony of Daniel Ham: "I had to cut my leg to let the bruise blood come out to show them": the tape loop, which apparently goes for fifteen minutes (Edwards played only snatches) repeats and reprocesses primarily just "come out to show them." Repetition as animating history rather than numbing or nulling it. Reich's piece played at a Town Hall benefit for the legal fees of accused rioters. Repetition breaks open the identical, "singularity becomes multiplicity." Edwards: "An Orphic vulnerability torn out and rent in the fury of its own music."

Reich sought a seriality devoted to "perceptible processes," designed to make seriality audible.

Duke Ellington's phrase "tone parallel"—an attempt to avoid hierarchies in building structural relations.

In the Q&A someone mentions Mackey (who as you've noticed by now was not featured in the talk) and his book Atet A.D., which apparently riffs on the title of a 1970s jazz album by Julius Hemphill, Dogon A.D., which was inspired by the culture of a tribe in Mali, the Dogon, that was never exposed to the slave trade. Atet A.D. is part of a serial poem with a title even more elaborate than Robeson's: From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Letters from a multimedia artist named N. to "the Angel of Dust."

"The ideal function of community is simply to exist." Kasey responds usefully to Lisa Robertson's meditation on poetry and community over at the Poetry Foundation, which seems to be doing a much better job of being interesting and ecumenical than the magazine does. All of Robertson's journals are worth reading; I have a serious intellectual crush on her.

Mostly been ignoring the activities of the School of Criticism and Theory" this summer at Cornell, but I am looking forward to this afternoon's public lecture by Brent Hayes Edwards: "Come Out: Race, Music, and Serial Poetics." I think he's going to talk about Nathaniel Mackey, whose work I'd like to know better.

Is it too early to get excited about the next SOON reading, featuring two of my bestest friends, Richard Greenfield and Brian Teare? I think not.

Anne says perceptive and provocative things about "American Poet Guys," Jim Goar's Whole Milk, and my Compos(t)ition Marble on her blog (scroll down, and read her Danish [CORRECTION: Dutch] pastiche-review of Petroleum Hat while you're at it).

Gratefully received: Rodney Koeneke's Musee Mechanique. Also appreciating the verse "Introduction" to Susan Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, which I took out of the library for its chapter on Ronald Johnson as cookbook writer. I love the idea of writer's block versus reader's block, how both can be taken as learning experiences: a dialectical approach to what we can't write, what we can't read, confronts us with real and not imaginary difficulties.

Talking about my Zuk chapter with Roger Gilbert yesterday, he pointed out that a utopian version of pastoral largely excludes or leaves to one side one of the major dimensions of our pastoral inheritance: mortality. Perhaps I should plan a sequel on the postmodern pastoral elegy. But it got me thinking about how maybe the wing of poetry that's not about the social (as Roger nicely put it, "the corrigible") is that concerned with mortality and the passage of time; this seems more specific and useful than what I've been thinking of as the poetry of the transcedent or even simply the Romantic. How to think the incorrigible with the corrigible in poetry: can it be done? Is it useful to try? Perhaps a true Marxist would say that fear of death would be mitigated or dispelled by the quality of life in a truly revolutionized collectivity, but I don't think I buy this. And of course one of the major, rarely articulated fears of collectivity is that one can only enter the collective by somehow dying as an individual. I remember as a kid hearing about how socialism meant no private property, and I immediately thought: you mean I can't have my own toys anymore? Now I understand better that it's collective ownership of the means of production that Marxism aims for, and not the abolishment of private property in this intimate sense of what's proper to one. But it ought to be obvious by now that individuality is as prone to corruption and corrosion by a synthetic rugged consumerism as it is by the actions of any politburo. Anyways. One possible path is a poetry that reflects on the mortality of a collectivity. The lyric returns containing multitudes, subjectivity gets broadened and complicated. More attractive to me than the effacement of the subject or attempts to prove it's an ideological mirage.

