City of Light

I got some great tips from commenters Peter and Greg (hi Greg!) on things to do in Brussels, but... Evie Shockley, who I met at the conference, invited me to come hear her read at the Highlander in Paris, and it's just too good an opportunity to resist. So along with fellow conferee Alanna Bondar, I'm training down to Paris tomorrow. It feels a little strange to choose to return to a city rather than check out someplace new, but I fell hard for Paris the first time I visited, and it's only an hour and fifteen minutes from here. Il faut miexu voyager a Paris, I said to myself. So if by any chance you'll also be at Evie's reading in Paris tomorrow night--I'll see you there!

A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Brussels

It's a toss-up which is harder to blog with: my iPhone or this wacky Belgian keyboard. So I'll just say for now that the conference is really excellent and is helping me clarify many of my ideas about pastoral, its relation to ecopoetics, and the cage match I've been wanting to stage between nature writing and postmodernism. Being at the conference feels like being inside a giant brain thinking hard about all th same stuff I've been preoccupied with for years. When typing gets easier (probably won!t happen before I come home) I'll share some of the notes I've taken on the panels I've attended. My own paper will be presented tomorrow morning. However, to tide you over, here are some brief observations:

- European academics are mad for PowerPoint. This can be useful, as when complex bits of text or chunks of poems need to be presented to the audience, but just as often it seems pointless or distracting.

- I'm noticing a divide between the diehard nature poets and the theory-heads, but for the most part people are amiable about it. This morning the poet Judith McCombs gave a talk prefaced by the remark that, "If you can't do theory, you tell stories." Hmm.

- People still use psychoanalytic implements (Kristeva, Lacan) to construct their arguments--why does this now strike me as quaint?

- The part of Brussels I'm in (I believe it's called the Uccle, but that probably just means "center," though as far as I can tell we're nowhere near the center) is quite dull, but there are lots of little boutiques and shops. Glanced into a butcher shop: meat seems much, much more expensive when it's priced by the kilogram.

- My French is good enough to shop with but not good enough to talk about anything remotely substantive. Quel dommage.

- Purchased a copy of <> on the theory that reading a book I know very well might help rectify this problem, or at least make it possible for me to hold cunning dialogues with les dragons.

- Differences in accent can produce surprising effects. For example, one scholar's Singaporean accent made "nature" sound like "Nietzsche." This produced such fascinating phrases as, "the escape from culture into Nietzsche."

- Jet lag doesn't affect me very much traveling westward, but we'll see the damage done when I fly home again.

That's it for now. I might try for some pictures, eventually.

A Bruxelles

Tired, buzzy, synthesizing on almost no sleep. Note to panel-goers: the phrase "in the final analysis" does not necessarily mean the speaker is anywhere near wrapping up. But I've already been exposed to some useful ideas about the intersections between ecopoetics and postmodernism.

Missing my girls. More later.

The Widow Party

If you're in the Chicago area it's not too late to catch a performance of The Widow Party, a "collaboratively written and performed melodrama, Wild West show, political thriller, pageant, and farce" and the second of four poets' theater shows being put on by Links Hall and curated by John Beer. The collaborators this time include Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson (the author more equal than others), Jennifer Karmin, Patrick Durgin, Jacob Knabb (who also had a small part in the final performance of "Humana Ante Oculos" last week), James Shea, and Lisa Janssen. As that description implies, it's a true phantasmagoria, incorporating sound effects; hilarious/disturbing videos; a showstopping conflation of Annie Oakley and Hannah Weiner into Hannie Oakley and Annie Weiner (with go-go dancing!); convincing imitations of Walter Cronkite, Louis Armstrong, and Jimmy Stewart; mind-reading; odd props (including a pistol that resembles nothing so much as the newborn Alien or the Eraserhead baby; Patrick's faultless impersonation of Britney Spears; and divers other wonders.

If the Rodrigo Toscano pieces I took part in last weekend were Beckettian in their spareness and painful humor, The Widow Party is like a rock musical co-written by Brecht and Joyce. Filled with disturbing images of violence (mostly sound images), it obviously wishes to challenge the audience and implicate us in the piece's mashed-up war-discourse (there's a character-persona called "You," an aspiring film director). Yet I didn't feel much in the way of an alienation effect; I was instead supremely entertained by the sheer verve of the language and the nutty energy of the poets. We even get to dance at the end! I went home from Friday's performance wondering about the place of pleasure in this sort of theater. Certainly Johannes and Joyelle didn't seem disappointed when I told them how much I'd enjoyed it, but I wonder if the information the play seems to want to transmit about the violence of our spectatorhood doesn't require a more didactic hand. On the other hand, no preacher is more likely to find him or herself addressing the choir than a poet, much less a troupe of poets putting on a show--and punishing the audience doesn't strike me as viable or even particularly ethical nowadays. What does it say, though, that I found the mad world of The Widow Party so familiar, even homey? Maybe that's the poison in the pill.

Today I and assorted other profs froze our tuches off while decorating Lake Forest College's 130th commencement. Tomorrow Emily, Sadie, and I set off for Ithaca; and Tuesday, I fly to Brussels for the Poetic Ecologies conference. Blogging may be even more sporadic than usual for a while.

Am I a sap for anything that's been, a sieve for anyone, for feeling tremendously excited about Obama's having cinched the Democratic nomination? Then a sap, a sieve I must be.

