The Possessed, or: Creative Writing and Curiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading on Sunday at Myopic Books

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

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

Visibly Relieved

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

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

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

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

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

I write for myself and for strangers.

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

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

Lecture

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

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

Visibly relieved

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

What's beyond reading?

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

I want to look at that.

Poetry Is Blue: Brief Descriptions of Material Properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark McMorris: Entrepôt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

("Gadji Beri Bimba," 67)

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

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

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

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

The (Conceptual) Pleasures of the (Conceptual) Text

Buzz Spector (American, b. 1948)

Conceptual Art, 1996

Torn paper

(outside men's room at Harris Theater, photographed between sets of last night's Magnetic Fields concert)

The maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there's no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we're knee-deep in this one, you and me, we're practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us, what do you say, shall we give it another whirl, we can go naked, I suppose, there's nothing to stop us and everything points in that direction, do you think there will be much music later and of what variety, we've that, at least, now that there's nothing left...
—Vanessa Place, from Dies: A Sentence

Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually.
—Kenneth Goldsmith, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing"

Conceptual narrative necessarily marked by digression, omission, despair, the ecstatic uprising of the sentence against the tyranny of paragraphs ("A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is," G. Stein), chapters, plot and character. Writing that does not find a readership but which inaugurates a thinkership. Is it correct, then, to speak of the pleasures of the conceptual text?

To review: R. Barthes: the readerly text produces pleasure in part by not challenging the reader's role as consumer of subjectivity, by presenting an unbroken sequence of events for digestion. The writerly text produces bliss/jouissance by challenging/cruising the reader to re-interpret the signs, to be attentive to the materiality of language, which perversely exceeds or falls short of any and every narrative object. These are categories analogous to those of innocence versus experience, and thus dependent on each other. Further, as Blake knew, the proper path is not from one to the other, but to circle back again, to pass through experience and back again to innocence, but innocence-with-a-difference (only after such knowledge, forgiveness). So every and any text is both readerly and writerly, though texts which present themselves as writerly are much rarer than the other kind and are marked today as experimental/innovative/postmodern/difficult/hybrid/unnamed/unnameable.

It would be simple, then, to say that conceptual writing is writerly writing and to have done with it. As Barthes says in the first pages of S/Z, "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (4). This would seem to jibe with three sentences from Kenneth Goldsmith's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing": "Marketplace fiction and forms of 'purposeful' writing are of completely opposite natures. The former is concerned with making a text with a specific function. Fiction, for example, whether it is a work of art or not, must be utilitarian or else fail completely. Conceptual writing is not utilitarian." (Notice how we might reiterate a Romantic formula there if we replaced the phrase "conceptual writing" with "art" or "the artwork.") But is the "plural text" (6) that Barthes writes about really less utilitarian than a "classic text," such as the Balzac story he winds S/Z around? If anything, it's more utilitarian in that it provides employment for literary critics and the academic-industrial complex. Put another way, to enlist the reader as "producer" seems worlds apart from the playful expenditure that seems to characterize divers conceptual texts, from "pure" conceptual pieces like Day and Traffic to the baroque foliations of La Medusa and Dives to those mixed or "impure" conceptual/noulipian pieces that ring changes on the Shakespearean sonnet (Jen Bervin's Nets, Paul Hoover's Sonnet 56.)

Goldsmith's conceptual-perceptual binary indexes the continuum between pure, impure, and baroque that Place & Fitterman map out in Notes on Conceptualisms. But I find "pure" and "impure" unhelpful labels in determining the nature of the pleasure(s) to be obtained from conceptual writing, broadly speaking. "Baroque," on the other hand, is a term I've long associated with a form of writing that I experience as deeply pleasurable, one which exploits the tension that Goldsmith identifies in the penultimate of his "Paragraphs":

Writing of any kind is a physical fact. The physicality is its most obvious and expressive content. Conceptual writing is made to engage the mind of the reader rather than her ear or emotions. The physicality of the work can become a contradiction to its non-emotive intent. Rhyme, meter, texture, and enjambment only emphasize the physical aspects of the work. Anything that calls attention to and interests the reader in this physicality is a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive device. The conceptual writer would want to ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way (to convert it into an idea). This kind of writing, then, should be stated with the greatest economy of means. Ideas may be stated with numbers or words or any way the author chooses, the form being unimportant.

Place & Fitterman claim that conceptual writing is a mode of allegory. The baroque takes the age-old tension between mind and body, spirit and pleasure, as its formal principle, and thus becomes a double-voiced, heteroglossic tale that refuses to dissolve the physical pleasures of the ear and eye or the no-less-physical because fundamentally temporal pleasures of narrative for the sake of its idea, even as it insists on its concept and the possibility of a key to the text's mythologies. This already true in the history of "straight" allegory—look at how Redcrosse, the allegorical knight of "Holiness" in Book I of The Faerie Queene, completely and consistently behaves in all-too-human ways. After all, if he started out "Holy" and finished up that way, there'd be no story at all. Which is why Redcrosse's slaughter of the monstrous Errour takes place at the beginning of his tale, instead of ending it.

The canonical Modernist example of the baroque has to be Ulysses, which is based on various conceptual procedures from micro-procedures like the history of the English language that characterizes the narration of "Oxen of the Sun" to the book's macro-mapping of its chapters onto the Odyssey (a mapping that, notably, depends on the extra-textual commentary that Joyce built into the "Ulysses experience" by enlisting ephebes like Stuart Gilbert, so that for ever after we would refer confidently to "Oxen of the Sun" and other such chapter titles that don't actually appear in the book). But you'd have to be blind and deaf to let Joyce's conceptual apparatus drown out the pleasures provided by the musicality of the sentences and the unfolding of the narrative, or to force Bloom into one or another conceptual category (as Jew, Other, cuckold, father, artist, bourgeois, etc., etc.) and not enjoy the considerable pleasures of his company.

