Last week Cornell's English Department was visited by David Hinton, the poet and translator of classical Chinese poetry. I was going to blog about it but Julie Phillips Brown (an MFA/PhD student here who's read for SOON) has gone and beat me to it. Generally been slow on the trigger with blogging lately. The semester's winding down (or rather, up) and keeping me in a busy and distracted state. Normally busy-ness is an kind of aid to concentration, like the prospect of hanging, but not lately.

I am at least getting some work done on my Ronald Johnson chapter: right now I'm thinking about his engagement with Concrete Poetry, and I've been immersed in books on the subject, especially Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View, which the good people of UBUWEB have archived in its entirety along with a vast wealth of hard to find texts on experimental poetry—I never realized the depth of their collection before, it's an invaluable resource. I don't know why it didn't quite consciously occur to me before, but of course Concrete Poetry has obvious affinities with Objectivist writing, which in turn of course derives from Imagism and "No ideas but in things," etc. From another angle, Concrete Poetry (and I am mostly thinking of the texts I've found in Solt that are part of that 1950s-60s movement, not visual poetry more generally) is just a more radical form of the fundamental avant-garde art technique, montage: the constructivist syntax that determines connections between elements of a collage or constellation (Eugen Gomringer, the Swiss-Bolivian "founder" of CP, called his early work "constellations"—I don't know if he was aware of the Frankfurt School's concept of the same name) is magnified or refracted so as to break up the syntax on a level smaller even than that of the line—even the "syntax" of the individual word or phoneme. By these lights some of late Zukofsky has begun to appear to me as a kind of concrete poetry: 80 Flowers achieves its compressed and ambiguous syntax in part through the concentration of each "flower" into the space of five "words" (hyphenates permitted) and eight lines, claiming for itself something of the telegraphic immediacy of the concrete poem even as the syntax denies or rather radically slows access to whatever a "flower" might have to "say."

What has this got to do with pastoral? In part, I think it's the naivety deliberately assumed by the concrete/Objectivist/Imagist poet, and the naivety of the claim that one can transform something so slippery as language into an object as available as a billboard. This also points toward the problem all pastoral poetry has in drawing the line between critique and commodification: the image that puts us in the presence of "nature" may reject and negate capitalist exploitation or simply be another manifestation of it, like the Marlboro Man. Some form of rigor—mayhap the "slowing" I referred to in Zukofsky—is required to produce the valuable sort of pastoral. The plain-speech rebellion against rhetoric of Williams and Pound seems pretty much exhausted by now, and most plain-speech pastoral poems nowadays just read like miniature vacations, with little or no critical bite unless an oppositional context can be found for them (a chapbook of plain pastoral from a small press will seem more valid to me somehow than a perfect-bound one—but how legible is that shift, really?). Some kind of torque on the language is required. I guess this whole project has been an attempt to find a formal or constructivist affiliation for this mode of writing. It seems most likely that it would succeed when the naivety is tactical rather than genuine—when the poet is "foolish like a trout," in Richard Hugo's phrase. One may say these things about the immediate objectivity of the poem, just as one may put elegant language into the mouth of a shepherd—but in the service of some goal that goes beyond mere nostalgia for some imaginary pre-modern way of being. Nostalgia as a means, not an end—what good is it to say, with Emerson, that words are fossil poetry (and isn't that the sentiment that the desire to objectify the poem stems from)? What shall we do with these fossils, besides dig them up? Shall we use them to prove evolution? Or to claim that we haven't evolved at all? Shall these bones live? And what could that mean, what would that look like?

But no matter where the concrete poet stands with respect to semantics, he invariably came to concrete poetry holding the conviction that the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time. In other words the concrete poet seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion and repetitious emotional content; of its servitude to disciplines outside itself as an object in its own right for its own sake. This, of course, asks a great deal of what used to be called the reader. He must now perceive the poem as an object and participate in the poet's act of creating it, for the concrete poem communicates first and foremost its structure. (Solt)

What, in short, to make of Johnson, whose pastoral is of the liveliest, most delightful sort—but who appears completely uninterested in critique or social engagement? What to make of someone so in love with surfaces? Do I force depth upon hiim by finding allusions and symbols and all the other "burdens" in his work that Solt claims the concrete poet wishes to discard? "Structure" is undoubtedly what interested the writer of ARK, who plainly states his desire to produce something non-discursive, an anti-Cantos. He communicates a structure. But what does this desire to communicate structure first and foremost itself communicate?

News from the Department of Unsettling Coincidences. And yes, my middle name happens to be Michael.

Someone found this blog with the search term "cheap HEADstones."

It was a pleasure to have Shanna Compton and Ryan Murphy up to Ithaca for the SOON series last night. The mysterious Mr. Murphy read first: if you saw the profile of him that appeared in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers then you know about his "one-shots": chapbooks and broadsides that are each attributed to their own imaginary publisher. They're not available on the Web or in any stores that I'm aware of except for McNally Robinson in Greenwich Village: Ryan calls this "anti-marketing," by which I think he means that remaining a bit mysterious actually intensifies the demand for what he publishes. He was kind enough to gift me with what I presume to be one of his own one-shots of his own work, a handsome chapbook called Poems for the American Revolution whose publisher is given as "The Dutchess County Department of Occupational Training," along with the somewhat more conventionally published Down with the Ship from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, a product of the MFA program of the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Ryan read from both books and I was particularly taken with the chapbook, whose six short poems are titled after famous figures from the American Revolution but whose content is obliquely and tenuously determined by those titles, which serves to suggest new possibilities for what we might mean by an American revolution, even if only a turning in place. I like the incantatory qualities of the first poem, "Revere":

Bombardier, you laid the tracks
For our hundreds of eyes
Spine for flowers, spit azalea

The lush lawn of the vacant girls' school
Tuesday is Sunday only
No one is dreaming

Bunker Hill, I-98, the harbor subs
Like the face of a watch.
I should like to wake you, minute by minute

Clatter through the restless green night.
Bombardier, with your lantern eyes
And lantern head

If
If if
And by sea.

Shanna was next, and I've already had a bit to say about the pleasures of her work. She read a few poems from Down Spooky (including, I'm pleased to say, "Post-Texas Expressive Heat," quoted in full in my review) and then more recent work from a promising sequence called For Girls, inspired by a 19th-century manual of etiquette written by a Mrs. E.R. Shepherd which purports to tell young women how to be young ladies. Here's the poem that Aaron ably transformed into a broadside (really a trifold) for the occasion (I use asterisks to represent the breaks, but you should try to envision three columms, side by side):

You can carry, girls,
a little distance

your influence
to the new side

your awakened study
of formation, requirements

*

First then, girls, you should
fasten onto your shoulders

a strap for purpose
for industrious earnest

pressure, for attending
to the demands of nature

Think of it
as a uniform

outside of which
you'd be too apart

*

All rooms have doors
& also windows

I haven't actually
heard that said, but

a draft might come
at right angles

toward the animal
part of you

the portion you've
bitten raw

I look forward to seeing these poems collected in a book, as I suspect they eventually will be. Thanks to both our readers, their significant others Kira and Shawn, and the folks who come out to hear a little poetry on a very rainy Saturday night.

Caustic empathy.

Poetry does a far better job of coming to grips with contradiction than the political prose I've been hacking at all morning. To wit: Rick Snyder's exceptionally useful "The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf" that's up at Jacket. His take on Nada Gordon's V. Imp—really, the poetry itself that he reproduces there—moves me deeply. I'm going to reproduce the passage from “Foreword: The End of Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism, and Terrorism" that Snyder quotes here:

Mule and Ostrich took a walk in the vale of tears. Their minds were elsewhere.

“Tread lightly and accurately,” Ostrich reminded Mule. Mule nodded solemnly.

The hoi-polloi stormed around them, rending their garments: Brooks Brothers suits, red suspenders, tallises, green headresses, burkas. Everyone was spewing so much vital fluid that their faces, hands, and chests had gone all viscous.

“No one had a clue,” said Mule, lowering his head and pawing at the rubble, his mane and eyelashes thick with white dust. “I feel so mournful.”

“Don’t you still want to take the language somewhere else?” Ostrich asked, swerving his head around to stare cross-eyed at Mule.

“Of course I do,” sighed Mule, “I’m a beast of burden. That’s all I know how to do. But right now I wish we had hands so we could hold hands.”

“That’s liberal humanism,” said Ostrich, looking ruefully at his leathery talons and Mule’s splayed, yellowing hooves.

“So?” said Mule, his lip quivering.

Yes, Mule. Yes, Ostrich.

In what could be the biggest policy divide on the panels, Senator Barbara Boxer, the liberal California Democrat and environmental advocate, is in line to take control of the Environment and Public Works Committee from Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has disputed the existence of global warming.

“He thinks global warming is a hoax and I think it is the challenge of our generation,” said Ms. Boxer, who said she has a cordial working relationship with Mr. Inhofe. “We have to move on it.”