Collapsible Poetics Diary, part 3

"The Makings," by Rodrigo Toscano, Links Hall, Sunday May 4, 2008

Thursday, May 2

Tonight we meet at 6 PM for what's meant to be merely a technical rehearsal. Rodrigo says he's never been in such a professional theater environment before; at first, he's leery of over-rehearsing the pieces (avoiding "product), but we end up doing a full-dress rehearsal so that our lovely stage manager Rachel can get all of the lighting ducks in a row. It's remarkable to run through all four pieces in succession; I'm only in two of them so I get to watch the others work as they do "Spine" and "Humana Ante Oculos." I'm getting more comfortable with the physicality of "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," in which I play the piggiest of the eponymous angels. It will be odd when someone I already know comes to one of these things to watch me writhing on the floor. Two of my old college buddies, a lawyer and an archeologist, are planning to come to Saturday's performance to see the Vogon poetry. I wonder what they'll make of it--is this the kind of thing I want people at my college reunion to know about? It's like playing D&D in public, the more so for Melissa, who has to wear a cape for "Humana" and jokes that she stopped doing this around the same time she stopped rolling 18-sided dice. Of course there's no such thing, but I refrain from inflicting my geekly expertise on her.

It actually takes much less time just to run through things than I'd expected, and since Rodrigo doesn't need me for two of the pieces, I get to leave early again. Browsing at the used bookstore across the street for a few minutes before driving home, I find the old paperback edition of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems, Kenneth Koch's On the Edge, and Tom Mandel's To the Cognoscenti. Not a bad night.

Friday, May 3

Opening night! We arrive two hours early to hurry up and wait and sweat a bit in the intense humidity, which cracks into tremendous rain about an hour before "curtain." Everyone's nervous but me: for some reason, I feel completely calm about barking "Puercos!" and snorting in front of a roomful of strangers. The fact that I'm not the author, that I'm just a player in Rodrigo's game, feels tremendously liberating. Vanity only comes in to the fact that when I looked at the video I made of yesterday's rehearsal, I saw that not tucking my shirt in would reveal rather more of my pig's tail than I'm comfortable with. So for this evening it's safely stowed.

They hold the house for a few minutes to give folks more time to make their way through the rain, but it's still a sparseish crowd (more than a dozen, fewere than twenty) that awaits when we finally gather on the stage. John introduces the pieces: I haven't heard this before and it's rather instructive to think of what we're doing as a Zukofskyan "test of poetry." While John reads his intro Fred, Melissa, and I stand at three corners of the performance space; I've decided to stand holding my script with my arms at my sides, resisting the temptation to put a hand on a hip or worse, put my hands in my pockets. Not that Rodrigo really calls upon us to be "actors," but I still want to avoid distracting bodily movements or to shrink myself, which is sometimes my instinct when regarded. So I stand there, shoulders back, hands at sides, feeling rather like Jean-Luc Picard on the deck of the Enterprise.

The lights go down, John moves into the fourth corner, and the first piece begins. I only have a few lines to muck up in this one; mercifully, none are mucked. My wrist having more or less healed, I'm able to help set up the stage for "Spine" after delivering the faux-Shakespearean line that concludes "The Makings." Then John and I get to sit and watch "Spine"; again, the actor's ethic I've absorbed from somewhere has me holding my body still (though not rigid), watching the show and resisting the temptation to look at the audience to see their reactions. There are a couple of muffled laughs in response to "Spine," which has a number of funny-uncomfortable moments, but for the most part the audience is silent.

Time for "Pig Angels." The three of us kneel on the floor in a row for a long moment, like samurai preparing to commit seppuku. This was hard for my thirty-seven year-old body at first, but after a week's rehearsal it almost feels comfortable. Then Fred leans over and hits the floor and Melissa and I follow suit. "And these puercos sin destino... que?" I don't know if my Spanish pronunciation has truly improved, but it seems to satisfy Rodrigo--he had advised me to utter the "ques" in the spirit of a New York kvetch, which is something deep in my blood. It's funny how some pieces of direction click and others don't: a director just has to keep trying different approaches until he or she has been understood. It's far more intense to actually perform the piece as opposed to merely rehearsing it: I break into a sweat midway through and when the four of us have collapsed on the floor after a particularly physical moment, we're all breathing hard. Catching onto my cues and hitting each line feels a lot like surfing must feel: you're in the grip of a tremendous force and you have to bend and sway with it or you'll be crushed. And then before I know it my moment's over, the lights go dark, and I again retire to the folding chairs in the corner with John to watch the final piece, "Humana Ante Oculos."

The last piece is followed by a longish film of another of Rodrigo's poem-plays, "Cordoned." I'm glad just to sit and rest and not be the object of anyone's attention; it's a strange effect, having the back wall effectively open outward into a new performance space, with other players (I recognize my Ithaca running buddy David Brazil in the cast). And then it's time to stand and bow, which we do awkwardly and gratefully. We've survived.

Saturday, May 3

After the show last night I checked my messages to learn that Richard Greenfield was unexpectedly in town: his flight had been canceled due to the awful weather. So I got to hang out with him until the wee hours at home, and in the morning he met Sadie Gray. You can see what a natural he is with kids. I'm pleased to announce, by the way, that Richard's haunting and necessary second book, Tracer, has been accepted by Omnidawn and they're working overtime to bring it out early next year. He gave me some very good, very challenging advice on changes to make to my Severance Songs manuscript, which has been languishing for a while now. In some ways that advice amounts to making the "I" stronger in the poems, and also to performing--his word--the tension between the book's clevernesses and the more painful, heartfelt material. Or as I put it to Emily talking about it later, "I have to let them see what I'm hiding." In a way, he's asking me to be more Romantic and more postmodern, and to let go of what you might call my high modernist (not to say fascist) tendencies to exert minute moment-by-moment control over what readers can and can't interpret.