During her visit to Lake Forest Vanessa Place said several times that many of her works are designed to excite the question, What is this?, or more precisely, What is poetry? What is narrative? And her most purely conceptual works (such as her self-appropriation "Statement of Facts" or her darkly witty Gone with the Wind) are royal roads to those questions. But I am more attracted to her baroque writings, which exceed their correlative objects but are nonetheless objects (Place would probably prefer "sites"), sensuous and seductive and excessive as all hell. They are, to return to Barthes, texts of pleasure and of bliss. You think them, but thinking is just the beginning of experiencing; you produce them and are surfeited at the same time.

My thinking on these points is bound to circle back to poetry eventually. And it will also guide, or thwart, progress on Miramare, which to paraphrase Robert Frost, of all people, now like a piece of ice (its concept) on a hot stove (materiality, narrative) rides on its own melting (toward the dissolution, or solution, of both).

"If a hamster is lapping syrup it will be seized with a hamster clamp."

Vanessa Place performs.

The above is probably my favorite line to have so far emerged from the 2010 Lake Forest Literary Festival, which concludes today. It's the translation of a Hungarian tongue-twister featured in a story that Shelley Jackson read last night that was absolutely crammed with tongue-twisters in various languages in a bravura, hyperJoycean performance. It's been thrilling and a bit daunting to be confronted by such a high-powered group of experimental writers, each of whom pushes and punishes every boundary she encounters.

The festival officially began on Tuesday with a panel discussion moderated by me and featuring Jackson, Vanessa Place, Teresa Carmody, Lily Hoang, and our current Plonsker resident, Gretchen Henderson. I didn't know any of them except for Gretchen, and it's kind of a strange way to meet someone: to interrogate them, en masse, before a live audience. Here's my list of questions, not all of which I got to ask:

1. What would you say is the essential difference between the kinds of writing you practice and mainstream literary fiction? Does it boil down to a particular technique, such as collage? A particular stance? Your relationship with your audience? Small versus big press publishing?
2. What are the debts, if any, of this mode of writing to the art world?
3. Vanessa: Please explain your objections to genre. Why is it inaccurate to call Dies: A Sentence or La Medusa "fiction"?
4. If genre fiction emphasizes plot over character, and literary fiction is “character-driven,” what drives your writing?
5. In a conversation between Lily and Molly Gaudry on Gaudry’s blog, the two of them discuss the artist as romantic figure—such notions as suffering for one’s art and so on. Is an experimental/hybrid stance toward writing inherently anti-romantic?
6. How important is it for innovative writers to control the means of production, whether that means creating your own press (like Les Figues) or creating your own means of web production and distribution?
7. What’s feminist about experimental fiction? Or to approach the question from a different angle: please talk about the relationship between your writing and the body.
8. In a recent interview, Renee Gladman has said that she finds herself drawn to the sense of community that poets have, and that in her experience fiction writers don’t tend to organize themselves along communitarian lines. Has that also been your experience?
9. Poets are used to the idea of not being able to live off their writing, but my sense is that fiction writers are less reconciled to the notion of the unmarketability of their wares. Can we talk about the relationship between your “day jobs” and your writing? Does it free a writer to not have to sell her work directly? Or is it another sort of limitation?

I won't attempt to reproduce the panel's answers to these questions: it probably more fun and more conceptual to go read their work, then imagine what each of them might say. Vanessa Place got in most of the good one-liners: I remember her saying something like, "You have the right to speak provided that you're always interrogating." Later, when she was visiting my poetry-writing class, one of my students called attention to a line from La Medusa: "Me, the Maladictine monk." Instead of a Benedictine who literally "speaks good" and leads the faithful to Christ, the narrator of that text speaks evil and leads the reader astray. And that's her ethics: to "lose" the reader and leave her to find her way "back" or "out" or "through" again. I think of what Emily Dickinson said about her father: that he read "lonely & rigorous books." If you can be lonely amidst the infernal cacophony of voices in La Medusa, which I'm only just beginning to explore, and which brings to its phantasmagoric investigation of Los Angeles Place's direct experience of the infernal as a lawyer who brings appeals on the behalf of indigent sex offenders, as well as her imaginative experience of historical evil, manifested in the small excerpt of text I've read through grimly (un)funny jokes about the Holocaust and lynching.

In her reading yesterday afternoon she achieved a coup de theatre by following up a very funny piece--an exhaustive catalog of names and nicknames for female genitalia--with the raw transcript of testimony from her work, a sad and sickening story told in the uninflected language of the law of an alleged rapist (Place's client, for whom "every woman was a 'bitch'") and his alleged victim, a prostitute who died of a drug overdose shortly after the apellant's preliminary hearing. Other conceptual projects that Place presented including her "whitewash" of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: her "reading" consisted of about five minutes of silence, concluded by the last words of the novel: "after all, tomorrow is another day." The overall project, as I understand it, erases every word of Mitchell's novel except for direct references to the black characters, most especially the word "nigger." I am braced and a little terrified by Place and her work: she seems utterly unadorned by sentiment, and completely radical in her pursuit of an ethics/aesthetics (she disputes the distinction) of mere presentation and the reader's self-implication. I am most naturally drawn to Dies, which is a 50,000-word sentence that all apparently takes place in the mind of a soldier during World War I: it's beautifully written and lushly printed (by Les Figues) and, probably for this reader, at a safer emotional distance than the work which engages so unflinchingly with the persistence of evil and the "not-okay" (a phrase that after Place takes on much darker inflections than those suggested by flarf's invocation of those words).