Home from engagement celebrations, which were simultaenously enlivened and dampened Sunday night by the torrential rains that swept the Washington, DC area. Drove in the rain yesterday, too, and it's about to rain here in Ithaca. Catching up with my contributor's copy of Denver Quarterly, in which a portion of Compostition Marble appears under its original title. Wonderful percussive popcorning ears on display from Stephanie Anderson ("It's my turn for callus. Tussle and muster / me to ore"), Crystal Curry ("morning's throat & navel / play / my flatterman, my strapless cop, my / star to string / the wires up"), Sarah Goldstein ("Juggernaut, give me all you have— / flower band, bait whistle, morning on a branch"), and Joshua Harmon ("Green bolts in hills' haet: nub and quick, windy and wracked, pulls a slip: a furl limns tips split, a sleaving, slift"), while more sibilant musics are on offer from Chris McDermott ("Chronic simpers in between. / They temper an otherwise / ache niche") and Sandra Miller ("neither is the shady vox in the open savanna / open to ask a snare or ask / to snare itself")—her splendidly strange book oriflamme. is engagingly and perceptively reviewed in this issue as post-zaum rather than post-language by Karla Kelsey). The contents in general seem nightly pressurized: there's a long-lined meditative poem that somehow reminds me of Coleridge by Ben Doyle, two suggestive poems titled "Installation" that are both artworks and descriptions of the encounter with artworks by Joe Bonomo; a conversation between and poems by Aaron Kunin and Ben Lerner; a vein of elegy illuminated somehow between some Mandelstam translations by Andrey Gritsman and a poem of Joanna Klink's titled "What (War, 2003—); some poems and an essay on the poetry of nightlife by Daniel Tiffany; and other riches not yet plumbed. If I may strike a Sillimanian note for a moment, I think DQ and Chicago Review between them demonstrate some of the finer possibilities of academic literary journals when permitted to bear the stamp of a viewpoint.

Also read the Mark Halliday piece on Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners in Pleiades that Jordan commented upon last week. Like Jordan, I find Halliday to be an engaging and entertaining writer, even though he's as willing to divide the poetry world into halves as Ron is, and though he would firmly locate me in the "wrong" half of "postmodernist blur-buzz boosters." I actually have a lot of sympathy for his notion of the centrality of the person and the interpersonal to poetry, something articulated at considerably greater length by himself and Allen Grossman in The Sighted Singer—but I fail to understand why a poem must actually contain some sort of rhetoric of paraphrasable address to show "interest in the reader": Halliday complains that Ashbery's poems show very little interest in their readers and therefore it doesn't make sense to call him a poet of "intimate address" as Vendler also does with George Herbert and Whitman. It's true that Ashbery isn't solicitous of the reader: he doesn't take you by the hand, or rather when he does it's to lead you down a blind alley that then opens onto surprising vistas. But Halliday seems to diagnose the contemporary poetry of "blur-buzz" that isn't in the line of "the greatness of Yeats, Frost, Stevens, and Eliot," "poets who make earnest, urgent, paraphrasable declarations about life," as contemptuous of readers, or worse, feigning uninterest in being read. "Poems seek readers," Halliday writes. "Poems are social acts in relation to anticipated readers." Absolutely. Maybe even it's true that the best poems are paraphrasable—I just think maybe they're not paraphrasable yet. That is, they offer an experience in language, rather than represent an experience with language, and one might then try to represent the experience one has had—in conversation, in a review, and best of all I think, in a poem of one's own. That still remains my highest mark of quality in poetry, my equivalent of top-of-the-head-removal: the itch set up by words in my own fingers and ears. Good poems are catching, even if you don't fully catch the meaning, even if you don't feel quite qualified to be a given poem's addressee, yet. I don't see why such a model of reception should disqualify anyone from eventually achieving the "greatness" that Halliday talks of: "Like Vendler, I love the idea of greatness, and I'm repulsed by the notion that in some politically salubrious way we have outgrown the idea of greatness." There's still some essential, inimitable spark that a poet brings to his or her language and surely bonfires are still possible. But I'm still convinced that the more open forms (whether or not the communities that gather around these forms are genuinely "open" is another question) that invite the participation of reader/writers are both more democratic and more true than those which package a readily paraphrasable meaning, while by no means foreclosing the infinite possibilities borne by individual talent.