This notion of performance as that which permits the reader's full entry into one's poetic carries through to the evening's performance. The weather is again lousy, but the cast's spirits are high: the stakes seem lower than they were on the first night, while at the same time our confidence in our ability to get through the evening is heightened. Rodrigo has also decided to ditch the film at the end, a wise move that somehow adds to the holiday atmosphere. When we get out there the performance is much tighter than the previous evening's, and to my mind much funnier--yet nobody laughs! I thought, for example, that the moment in "Pig Angels" in which John and I do some improv was pretty tight:



When we talk about this afterward, Rodrigo says that the pieces' relations to current events can change the quality of tension with which the audience receives them. For example, "Pig Angels" had a much more intense effect during the time of the big immigration-rights demonstrations a couple of years ago. Rodrigo's not after laughs per se, but the laughs he does want are painful laughs, Beckett-laughs.

My Vassar friends Alex Elsberg (the lawyer) and Josh Wright (the archaeologist) go out afterwards. Josh has just come from a conference at UChicago and says that the experience of the plays was oddly consistent with attending academic panels: twenty minutes of words and signs being put into some sort of context, again and again. I tell Josh that the D&D-like game that he ran for us back in college was responsible for my engagement with experimental poetry: the immensely complex narratives he immersed us in, in which we often had a soldier's eye view of conflicts on an at-least Napoleonic scale, increased my tolerance for mystery, and made me more able to plunge ahead and take risks in spite of an incomplete or misleading map of the territory. This perhaps puts me in danger of committing the classic blunder of marching on Moscow, or in agreeing to take part in performances that will lead me who knows where; but I'm still grateful to him for deepening my powers of negative capability.

Sunday, May 4

On the evening of the last show folks are nervous again. Melissa's anxiety about the cape has returned, in spite of her having totally reinvented the way she uses it in the space the previous evening. Fred relates that his four year-old son told him after last night's performance that, "I liked it when you said 'The moon, the moon,' Daddy. But I didn't like it when you said, 'The sun, the sun.'" We're all exhausted, but I'm sad that this little community is about to break up. Melissa worries that closing nights are as bad as opening nights--not that our opening night was bad, but we all agree that Saturday was a high we're unlikely to hit a second time. Nonetheless, poetic theater's faux duress takes hold and I'm as pleased or more pleased with the last show as I was the previous one (though for some reason there are many more El trains passing, and I learn later that my video camera died after twenty minutes).

This is the smallest audience yet, but one of the most appreciative, thanks in large part to the presence of Johannes Goransson and Joyelle McSweeney, who are the poets on deck for next week's performance. Joyelle laughs at all the funny bits and claps after every piece, which buoys our morale and carries us through this last long strange trip. In spite of this, fatigue makes itself felt: I blow one of my cues (John reads a line in Spanish, then English; I didn't wait for the English) and after the show we're all pretty beat. Still, it's my last chance to be part of the troupe, so I join Rodrigo and the others for a late dinner at Rodan in Wicker Park. Rodrigo's very complimentary toward each of us and seems very pleased with how things have gone--apparently our performances have changed some of the ways he'll treat these pieces in the book, Collapsible Poetics Theater, that won the National Poetry Series this year and will be brought out by Fence Books next year.

At ten PM I return to the bourgeois land of husband-and-father-and-professorhood, leaving my theatrical avant-garde days behind. But what I learned about performance and the possibilities of introducing the body--the real body, the whole thing--into poetic ways of moving and knowing will stay with me for a long time.



Excerpt from "Spine"

Stand By Me

Collapsible Poetics Diary, part 2

Wednesday, April 30

Wrist very painful this morning from flipping and flopping on it in bed; nevertheless, I'm convinced it's only strained. From the Lake Forest train station I stop in at Walgreens and pay $8 for a black elastic brace for my wrist with "ACE" on the side in red letters. Pretty tough:


Spent the day meeting with students and pondering the reading list for my fall "Modern Poetry" seminar. I end up choosing to focus on American poetry and place an order with the bookstore for the following titles:

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems
- William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
- Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
- Ezra Pound, Personae
- Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
- Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
- John Ashbery, A Worldly Country
- Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
- Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook

As you can see, it's a list heavy on the modernist classics that shifts gears rather awkwardly at midcentury and winds up with three recent books. I'm already rethinking some of them: the Pound that matters to me is more the Cantos Pound than the translations/Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound, so I might just throw the Selected Cantos at them or even Sieburth's edition of the Pisan Cantos, which has excellent notes. Black modernists are perhaps underrepresented--I'd love to teach Tolson's Harlem Gallery. Wondering too if they oughtnt to read Plath's Ariel, which must be one of the most influential books ever written. And I'm obviously infatuated with Gabe's Rhode Island Notebook and see it as a kind of quixotic recasting of the Poundian epic impulse--but it's very long, possibly too long to give to students at the end of the semester, even if I selected excerpts for them.

When I arrive at Links Hall for the 8 PM rehearsal (having miraculously found a parking space on the same block in spite of the Cubs game), the others have already put in a lot of work: Fred, Melissa, and Rodrigo have been rehearsing the pieces I don't appear in in a grimy space on Ravenswood Ave. I go across the street to get coffee with Melissa, who reveals that this kind of performance pushes her out of her comfort zone, "but that's probably a good thing." My own sense of comfort may evaporate once I'm snorting and writhing in front of a live audience, but for now it's sustained by the fact that I am merely Rodrigo's instrument--these are not my words, though they are my gestures, my pronunciations.