Shelley "Action" Jackson.

The confrontation with Place's work will be, I think, the most lasting legacy for me of this conference. I enjoyed the readings by Lily Hoang and Teresa Carmody on Tuesday night, but the purest pleasure has come from Shelley Jackson's Wednesday evening reading of the aforementioned tongue-twister story, plus a couple of shorter narratives which derive all of their words from the front page of The New York Times. The procedure here is a little like that used to create Kenneth Goldsmith's DAY (but not at all resembling the technique behind Kent Johnson's DAY), only instead of simply appropriating and monumentalizing the paper she's scavenging it for narrative purposes that inevitably manifest her own interests and obsessions (Tristan Tzara on cut-ups: "The poem will resemble you"). That is, the ambiguous identity of the (female) body as oozing, borderless object: she has a lot of fun with blobs, goo, tentacles, and other substances that I most often associate with the visual work of Cronenberg and Matthew Barney and Richard Serra.

It's the sheer linguistic exuberance that will send me back to Jackson's writing (I am about a hundred pages in to her wonderful satirical novel Half Life, about an alternate reality in which Twofers--people with two heads--take on the allegorical and literal burden of queerness and difference, responding--as real queer people do--with "Pride." It's funny as hell). I will also be reading her hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, and perhaps putting it on the syllabus of a course on Frankenstein for first-year students that I'll be teaching this fall. But I was most inspired, oddly, by the list of authors that she said she was teaching this spring: Beckett, Bruno Schulz, Clarice Lispector among them. It reminded me that there is a doorway for me into this kind of narrative work, and that I don't have to feel "outside" of either fiction in general (which I too often do, thinking of it as poetry's Other) or of the coterie of experimental fiction.

Today at noon we'll hear from Vanessa Place once more, this time on a nonfiction book that she's publishing entitled The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and the Law which Random House is bringing out this month. At 4 PM Angela Jackson and S.L. Wisenberg (author of the appealingly titled memoir The Adventures of Cancer Bitch) will read, and the festival will conclude with Gretchen's performance of her Plonsker-award winning book, Gallerie de Difformité. If you're in Chicago, it's not too late to catch the train here.

Go Read

Durs Grünbein's essay, "Why Live without Writing." This sentence will stay with me: "Someone [i.e., the poet] who is spared nothing in what he does, who has no protection and no aesthetic privilege, such a person will at least lay claim to his constitutionally guaranteed space, as part of a properly constituted minority." And this one: "You fill page after page, as Nietzsche once put it, with angry yearning, not to cozy up to your nearest, but out of love of those farthest away from you, and because the contemporary and the day-to-day will be all the more precious to you when you return to them in a wide arc over unknown terrain." One more: "Writing, the voice whispers to you, is the least circumstantial method of breaking out of the given and the immediate."

In some ways this essay is my best answer to the implicit question "What does it mean to succeed as a writer?" that I grapple with below.

Literary Announcements

I'm extremely pleased to be able to announce a new development regarding the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency. Jennifer Moxley, who any reader of this blog knows is one of my all-time faves, has graciously agreed to serve as judge of this year's competition. The winner will spend two months in residence at Glen Rowan House on the campus of Lake Forest College completing and revising the winning manuscript, which will then be published by the &NOW imprint of Lake Forest College Press and distributed by Northwestern University Press. In addition, he or she will meet with students and faculty, visit classes, and participate in the 2011 Lake Forest Literary Festival. And did I mention the $10,000 prize?

We invite applications for an emerging poet under forty years old, with no major book publication, to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2011) in residence at Lake Forest College.

Send:

1) Curriculum vita
2) No more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress
3) A one-page statement of plans for completion to:

Plonsker Residency
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Box A16
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045.

Bob Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and myself will continue to administer the prize and winnow the field, but the final decision will be made by Jennifer Moxley.

The first Plonsker Prize-winning book, Jessica Savitz's Hunting Is Painting, will be going to the printer soon. And Gretchen E. Henderson, the charming and ferociously talented author of the second winning book, Galerie de Difformite, is hard at work revising that piece of hybrid prose and generally making herself invaluable on our campus.

Speaking of hybrid prose, the 2010 Lake Forest Literary Festival takes place next week, and the public is welcome to attend. In addition to Gretchen, the featured readers include Vanessa Place, Teresa Carmody, Lily Hoang, Angela Jackson, S.L. Wisenberg, and our keynote presenter, Shelley Jackson (author of the feminist Frankenstein cut-up Patchwork Girl and an acclaimed novel about Siamese twins, Half-Life). A complete schedule can be found by clicking on the link above.

Finally, I've decided to attend this year's AWP after barely attending last year's and missing the New York conference altogether (my daughter was busy being born). Looking forward as always to old friends, new books, and overpriced hotel bar drinks.

"the poetry of self-promotion"

My title is taken from the comments stream of an article recently published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Alpaugh's "The New Math of Poetry. The article at first seems to be rehashing the tired conservative complaint about the proliferation of poetry and its venues for publication—a lament for the gatekeepers. But it becomes more interesting when Alpaugh begins speaking out for what he calls "independents": poets like himself who are unaffiliated with any institution. His real argument, it turns out, is that because it's impossible to sort the poems and make sure each receives its just reward, that the existing institutions (MFA programs, literary magazines, the Poetry Foundation, all the usual suspects) resort instead to sorting poets. It's easier to recognize a colleague, in other words, than it is a genius poem. This is the money paragraph:

Perhaps the most sinister fact about the new math of poetry is that it allows the academic oligarchy that controls poetry to impose a nonaesthetic, self-serving scoring system without attracting notice or raising indignation. Since no one can possibly read the vast number of poems being published, professionals can ignore independent poets and reserve the goodies—premiere readings, publications, honors, financial support—for those fortunate enough to be housed inside the professional poetry bubble.