You can't tell me that's not, at least potentially, a change for the better.

For two posts in a row, Joshua Clover laments the foolishness and ideological blindness of other poets (and, as his second post makes clear, this poet in particular) who ran out to vote for, as he puts it, "candidates more conservative than the Republicans they found beyond revulsion twenty years ago" and who now dance pathetically in the end zone celebrating a Democratic Congress. Apparently I didn't express nearly enough skepticism to satisfy him: indeed, his tone makes me think he lives in a world comprised of a virtuous Berkeley-Marxist-anarchist minority who are all "in the know," and who behold the majority of marks and suckers with mixed pity and contempt. There's hardly any distinction to be made between liberal marks and conservative suckers in the bargain, since both by voting at all vote to perpetuate the system. Those of us who, in spite of our misgivings about a badly damaged political system, joined the less-than-half of the eligible population who voted (does that mean in fact that 60 percent of the electorate are Marxists and anarchists rather than apathetic? Would that it were so!), discover that we did not in fact vote for change, for some kind of brake on an incoherent, compulsively violent, and reckless administration, but for more of the same. The "personnel," as Joshua would have it, are all empty signifiers, so that by his own lights he can plausibly plug in "Condoleeza Rice" for my "Nancy Pelosi." It's a gross misinterpretation: I am not celebrating the rise of any old woman to the post of Speaker of the House, but the rise of a specific woman who is probably more sympathetic to Berkeley-style politics than anyone in the new Congress (with the notable and welcome exception of Bernie Sanders, I-VT). Joshua takes such a long view of our admittedly disastrous era that individuals and institutions scarcely matter: we are all fiddling while Rome burns and it signifies little who takes the part of lead violin.

Perhaps he is right. And I have nothing to say to anyone who is actually pursuing an alternative politics: who doesn't just stand aloof with jaundiced eye but actually works for radical change. I don't see myself as someone who does this, at least not yet: I am at best a sympathetic fellow traveler, reading Rexroth and Bookchin, trying to formulate an adequate response to the crises of the world I find myself in, while at the same time unwilling to make the complete separation from the mainstream—the world where most of my friends and family and ordinary people live—that the radical position seems to demand. I criticize myself constantly for not being more active, more courageous, more clear-sighted. But when I look at the world I find more questions than answers. I am not satisfied by any single political program that I've ever become aware of. And I persist in seeing difference where Joshua sees identity: Democrats, even conservative Democrats, are not Republicans, for the simple reason that they've been out of power for the past six years and have had no significant influence on the ghastly policies of Bush-Cheney. I want opposition to those troglodytes on almost any terms, because I think they are way, way beyond the ordinary ghastliness of neo-liberalism: they are fanatics personally responsible for the loss of more than half-a-million Iraqi lives. And maybe I really have been suckered—"please don't throw me in that briar patch!"—maybe the neo-liberal machine will simply function more smoothly and destructively now that we have divided government. But maybe not. I'm taking a chance on "maybe."

We Americans do need to imagine something new, we do need to take on responsibility appropriate to our power to affect the world. But right now I want to slow down the pace of destruction: when the big crisis comes, the Depression-equivalent that I'm expecting sometime in the next decade or so, I don't want the damage to our environment to be utterly beyond repair. I don't have the answers, or a fully consistent political philosophy. But given the simple choice between casting a vote that might do something to impede the flow of greed and and arrogance and fanaticism, and not voting—irrespective of what other activities or criticism I might be able to muster—I chose to vote. And I am provisionally pleased with the results.

Reading the Kenneth Rexroth issue of Chicago Review. Put off to some degree by the man's old-fashioned displays of sexism and machismo: these seem rote, tiresome, and predictable, but his affinity with Lawrence (who I feel has genuine insight into the workings of sexual desire and sexual difference, however obscured these insights might be by talk of loins and plasms) might point toward an at least partial redemption of these unattractive qualities. More impressed by his seriousness and sense of mission: though wary of messianisms, I think poets with a genuinely elevated sense of what poetry is for preserve the art as a whole from the inconsequentiality it's perpetually teetering on the brink of—though at the same time I'm glad not everyone thinks this way, it would severely restrict poetry's imaginative range. I can only think of two living American poets who convey a Rexrothian depth of seriousness in all they say and do (without, I hasten to add, sharing Rexroth's essential poetics or politics): Allen Grossman and Jorie Graham. Both produce work that can edge into self-parody, but it's easiest to parody those who actually stand for something: call it the Old Sincerity. Anyway, Rexroth has this to say on the subject in a 1931 letter to Louis Zukofsky that seems startlingly relevant to our present situation:

The poet has, after a few perfunctory struggles, acquiesced in the judgment of capitalist civilization: that he is a weak, lazy fellow, incapable of rational thought, merely a convenient dispenser of vicarious spasms of emotion. The unconscious efficiency with which a class preserves itself is uncanny. The greatest enemy of social stasis is the subterranean transvaluations which go on in the arts, and this enemy operates most efficiently in the art of poetry for the reason that poetry is, or can be, most intimate with the values concerned. Poetry is the symbolic criticism of value and because this criticism can garb itself in even the most random subject, it is specifically inapprehensible. Many a panegyric, written as a set subject for the enthronement of a monarch has been part of the exploration of avenues of thought which has led to the overthrow of his dynasty. Therefore, as the range of value for poetry reduces to a minimum the security of the prevaliing ideology approaches a maximum.

This seems entirely consonant with Adorno's argument in Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere that the critical power of an artwork resides in its "subterranean" negativity, its implicit rejection of things as they are—Rexroth's remark about the panegyric would extend that possibility of rejection even into a poem that superficially affirms "the prevailing ideology." At the same time he seems to say that when poetry is not valued dominant ideologies go unchallenged, but maybe he's saying something else: that poetry needs to be able to address the entire "range of value" or be a test of value in general if it is to have critical and I daresay (for the 1931 Rexroth) revolutionary power. Read that way, Rexroth's paragraph would affirm a diversity of seriousnesses and a variety of means by which poetry can act as "the symbolic criticism of value"—which itself might encompass anything from an attack on prevailing values to a conservative call of return to forgotten or negelected values to a fully Blakean transformation of values. Rexroth seems to have managed all three in the course of his career and I may have more to say about him when I'm finished reading the issue.

Two Cheers for Democracy

I am skeptical of the Democrats' power to deliver change—or their commitment as a party to the kind of progressive values and socialist programs that I favor. Our political system seems all but bankrupt and broken to me: for a long time it's been a servant of short-term business interests and poorly defended against the tyranny of the majority. God knows what kind of voting problems are going to come out in the wash over the next few days. And the Senate, which is still too close to call, will be in the power of "moderates" who are in fact serious social conservatives even if it swings to the Democratic side.

That said... "Nancy Pelosi, first woman to serve as Speaker of the House," has a nice ring to it.

I'm going to bed.

I voted. Ithaca is a left-wing bastion and all the Democrats are a lock (with the possible exception of our sheriff, who's got two opponents this year), but the more votes recorded for non-Republican candidates, the better. Plus I voted the Working Families ticket to give genuine progressives a boost.

Nonetheless, the heavy lifting is up to you folks in red states/districts. I hope your voting machines work (we have the old-fashioned lever system in Tompkins County, it works just fine).

Why isn't Election Day a national holiday?

The week's getting off to an ugly start: Republicans are gaining in the polls, and I just learned that Adrienne Shelly, star of two of my favorite movies from the early nineties, Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, apparently committed suicide last week.

Gimme some sweet redemption, sometime.

Ever since 2001 when it first came out and I read Elvis Mitchell's review, I've wanted to see Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's film What Time Is It There? and last night I finally did. The plot is extremely simple: a man dies, and his wife and adult son are cut adrift from themselves and each other. The son, who sells watches on streetcorners, sells his own personal wristwatch to a young woman on her way to Paris; thereafter, the film intercuts between the lives of the son and mother and the young woman's alienated tour of Paris. The son becomes obsessed with Paris and specifically life lived on Parisian time, resetting every clock he encounters seven hours behind Taipei time. The mother obsesses over the possible reincarnation of her husband, shrouding their apartment in darkness so as not to "frighten" the father's spirit and making meals for him in the middle of the night. It's a slow film: one unsympathetic critic said it was like watching paint dry. The literature on Tsai confirms what the style of film suggests: a man in love with cinema, particularly what we might call its high European Modernist period—the Italian neorealism of the forties and the French Nouvelle Vague of the fifties. Not only does the male lead watch Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows but the female lead actually ends up sharing a park bench with Jean-Pierre Leaud, the star of Truffaut's film. Sounds pretentious, no? But what drew me into the film was its adaptation of the estranging devices of modernism—in cinematic language that means medium shots held by a static camera, no music on the soundtrack, a cast of uncharismatic actors or non-actors (on the DVD Tsiang claims that Lee Kang-shen, who has been the Leaud figure to Tsiang's Truffaut in many films, is not really a professional actor, and that Lu Yi-ching, who plays his mother, keeps a coffee shop between films), and long, long takes—in the service of a kind of realism. Or to put it another way, if the conventions attending a Hollywood film are artifices of absorption, the static, painterly frames of Tsiang's film (but "painterly" isn't quite right, it suggests a degree of aestheticization belied by the banality of what most often holds his camera's attention) foreground their artifice so as to foster both a deeper and more superficial level of absorption in the viewer.