Rodrigo expresses concern when he sees my wrist brace and orders me to lay off of moving heavy things for the time being, but it's really feeling much better after a day's partial immobilization. Tonight is largely a technical rehearsal, with Rodrigo and Rachel going over the placement of lights while the rest of us take our positions and only murmur our lines so as to provide cues. Acting is boring: there's a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, innumerable stray moments in which you might go to the bathroom or check your voicemail, but mustn't engage in sustained distraction because your director might call upon you at any moment. Still, it's fun to be part of something larger than yourself, even if it's only a little bit larger. Though there's been little opportunity for the five of us to get to know each other as people, a certain camaraderie has taken hold. We all want this to succeed, though it's not yet clear to me what success for a poet's theater will look like. Rodrigo's not chasing laughs, though there are a lot of funny bits in his pieces. Nor do we want that "poetry sigh" that characterizes the humid atmosphere of most poetry readings.

The best part of the evening comes when John and I get to sit and watch a full run-through of "Spine," a piece in which neither of us appear. The hard work Melissa and Fred have put in shows, and they take command of the space and their roles very convincingly. Fred especially has a kind of edgy charisma when he's on stage: the audience's eyes will follow him. Rodrigo is the third player; I can never forget that he's the author and director, and wonder if the audience will feel the same way. I won't say much about the piece itself except that it seems to be a kind of allegory of labor and the experience of alienation from the fruits of one's labor. It would be fascinating to follow these poetic threads into Rodrigo's other work, which is of course similarly preoccupied with labor in the economic sphere.

Rodrigo lets me go a bit early after we've got the lighting down for "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," the longest piece in which I have a part. Tomorrow's the long dress rehearsal, starting at 6 PM and ending who knows when. I get home in time to say goodnight to Emily and Sadie, then ice my wrist for a bit. I feel that I'm on the mend.

Collapsible Poetics Diary

Monday, April 28

Weekend in Maryland visiting with Sadie's maternal grandparents, flew back from Washington and arrived at O'Hare around 3:30. (Sadie was golden on the plane and I got to read a good chunk of Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook, fortuitously and startlingly found while browsing at the Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda. More about that in another post.) Homeward, get groceries, drop off Emily and Sadie, and, without having left any time to grab dinner, drive into the city in search of Links Hall, which turns out to be a stone's throw from Wrigley Field. I'm the last to arrive; my collaborators Fred Sasaki, Melissa Severin, John Beer (who's responsible for this whole Poets' Theater business), and dramaturg (poeturg?) Rodrigo Toscano are already upstairs in the shambling old building and moving around the performance space, which looks like a dance studio with bleachers at one end and no mirror or barre. The El goes by pretty regularly outside the row of windows facing east. Quick introductions and then Rodrigo's showing us some video of previous productions of the plays we'll be performing.

I write "plays" and it seems like the right word insofar as we'll be at play; also there are scripts and lines for us to read, along with very precise stage directions. But it quickly becomes apparent that a wide gap yawns between poets' theater and regular-type theater, at least as Rodrigo envisions it. First off, there's zero interest in illusionism, which is why for almost all of the pieces we'll be holding and reading from scripts (though there is one piece dynamic enough that it requires the players to memorize lines--thankfully, I'm not in that one). Rodrigo says he wants the labor to be transparent--"This is not a product" he says, more than once. Another point is that although we each play distinct parts, there are no characters per se, nor does the primary dynamic of each piece--what generates its tension and energy--derive from conflict between characters. (This violates the first rule of drama that I always teach to students: that each character must palpably want something, and the desires of the characters inevitably conflict.) The tension rather derives partly from the good-old-fashioned Brechtian alienation effect
--most of the pieces feature some sort of confrontation with the audience, while deliberately withholding the ordinary theatrical satisfactions of plot or realistic dialogue--but also from the players' own struggle with the language. There's a fair bit of Spanish in the longest piece I'm performing in, which I've never studied--nevertheless, Spanish I must speak. Still, it remains theater: we are bodies moving in space, saying lines, handling props, interacting with each other and an as-yet imaginary audience.

After we watch the videos we get right to running through the long piece that features John, Melissa, Fred, and myself. And there we all are, first kneeling, then squatting, then lying, then actually writhing on the floor, performing the intricate movements in Rodrigo's script. I'm nearly middle-aged, I think to myself as I sprawl there, pretending to stab little creatures on the floor with a pencil. But there's actually little time for self-consciousness: Rodrigo is a professional, he's done this before, he knows exactly what he wants and he has specific instructions and pointers for each of us. And I'm surprised to discover fewer inhibitions than I might have expected from myself. It's liberating to come out from behind the podium, but it also helps that I'm just a player, an interpreter of Rodrigo's work and not my own. I'm a collaborator, in every sense of that word, but not the author. Plus you can't take on a role that asks you to snort like a pig (you'll just have to see it to see what I mean) and worry too much about your dignity. I also haven't eaten anything since a sandwich at the Washington airport hours and hours ago, so I'm a little lightheaded.

We go at it pretty hard until well after the official stopping time; then Rodrigo "releases" me since I'm only in one long and one short piece; the others remain behind to work on two other pieces that I'm not in. I didn't request this, but it's good sense on John and Rodrigo's part, knowing as they do that I have a new baby and job responsibilities this week. In fact, somehow between now (9 PM) and the drive home and tomorrow, I have to prepare for the final workshop of my final poetry writing class, which happens at 9:30 AM tomorrow. So that's going to be two days of rehearsal preceded by frenzied and intense activity. The rest of the week will hopefully be a bit smoother.