This is a fair criticism, and an intelligent articulation of the protest that curdled into ressentiment in the days of Foetry. The publication possibilities for poets have exploded, but the oligarchical apparatus of recognition and initiation has not. These institutions exert the power they do because there is no market for poetry—the market being the only extra- or hyper-institutional force that our society recognizes as the ultimate court of appeal. Many poets celebrate what they see as the decline of the power of gatekeepers because that means there are no more barriers between their work and readers. But the common reader of poetry probably does still rely on some kind of middleman, be it the imprimatur of a famous poet or just a website like Poetry Daily, which as Alpaugh points out is a largely uncritical distributor of oligarchy-approved poems.

Still, I find it strange that his touchstone poets—his examples of poets whose work would never have survived without institutional support and rescusitation—are Blake and Dickinson. They make for a strange pair. Blake, you will recall, was a print-maker, and thus very much the owner of his own means of production and reproduction. Dickinson, of course, famously declared that "Publication - is the Auction - / Of the Mind of Man -" and in a sense was also her own "publisher," sewing up her fair copies into fascicles so as to, like Berryman's Henry, "hide the pieces, where they may be found." In their eccentric way, they might offer better paths forward than tsk-tsking over the problem of poetic overproduction.

Commenter "markleidner" gives my post its title. His full comment:

don't worry... today's dickinsons & blakes won't sit idly around, waiting, hoping for attention to descend on them... and thus remain uknown... they will know the world needs to hear their voices, and they will be consequently burdened with the responsibility... to take its ear by force... and master the poetry of self-promotion

Yesterday a student came to talk to me about grad school. Mindful of the dismal prospects, I urged her to think carefully about the decision, to recognize its likely economic consequences, and to take a year or two off after completing her undergraduate degree before applying. But the best advice I gave her—advice I would have liked to receive when I was in my twenties—was not to put her trust in institutions. Instead of waiting to be recognized, Lana-Turner-at-Schwab's style—or worse, disciplined, shaped into a round academic peg that may never discover any holes, round, square, or otherwise—any writer today needs to DIY, even—perhaps especially—those who have found some kind of institutional niche.

To succeed as a writer—and I define "success" quite simply as being able to continue in one's work—you not only have to "create the taste by which [one] is to be relished" (Wm. Wordsworth) but you have to create relationships and infrastructure and paths of distribution. Start a press, start a blog, form a reading group, start a reading series. If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don't sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I've found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one's own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one's work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees.

"Self-promotion" is a crass phrase, or rather a class phrase: I was raised to be squeamish about such things because I grew up in the middle-class "meritocracy" with the assumption that the privileges I was born into would be continued automatically, provided that I did well enough on standardized tests to go to the "right" schools. Needless to say, neither I nor many other people from such circumstances can afford to go on thinking this way. This is not something to be regretted. At the same time, I'm not advocating that writers shrug their shoulders and just convert to the cult of self-commodification. I'm not quite sure that the phrase "the poetry of self-promotion" will ever enable me to see self-promotion itself as poetic. (Though I can't help but be skeptical about the corollary saying of Robert Graves', "There's no money in poetry but there's no poetry in money either.") But I do think that what poetry you promote and how you promote it matters, and that ultimately we can't and shouldn't separate a poem from the context of its production and means distribution.

Here I recall a crucial paragraph from Vanessa Place's and Robert Fitterman's endlessly thought-provoking primer Notes on Conceptualisms (parenthetically, I am very much looking forward to Place's participation in next week's Lake Forest Literary Festival, which promises to be epic):

Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to "read" the work as much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualism's readymade properties capitulate to and mirror the easy consumption/generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture. Impure conceptualism, manifest in the extreme by the baroque, exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. In this sense, its excessive textual properties refuse, and are defeated by, the easy consumption/generation of text and the rejection of reading in the larger culture.

Note: these are strategies of failure.

Poetic overproduction here is no longer cause for nostalgia for an imaginary past in which there was "just enough" poetry, Goldilocks-style, and only the right sort of poems received prizes. Instead, "the new math" that Alpaugh laments takes its proper place as a symptom of the larger crisis/"rejection" of reading, which is in turn contextualized as a symptom of technological change/acceleration ("the easy consumption/generation of text"), which in turn may be conceptualize as a symptom of the current state of capitalism, which finally leads us to something resembling reality. That is, poetry's problem is everyone's problem: there are more and more people on the planet every day whose participation in labor or collectivities of any stripe are becoming less and less meaningful, as we trade our labor and agency for the false freedom of consumer choice and the increasingly tattered illusion of "security." Or as Richard Greenfield puts it in his poem "Harm": "one is so small in the age of terror as to be vast..."

The paths of conceptualism that Place and Fitterman describe confront this logic head-on via "strategies of failure" which are also "assassination[s] of mastery" (a strongly political move when these strategies are in the hands of anyone not historically a "master"—that is, anyone not white, rich, heterosexual, and male).* This is, perhaps needless to say, not a path likely to appeal to Alpaugh. I don't know his work (but I see he's published one book with the New Formalist house Story Line Press), but everything about his essay points toward nostalgia for mastery and the hierarchically controlled access to mastery that a smaller world of poetry would provide. Yet his touchstones, Dickinson and Blake, were both strategists of failure, not only in their eccentric paths to publication, but in their highly allegorical and linguistically/imagistically excessive work.

There's an intrinsic connection, there to be discovered, between these poets' production/reproduction and their historical experiences at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (Blake) and the rapid economic and territorial expansion of the U.S. (Dickinson). And I would suggest that writers today need to think closely the connections between what they write, how they publish it, and the scene of writing at this moment of textual—and human—devaluation.