It's raining cats and dogs in Maryland. Caught a snippet of an interview with Michael Stipe on TV last night, and said a lovely thing, more or less this: An artist begins at the bottom of a circle in which they know nothing. Then they progress clockwise up the circle until they're at its summit, at which point they know everything there is to know about their chosen medium, materials, etc. If they stop there, they become a craftsperson. But an artist is to keep going, to forget what you've learned and go back to the bottom of the circle (the zero of the circle) and become a beginner again, start the process over again, be willing to make mistakes again.

It's hot in Maryland. Taking an early morning break from the family vortex (first typed "vortext") to see what's what. I really like these poems by Tim Botta at a journal new to me, Alice Blue Review. And Jessica Smith has a great post on the topic of self-publishing. She claims as an aside that visual poetry is the most radical wing of the language writing vortext. Hum. Don't have enough experience with vispo to judge, but I'm certainly intrigued, via RJ, with what I've seen of the visual work of I.H. Finlay and assorted Scots, plus I've been browsing through the Solt book. (Ian's son Alec, I discover, has published a book of Football Haiku in celebration of the World Cup. Not being a sports fan generally (except newly and strangely of golf) I don't think my lack of interest in soccer can be entirely attributed to American exceptionalism, but who knows for sure. Anyway, the link's there for the 99% of the world population that does care.

Off again.

Senesence setting in in blogland, at least this corner of it, but in that I resemble the duck (the drake) who's paddling fast as he can. Making slow progress on the opening of the Johnson chapter—that protracted moment in which you realize what you thought you wanted to say may not be what you wanted to say, at least not in the way you imagined. It's happened with all the other chapters and it almost doesn't bother me now. Almost. Also trying to put my study in order for the first time in almost a year—bought a new bookcase in an attempt to get sundry books, magazines, and papers up off the floor. Haven't seen the top of my desk in months. And getting ready to go to Maryland this weekend for an engagement party that Emily's dad is throwing for us. Such things can be fun, but they're stressful too.

Speaking of engagements and weddings, Aaron and Wendy's went off without a hitch: a beautiful ceremony chock-a-block with poets. Mark gifted me with a copy of My Spaceship, which I regret having been too lazy to contribute to: so far I've especially enjoyed the spaceships of Maureen Thorson (who is THE person to talk to if you're putting a themed anthology together; her contribution to Aubergine was one of my favorites, and her spaceship poem, "Astrogeometry," is in truly heroic couplets), Stacy Syzmaszek's "Aircraft Fourier" (natch), Catherine Meng's "Documentation From Initial Landing & Colonization" ("POWER ME OFF"), and William Corbett's nostalgic "When Mars Was a Candy Bar." Also freshly gifted to me from the poet herself, Theo Hummer's The Parrot Bride, very handsomely produced by Chris Rizzo. It's part of a burgeoning poetic microgenre inaugurated, so far as I know, by Laurel Snyder's Daphne and Jim: the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure poetry collection. Laurel's book turns the history of her own parents' love affair into a kind of unfinishable Mystery of Edwin Drood; Theo's is a more whimsical yet strangely mythic pastiche of a pirate story, gentle iterations of Ishmael's impulse to knock people's hats off in the street with echoes of country music and Joyce and the Gospel of John reverberating throughout. I like the epigraph, taken directly from the original corporate publisher of those books:

What happens next in the story? It all depends on the choices you make. How does the story end? Only you can find out! And the best part is that you can keep reading and rereading until you've had not one but many incredibly daring experiences!

"Incredibly daring experiences"—I like the old-fashioned, J.M. Barrie-ish whiff of that. And it's a nice trope for the reading of inclusive texts, the spirit required to forego closure. As Peter Pan said, "Death shall be an awfully big adventure."