Tuesday, April 29

The last day of classes at Lake Forest goes well, and I'm genuinely sorry to see this batch of students go: they're a terrific bunch. The poetry class workshop is always fun; I had been a little more concerned about the final meeting of my senior seminar, which I'd billed as a mini-symposium on creative writing, plus treats (I bring Twinkies, which prove to be literally inedible; one of my students brought homemade brownies and peanut-butter cookies and wins the implicit contest). This could have been a shapeless mess, but it's actually energizing: we discuss such questions as what creative writing is for and why should one bother with certain kinds of writing when film and TV and video games do a much better job of rendering what are essentially nineteenth-century realistic narratives. I don't know if I really persuade anyone that they should aspire to write more like Dodie Bellamy than Sarah Paretsky, but I may be the last voice they hear for a long time that isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of the market.

After class it's time for the annual Senior/Faculty Cocktail Party, which is surprisingly fun. The kids are all dressed up and bursting with pride at their accomplishments, rubbing elbows with faculty in a familial way. I sip a little wine and felt sentimental about my first year as a prof for a while, but soon I have to shake myself loose and shake a few hands before hopping in my car and driving home to Evanston for an hour or so of dinner and family time. Sadie bouncing in my lap while Emily puts dinner together; at one point she opens her mouth and lets out a long, long, catlike yowl, then blinks at us in surprise as if to say, "Who said that?"

Back in the car: rehearsal starts at 8 tonight so there's little traffic, but then I slam into a cacophony of cabs, cops, and Cubs fans: there's a game tonight. I call Rodrigo on my cell and tell him I'll be a bit late, but it sounds like he's just arriving himself. Round and round in widening concentric circles until I find a spot three blocks south on Belmont; not too shabby. Arrive at the hall and meet Rachel Damon, the lighting designer and stage manager: the first part of the evening will be devoted to blocking each piece and figuring out what to light and where. Fred's later than me and when he comes in he tells us why: some asshole slipped into the perfect parking space he'd found just outside the hall. We debate for a moment the respective merits of kicking the guy's ass versus keying his car; the latter option is rejected as being too passive-aggressive. I argue that karma will surely visit an appropriate doom on the jerk. Meanwhile Rodrigo is constantly in motion. He seems to be a little disappointed when Rachel tells him that, because it's a white room, even one light will basically illuminate everything, making it impossible to do much with deep shadows; but he quickly recovers. Improvisation is a big part of poets' theater, after all.

Tonight I'm noticing a couple of things. One is how readily we submit to Rodrigo's direction: you would think getting a bunch of poets who don't really know each other to work closely together like this would be like herding cats, but we all immediately and instinctively bow to his benevolent dictatorship (a dictatorship, in a sense, of the proletariat, given Rodrigo's day job as a labor organizer). He knows exactly what he wants and he's willing to work harder than anyone else to get it: these are prerequisites, I think, for anyone who wants to take on the daunting task of performance, much less directing. He's not shy about making us work, either: "I'm going to work you guys to death," he says with no discernible irony. But he doesn't need to browbeat us: we do it willingly. There's a kind of soldier's comradeship that carries us through; maybe that explains why theater folk are called "troupers." So although my joints are aching from yesterday, and I eventually sprain my left wrist rather badly when I do a clumsy job of moving a table, I don't even think of complaining. The show must go on.

The other thing I'm starting to notice is the nature of poets' theater itself and how fundamentally paratactic it is compared with more traditional theater. Most plays organize the stage space, the actors' movements, the dialogue, and the relationships of the characters hypotactically: if it's done right we are never confused about who's married to whom, or why the count launches into a soliloquy, or whether that chair downstage is supposed to be just a chair or a seat on the subway. Every element is relatable to every other element, and this is a big part of what enables the audience's suspension of disbelief. Poets' theater, on the other hand, bears the same relation to a regular play as verse does to prose, or lyric to narrative: mere simultaneity of being and acting is all that's provided to cement the relationships of players, space, props, and audience. The language is important, but not as central as you might expect: it's just one element in a group of visual and spatial elements. It's their arrangement that is "poetic" and that will evoke, I hope, thoughts and feelings in the audience not easily arrived at through conventional narrative means.

Another hour or so crawling on the floor and bellowing in Spanish: Rodrigo seems pleased with our performance overall, and he's even more pleased with our rendering of a shorter piece that will launch the evening; he says we're setting the template for it. Without actually coming out and saying how badly I'm mangling the Spanish language, he tells me not to worry, because my struggle with the language is part of the piece--translation and the crossing of borders is one of its major themes. So when it's time, at 10:30, to pack up and go home, I'm feeling pretty good about our two-nights progress, in spite of my throbbing wrist.

Sadie Doesn't Speak

...but here are some great pictures of her:

Meeting Lake Michigan.

Too big for the sink.

Pink towel.

Hi there.

As her mom says, "Eyelashes for days."

Sadie Speaks

So much to say, and she's not even twelve weeks old.

A Normal Reading

It was actually an awesome reading. After a windy drive downstate (as a Northeasterner, it takes some getting used to talking about "downstate Illinois" with exactly the same inflection and implications with which one speaks of "upstate New York"), I arrived in Bloomington-Normal and was met by sweet and menschy Gabe Gudding. We then met Gabe's collaborator Kristin Dykstra, fellow reader Juan Manuel Sánchez, Illinois Wesleyan's Michael Theune, and a small gaggle of grad students for pretty-good pizza at Lucca, which is apparently the tiny headquarters of the long-beleagured Bloomington Democrats (the building where the GOP was founded is just a couple of blocks away). The reading itself took place in an art gallery deep in one of the most cavernous buildings of one of the most cavernous campuses I've ever visited, and was startlingly well-attended for a chilly Friday evening--sixty people or more, most gratifying.