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


* It's hard for a white male heterosexual to pull off conceptualism without the gesture being recuperated into his pre-existing privileges: Kenny Goldsmith's career is certainly not suffering for his being the poster-boy for "uncreative," "de-authored" writing. Even Kent Johnson, whose heteronymia offers perhaps the most promising means of attack on mastery, hasn't done too badly for himself in terms of notoriety, as well as the more meaningfully narrow terms of "success" as I defined it earlier. This is not to denigrate the work of Goldsmith or Johnson, both writers I admire; I just want to acknowledge that their apparent subject-positions create meaningful difficulties.

A Note on Greenfield's Tracer

The ordinary meets the apocalyptic in Richard Greenfield’s Tracer, as mundane activities—reading the mail, household repairs, stopping by a garage sale, taking a hike—“leak autobiography” ("The Sign," 37) and the speaker confronts himself with the twin burdens of isolation and being American in a time of war and paranoia. As Andy Frazee notes in his review of the book, "Greenfield upends Whitman’s paradigm of personal and national self-making, reversing it into a question of how much of the self is self-made and how much is received or constituted by the culture." There always was a lonely side to Walt Whitman: his eagerness to merge with everyone and everything he sees suggests an anxiety about the insufficiency of ordinary human connection: the speaker in Leaves of Grass has no blood relations, no non-imaginary lovers, does not/cannot marry, has no fixed place of employment, has no identity smaller or more constant than "an American, a kosmos, one of the roughs."

The speaker in Greenfield’s book is a Whitman drained of optimism and thus all the more absorptive and spongelike; caught in a Beckettian updraft, he can't go on and does. Unable to disidentify with his own imperial self ("Self-hatred eventually coils upon itself" ["Rezone," 55], the speaker of these poems (many of them named for high-tech weapons systems: Maverick, Bastion, Hellfire) nevertheless, through a kind of caustic irony, attempts to dissolve the boundaries between himself (on "the outskirts," from "the fringe month") and the remote possibility of a reader.

One of my students reading the book yesterday reminded me of Greenfield's poem "Avenger," published in the first issue of the late lamented journal Soft Targets; a poem written for Tracer that does not appear in the published book. To my eyes the poem represents a transition or hinge between the romantic-in-spite-of-itself Carnage in the Lovetrees and the bleaker, more astringent Tracer. "Avenger" (another weapons system, I imagine) locates the "I" on an actual or apparent battlefield, whereas the violence haunting Tracer is all at a far distance, thus depriving its speaker (hereafter, "the Tracer") of even the ghost of heroism that, say, Whitman accrued to himself by nursing wounded Civil War soldiers. The "Avenger" stages a scene of complicity with imperial violence that, in context, reminds me of the feckless torturer-poet of Kent Johnson's poem "Get the Hood Back On".

In a move that Johnson might or might not approve of, the Tracer stands removed from overtly political gestures—he is neither righteous nor does he offer mea culpas. It's poetry itself—not the American poetry scene—that he wants to test for its capacity to be human, in spite of the incredible odds against it. That test of poetry, and of the romantic stance that Greenfield can't help but identify with poetry, is crystallized in the poem "Weapon Alpha," an ironic restaging of Wordsworth's famous "Boy of Winander":

I wanted to talk

Give it up, the voice said


    The voice

was the brief mediation between the self and the absorbing blank cliffs

there would be no talking, only listening to whomever this other

   that is the voice is

...........................

This was not a place; this was an event:

   I was measured by it

little remained or time, but there was none other

to gauge besides me, remanded into what should be

forgotten (the stones would never remember)

   I wanted to be   not me

and there was   no other there

without me,   though I insisted in the falsity

no other was there—only the dispersal of

my own self




un-wildering where I went

In Wordsworth's poem, later incorporated into The Prelude, the doomed Boy shouts and hears nature respond, his sense of self magnified by its resonance with the voice of nature—though the poem suggests that what he hears, what most moves him, "Listening, [into] a gentle shock of mild surprise" is not "the voice / Of mountain-torrents" but "echoes loud / Redoubled and redoubled." For the Tracer, the voice is "Weapon Alpha" in the war for the self's dominion, and as such must be put into question or suspended so as to make listening to the Other (surely the diminished Nature of his world and ours, but also the political Other, racial and national Others, as well of course of the unconscious Other that je is). If there's any salvation for the Tracer it's in the otherness of poetry itself, and the possibility that the situation of the (Romantic) poem—the voice crying in the wilderness, hoping to absorb its mana—is not a place but an event.

Which word I can't help but read in its Badiouan sense, as that which inaugurates subjectivity in the realms of politics, science, love, or art, through the new subject's fidelity to it. In poetry, as Badiou's inaesthetics puts it, such fidelity is achieved either through Rimbaudian multiplication (so that the false authenticity of the self in effect cancels itself out to become the void-space from which a responsible subject might be born) or Mallarmean subtraction (there is no self and no world either, only words that are the antithesis of "voice," presenting the void directly). Tracer, then, represents a surprising shift toward Mallarme for this poet, who has written a book that articulates a rare American negativity, out of which something beyond the deadly equation ("Already I am we," ["Speaking For," 13]) of the reflexive self might emerge.

Everybody’s Got One

My appetite for opinion waxes and wanes. In the years of graduate study, I was driven to test the strength and ductility of my own opinion—to try enthusiasms, as a plaintiff tries a cause. I thirsted, too, for others' opinion, most especially on poetic and political subjects. But that appetite has, for the moment, worn itself out and down to the nub.

"Watch this space." Not in expectation of novelty, but because the space exists and can, will, change. I keep some space for myself.