Watching Tsiang's isolated characters struggle for some sense of connection in the wake of the father's death (a moment that is beautifully and hauntingly elided in the opening scenes: first we spend several minutes watching the father sitting around in his Taipei apartment, then we cut to the son being driven in a car with—it took me several moments to realize this —a cannister containing his father's ashes in his lap), my eyes glided across the screen, noticing details of the composition (often one character is foregrounded and isolated from another character in the same frame but in the background, in deep focus), while the characters do things like wait for trains, eat, lie in bed, go to the bathroom, or watch TV. Yet these details have a curious cumulative power. In the final scenes, the young tourist, Chen Shiang-Chyi, has failed at making a sexual connection with another Taiwanese woman she met in a cafe (simultaneously with similarly frustrated connections on the part of the other characters—Lu masturbates while a photo of her dead husband stares at us, and Lee has sex with a prostitute who later steals his case of watches). She lies asleep in a chair by a pond while some youths make off with her suitcase. In the next shot, while she is still sleeping, the suitcase floats across the pond from left to right. Then we see a well-dressed gentleman standing nearby who retrieves the suitcase from the pond with his umbrella and sets it back upright near, but not too near, Chen. When he turns we recognize the figure of the dead father. In the last shot he is standing with a Ferris wheel behind him in the distance: he lights a cigarette and walks off toward it, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Chaplin, as the clocklike Ferris wheel slowly begins to turn. I was moved nearly to tears by this unexpected and silent resurrection: the effect was not unlike what I feel reading The Winter's Tale when Hermione comes back to life at the end.

Though the characters are lonely and sorrowful, the film has a lightness of touch: there's nothing ponderous about the long shots, only a kind of mysterious dwelling with what feels like the shifting reality of human experience when strong emotion pulses under the banality of everyday life. Where opera or melodrama use dramatic confrontation and arias of feelling to illuminate character, Tsiang subsitutes more obviously formal devices—principally the sheer looking of the still camera, which when extended over time both invites and frustrates penetration of the characters' subjectivity. We cannot touch them but find we have been touched by them, lightly yet hauntingly, without seeming to move. I find myself likening this to the effect that a pattern in language can have on our emotions almost irrespective of the content of the words in that pattern. The rhythm of iambic pentameter, or the pulse of white space, or the sinuous sustaining of a sibilance, does secret work on my emotions while the poem seems to dwell on something ordinary—a red wheelbarrow, maybe, or a blackbird in a tree. Sometimes too a poem will work on me because I'm moved by its scale: the intensity of its presence whether almost instantaneous or drawn out over many pages. Pound's work demonstrates both ends of this: "In a Station of the Metro" can almost never be read, only reread, because it's over before you've properly begun it, and yet the kernel of experience that it contains has been transmitted straight into you; while The Cantos provoke, enrage, and move me to pathos almost by their mere being, their massive and monumental ambition, the scope of their failure. There isn't really a sufficient language for the affective dimension of formal devices—but I recognize and am drawn by works of art that foreground the means by which they were made, and the passion of the maker for those devices, while encoding more immediately recognizable human experience with those devices. I am moved by the very fact of the objective correlative, a variation on the pathetic fallacy: that objects rendered with a sufficiently exact attention might weep for us, or with us.

November has come. Thanks to Mark, Craig, Jonathan, and Arthur for their comments on the poet-critic question. (All boys! Is there something inherently masculine about this kind of fretting over categories?) Certainly a big part of my interest in this question is professional: if I weren't an academic-in-training I wouldn't be quite as affected by the rather peculiar disciplinary demand of having to put my interests more or less in order. My list of "research interests" seems arbitrary to me, with a lot of overlap: Modernism, Twentieth Century, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, American Literature, Literary Theory, Critical Theory, Creative Writing. And where in there do I cram my love for Joyce and Woolf and Lawrence, or for Boswell's Life of Johnson, or Andrew Marvell and George Herbert, or Keats?

Love is the question (the answer?). While part of me instinctively accedes to the notion that the practitioner has insights unavailable to the non-practitioner, I fall back on my belief that poetry, more than other verbal arts, calls upon all its readers to become practitioners: to think and feel from inside the poem they read (especially a poem they read aloud). Lyric especially demands this, given how much it leaves out. Nearly everyone has at some time or other written poems (even if only between the ages of thirteen and seventeen) and feels the impulse to encode some momentary experience in memorable language; at the same time, the implicit demand of poetry that it be responded to with writerly impulses helps to explain why most people find poetry to be intimidating. Even if you don't buy this reading-is-writing argument, most readers of poetry will concede that it demands a different range of mental activities than prose does. But the question for me has always been: given that my most instinctual response to poetry is a desire to write, what sort of writing shall I do?

My purest impulse—the one resulting most directly from the stimulus of a good poem—is to write a few lines of my own. But I also have the choice of writing something more or less critical, ranging from sincere puffery ("You have to read this!") to close analysis and historical contextualization. The sort of writing called "poetics" divides and includes these impulses: critical writing intended to enable the production of new poetry. And when I look at the first draft of my Zukofsky chapter, for instance, I find I have produced something closer to poetics: a largely affectionate treatment of Zukofskyan pastoral that has stimulated my more global desire for what I loosely call postmodern pastoral poetry. My reading of Zuk helps me read for that impulse in other poets, and nudges my own work in that direction. Very useful to me as a poet—but as a critic, I must sit down now with a colder eye and rework that chapter to be more dialectical, more skeptical, about Zukofsky and pastoral both. The illumination my writing/reading accomplishes, if it does, will then be less personal and idiosyncratic, but arguably more useful for those less interested in furthering their own projects than they are in arriving at some clearer view of Zukofsky and his engagement with pastoral.

That's as near as I can figure it, for now. Further comments are always welcome.

Had an interesting conversation with one of my advisors, Jonathan Monroe, yesterday—about the Zukofsky chapter but more generally about the sometimes incommensurate demands of poetry and scholarship (or to put it a bit more finely, criticism). He reminded me that serious criticism of contemporary poetry, especially by poets, is quite rare, unless you are critiquing a poet from a different aesthetico-political "camp." Even dead poets are not exempt: Zukofsky, for instance, has been vigorously embraced by the Language poets and most of their writing about his work praises it or actively seeks to elevate and canonize it. On the other side you have more conservative poet-critics who simply dismiss Zukofsky as eccentric and irrelevant. There's very little genuinely dialectical criticism of his or any other experimental poet's work: criticism which accepts as given that a particular poet is important and worth critiquing, but which then goes on to discover ambiguities and contradictions in that work and in that work's reception. (One major exception that comes to mind is the work of our leading Zukofsky critic, Mark Scroggins, whose rigorous scholarship is backed up by a healthy, though never cynical, skepticism.)

Part of the problem is simple human craving for approval: we do not want to alienate other members of the community we see as ours. But there's another rift between poetry/poetics and criticism: as a poet, I am primarily interested in what enables my own work and the work of other poets I care about. When I read a poet like Zukofsky, I am looking for news I can use: techniques and themes and turns of phrase that Zukofsky made more possible. For me, one of poetry's primary functions is the generation of more poetry—reading is writing, or wreading in Jed Rasula's phrase. That's a fundamentally different attitude than that assumed by the critic, who reads in a more specifically interrogatory mode, and with a more or less specific ideological axe to grind. It's the old battle of Beauty vs. Truth, really. And the question for a poet-critic like myself has to be not, Whose side are you on?, but: How are these different modes of reading implicated in each other for me? Why am I hyphenated? How can this tension be productive for both kinds of work, both modes of questioning? Mark, you're a poet-critic. Care to address this question from your perspective?

Much to ponder. In the meantime, I'm on the road again: to western Massachusetts for the wedding of our friends Jen and Bronson at Gedney Farm. See you when I get back.

I have become an academic job applicant cliche: obsessing over paper quality, staples vs. no staples, tearing apart and rebuilding my c.v. over and over. It's not pretty. By the time you actually get around to applying for an academic position, most of the real work is behind you: you have to stand or fall on how you've spent your time as a grad student. What I, and hundreds of other people, are doing now is akin to the twisting and contorting of one's body after the bowling ball has already been thrown, in a futile and entirely magical attempt to further shape its destiny. It's not exactly ergonomic or sensible behavior and I should cut it out. I will cut it out. Next week, maybe, after the applications have been sent.