Juan read first: his poems are influenced in arguably equal measure by Mexican/Chicano folklore and by Wallace Stevens, a potent combination. Some of the poems were presented in Spanish, then in what are apparently very loose "translations" into English; at least once he reversed the order, which is an interesting move, putting into question which poem/language is the (ab)original. I can't find any links to his work on the web, but he's got work in the new Mandorla (Kristin gifted me with a copy) and you ought to check it out: it's lushly beautiful writing.

I felt like my own reading was one of the strongest performances I've ever given, and it presents to me a kind of challenge to live up to my burgeoning sense that poetry readings ought to be treated as performances, with all the demands on the writer and promises to the audience that that implies. There were a number of environmental factors that contributed: I had a lectern with a microphone and an excellent sound system, which makes it possible to exercise a lot more control over tone and volume than when reading unassisted; I had a large audience that seemed unusually receptive to what I had to offer them; and the atmosphere of a gallery with half-assembled exhibits permits concentrated attention and conviviality while avoiding the sterility of the classroom, the formality of the auditorium, and the tumult of the tavern. I had also, almost inadvertantly, assembled some material that I was able to shape into a performance more easily and with more effect than I've managed in the past. Beginning with some new work with narrative elements and a tone by turns whimsical and sinister, I then moved backward to a piece from the new chapbook, "Lecture on Modernism," which had a similarly playful tone. Then I shifted to more serious ground with an excerpt from Compos(t)ition Marble, a book I've had mixed success from reading in the past (I apparently once bored the pants off some guy at a reading I did in New York soon after that book was published). Key to the success of this reading was in preparing the audience (telling them it was my 9/11 poem, my New York-love poem), and then in presenting just a few lyrical slices of it; the poem is too dense, I think, to be read out loud from the beginning for any but the most patient listeners. Finally, I closed with a poem from Selah, "Infected Elegy," that I've had some practice with, and which seems to be one of the most performable pieces in my inventory.

I learned a lot from doing this reading, and though I don't expect I'll ever be able to exactly repeat it, it's worth meditating on the value of performance when it comes to poetry readings. Some poets, perhaps even most poets, seem either to disparage the idea of performance or else simply don't give it much thought, while others actively and programmatically exercise a kind of anti-charisma in their readings--the idea being, I suppose, to deflect attention away from the poet's personality and back toward the text. I have some theoretical sympathy with the premises of the anti-reading: poets are not extroverts, as a rule, and if we were all natural performers we'd probably choose other lines of work. More importantly, much of the poetry I value most is highly textual in its effects, requiring the kind of rereading or dwelling-with that reading out loud doesn't permit. I would be dismayed if an emphasis on performance and orality were to diminish the already marginal space such work occupies, because I think that's where the real R&D work of the language gets done.

On the other hand, I've been bored, irritated, or enraged by far too many readings, with or without theoretical bases for their anti-performative qualities, to wish to inflict the same on any live audience I might be fortunate enough to have. I see no necessary incompatibility with being entertaining and with doing strong and challenging work. Some poems, or portions of poems, are less oral than others, as I've learned with Compos(t)ition Marble, and I've also had trouble finding a good way to read from Fourier Series, which is primarily visual in its arrangement. But if you do have arrows in your quiver that lend themselves to being guided by the voice, why not fire them? Variety of emotional affect is also key, I think: that's why I started with comic poems and then took a more serious and elegiac turn halfway through. Anything a poet can do to displace or shatter the mild glazed hum that seems to preside over the vast majority of poetry readings is to the good.

To embrace the performer's role at a poetry reading bears with it a number of risks, none greater in my view than in presenting yourself as someone who wishes to please. This is crucially different from wishing to be liked, which I think crushes many poets as performers because of the modesty and self-effacement that goes with that wish. It's also different from the desire to make a sensation that I associate with natural performers, the people who are always "on" whether they have a podium or not. The desire to please means above all accepting, at least for the duration of the performance, the mantle of difference between yourself and the audience: you are no longer part of its community, but a figure with distinct powers and responsibilities toward that community, and you have to risk not just their rejection but your own momentary sense of self-estrangement from that community. It's that little voice in your head that you imagine chorusing in everyone else's head: "Who does he think he is?"

From this fear arises, I think, the instinct to pander--to get everyone laughing and nodding, to deflect hostility in the manner of the class clown. It's a tough instinct to resist, and it's tough not to find it contemptible in oneself or others. But to perform well isn't to pander: a strong performer of poetry is willing to risk offending his audience or making them a bit uncomfortable; s/he's willing to risk emotionality; s/he's willing to risk even boring them a little, or to try and make them think. All of these negative affects are capable of pleasing when bound up in a performance that has some shape, some sense of arc or destiny in its five or fifteen or forty-five minutes length. A big part of this comes simply from trusting your own work: from believing in its potential to move people and, yes, to entertain them, if it's possible to imagine "entertainment" that doesn't partake of distraction. Which links, in ways I don't have time to explore just now, with the willingness to take one's vocation seriously--in public--that so fascinates me in poets like Jennifer Moxley and Jorie Graham.

After the reading there was a friendly gathering at Kristin's house with some of the grad students (alas, I didn't catch their names), and a long wandering discussion of the sort that I have too rarely these days about poetry, poets, teaching, and the movies. I received another gift, this time from Michael: his new anthology from Teachers & Writers, Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, which I think is going to prove enormously useful to my teaching, and we were up quite late (something else I don't do much of these days, except when awakened by Sadie). All in all a thoroughly pleasing and satisfying experience; I'd go back to Normal any time.