What's at hand: teaching, family, the occasional poem (itself occasional of a train ride, a black mood, news that's hard to swallow), novel-writing. I swim in this last like you swim in the ocean, parallel to the shore, suspended between painful shallows and unfathomable depths. I don't know what fiction is. I reach, swim, kick.

Reading. New books still come and some of them capture my attention. Last week, two very different books: from Coach House a work of what Rodrigo Toscano calls "the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I've read to date," Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure. A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab. One poem, "Grievable," consists entirely of a list of Arabic names. The final section, "L'éveil," is comprised of what the book's "Afterthought" calls "four remnants of an otherwise abandoned poem on Israel's thirty-three-day war in Lebanon that started July 12, 2006 and was my original awakening to this project." I should think that the "conceptual-modular" would be a node that would want to resist or subvert aestheticization of politics (and Zolf would seem to want this given a poem in another section titled "Anticipate (peut-être)" that asks if Walter Benjamin was "the first suicide / Bomber"), but I'm continually distracted by how physically beautiful the book is: its printing, and that gorgeously textured paper, like cotton, that Coach House always uses.

Is this an opinion?

The other book is Geoffrey Nutter's latest from Wave Books, Christopher Sunset. His book A Summer Evening made a powerful impression on me for its old-fashioned limpidity and its deployment of a series of short poems (all ten lines, it's brother to Cort Day's The Chime, which also influenced my idea that a serial lyric could sustain a whole book) The poems here vary more in length but they still follow the law of the brief lyric, presenting moments of varied quality and making them beautiful by articulation and tongue-in-cheek ontology. I feel a kinship with this writing, its debts to Wallace Stevens and James Schuyler. It would seem antithetical to Rachel Zolf's political theater, but there are moments in which its investigations of slipped being interface with a recognizable world of wounded cities (New York hovers in the background but names are reserved for places like Teaneck).

But the crucial difference between Nutter's poetry and Zolf's, I think, has less to do with politics per se and more to do with solitude. Nutter's poems partake not of Quietude but of quiet: the speaker seems alone in a world of mutely significant objects, even when those objects have names (as in the very funny "Poem against Winthrop") or when the speaker's own family appears (but they appear as frozen images, as in the poem "Family Portrait "). Whereas Zolf's world is raucous, contested, its heteroglossia weighted both ethically and aesthetically.

And so I find myself tempted once again to re-enter the arena of opinion, which too often is the assertion of a dumb binarism: updating rather than critiquing a tired old dyad like School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant into monoglossia vs. heteroglossia, intuitive versus deductive, assertion versus document. Why play this game? Why not just let the poems be the poems? And permit myself to feel strongly drawn to both kinds of work, and to permit myself to range freely between those polarities in my own writing, rather than attempting any kind of synthesis or middle space or even any American Hybrid™?

So I beat on back into silence, figuring, letting words be words, deferring my own hot air.

A New Year

First day of classes of the spring semester. The sun of anticipation on a gray day: one always hopes for surprises, engagement, enlightenment, at the start of something new. And usually it arrives.

It's time to start planning your application for the third annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize. This year we are once again reading poetry manuscripts and the winner will receive $10,000, a two-month residency on the campus of Lake Forest College, and publication of their book by the &NOW imprint of Lake Forest College Press. Poets under 40 who have not published a full-length book are eligible. Please see the website for details.

There's another project percolating for which I probably will be issuing a call for work in the next few days or weeks. Watch this space!

Teaching two creative writing courses this term along with my 19th-century American lit survey. Pushing the postmodernism pretty hard in the intro course: my texts are Hazel Smith's The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing, which I've come to like a lot, not least for its being non-Americocentric (Smith is Australian); and the still very new The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, edited by Lake Forest's own Davis Schneiderman and Robert Archambeau along with the founder of &NOW, Steve Tomasula.

In my poetry writing class I'm returning to a model that asks students to read a fair bit of contemporary poetry, as opposed to the pure workshop I did last year. The texts:

- Mike Theune, ed., Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. I used this book last year: I like how it uses the idea of the turn to involve students with structure without getting bogged down in issues of prosody. Each chapter has its own author or authors, which makes for variety, and there's also a goodly number of sample poems.

- C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style. I've long wanted to read Giscombe seriously and now's my chance. Plus it will be a good way to introduce students to the possibilities of prose poetry.

- Richard Greenfield, Tracer. I've taught Richard's Carnage in the past and it always draws its readers in with its tensely autobiographical apocalyptic flourishes. Tracer is more austere and I'm curious how they'll respond to it.

- Kate Greenstreet, case sensitive. Also taught this one before; a favorite for its formal variety and relative accessibility. I thought about teaching the new one—the students would probably love the videos—but this time stuck to the devil I know.

- Jennifer Moxley, Clampdown. I've written more than my share of mash notes to Moxley's writing so I won't do it again here. But I love this book, and I think my students will love it too.

- Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms. A late addition to the syllabus in honor of Place's upcoming visit, along with a fistful of other exciting experimental writers, for the 2010 Lake Forest Literary Festival that will be taking place on our campus March 2 - 4. With any luck Vanessa will be able to make herself available to my class to talk about the book and to answer some of what I anticipate will be many questions about it.

Prose's Poetry

Winter break is here, and after turning in my grades, jaunting to New Jersey for most of a week so that my parents could spoil Sadie, and a bout of flu, it's Christmas Eve, which means this secular Jew has for the first time in a while a moment to look about him.