Rachel Blau du Plessis' Ronald Johnson article in Facture 1 mentions a 1960 book of "vatic criticism" by Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, which proposes a biological approach to poetry and a poetical approach to biology. Of use to my dissertation because pastoral's variations on the pathetic fallacy are articulated by what Sewell identifies as the first phase of the Orpheus myth: nature's responsiveness to the poet's song. (The other two phases are the failed expedition to resuce Eurydice from the underworld and Orpheus' dismemberment by the Maenads and his subsequent incarnation as a singing prophetic head.) Du Plessis sees the Orpheus myth as central to Johnson's work, and interrogates the problematic gendering of that myth; I'm inclined to be more interested in Johnson's inclinations toward science and natural history. But Sewell wants us to see the term "myth" much more broadly, just as she wants to use "language" more broadly to mean the formal basis for any activity whatsoever, with the difference between birdsong and human song being our ability to reflect on it; as Sewell puts it, "The invention of a language entails the seeing of a distinction between the form constructed and used by the mind-body and the form as perceived in the material of experience to which the language is to correspond. This may have been a gradual process, perhaps akin to the perception of a self distinct from surroundings though remaining intimately linked with them, which is the nature of self-consciousness" (29). She's a determined monist, as the phrase "mind-body" makes clear, and she insists on the presence of the body in the most abstract mental operations, which makes me think of the passage from "A"-14 that proceeds from lower limit body to upper limit mathemata. Myth thus monistically becomes the name for meaning-making in general, its capacity for deception no greater than its necessity for speaking truth:

All formal operation is myth. Logic, under which we include all the highly developed forms of apparently purely formal mental activity in which attention is not paid to the participation of the body, which is nonetheless, tacitly, part of the process and a vital part. That mathematics, for instance, is not a detached activity may be seen from the passion with which it is pursued and the use of such terms as "elegance" or "beauty" in connection with its workings.... The only choice for the mind lies not between mythology and logic but between an exclusive mythology which chooses to overlook the body's participation and an inclusive mythology which is prepared in varying degrees to admit the body, the notion of the organism as a whole, as a partner in that very odd operation known as thought. (38)

Reminds me of another Zukofskyan moment when he recalled how as a student he observed one of his professors sit on a radiator while discoursing and then jump up again when he found it too hot; the professor's discourse did not interest him "but the preoccupied man did." Anyway, I find this distinction between "exclusive" and "inclusive" mythology, particularly as it pertains both to the body and reflecting on the body's participation in meaning-making, very useful and attractive. And Sewell follows up the above with a wonderful paragraph that helps me reflect anew on my desire to attempt fiction:

Word-language, in the course of its development, has itself acquired two modes of operation, a more exclusive and a more inclusive one. The first is prose, which does not necessarily recognize the agent's participation in the system of words and ideas under construction; the more it does so, the closer it may approach to poetry. Prose has as its aim to establsih a form of words which shall be equivalent to experience, the self participating in the construction being disregarded. To examine an inclusive mythology we must turn to language's other mode, poetry. Here the inclusion of the participating self (poet or reader, it is all one) is open, deliberate, an active ingredient in what goes on. Poetry is the most inclusive form of thought we have yet devised, a conscious call upon those resources of myth which underlie all language and all thinking. If the self is involved in any working system of thought, wheterh it is recognized or not, poetry, with its recognition of the self's cooperation, is in fact nearest to reality. Exclusive mythology, in its preoccupation with abstract form, embarks on a wholesale game of make believe by the exclusion of the self. Poetry, metaphor, mythology are highly realistic and down to earth. It is logic and mathematics which are the imaginative and fantastical exercise. (38-39)

I like this a great deal, even as it makes me wonder anew: why is "inclusive" writing, which includes the active participation not only of the body but as Sewell maeks clear, the self, so much less popular than that which "excludes" participation? Simple laziness? Or do we mostly just seek "escape" from our reading—an escape from the responsibility of participation in our own lives that daily life demands (not that those lives don't offer plentiful other means of diversion and distraction, most often in the form of addictions—to TV, alcohol, caffeine, bad relationships, what have you. Is exclusive-absorptive narrative just another addiction?). I would further extrapolate from Sewell's sketch that just as prose can tend toward poetry by tending more toward inclusiveness, so can poetry tend the other direction: the urge toward experimental dissonance in poetry might be an attempt to break away from modes of poetic discourse that we can no longer see, or are no longer using, for purposes of inclusion-participation. And Sewell's monistic foregrounding of the body's role might provide an incentive beyond the democratic for reading poetry: simply as the mode of language that invites our bodies to the scene of discourse rather than pretending they don't exist.