Grieved to learn, via Jasper, of the death by cancer of Deborah Tall, who held what was perhaps her last reading at Bookery II the day of my wedding, September 17 (for obvious reasons I did not attend). She was a beloved figure here in Ithaca, particularly of young writers and poets, and she will be missed.

I am moved and enthralled to discover, via Nada, that Richard Foreman of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater has started keeping a blog, named for his upcoming show Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! Like Nada, I find his statements about theater applicable to poetics. I am especially interested, in the context of my dissertation and thinking about the poetics of fragmentation in general, in his desire to avoid the completeness that generally comes with theatrical or cinematic representation: the Gesamtkunstwerk that's pretty easy to associate with fascism, though not necessarily political fascism. (On the other hand, that seems exactly what Pound was after with the Cantos—but lacking the collaboration of history they devolved into something more useful and more interesting.) As Foreman writes, "Why can I return to a painting, a poem, aphorisms, music—? Yet to see a play or film more than once is usually unbearably boring? Because these other forms elude one by leaving out at least one level of perceptual experience." Of course this makes "a poem" a sort of undefined baseline, when in fact there are poems and poems. Those I tend to think of as being more aesthetically conservative do seem intent on presenting a kind of miniature totality of expression: here is me, here is something authentic, here is a piece of my beautiful soul. Sometimes I think poems that do not actually belong to this category are misread as such: in fact, maybe Foreman is right about the nature of language as a means of representation, and it's the reader who brings totality to the work. In that case the question is how ready-made a given reader's responses are (and thus more or less able to respond to a work that doesn't belong to some genre the reader's already familiar with).

Anyway, Foreman's method for avoiding completion in theater is worth reading about: he cites Stein, who saw her plays as "landscapes" for consciousness to wander across, and seeks to achieve a similar affect through his juxtaposition of stage and film:

No—-we seek a form that forces the perceiving mind to “jump” like a spark from one level of “potential content” (film) to another (on-stage performance)—-which means that normal “tracking consciousness” is bypassed while the new field created between spectator and the “in between” space manifest on-stage in a field of total alertness --without a subject! (The minute you have a subject, you have a prison created by that subject—and the deep content of this art is freedom)

In his first entry, Foreman elaborates on the nature of that "freedom":

What I do in my theater is simply to layer different self contained ‘realms of being’ (image, sound, idea, or movement) over one another in ways that allow such overlapping layers to bleed through each other and create thereby, maps of new mental territory in which heightened sensibility re-energizes the internal mechanism we all share in common.

Inspiring stuff. For some reason it has me thinking about the Adorno project currently being engaged in by Robert (love that photo of Adorno on the beach with headphones on—sounds like a sequel to Einstein on the Beach, don't it?), Mark, and Dave Park are currently embarked on. I'm fascinated by this because Adorno is probably the single most important theorist to my dissertation: the idea for the "negative pastoral" that I see avant-pastoralists like Zukofsky and Ronald Johnson practicing was inspired by the tantalizing hints Adorno drops in Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere about the nexus of the modern artwork (critical and negative) with utopian representation (almost always a false image of reconciliation between human beings and nature). How does Foreman enter into it? Because of that phrase "maps of new mental territory," which for Foreman seems more psychoanalytic than Marxist-utopian (I'm thinking of Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping"), and that interests me because sometimes negative pastoral as I've sketched it can seem a little abstract and dry, without the excitement of libidinal charge that Foreman's artwork, unashamedly pursuinng in full cry the riches of the (dead?) unconscious, wants to carry. In the context of my project, the joy and sense of freedom he describes comes closest to articulation in works like Zukofsky's 80 Flowers (which by at least doubling the meaning of every word and every provisional syntactic structure demands split consciousness from its reader, even as an affect of delight prevails over the text as a whole) and Johnson's writing (especially the concrete poetry, which cultivates the gap between visual and legible). It seems to me that the preservation of this gap (formal manifestation of the negative) is what makes it possible for these works to pull off an amazing trick: they are pastorals, having all the energy of the truly utopian, yet avoid being false. They are stimulating rather than wholly consolatory.

A last note, irrelevant to what's gone before: I'm very interested in the exchange between Mark and Ron that suggests how literally Ron may have taken the notion that Quietude = Anglophilia. Is that whole trouble-making dichotomy Post-Avant vs. SoQ derived from Ron's inability to "hear" English verse? A gag reflex his only response to "ceremonious words"? (Mark quotes a blogger new to me named Sean Lysaght as saying, “I think the missing piece of the Yank auditory canal is the ability to hear 'ceremonious words'. American poetry is so tuned to the vernacular that it no longer recognises poetry pitched in a higher key.") This is too simplistic, as Mark goes on to point out: but I wonder how much of it explains my own unwillingness to sign on to Ron's dichotomy? As I mentioned in reviewing Camille's book the other day, at Vassar in the late eighties/early nineties we English majors got a pretty traditional education in the British literary tradition, which did in fact seem vampirically to embrace the few American poets taught there (Bishop, Lowell, Berryman). My ear was very much conditioned by iambic pentameter, so much so that it took me some years to accliimate myself to the wild proliferation of New American vernaculars. But I'm still very fond of English verse and there's no erasing the primal grooves Herrick and Herbert and Milton and Shakespeare have carved in my mental records. In fact lately I've been contemplating writing some blank verse, partly because teaching a Shakespeare course has reminded me what an amazingly flexible and powerful instrument it can be. Anyway, it would be amusing if much of the controversy between the raw and the cooked simply comes down to "He (or she) who has the ears to hear, let them hear." Me, I plan to continue to cultivate binaural listening habits.

Off to Maryland for a couple of days tomorrow for a last wedding-related hurrah.

My old friend Camille Guthrie from Vassar days has a new book out from Subpress called In Captivity. The title refers to the last of the famous Unicorn Tapestries on display at the Cloisters in northern Manhattan; I blogged about seeing them and Camille's engagement with them back in July 2005. The "In Captivity" tapestry seems anomalous to the sequence as a whole, which depicts the hunting and destruction of the unicorn: where in the sequence, if anywhere, does it belong? Do they catch it, then release it and kill it? Were there two unicorns? Or does the tapestry represent an alternate, choose-your-own-adventure style ending to the pursuit? At any rate, now I've read Camille's book and it's marvelous: wryly funny, lyrical, even mesmerizing in spots. I've admired her formally adventurous and daring work since college, but I think she's achieved a new fluency and wit here to accompany the mythic landscape that she generally chooses as the backdrop for her poetry. For one thing, New York City is as fully present and alive in this book as the medieval world of the tapestries is, and our contemporary idiom is woven seamlessly into a tapestry (the pun is unavoidable) of high lyric. Rilke and Rabelais coexist here, while I fancy I can hear the "classical" education in English literature that was on offer at Vassar (i.e., strong doses of poetry and prose from the English literary tradition with little or no theory gumming up the works) in Camille's citations of Milton, Shakespeare, Blake, and Edward Lear. There's also a splendid assortment of forms on display: the funny and erotic list poem "My Boyfriend," the Steinian stanzas of "The Hunters," a masterly sestina called "My Psychomachia" ("He who knows the word for a thing I know masters the thing"), and a sequence called "Defending Oneself" that consists of "mirrored" quatrains, two above and two below a single black line.

Any New York book nowadays is a post-9/11 book: Camille handles the disaster obliquely and yet personally, stalked and stalking through the streets, which can at times appear as a Waste Land but with the survivor's ironic distance constantly punctured and punctuated. There's a welcome sense of bodily experience that I can't help but think of as the feminist difference between what Camille's up to here and the Eliotic in general. Plus the pieces of literature and myth she conjures seems fresh and alive: not fragments shored against ruin but the palpable elements of one woman's experience. From "Defending Oneself":

The finest I could've afforded
I sent him ten pairs of antique Levi's
As soft as a rabbit napping on moss
I'll overnight twelve more Tuesday

Forget it all, Leaf Litter
Your letters were shredded in the Reign of Terror
Then used to cover potatoes from frost
It was a fairy vision


_____________________________


True and False Heart
She'll do it you can count on it
She'll chop off their candied heads
And pretend not to like the sound effects

I'll still speak to her reddening while we talk
But only in answering couplets
She—celebrated oil of vermin
Me—genuine dust of scorpion

There's an uncanny knowledge on display here, a rounded awareness of one's one darkest corners and the difficulties of an ambiguous cultural inheritance. It captivates me and I hope it will captivate many more readers.

Excellent reading last night. Wyatt's short fictions are sly and funny, with a surprising amount of pathos creeping in between deadpan deconstructions of the domestic New Yorker story. Michael was finishing up a Northeast tour promoting his comic novella Martian Dawn: a slow-burning satire on the personalities and producers of American culture, high and low, spiritual and commercial. Afterward Michael was generous enough to gift SOON with a slew of copies of SHINY, plus a couple of copies of his 2000 book of prose poems, Species. Huzzah for the gift economy!