What's caught my attention is a terrific interview with Renee Gladman conducted by Joshua Marie Wilkinson that's the last thing to appear in the alphabetically-by-author edited latest issue of Denver Quarterly. Though a prose writer—now a fiction writer (a distinction I'll say more about below), Gladman identifies with poets and poetry, partly because of her early training in philosophy (there's not much of a tradition in this country of philosophically informed fiction; poetry of course is another story) and partly because poets are conscious of community (I wish to add an asterisk to that word, though, or at least to point the reader back to Lisa Robertson's salient commentary on the word's unfreedoms) in a way that fiction writers are not. As Gladman says, this is partly for reasons of cultural capital but also, and more intriguingly, because of the "form" (her scare quotes) of prose itself: "I find that [prose] texts differ so much from one author to another that the genre connecting them remains a bit of a mystery, which, in some ways, benefits the writing, keeps it from growing stale. But, in other ways, doesn't provide enough of a center to bring people together."

Gladman's been on my radar for a long time: for starters, we were classmates at Vassar. Though I don't remember ever meeting her or sharing a classroom with her, it's likely that this did occur at some point—it's a small school. She, along with Camille Guthrie and Duncan Dobbelman, are the only writers I know of who graduated from Vassar in the early Nineties who went on to pursue a broadly experimental or innovative approach to their work. The Vassar English Department, as I recall it, was a profoundly conservative (with a small-c) institution: the only time I ever heard the word "postmodernism" was in a class taught by a visiting instructor whose name I can't remember, and my poetry teacher there, Eamon Grennan, was and is a composer of pellucid first-person lyrics, whose spirit of negative capability is captured in the equivocal titles he favors for his books: What Light There Is, As If It Matters, etc. He was a wonderful teacher in many ways, a lover of Shakespeare, whose Irish accent guided me inside the language in a new way as he read poems by Lowell and Larkin and Berryman to us. But I still remember his critique of a sestina I wrote inspired by the Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing; it was not, I'm sure, a good poem, but what he focused on was its debt to pop culture, which ipso facto rendered it shallow. It's taken me many years to undo the damage of that, or at least to turn what I at first accepted as Parnassian prohibition into a useful skepticism about poetic prohibitions in general. So it goes with my undergraduate education in general: though I'll always be grateful for the solid and broad grounding in actual literature that I received there, it was and to some small extent remains an obstacle to my encountering of the contemporary, the real-time.

Gladman majored in philosophy at Vassar and that, perhaps, has made all the difference. As a gay black woman she was troubled, to say the least, by the absence of an inscription point for her subjectivity in the history of Western philosophy, but it must have given her mind some rigorous exercise nevertheless, and then as she says she discovered that poetry could give her that point of inscription. Or as she says, "I was most interested in experience—how you obtain it, how you 'capture' it—but what led me to poetry rather than fiction, where experience is captured all the time, was a need to slow the whole thing down, to draw out the moments of experience, expose the gaps." I think this gets at some of what I was trying to express in my admittedly jejune griping about fiction this past spring (it should be obvious now that this griping was really a way for me to psychologically clear the decks for my own return to fiction). That is, fiction "captures" experience in part by hurrying it along, by encoding it in forms (characters, plot, descriptions, dialogue) that take their interest from their motion rather than immersion. Becoming versus being. "I started looking intensely at the mundane," Gladman says, because the mundane is where doing gets closest to being—experience qua experience which must always remain uncaptured. "Drinking apple juice. Eating soup."

(I am also reminded at this point by another interview in PEN American between Richard Ford and a young writer of short fiction named Nam Le. I looked at his book of stories, The Boat, and I wasn't particularly impressed, but I did enjoy this moment of heresy in the interview: "Yesterday I was thinking out loud and said that maybe the problem with fiction is human beings, characters. We funnel everything through characters. And when you're dealing with something that involves mass influence and forces that have come about because humans have joined in unpredictable—or predictable—ways, then it seems like the worst kind of bad faith to think you can allegorize that into a simple human story. But if you diffuse that into many human stories than you diffuse the narrative. Why is it that every single apprehension of some great historical incident or atrocity has to come through the story of this guy or that guy, or this woman who was there, and maybe fell in love with that other person?" It's a wonderful and necessary question, but the closest he and Ford come to answering it is with the idea that "a story between this person and that person is the ambassadorial story for their time and place in history." Which is a good defense of character-based realistic fiction but at the same time nakedly reveals the complete absence in such fiction of anything an intelligent person can call "realism." Anyway.)

As I mentioned above, Gladman makes an interesting distinction between the kind of hybrid prose she's published thus far—the "prose block" is how she and Wilkinson describe the form—and fiction, because as far as she's concerned none of her fiction has been published yet. (That will change with the publication of her novella Event Factory, the first in a trilogy to be brought out by the mysterious "Dorothy, a publishing project"—if they have a web presence I haven't discovered it.) The books of Gladman's that I've read and enjoyed, Juice and The Activist, definitely play with narrative without quite leaving the grounds of what I'd call poetry. Part of what's attractive about them is their hybridity, which is captured in this notion of the prose block, which Gladman calls "the articulation of my personality, the body of my thinking. It captures a tone, a feeling toward language, that I have not been able to conjure in any other form.... A block of text is a moment of travel that captures a pattern of experience and holds it there. The white space says, 'Look at it!'" In other words, her hybrid writing imports some of that tension between the sentence and the line, fundamental to the functioning of poetry which calls a near-halt to becoming, into prose, primarily by organizing white space (there's a fair bit of parataxis to her writing as well, though nothing as disjunctive as a New Sentence). The logic of the line break becomes the white gulf around the block of prose, floating there on the page.