New Things Arise

I'm thrilled to be part of some great new doings in the literary arena at Lake Forest College, namely:

- The creation of Lake Forest College Press and its imprint, &NOW Books (inspired by the &NOW Festival of Writing as a Contemporary Conceptual Art;
- The launch of a new biannual anthology, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, to be published under the eponymous imprint;
- The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, offering a two-month residency at Lake Forest, a $10,000 stipend, and book publication for a writer under forty years of age with no major publications (chapbooks excepted).

Exciting stuff! You can read more about it here at the blog of my colleague Bob Archambeau. I'm grateful to Bob and Davis Schneiderman for making me a part of their plans for literary empire-building.

In more personal news I can announce some upcoming personal appearances at which you can hear (and see) me read my poetry:

- On Friday, April 11 I will be reading with Juan Manuel Sanchez at Illinois State University in Normal as part of their Pierre Bourdieu Memorial Reading Series. It will take place at 7 PM in the University Galleries (here are some directions). Thanks to Gabe Gudding and Kristin Dykstra for making it happen.
- On Wednesday, April 16 I will be reading at The Book Cellar in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago along with Eddie Kilowatt, Robert McDonald, Patricia Stewart, Saadia Ali Aschemann. It starts at 7 PM; the Book Cellar is a nifty little independent store at 4736 Lincoln Avenue, right on the CTA's Brown Line.
- For those of you willing to brave the northern suburbs on a Tuesday afternoon, I'll be reading on the Lake Forest College campus at 4 PM on Tuesday, April 24 in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall, Middle Campus.
- On the weekend of May 2 - 4, I will be a player in Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater alongside Melissa Severin and Fred Sasaki to kick off Returning from One Place to Another:
A Poet’s Theater Showcase at Links Hall in Wrigleyville.
- Finally, my European fans will be able to catch me presenting a paper on Charles Olson and avant-pastoral in Brussels during the Poetic Ecologies Conference that will be happening there from May 14 through the 17th. I'm looking forward to this truly international gathering of critics and poets concerned with, as the conference subtitle has it, "Nature as Text and Text as Nature in English-Language Verse."

So if my infrequent blogging bothers you, chances are you can catch me in person at one or more of these events.

Finally, for all you Sadie Gray fans out there, here are a couple of more pictures off the camera phone:

Looking alert in her car seat.

We've been looking for a new apartment. Sadie seemed to like this one.

Laughing at, rather than up, her sleeve.

Smiling at her great-grandpa.

Looking for spring.

Showeres Soote

No, this blog isn't an entirely vacant space to let, though it can look that way these days. I only wanted to show you that incredible SF name: "Nada Basic, Engineer." An alias of the other Nada's, perhaps?

This past weekend Sadie met my sister, her Aunt Vanessa, for the first time:
And Vanessa was quick to discover that from Sadie's perspective, we're all just human pacifiers:

Out there in the poetry blogosphere people have been talking about all sorts of interesting stuff. There was an extensive and fascinating discussion of the aesthetics and sociology of poetry book covers, led by Kasey and Gary (that's the first entry; see Gary's archives for the rest). At Harriet, Reginald Shepherd has been poking the wasps' nest of avant-gardeners with a sharp stick once again as he talks suggestively about white male technophilia, and is responded to by, among others, Harriet's latest avant-garde blogger, Linh Dinh. "I’d say that the best avant-garde artists and writers are those who reflect their moment in history while simultaneously rebelling against it," Dinh says. "Only lackeys celebrate the status quo."

We might look askance at this last. Is "reflecting" one's moment in history necessarily a celebration of the status quo? Isn't "rebellion" at least as much a question of content as form (to say the, um, least)? I think most skilled poets both reflect their time and are critical of it; I'd rather reserve the category "avant-garde" for those with specifically formal modes of rebellion (I would include "social form" in this category, referring to alternative means of publication and distribution, happenings, heteronyms, et al).

Finished Moxley's The Middle Room, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I gradually began to tire of the total immersion narrator Moxley insists upon into every moment and detail of her life preceding the moment she and Steve Evans moved to Providence, R.I., and got married. Though predisposed to admire the seriousness (leavened with some humor) with which Moxley takes her own becoming, I felt in myself arise a being similar to the "anti-Cupid" that constantly sabotages and undermines young Jennifer's romance with Steve, her noir dream. This spirit of anti- was staggered by the colossal self-indulgence the book, in all its length and with all its nineteenth-century sentences, seemed to represent. But ultimately I was moved by what I felt to be the core intertwined stories of a poet's finding creative community and of a child's separation from the (literary but also literal) body of her mother—both figures of outward. I felt intensely, personally involved in this story, not least because of details of my own biography; and when Jennifer's mother Jo passed away into wretchedness and then death, I wept.

Teaching, reading board books to baby, working on the Olson paper I'll be presenting in Brussels—time for blogging passes me by. But I shall not forsake it utterly.

A Letter

Even now that I'm an actual professor, even though I've been working toward the ultimate goal for almost a decade, I still can't quite believe I've made it through. But as this piece of paper attests, I've finally crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is. All that remains is to go to Ithaca (hurray!) in May to pick up the more durable piece of paper in the horribly expensive doctoral regalia I'd better hurry up and order. These new identities, so rapidly and recently acquired—professor, father, PhD—sit uneasily upon my shoulders, though I'm probably the only one who thinks so. (Least of all my daughter, currently wrapped up in her sling against my chest, fast asleep.)