Next month it's going to be a small-press fest featuring Erica Kaufman of Boku Books, Stacy Szymaszek of Instance Press, Shanna Compton of Half Empty/Half Full, and Ryan Murphy of innumerable one-offs and invented publishers (see the profile of him in last month's Poets & Writers. In addition to reading, we're planning to have them talk about small press publishing. A can't-miss event!

One of the SHINYs (Issue 9/10, 1999) contains some excerpts from Ted Berrigan's journals between 1961 and 1969. A couple of gems:

[1963]
[Sunday Feb 10th 8 p.m.]

    I want to write poems that cannot be understood until they
are felt. They must be read, then must germinate in the brain
until they flower. Then they will be apparent—but still
cannot be paraphrased with any meaning for others. Each reader
must make something out of them himself, w/o effort.

And:

[1964]
[n.d.]
        What a poet
    "does" is like
what a yo-yo
        champ does—

But what is that
            called?

Now back to my regularly scheduled Sunday: grading papers and making diabolical plans for this evening's D&D game.

SOON Productions Presents a Reading by Michael Friedman and Wyatt Bonikowski

It's prose for a change! Come tomorrow evening to the State of the Art Gallery in downtown Ithaca at 7 PM to hear the work of two exciting experimental prose writers.

Michael Friedman has edited the influential literary journal Shiny since 1986 and is the author of six collections of poetry. Several poems from his most recent book of poetry, Species (The Figures, 2000), were included in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). His first book of fiction, the comic novel Martian Dawn, was just released by Turtle Point in Sept. Friedman grew up in Manhattan and has lived in Denver since 1995. He has taught in the MFA writing program at Naropa University in Boulder.

Wyatt Bonikowski's short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Denver Quarterly, elimae, Exquisite Corpse, and First Intensity. He has also published articles on twentieth-century British literature and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a book on war trauma and narrative called Traces of War. While his parents are both from Philadelphia, he and his siblings were dragged around the country while growing up. He has lived in Florida, two cities in North Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, and California, and he and his wife have driven across the country, with three cats in the backseat, three times. He recently received his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, where he currently teaches, and he lives with his wife and daughter in Ithaca, NY.

Immersed in the first stages of the kabuki dance that is the academic job application process: writing letters, extracting a twenty-five page writing sample from two-hundred-odd pages of dissertation, and trying to parse what a particular school's advertisement signals about what they're really looking for. An unexpected benefit of this sort of head-scratching is that it re-engages me with my dissertation work, which has been lying fallow since midsummer, when the wedding preparations were first starting to heat up. Writing an abstract has been especially useful, as well as something of a relief: the damn thing coheres after all! When the envelopes are all licked and stamped I should be more than ready to return to the chapter on Ronald Johnson. I'm interested right now in his engagement with Ian Hamilton Finlay and wondering how I can learn more about it. It seems that they would have had very different temperaments: Finlay is actually much closer to the sardonic, critical spirit that I associate with "negative pastoral" than Johnson is. But then I see the three poets my dissertation deals with as something like stages in a dialectic: Pound as overreacher, Zukofsky as poet of renunciation, and Johnson as author of a radiant new attempt to "write paradise." Though I have no evidence as yet to support this, I suspect that Johnson's ARK was in part a reaction to Finlay's darker temperament. It will be interesting to see what I can turn up.

Feminism and chauvinism are very much on blogland's mind right now; as far as my own position goes, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with Jonathan when he writes that "nobody really wants to hear a man congratulate himself about how feminist he is." I will say, however, that the discussion has sharpened my approach to reading Beverly Dahlen's new book A Reading 18-20, just out from Instance Press (they don't seem to have a website but the book's available from SPD) and kindly sent to me gratis by Stacy Szymaszek, whose Emptied of All Ships I admire (I'm just a sucker for sea chanteys, I guess). I haven't read the other installments of the "A Reading" project, but this one impresses me as being one of the more moving and thoughtful variations on the subgenre that I've come to think of as "Frankfurt School poetry": poetry that immerses itself in the language and spectacle of modern capital, Arcades projects crammed with dialectical images, seekers after the truth content concealed by bits of governmental- and corporate-speak. The poetics of cognitive mapping, usually but not always unfolded over a particular urban space: the most recent work of Joshua "You can't spell 'Marxist' without 'Matrix' Clover comes to mind but also Rob Fitterman's Metropolis project, Kevin Davies' work, and almost everything I've seen from Atelos (especially books by Rodrigo Toscano and Ed Roberson). While many, many poets work this territory, these writers stand out for me for writing most often in books and series rather than individual poems: they take deep breaths and plunge for long periods into the spectacle, scalpel in hand. The major precedent or "root poet" for this approach is probably Jack Spicer, whose Collected Books map a lot of territory, including American politics and baseball, the currents of homosexual desire, and quite often the literary itself (from the first book, After Lorca, a necography of the Spanish visionary poet, to the last, The Book of Magazine Verse, a witty riff and deconstruction of the American media scene in the mid-Sixties). I don't know if this comes close to explaining the generally masculine tenor of this mode of writing: certainly Spicer himself had little use for women. But I am interested to see that Dahlen, who like Lisa Robertson seems interested in interrogating not only capital but poetry itself, engages directly with Spicer, not only in the title of her book A Reading Spicer and 18 Sonnets but in the present volume, who makes an appearance at the beginning of "A Reading 20" as a kind of revenant of negativity:

Redundancy is an antidote to psychic noise Ted says and writing it now I wonder can that be part of the poem or I'm starting to worry what's part of the poem like Spicer who seems to be fussy about that all the time what's in the poem and what's not what you can bring in and can't how old that feels to me how long I've thought of that not wanting it never occurred to me to credit Spicer now there's a paranoiac boob old false face lumbering, something about the raw and the cooked, bulges, and what you could put into that sack and maybe watch it squirm out the edges the poem a sack of kittens to be drowned. reading Spicer that's morbid his morbidity one side of that affects me strongly something at the boundary of civilization someone who lots of the time was beyond the pale.

I'm engaged by the personal tone of this, the sense of Dahlen's presence as a thinker: she seems to have less need of the ironic mask that most of the other poets of this mode that I've mentioned feel compelled to wear. Reading Dahlen reading, I often feel like I'm both enjoying the poetry and also reading a kind of brilliant textbook or at least sketchbook of a poet's progress: a poet who's also very much a critic (and isn't that what consistently appeals to me the most, the poetical-critical boundary?). The poetry per se, or rather the verse, happens between prose poems that take up the texts of predecessors and comrades, continually resituating Dahlen's "reading" in a shifting yet bracingly contemporary landscape. This is where we come from, this is where we live, this is the voice of the real mumbling in the breath of the commodity:

sheltering tough thought in exchange for the thickened plot
the deliberate colors of the fall from grace in a frosted glass
an eternal winter sunset qualified by artifice
by the hairs on her chin dowdy gray
by sexual ambiguity by the refusal to be the classic straight line
by prickly holly thorns below south the sun in the shape
of a rooster's foot inching towards Lapland
where the witches live

upon whom the sun has gone down

quoted on the bare bricks of Market Street
is it the end yet said my grandfather dying
darkness is all Were
proud? Of what? To buy

a thing like that.

I'm moved by Dahlen's attempt to construct a usable past in this poetry, a past which she puts under considerable pressure, finding what's living and vital in old chauvinist bastards like Spicer and Pound. It's a path that has, I feel, much to teach me.

I'm not Tony Hoagland's biggest fan, but this article, "Fragment, Juxtaposition, And Completeness: Some Notes And Preferences" from The Cortland Review on the uses and abuses of fragment and collage is quite useful and balanced: I would happily give it to undergraduates to whom I was teaching collage as a mode. When I come across an article by Hoagland I'm usually waiting the entire time for the other shoe to drop: for him to come out and express his preference for the easiest and most accessible kinds of poetry, and to dismiss other modes as highfalutin'. (The title of the book his essay comes from, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, is an example of the kind of pseudopopulism and false self-deprecation that I find so irritating.) But here Hoagland only gently questions the rising popularity of collage as a mode, and he raises a pertinent point of comparison that should have us all thinking: "Contemporarily, in some poetic circles, fracture and breakage have become the techniques by which authenticity and energy is certified—perhaps not much differently from the way in which explicit confession was used in the past to certify poetic authenticity." Also, his counterexample is one I find easy to embrace: Allen Grossman's weirdly skewed and prophetic poetry, which performs its feats of wonder within the bounds of normative grammar and syntax, leaving Hoagland to conclude, "The powers of complex coherence, visible in Grossman's poem and available to all of us, shouldn't be lightly abandoned, or shunned." He's absolutely right. But it's as yet sadly rare to find arguments of this sort for the broadening and deepening of the palette/palate, as opposed to mortar shells of snark and dudgeon inaccurately lobbed from one camp to the other.