Most contemporary American fiction is either comfortably exclusive-absorptive or else dabbles with the participatory in superficial ways; a handful of aging or dead modernists bring us fully into the kitchen of language-making as they tell their stories (Pynchon, Gass, Gaddis), and then there are the prose stylists who are practically poets in my book whose narratives are a decidedly secondary pleasure (Lydia Davis and Carole Maso come first to mind). Where do I see myself? I'm drawn toward the latter category as being closest to poetry, and as being an approach to prose in the spirit of poetry: the desire to test the balance of sentences and paragraphs as I currently test the balance of sentences and lines (and individual words, phonemes, and fragments). But I'm interested in characters and story too—gamemastering a D&D game has awakened me to my interest in melodrama and has helped me to realize that I'm not as clueless about plotting as I once thought I was. Yet the pleasures of a page-turning plot, like pleasure in characters or even images, seems secondary, if not actually opposed, to the pleasure of sentences and paragraphs. Perhaps I'm creating problems where others don't see them, but I think that contradiction is the fundamental one to be navigated by a writer whose first allegiance is to the kitchen of language rather than the elegant dining room (or the fast-food joint for that matter). At any rate, Sewell's own limpid prose is helping me to think more rangingly around the the question, for which I'm grateful.

Thinking a lot about fiction and its discontents. Producing not very much poetry lately and feeling the gravitational pull of prose. Short stories don't interest me very much, it would have to be a novel. An insane proposition with a dissertation and a wedding and a job hunt all looming. But. The folks behind National Novel Writing Month say you can do it regardless of what's going on in your life. A kind of mental traveling that you slice sixty to ninety minutes out of every day for. But. What are novels for, anyway, in 2006? What can they do that movies and video games and plays and (most especially) TV dramas can't do better? You might say that fiction is still the premiere genre by which we represent inwardness—more specifically, the experience of subjectivity within a given milieu or social moment. But poetry, or at least poetry taken beyond the constraints of the personal lyric, is entirely capable of doing this, superbly. The thing novels have going for them is: people read them. I don't have statistics on hand, but I suspect even the strangest or most marginal novels sell five to ten times more copies than your average poetry book. I think of an especially "poetic" novel that I read and enjoyed many years ago, Mark Richard's Faulknerian fable Fishboy. This debut novel circa 1993 has no plot to speak of, is written in baroque and labyrinthine prose, and features a rather passive boy (well, fishboy) as its hero: it was reprinted at least once and has eleven Amazon reviews. And I think of how Verse Press slyly stamped FICTION on the back of Joe Wenderoth's uproarious book of prose poems, Letters to Wendys, no doubt to the benefit of its sales; at least one of its Amazon reviewers (one of twenty-three!) goes along with the fiction/Fiction by using scare quotes: "This little book full of little 'poems' packs a thunderous punch." Protect your readers from having to read "poems," and they will come and read them.

The guy behind NaNoWriMo, Chris Baty, has written a book based on the concept: No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. Now I must admit to being a sucker for this kind of thing: the constraint on time, the imposition of an arbitrary deadline (which is Baty's single brilliant idea), is as satisfying a constraint as a sestina or an abecedarian poem or writing a line of verse for every one of Charles Fourier's personality types. When I was in college I wrote a screenplay with the help of Viki King's How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method (the book makes a cameo appearance in the desk drawer of Tim Robbins' murderous movie executive in The Player); it was a lousy screenplay, Tarantino-lite, but at least I wrote the damn thing and learned a little bit in the process. Baty's idea is basically similar: give yourself permission to write something shitty, and "win" NaNoWriMo by producing a text of 50,000 words or more: no aesthetic judgments shall be rendered. The pursuit of "exuberant imperfection" is undoubtedly liberating, and the book in its chatty and cheerful way presents an eminently sensible formula for launching a big writing project and staying sane: securing support for friends and family, strategies for recovering from slumps, and so on. Content, like quality, is almost beside the point: this can be taken in a spirit of experimentation, or it can present the unappetizing spectacle of an indiscriminate prose factory, especially given the implied constraints of realist fiction (though NaNoWriMo-ers have worked in every conceivable genre). The point of limiting oneself to 50,000 words in one month, after all, is to transform the self-evidently Herculean task of novel-writing into something doable: in other words, it's an at least implicit constraint on ambition. You can read Baty's ambitions in the first of his sample "Magna Cartas": a list of answers to the question, "What, to you, makes a good novel?" It's actually an extremely useful question; here's how Baty answers it:

first-person narration
quirky characters
true love
found objects
disappointment
music
catharsis
feisty old people
strong, charismatic protagonists
improbable romances
smart but unpretentious writing
urban settings
cliffhanger chapter endings
characters who are at turning points in their lives
books set in the workplace
happy endings

To me, this list blares that Baty's aspirations are no higher (and no lower) than to write Nick Hornby novels: entertaining, quirky without ever venturing into the truly maudit or srange, thoroughly middlebrow. An impression confirmed by his second list of "things that bore or depress you in novels." This just isn't as good a question, immediately putting aside an affect, depression, that I associate with a great deal of unquestionably great fiction and prose (Dostoyevsky, W.G. Sebald, Kafka, Nabokov, you name it). But okay: "boring" is at least properly subjective and individual to the writer. Here's what bores and depresses Baty:

irredeemably malicious main characters
books set on farms
mentally ill main characters
food or eating as a central theme
ghosts, monsters, or demons
dysfunctional sibling dramas
books consisting largely of a character's thoughts
weighty moral themes
books set in the nineteenth century
unhappy endings

To each his own, right? But I can't help but feel that Baty's desire to evade some of the elements I associate with great (and to a large degree, modernist) novels means that the entire project of writing 50,000 words in 30 days is itself designed to evade not just "depression," but thinking about fiction and what fiction does well, what it's for, what your fiction might contribute. I am probably here just singling myself out as one of those people who the Frequently Asked Question bar from participating: "People who take their writing (and themselves) very seriously should probably go elsewhere. Everyone else, though, is warmly welcomed." To which I say, two cheers for democracy! Two cheers for the organizers' thinking behind NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to extend "the glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art" to the multitude. But doesn't the emphasis there shift from writing to having written? Isn't the thirty days a kind of endurance trial, a pleasure of renunciation as much as it is of excess? What about literature, goddamnit? Baty's book and the NaNoWriMo site can't answer these questions. They can't help me understand what writing fiction might feel like and how it might change me.

For what it's worth, my own personal Magna Carta: what, to me, makes a good novel, even though it can't answer the larger question of what novels are good for:

witty and graceful prose
intelligent but flawed characters
an immersive and believable world
news I can use about how people behave
memorable images
memorable sentences
short and dense or long and airy
conversations about ideas
comedy
indelibility
tragedy
hanging out with likable characters
melodrama
learning something about a trade, a culture, an area
romance
weighty moral themes

Belated SOON report: Aaron Kiely and Kish Song Bear rocked the proverbial house on Saturday. Aaron's work uses subtle interlacing webs of repetition toward political-poetical ends: he made me think of Stein plus Gandhi, with a little punk rock flavor thrown in. Here's the poem that our own Aaron (who's getting hitched this Saturday!) reproduced on his usual beautiful broadside:

Monday Morning Poem

Oh yeah,

Fuck War.

Fuck War Forever.
Any War.
Ever.
Forever and Always.
Without exception
til the end of Time,
Fuck War.

Fuck War and Its Defenders
and Rationalizers
and Explainers
til the end of time.

Fuck War and its Zombie Parots forever.