"In fact, what makes writing fiction interesting is this unshakeable desire to stay still, how that troubles the instinct of sentences to progress." It's a dialectic between stillness and movement that Gladman's hybrid prose enacts. And though presumably her new commitment to fiction-qua-fiction must mean coming to terms with "progress," she's still interested in thinking about the sentence in a way that, I rather suspect, doesn't occur to most fiction writers: "I am loosely interested in questions of event, character, and time as they encounter the experiment of the sentence. That is, the sentence that does not attempt to coalesce the problems of narrating experience in language but rather is invested in exploring the dynamics of these problems.... [W]ithout the awareness that as you're moving through language you must come to terms with the instinct of our parts of speech to write linearly with a clear destination, you're missing what's so intensely fascinating about the sentence and the relationship of self to it."

Gladman's idea of prose needs poetry: the consciousness of the internal and social tendencies of speech to progress in linear ways, coupled with the desire to throw monkey wrenches in the path of that progress, so as to encounter experience without capturing it (or letting it slip through your fingers, it amounts to the same thing). A writer most at home in the sentence, or the paragraph, who needs that volta, that break, to feel that writing is sufficient to an identity-experience that has spent most of history on the invisible margins. It fascinates me. As a poet I have often adventured with the prose poem or prose block (I have a chapbook that consists of nothing but) and felt that the logic of the line break was still with me, though I depended maybe more on parataxis than white space. Now that I'm writing a novel which is, in many ways alas, a conventional novel with a story to tell, I'm bewitched by sentences, by their flow (Gladman says that when she writes in longhand, as I'm doing, the sentence takes precedence over the paragraph and I find that true for me as well). Perhaps some other, future project will take me into this fruitful zone of hybridity (or maybe it's yet to occur in the novel-writing process, or maybe it's occurred and I'm blind to it), but I am now very curious to read Gladman's "fiction" and to discover what is and isn't "poetic" about it.

Manuscript

Taking a few minutes away from grading creative writing portfolios to write this. The novel chugs along, but for the past week and a half at semester’s end I’ve been devoting my limited writing time to assembling a new manuscript of poems. It surprises me that I can do this, but I was inspired by Catherine Wagner’s My New Job, one of five interesting (and as always, handsomely designed) titles that the good people at Fence Books have seen fit to send me. These are:

• Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton. I hadn’t heard of Kearney before this but I love the highly visual language he’s come up with for these poems, especially given their usage of popular rap songs as source material. It’s as if Tom Cruise’s virtual crimesolving screen from Minority Report were being used to track black American culture.
• Macgregor Card’s Duties of an English Foreign Secretary. I haven’t spent much time yet with this book from one of the former editors of The Germ. But one of the notes in the back caught my eye—it’s apparently a book written in tandem with another poet’s book, a woman whose name escapes me (don’t have the books here). That’s an interesting and tricky way to bring off a collaboration.
• Laura Sims’ Stranger. Spare, sad lyrics in memoriam for Sims’ mother. Mostly I am struck by how both the haunting Gerhard Richter cover image and the subject matter (the loss of a mother born in the 40s and lost in the 90s) rhyme with that of Selah.
• Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize. Playful postmodern prose poems that suck me in with their exuberance (Lyn Hejinian’s blurb claims that they “linguisticate”). Arranged in alphabetical order just like Ashbery’s new book Planisphere (little J.A. needs no links from me). My observation is that this looks great on a table of contents page provided you’ve used most of the letters of the alphabet and if not, not.

Of the bunch it’s Wagner’s that has held my interest most closely—I’ve admired her for a long time for Miss America and Macular Hole (also available from Fence), books which attack the feminist project from a space at once cerebral and visceral. My New Job continues this, taking on female sexuality where Miss America was primarily concerned with images of the feminine and Macular Hole was preoccupied with pregnancy and childbirth (you could say then that the books are published out of order).

My New Job has a savage and sexy wit, but its greatest strength is its formal variety. And when I saw from the notes in the back that it’s actually a compilation of chapbooks, I was newly inspired to see what could be done with my own chapbooks of the past few years, Compos(t)ition Marble and Hope & Anchor. The age has demanded or seemed to demand in the past fifteen years the concept book: poems with a plot, or at least books with some discussable and therefore promotable “hook,” concept, or master form. The poetry collection as such has become antiquated, territory ceded to Quietism.

This is a shame, because as much as I like concept books (as a progressive rock fan from way back I’ve always loved concept albums, rock operas, and other such pretensions: long live Thick as a Brick, long live “Bohemian Rhapsody”!), they do have a tendency to subordinate and overdetermine the poems. That’s why the year-ago workshop on Severance Songs was so valuable to me: my friends convinced me that superimposing a conceptual structure on those poems was suppressing their native energies and alchemies. Removing that superstructure helped me to rediscover the infrastructure that was already there, the real conversation those poems were always having with each other about ethics and aesthetics, love and shame.

My New Job splits the difference in a way by being not a collection of poems but a collection of chapbooks, each of which seems to manifest a degree of conceptual unity but which, as sections, have a relation to each other I can only describe as paratactic. It has inspired me to create a new assemblage of my chapbooks and of chapbook-sized sections of new poems, and though it doesn’t have a title yet I can tell that they fit and resonate with each other in surprising ways. (Surprising at least to me: most surprising is the apparent consistency of my own sensibility—I don’t appear to be anywhere near done with what you might call the ironic baroque.)

It’s a pleasure to be actively working on poetry again and to be thinking about the questions putting a poetry book together asks of me, while simultaneously slowly accreting the bits of narrative that will eventually, I trust, cohere into something I can call a novel. Not the least pleasure now available to me is that of procrastination: if I don’t feel like working on one project I can always fiddle with the other, and go to bed in the evening feeling like I’ve accomplished something no matter what.

Speaking of Severance Songs, Tupelo now tells me it won’t be published until Spring 2011. This is disappointing, but it does mean more time to get things exactly right. And with any luck its publication will coincide with my first sabbatical, so that I can actually take the time to go on the road with the book in a way I’ve never quite done before. Stay tuned.