Alan Gilbert talks up The Men in this week's Village Voice.

Starting to teach The Merchant of Venice today. It's a far more repellent play than I recalled: racism and scorn for difference are everywhere, and not just in the portrayal of Shylock. Difficult to see how anyone could pull it off nowadays as a comedy; at the same time, it's difficult to see how Shylock could be made heroic or appealing (as has sometimes been the fashion) without drastic cuts. The homoerotic charge of Antonio and Bassanio's friendship is interesting, but strangely bloodless, conflating melancholy with same-sex desire. And Portia seems a very cold and calculating character, the least appealing of Shakespeare's heroines. I'm curious to see Michael Radford's film version with my class next week to see how he addresses these problems.

The Men

On my thirty-sixth birthday, I'm delighted to have finally given myself the present of Lisa Robertson's newest book, The Men, out from Toronto's BookThug. It's a tour-de-force of metapoetry, a rather tricky and elusive subgenre in which the poem and poet examine the bases for their own production: a critique in the Kantian sense. That's not all it is, of course, not nearly all: Robertson's writing wouldn't compel me as it does without her exquisite ear, connected on a cellular level with her wry and incisive wit. "Incision" is an apt term for her poetical procedure in this book, I think: she cuts cross-sections and core samples through the lyric tradition with the seemingly dull tool of repetition honed to a razor edge. In this passage at the end of the book's first of five sections (they tend to have titles that somehow suggest palindromes without actually being one: "MEN DEFT MEN," "EVENING LIT THE GNAT"), the inhibition of a woman's speech is deftly eroticized:

I've touched the men who stopped
My tongue, I've touched the men
In the free breeze foreignly. But this
Immaculate equal
Grows as I speak
And their two styles flossy.
And their two
Styles flossy.
And hence experience
Analogy.
Butonly in relation
To the men
And my own eyes.




In this rough verse
Unavoidably the men
All bordered with sky blue
Stand alone
And my little bed also
Bearing nothing more.
I have only the reticence of intimacy.

Petrarch's Laura seems to speak in that last line (about not speaking), while the history of the lyric is indexed to my ear by phrases like "my little bed" (the sonnet as "little room") and the delightfully silly "two styles flossy" (stilnovisti). The motor for all this is, naturally "the men": Robertson deliberate conflates lyric as such with the gender that has historically defined and produced it. But she's not simply turning lyric on its head and turning men into erotic objects (though she does this with breathtaking effectiveness); nor is she interested in the ingenuous ecriture feminine that I've seen in some other younger feminist poets who center their writing on bodily or "gurlesque" experience. The Men is a romp through the secret masculinist history of lyric—erotic blazon, phallic wit, love as spur to writing—that Robertson's wily speaker seeks to crack open for herself by rendering that history visible (no mean feat in itself, at least not when accomplished sans soapbox) through the prism-like refraction of "the men" as subject-objects of desire:

The men have a house
Of rooms and time
To walk through them
Pondering their sons
And daughters, feeling
Loss and the long tiredness
Of passing. At such times
In exhaustion
They show you the liner notes. Look
Say the men, look
And the first webs of lust
Flicker
Near the window
And their shirts are sweet
And their sweat bitter:
Just delicious.

Sappho's "sweetbitter" is evoked here, while later those men in the window are wearing "short-sleeved shirts," evoking the pathetic pipe smoke of the men in Eliot's "Passages." Not only are "the men" conflated with lyric, but they are also conflated with lyric's landscape (the pastoral is never far from Robertson's mind, and in many ways "the men" are obviously the descendents of "the Roaring Boys" from Robertson's Xeclogue). "All landscape is second," Robertson says: nature-gender is mediated by poetry and thus has a history to be taught and exploded. "Inside the men are people": there's a generosity of spirit here, a sense that men as well as women are imprisoned by gender roles. Simply as a trope, The Men remind me of another Canadian poet's work with men as desiring/desirable machines: Anne Carson, especially The Beauty of the Husband and the book whose title Robertson both echoes and strips down, Men in the Off Hours. Not least do they resemble each other in the astringency of their wit, which I associate with the disciplinary play of the classicist, she who knows her way around an epigram. And I am also reminded of the power a repeated noun can have, how a word as everyday as "men," especially when paired with the suggestive placing of a definite article, yields up treasures of signification when put under lyric pressure: coal into diamond. Another significant word that recurs in The Men was new to me: "hyrdromel." I had to look it up, but of course the meaning is clearly embedded: hydro - water, mel - honey. When fermented this combination becomes mead: a lyric drink, methinks, evocative of the middle ages that every love poem yet strives to inhabit. Robertson juxtaposes this word with "poverty," and it's that rift, that dialectic—the sweet poverty of the feminine object—that she mines and overturns in this exhilarating work:

I call out hydromel to the men I take all of their style and I turn it to poverty. Who can say which loses? I call out hydromel to the ladies as false as the gorgeous poem. This is referential stability. This is our passion to speech. Hydromel in the meadows and in the evening light especially. I have plenty so I give it to them false human face men fluttering men recumbent men married men in cognition lady's men men homosexual men of the true synthetic space men as glamorous as dew. Your name is a syllable on my face and I speak it from your own juice. What's prior to cognition. Amazed head of a man I feed you violets and fall upwards bleating.

Maybe it's a side effect of wedded bliss, but I just can't get exercised over the annual Best American Poetry controversy, which this year is being ably conducted by Seth and Jordan and others. Partly this is because I'm over my desire to use Billy Collins as a punching bag: I happen to believe that he is afflicted by a species of self-loathing that infects his sense of poetry in general (thus radically scaling back its aesthetic ambitions and possibilities), but he is hardly the only poet so inclined. As for the bestness of the BAP, I think it does a better job of advertising its subjective intentions than does, say, the Norton, or other institutionally produced anthologies that purpose to give you an unadulterated slice of the canon. I wouldn't mind landing a poem in there sometime, provided I had esteem for the editor who'd done the choosing, but if it never happens I won't pout about it. I would rather put my energies into things like SOON—with all the wedding and honeymoon business, I've completely neglected to mention our most recent reading, which happened on Saturday the 23rd right after Emily and I got back from Canada. Pelin Ariner performed a sequence called "The Weekly Show," which invariably reminded me of both this and that. Her guests? Somebody and Nobody. Then it was a thrill to have Evelyn Reilly read. Evelyn is a fellow Barrow Streeter and I highly recommend her fierce, playful book Hiatus (scroll down to find it), which takes cues from Stein and Stevens, has a critical-feminist edge, and is precisely askance in its music. It's a highly various book in style and subject, moving felicitously between prose and verse, page-as-field and compression of the line. Here's one of my favorites, and not only because I just got married or because I once had a dog named Elsie:

"Elsie, Voluptuous Water"

Ask.  Ask Elsie.  "What is water?"

"Spousal love."  That's Gerard

who says.  Who?  What?  "Or

spiritual matters."  "Some Harold

you'll marry.  Some Harold."  Who?

Ask.  "To our door of proposed."

What?  "Water."  "Of voluptuous.

Of marriage."  Whose?  This tender.

Tender of spousal.  "Who?" she says,

"Who will take care of you?"

Mother of ask.  "Perhaps."  This.

Ask.  "What is spiritual?"

Sexual water.  "Spiritual what?"

Flesh.  How?  A question.

"Who questions?"  "Who questions

the door?"  Espoused, so what

is proposed?  "Flesh."  Of who?

What?  "Ask Elsie."  Bringing water.

Where?  "To the door."  Of proposed.

To the floor of espoused.  "Of what?"

What.  Ask.  Of what What?   Ask.

Evelyn read newer work, including pieces from her new chapbook, Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, out now from Brend Iijima's Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (you can read one sequence from the book, "Reverse Landscapes," here). My favorite piece that she read is a new longish poem called "Broken Water," which I hope will see print soon: an ecstatic and mournful ecopoetic meditation. I feel a strong affinity with her work and I'd like to spend more time with it—but time feels in short supply just now.

A Honeymoon

Hitchhiking on Wolfe Island.
Emily roadside.
Riding the ferry.
In front of the Sleepless Goat in downtown Kingston, Ont.
Not so sleepless in the lobby of our hotel.

I'll get back to substantive posting about poetry, etc., one of these fine days. Mostly playing catch-up with teaching right now, and contemplating the academic job market.

A Wedding

Chuppahs on the march.
The bride's processional.
Under the chuppah.
Totally married.
The morning after.

Wonderful family evening tonight at Madeline's in Ithaca—they did a kick-ass job. The wedding weekend has begun, and I feel great. Thanks to all who offered their good wishes! I'm en route to matrimony, and will probably not post again before there's a ring upon my finger.

Hey, I almost forgot: registered Democrats in New York should get up, stand up, and go vote for Jonathan Tasini in today's primary. Vote your principles and nudge Hillary and the debate to the left a little bit.