Blunt, simplistic even, yet memorable—he read a longer version that was even better in my opinion, engaging the reader/listener: words to the effect of, "And if you've ever rationalized a war, any war, any just war / Fuck you." This is all conveyed with the sweetest imaginable affect and gentleness, like a precocious child. His partner Kish Song Bear had a slyer faux naif persona: her background's in theater and her poems often have a surreal narrative quality to them. Not what's usually meant by surreal in the American context—the surreal of dreamlike juxtaposition—but rather narratives that startle even as they pull you in through their apparent coherence. I wish I could reproduce here an amazing prose poem she wrote about Oprah and Katie Holmes and Katie Holmes' ass, but maybe more typical is her broadside poem:

The Person I Love Is Distant (Because I Love Someone Else)

How do you say "straightjacket"
in Japanese? Would James Bond?
Dear Octopussy,
I have one glass eye. Meanwhile, I'm a marvel
with a chainsaw and one eye came loose
because it's just a marble. It's easier to crack
two nuts together than each separately.
Dear Dr. No,
what are you going to do with that cold slab
of meat and all them eggs? I take my hardcover
on and off. Dr. Yes, I'm never sure what story
I'm telling. I'm waiting for a filing cabinet.
You know what I'm going to say
to the person at the box office?

She read this and other poems with an air of ironic kittenishness—both readings were very sexy in their different ways, Aaron through a kind of potently straightforward vulnerability, Kish through reflecting on feminine objectivity and the objectification of the feminine. Don't miss a chance to hear them if they come to your town. And don't miss, wherever you happen to be, next month's reading (July 15), which will miraculously feature two of my closest friends in or out of the poetry world: Richard Greenfield and Brian Teare.

Meeting folks report: G.C. Waldrep came through town yesterday and we had an enjoyable long lunch together talking poetry and pastoral and whatnot. I think we have interestingly complementary but not exactly congruent aesthetics. I hear his manuscript Archicembalo has won the PSA's Alice di Fay Castagnola Award, and good for him: it's remarkable work.

Dissertation report: Officially began writing the RJ chapter yesterday. Today not much progress but I am immersed in what little critical writing there is. Rachel Blau Du Plessis' essay in the first issue of Facture (is that magazine still in production?) is particularly brilliant; Eric Selinger's "ARK as a Garden of Revelation" has also been very useful to me.

Weather report: After days of unseasonable grayness and cold, today brilliant sun and just enough clouds.

Extracurricular reading report: Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. I love a good nautical yarn.

Reading and enjoying Brent Cunningham's Bird & Forest, which is a tour-de-force of and in rhetoric, as it happens, thinking hard about the staging of the scene of speech and the positing of a field (or forest) through which meaning can be set singing and fluttering. Good stuff; I may have more to say about it later when I've actually got the book on me.

I also continue to be absorbed in rereading Emerson's essays as a way of getting into or under or behind Ronald Johnson. And becoming more interesting in ecopoetry proper. The Gilcrest book sees a line from Merwin, Snyder, Moore, and Stevens toward a poetry of "meditative consciousness," by which he somewhat contradictorily means the unmediated experience of nature: a poetics of référance, to use a coinage of Leonard Scigaj's, by which language (that is, symbolic action; that is, the Burkean "terministic screen" by which a given terminology ends up deflecting as much reality as it manages to represent) actually fades out or throws you back upon the "outside": a curiously antipoetic poetics. Actually Burke's ideas about language, which I'm just being introduced piecemeal to via Gilcrest, have fascinating implications for poetry's relation to the world, or to the real. This is a little piece of Burke's Language as Symbolic Action that Gilcrest quotes regarding the "entelechial principle," according to which many of our observations "are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made. In brief, much that we take as observations about 'reality' may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our own particular choice of terms" (pg 5, emphasis in original). Isn't that precisely the wager of poetry: that "spinning out" the implications of a terminology or terminologies (the linguistic material that poetry reflects on as a matter of the poet's choice and preoccupations; poetry has no terminology "proper" to it), when put under pressure by means of meter, syntax, rhetorical maneuver, collage, etc., will in fact put us in closer contact with reality, or at the very least cause us to question the adequacy of those terminologies and the picture that they present to us?

It's time I sat down with Burke, or would be if I had the time. The study of rhetoric fascinates me, and it seems more than a little assbackwards to have spent so many years trying to understand poetry without a solid education in rhetoric.