Back to weddingland I go.

Yep. Getting married on Sunday. That's pretty much topics A, B, and C around here. Some relatives arrive tomorrow, more Thursday, the kit and kaboodle on Friday. Saturday we're having a picnic at lovely Taughannock Falls State Park. And the ceremony happens Sunday at The Fontainebleau Inn, about twenty minutes from Ithaca proper. Afterwards we're taking a short honeymoon in Kingston, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River. We will be very. Tired. And happy.

Not sure I'll be able to muster up anything poetry-related until it's all over, but just in case, watch this space. And thanks to those who've expressed their good wishes, or simply have some.

"All of the records for me are living in this naive fantasia where people care about each other's well-being." Garrett Kamps' review of M. Ward's new album in the Village Voice is actually a great little miniature study on the sources and uses of pastoral—only Kamps simply calls it "safe," as in the childhood game of tag in which there is "the ether wherein you could be tagged, and the ether wherein you could not, called 'safe.'" Nice.

Have I mentioned lately that I'm getting married in a little more than a week?

Jasper talks about books versus poems, or in Derridean style, books versus writing, taking a kind of aerial view with an astute comment from ground level by Jake York if you scroll down. We certainly do fetishize the book nowadays, for reasons close to those described. I like the idea of books as the residue of some more fundamental activity (Jasper gives the example of Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day), or as media for larger arcs and projects—Nathaniel Mackey comes once again to mind, as someone who's been unfolding large scale narratives over several books for years. Duncan's Passages—a poem-series which I feel compelled to italicize, even though it is pointedly not a book—is probably the ur-text of this sort for the New American traditions. But it's difficult to evade the imprint (so to speak) of the MFA and book-contest cultures, which have set up the equation book=legitimacy. Kate Greenstreet's excellent series of interviews with "first-book poets" (a label I take from my own first book's Pinsky blurb) reinforces this idea with her question, "Did you expect the book to change your life?"—a question whose provenance and emotional truth all the interviewees recognize. And I, for one, cherished the idea of "my book" long before I even knew that poetry was what I wanted to write. That's the product of being raised in a family where books were reverenced, particularly by my mother. And that reverence may have even deeper roots in Jewish culture. The actual objects out of their packing cases, the actual books, are inevitably slightly disappointing given my history of feeling toward books. Yet I do feel that they've brought me bodily into a stream of discourse that has become a significant tributary of my identity.

Poetry is a river and individual books are stones and pebbles that divert or churn up its flow. Few of us identify with the water itself, unless it's the white water of a particular aesthetic or camp. But it might be spiritually and poetically enlarging for some of us to get back to poems instead of throwing all our energy into books. That's why dealing with the Nature Theater manuscript is interesting for me: for the first time, I'm thinking of the book as a vehicle for poems I believe in, rather than an end in itself.

Scott McCloud, the creator of one of my favorite late-eighties early-nineties comic books, Zot! (he also produced a superhero parody, DESTROY!, which has my all-time favorite dialogue exchange in it: as two superheroes battle in Manhattan, knocking down landmarks left right and center, the mayor says to one of his lackeys, "We'll have to evacuate New York!" To which the lackey responds, "Okay") has produced two masterpieces of instruction and analysis about his medium, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. Now he's made it a trilogy with a new how-to book, Making Comics. It's a fascinating excursus on comics technique, which McCloud has elsewhere referred to as "sequential art." But what caught my eye was a discussion toward the end of four "loosely affiliated tribe[s] of like-minded comic artists" that share the same values. These tribes and their values are named and summarized thusly:

The Classicists: Excellence, hard work, mastery of craft, the quest for enduring beauty.
The Animists: Putting content first, creating life through art, trusting one's intuition.
The Formalists: Understanding of, experimentation with, and loyalty to the comics form.
The Iconoclasts: Honesty, vitality, authenticity and unpretentiousness. Putting life first.

You can see why this quadrivium would appeal to my own cataloging sensibilities—on the same page he arranges the four tribes into a quadrant to indicate their parallels and oppositions—and why I'm immediately vampirically inclined to substitute "poetry" for "comics" (though of course McCloud's four tribes seem applicable to most any genre of art). In a back-of-the-book note, McCloud writes:

I actually sat on this idea for over ten years without publishing it, concerned that it might do more harm than good. I'm sympathetic to those who see any such efforts to categorize art as reductive and futile. But then I'd see these rants like:

- "Craft is the enemy of art!"
- "Alternative comics are for people who can't draw."
- "Everyone making mainstream comics is a sell-out."
- "Explaining art ruins it."
- "If it has no new ideas, what good is it?"

And I realized that in a world where so many people reduce art to two sides, maybe reducing it to four would be an improvement.

McCloud goes on to say that "Comics is an ecosystem" and that all four tribes are necessary. And if one embraces that point of view (though can one really be passionate about pluralism?), I think the usefulness of the four tribes model for mapping the poetryverse becomes apparent. It may not be an improvement on the critical work that Kasey does here on deconstructing the infamous "School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant" binary, but it does I think implicitly recognize the intimate connection between aesthetic and social positioning without being as falsely deterministic as SoQ/P-A. Simply by multiplying the number of available vectors it becomes possible to imagine more complex positions in the field (literally two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional) and also helps me to understand perennial alliances and clashes. There are two lines in the quadrant that align the tribes: the horizontal "Tradition/Revolution" line opposes the classicists and animists to the formalists and iconoclasts, while the vertical "Art/Life" line allies the classicists and formalists against the animists and iconoclasts. Diagonals represent more fundamental oppositions: it is difficult to reconcile the spirit of animism (content and story first) with that of formalism (exploring the boundaries of what one's art is capable of), or classicism (striving for perfection within one's tradition of art) with iconoclasm (McCloud puts this best: "The conviction of artists to remain true to themselves while never taking themselves too seriously. To fly no one's flag--not even their own"). McCloud cites various comics artists who unite two tendencies in themselves: Art Spiegelman is his example of a formalist with a strong iconoclastic streak, adventure writer Milton Caniff is an animist-classicist, and Dave McKean (a personal favorite of mine, gorgeous and expressionistic) is a formalist-classicist. People can and do move around among these positions, giving one priority and then another over the course of a career, and arguably "genius" might be defined by the ability to produce work that can make a plausible claim for each category (Shakespeare comes inevitably to mind, since I'm teaching him).

The risk run by using such a quadrant is of a sterile, historyless universalism: McCloud derives the four tribes from Jung's four major thought functions, as made famous by the Meyer-Briggs Personality Test: intuition, thinking, sensation, feeling. Discover your typology and choose your camp! (I generally come up an INFP on the test, but on the cusps, especially thinking/feeling and perceiving/judging.) But I'm convinced that such schema can be useful as a means of provisional orienteering, and anyway I seem to be a categorizing animal. If one can avoid reifying the categories (or worse, reifying particular artists), I think McCloud's four tribes can go some distance toward explaining the positions/arcs of individual poets and movements, as well as contribute to self-understanding.

Jairo van Lunteren of The Splendors did a little interview with me for this week's Ithaca Times article on local artists and their day jobs. For those who might be interested, here's the complete interview that he conducted with me via e-mail:

What is your motivation behind being an artist if it doesn’t make good enough money to make a living off of?

There are other kinds of economies and other sorts of goods. I write to make contact with a larger world, or larger worlds: of readers, of other poets, of people thinking hard about language, and not least the parts of myself that would otherwise go unexpressed. The rewards don’t often take monetary form, but they do add up to a life.

How many hours a week do you spend on your art?

This is hard to figure, because I’m a grad student at Cornell as well as a bookstore clerk, and yet I feel the work I do in those places is strongly connected to my work as a poet. At Cornell I teach (Shakespeare this semester, which is a thrill) and I’m finishing a dissertation on modernist pastoral poetry; these things keep me in constant contact with poetry because I’m always thinking about it, talking about it, or writing about it. At Bookery II I have the privilege of being the poetry book buyer, which along with my work with SOON Productions helps me to feel like I’m contributing to the community’s poetry needs. Then there’s my weblog, Cahiers de Corey (it’s a dorky name but I’m stuck with it), to which I post at least two or three times a week with my thoughts on poetry and poetics. It all adds up to a more than full-time job.

What does it take to become a professional in your field?

There’s a kind of creaky medieval model right now: first you apprentice yourself to a mentor or, more often these days, to a university MFA program; then you do your journeyman work, publishing in magazines; then you publish your first book, at which point they start calling you an “emerging” poet. But many of the most interesting poets reject this model and find their own idiosyncratic paths. Really there’s no such thing as a professional poet: there are only professional teachers of poetry and then the vast array of people who write poetry and publish it but whose livelihoods depend on something else.

Do you look at yourself as an artist with a day job or as a hobbyist?

Are these my only choices? Because I see poetry as a form of intellectual labor, I get for the most part to experience my life as more integrated than your question implies: teaching, critical writing, writing poems, selling books, and hosting readings all feel like part of the same life. I’m a working poet.

What is your day job?

I have two: as a grad student, I teach first-year writing seminars at Cornell, and as a clerk at Bookery II I stock and maintain the poetry section and also do the usual customer service tasks.

How many hours a week do you work?

Right now I only put in one day, or eight hours, a week at Bookery II. Teaching is harder to pin down: class only meets for 150 minutes a week, but when you factor in preparation time and the grading of papers, it probably amounts to at least 20 hours per week. So let’s call it 30 hours total, with the remaining time devoted to finishing my dissertation, blogging and writing poems, and otherwise having a life.

What is your art about?

Scratching an itch. Ever since I was small I’ve been fascinated by the music and strangeness and multiplicity of words: I loved that game where you’d repeat a word like "tomato" over and over again until it lost all meaning and became this uncanny object in your mouth. Most people think of language as a tool, something you use to attain ends outside of language: give me this, help me with that, I feel x about y. I’m generally convinced that words are smarter than I am, and if I let them have their way, they’ll discover and interrogate and express things that my ordinary instrumental mind just doesn’t have access to. Some of what gets uncovered seems profound; some of it is silly or obscene; some of it approximates the complexity of what I feel and think about politics and love and literature and death. I try to be a good listener.

What will have to have happened in your life as an artist in order for you to look back at it with satisfaction?

To have always kept growing; to never have repeated myself or been seduced by a single style. To have collaborated with other artists in other media. To have contributed something indelible to the conversation.

Please name one or more of your artistic achievements.

The obvious thing is to point to my published books. But last Friday I did a reading at Bookery II with the other SOON folks and I read a new poem that’s a kind of elliptical elegy for my little dog Bogie, who died suddenly this July. It’s not so much about him as it’s about how the loss of anything that we care for shakes our foundation, and the struggle back toward uprightness. People seemed moved by it and that’s really satisfying.

Why are some artists famous and others not?

Some of it is luck, and of course an artist with socioeconomic advantages like enough to eat and a good education is more likely to succeed than an artist who receives no support from her society or community. But a lot of it comes down to self-promotion. Many artists, especially writers, are basically shy people with little appetite for sending their work to strangers or schmoozing at poetry readings. Skill at self-promotion is probably more important than artistic talent when it comes to making a name for yourself. The good news for shy but talented artists is that the habits of self-promotion can be learned, provided you believe in yourself and your art. The bad news is that there will always be a surplus of mediocre artists with sharp elbows.

How can people get to know more about your art?

Everyone starts out loving poetry and then most have that love beaten out of them by bad teachers who’ve had their love for poetry beaten out of them by other teachers, and so on. But everyone’s instinctively delighted by clever. rhythmic, and surprising language. I would just advise people to head on down to Bookery II’s poetry section and browse around: look at some anthologies or try out a literary magazine like The Canary or jubilat. You’ll find stuff that surprises you and that doesn’t feel at all like homework or a chore.

What project(s) are you currently involved with?

Finishing the dissertation is my number one task right now. But I’ve recently collected about ten years of poems into a new manuscript that I’m going to try to publish, and I’m also shopping around a book of sonnets, Severance Songs, that I finished last year.

Caché

Films don't come much more unsettling than Michael Haneke's Caché, which I took in at Cornell Cinema (this is starting to become a habit) last night before dropping in on the English department's annual meet-n-greet party at the A.D. White House. It's a film about complicity: the individual's complicity with history and with the political policies of his nation, and the complicity of the viewer with what happens on screen. We never learn who's making the mysterious videotapes that push Georges and Anna off their complacent bobo perch, though the infamous closing shot suggests a mysterious collusion between their son Pierrot, and the son of the unfortunate Majid, an Algerian orphan whom Georges spitefully disenfranchised when they were both children. This mystery remains a provocation and irritant that lingers after the film has ended, mimetic of the bad conscience that Georges' private-eye antics fail to solve, and which can ultimately only be assuaged by sleeping pills.

When I see a film which privileges its technique and formal qualities over the usual Hollywood values, my thoughts turn to poetry, as with Days of Heaven (another film with class privilege on its mind) last week. Whereas Malick's film had the lushness and interiority of lyric, Haneke's self-conscious deployment of digital video, which turns the camera back on its habitual wielders far more effectively than "reality TV" does, makes me think of more those austere modes of modernism in which personal history and more global histories are made to interact so the reader can trace his or her own habits of constructing them. The example that comes to mind (and which affectively mimics both Haneke's coolness and his moral disgust) is Barrett Watten's Bad History, which among other things is an examination of the bankruptcy and exhaustion of the generation of '68 and of what is coming increasingly to look like an aberrant moment of spiritual expansion that has, like Majid's rooster, had its head chopped off and whose twitches are decreasingly lifelike. I also think of Bruce Andrews and of flarf—or rather of a poetry that could somehow succeed in re-presenting the word salad of our lives back to us in all its unalienated dismajesty, so that we recognized the world we have made. In other words, it's too easy to dismiss flarf as Other, as not our language, as something we personally privileged readers have no responsibility for. But maybe that's not flarf's fault, or art's fault—even watching Caché I found myself agreeing somewhat with Georges that he couldn't be blamed for something he did when he was six. But then that's the problem of responsibility: we've all been trained not to see ourselves as part of history, or to recognize the ways in which we've benefited from the horrors of primitive accumulation. (My great-great grandfather might have been dodging Cossacks in Russia, but that doesn't mean I haven't indirectly benefitied from the wealth extracted from American slave labor, for example.) Art falls short of moral instruction: it can only prick your conscience if you have one. Far from being a shortcoming of art, this points toward the failure of an education system and a culture which ruthlessly exports all "values" into the nuclear domestic heterosexual family. The aesthetic does include and require the ethical, but through the back door. What Haneke's film does, like Watten's poem, is show us how rotten the facade of the house is.

Fewer than three weeks before the wedding, a little more than two weeks before the MLA Job Information List opens for business, one day before my first class teaching Shakespeare. Instead of planning for any of these, I am rearranging a poetry manuscript. Over at right under "Poetry" I've listed some poems under the title, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, in my opinion one of the best titles I've ever stolen (it comes from the last chapter of Kafka's Amerika, aka The Man Who Disappeared). In spite of this the manuscript's been rejected time and again by, well, almost everybody. This might have something to do with the current trend in poetry publishing, the concept book: a mere "collection" of poems isn't as sexy as a book that has some kind of narrative or metanarrative hovering about it. Akin to this is the formally unified book, in which a device, constraint, or composition method creates a kind of (wo)man on the flying trapeze effect that publishers and readers alike find compelling. I've written both kinds of manuscript, arguably at the same time. But Nature Theater doesn't fit into either of those categories. While there are definitely recurring themes and moods, and to me at least the book does tell something of a "story" about my engagement with my Jewish-Modernist heroes, the poems themselves are various in subject matter, tone, form, etc. I think there still ought to be a place for the collection and so I've resisted trying to turn Nature Theater into a hardcore concept book—or more to the point, the poems have resisted me. But that does leave the problem of arrangement. I've tried putting the poems in thematically consistent sections, and I've tried dividing the book into two sections that seem to somehow oppose each or complement each other, and I've tried creating a continuous stream in which elements that really recur by obsession appear to recur by design. I've never been satisfied with any of them, and so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the manuscript hasn't yet satisfied an editor.

This weekend I came up with a new arrangement that, at least for the moment, both satisfies and excites me, and restores the flow of the book's energy (when a manuscript hangs around for a long time it can get stale in the writer's mind, even if individual poems out of context still seem fresh and urgent): alphabetical order. It may seem like a cop-out—Ron for one has complained about magazines that publish their poets in alphabetical order, so as to shirk making editorial decisions about juxtaposition and conjunction. But surrendering to a constraint, even a simple one, has given my work a shot in the arm in the past, and I think it's happening again. In alphabetical order the poems interact in ways that I didn't force or control, and the conversation between them is far livelier than anything I've tried previously. Plus that quality of obsession that I mentioned earlier is, I think, more on the surface: more nerves are exposed. And the old poems are ventilated in a way that makes room for new ones: I've found a home for many of the poems I've written over the last two years (basically, post Severance Songs) here, and they engage playfully and provokingly with the older stuff.

Whether or not the new arrangement is pleasing to publishers, I hope it will please me enough to help me move on to something truly new. It can be hard to have an old project hanging over your head for years and years: hard to see past or under or through it.

Odds and ends:

- What can I say about the experience of seeing Snakes on a Plane? A dramatic example of the power of low expectations: we were thoroughly entertained.

- Aaron has the word on how our Friday reading went, if you're curious.

- Also, I'd belatedly like to acknowledge poet Sina Queyras' short review of Compostition Marble, which she picked up passing through Ithaca while I was in Montana. Thanks for the kind words, Sina!