Always interesting and provocative: via wood s lot, a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace. I wish I'd read it back then:

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being "liked," so that her true end isn't in the work but in a certain audience's good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it." This dynamic isn't exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

To use an Emersonian phrase, I've clapped wings to a number of copies of Compostition Marble and they are winging their way toward expectant and unexpectant owners. Meanwhile I take crabwise steps toward my Ronald Johnson chapter: taking another look at Emerson's essays, rereading the early work in The Valley of Many-Colored Grasses, poring over Yves Abrioux's Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer, and boning up on ecopoetics with ecopoetics and David Gilcrest's Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Like many of the more interesting ecocritics (Lawrence Buell, Leonard Scigaj), Gilcrest engages with postmodern theory in order to foster arguments for the significance of a decentered poetics based on deep ecology; yet also like them, his horizon is limited to poets who use a minimally heightened plainspoken rhetoric to represent the confrontation with nature and/or the nonhuman: Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pack, Gary Snyder, Linda Hogan, Ira Sadoff, Carol Frost, A.R. Ammons, and, centrally, Robert Frost. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and to his credit, Gilcrest's focus is specifically on a Kenneth Burkean "rhetoric of ecological poetics," so it's natural he'd be drawn to poets whose engagement with nature is primarily rhetorical rather than mimetic: arguing for the decentering of the human from a more-or-less centered position, as opposed to performing that decentering at least partly by means of form.

I generally find this kind of poetry unsatisfying: it stacks up layers of description like an air traffic controller stacks up circling planes, then lands them smoothly and epiphanically. I actually don't mind the descriptive, especially when it's charged with energy by some means (verbally, formally, metrically, or else with scientifically or philosophically charged thought)—it's the rhetorical itself I resist, the authoritatively stated conclusion or (equally bad) the overwrought assertion of amibguity. I'm not sure this allergy does me any favors: the decline of rhetoric and the suspicion of noble speech has not to my eye brought about a corresponding increase in the quantity and quality of our democracy, either in poetry or in our public life. How I yearn for a president, even a president of imperfect politics (the only kind we're likely to get), who can actually talk. But I think most of us take in a blanket suspicion of rhetoric at an early age in this culture—a suspicion which does not replace an education in rhetoric and its devices that might enable us to defuse obfuscation and the illogical. Instead we seem to have only a YES and a NO button: the whole thing or no thing, you're either with us or against us. I have an intense longing for high speech, for speech that appeals to whatever it is in me that has contact with what's greater than me. I love Milton and Stevens, Shakespeare and Keats, largely for this reason. But the suspicion is in me, and is only appeased by New American appeals to the open field, the signifying chain, high-low juxtapositions, and whatever else serves to crack open the frozen sea of dead language. Still. I would like to see some new Romantic dispensation, something less self-centered and more truly Emersonian, Ronald Johnsonian—centered on a transparent eye/I that is constantly being overcome by fresh perception of the field, that draws new circles around onself and ones habitus. That does for oneself the act of opening and rebirthing without appeals to some always already reified Power. Another path to the numinous, and to consciousness, and to caring (Sorge) for one's world.

Compostition Marble?

So I brought in some copies of the chap to the bookstore this morning to put on consignment there, and I'm showing it to the owner, Gary, and he squints at it and says, "Compostition Marble"?

Yup. There's a typo on the cover.

But you know what? Compostition is an extremely cool neologism: in addition to "composition" I hear compost and stich and even superstition in it. It's actually quite appropriate to the text, though not my original intention. So I think I'll let it stand. I only wish it were also "properly misspelled" on the title page as well.

We are all of us in the gutter/margins/prisonhouse of language, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The competition is closed! The lucky winners should receive books soon—thanks to everyone who wrote in.

Composition Marble Is Here!

Clad in a simple yet elegant blue jacket, my new chapbook from Pavement Saw Press is here for the reading. I'm giving away one free copy each to the first five people who e-mail to ask me for one; after that it will be six bucks—less than the price of a matinee, without popcorn even—from Pavement Saw.