About halfway through Moxley's The Middle Room, and I am surprised anew by her commitment to a thoroughly romantic (and Romantic) poetics—or not only or not merely a poetics, but a way of living. It reads like a nineteenth-century memoir of the late twentieth century, if such a thing were possible, dotted as it is with archaic prepositions like betwixt and o'er—a testimony to the author's nostalgic passions (a phrase that, like wicked interior spy, recurs frequently throughout the book, and always in italics).

Over at Parsifal Press, Simone dos Anjos has posted a review of the book that recommends it "to those literary persons who take themselves too seriously." It's true that the book is characterized by the dry yet tender irony of the adult Moxley toward her younger self—yet "irony" doesn't seem quite right, because Moxley still seems perfectly capable of stepping back into her younger self's skin, so that only the barest daylight shows between "Jenny's" taste for melodrama and the older poet's frank savorings of that drama. Perhaps it goes hand in hand with her romanticism, but Moxley has always impressed me precisely because she does risk taking herself too seriously, a risk many of us are unwilling to take because it would make us too vulnerable. You need a thick skin, or a lot of arrogance, or most simply the courage to risk being hurt, again and again, to present yourself to the world as a serious person who believes in the significance of his/her own life and work (particularly a poet's life and work, which provide few if any social appurtenances with which to shield oneself). Moxley impresses and disturbs because her courage is coupled to what seems like the thinnest of skins: to spend time in the company of her poetry or her prose is to watch her bleed.

It's a lushly written book, very pleasuarable on a sentence level, once you've gotten used to the archaisms. As an account of one poet's sentimental education it gratifies my curiosity to understand from the inside what it must have been like to come to poetry from the communitarian and experimental stance that Moxley encountered as an undergraduate, and which she naturally took to be the path of the poet—very different from the thoroughly quietudinous education I received at Vassar, where the creative writing students pored over Elizabeth Bishop's drafts of "One Art," sat at the feet of bearded male profs, and felt at best a prickly rivalry with each other, at worst indifference. At least that was my experience—maybe I was sunk too deep in Dungeons & Dragons to partake more actively of Vassar's literary culture, such as it was. The two other poets who were there when I was, Camille Guthrie and Renee Gladman (I knew Camille pretty well; I've never met Renee, that I can recall), did go on to be associated with the avant-garde (Camille's first book, as it happens, is published by Subpress, the publishers of Moxley's memoir), so maybe they found more a more challenging aesthetic and a more involving community (with all the attendant romance, rivalry, and performative opportunities) at Vassar than I did.

Why do we become poets? Moxley is able to pin it down to one moment: when she brought the first poem she ever wrote to her mother Jo—the guardian and arbiter of all things literary in that household—and she pronounced it, "very impressive." I can find no single primal scene in my own background to match that, but in the house where I grew up it was my mother as well who was the litterateur and arbiter of taste when it came to books and aesthetic questions generally. Her attention was not always easy to secure; so when she responded positively to my own early attempts at poetry I was goaded to carry on with it. At a perilously young age—fourteen? twelve?—I was determined to become a writer. But I didn't settle, or resettle, on poetry until my middle twenties after failed attempts at a novel sent me back to, yes, the one form of writing that had consistently garnered praise from teachers, friends, a lover or two, and, yes, my mother—who had died some years previous, while I was still in college.

Perhaps it's that intimate response that, if we're lucky, we can get from a reader of our poems, that blooms into a vocation for an art form that your average person seems to hold in a strange mixture of awe and contempt. (Awe because they knew what it could or should have been when they themselves were writing it, as adolescents—contempt because it was they themselves who had written, and they nor nobody else they knew could possibly be a "real poet"?) You need to be an egoistical tyrant to sit down and demand that someone who matters to you read your novel; but we've all sat across from beloved or respected faces and scrutinized them as they read our lines, waiting for the reaction that will bless or damn us.

So poets write for/to/with lovers—a truth as embarrassing and necessary as the artist's bare self-seriousness. Both of these facts Moxley refuses to mask even with the garb of eccentricity, and I'm amazed by that. And compelled into following her many-branching paths—I'll be ordering The Line when I'm done with this.

A Lapse

Not much left over. Can't resist the baby talk: we start out speaking normally but by the end of the sentence our inflections shoot way, way up, like those of teenage girls.

Hello world.

With Emily at Starbucks.

Toes!

My father wants to be known as Sadie's "Poppy," but he may be changing his mind now that he knows our president calls his own father by that name.


Reading Silliman's Ketjak, pronounced keh-chak. A ketjak is a Balinese "monkey dance" intended to exorcize evil. It's a long poem in prose in which the same sentences and sentence fragments keep recurring in longer and more complex iterations as each paragraph swells to become much larger than all the preceding paragraphs. An anticipation, it seems, of Ron's employment of the Fibonoacci sequence in writing Tjanting (pronounced chanting, so he didn't move all that far from that idea). Written in the mid-seventies, it was his first demonstration of the New Sentence, something I'm actually more familiar with in practice from reading Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Reading it is like sitting down to listen to one of the jazz CDs—Thelonious Monk, say—that contain many tracks of variation on the same tune, so that your head nods at the return of a phrase, now freshly contextualized by the tide of new text that surrounds it. In that respect it's also like hitting the "refresh" button on the browser of a website that's constantly updated but which always retains some of the same basic elements.

I can see why it would have outraged and titillated and bored when it first appeared; I can see now why some would now find the technique to be uttery canonical, if not old hat—but I never lose sight of the fact that the majority of readers today would find the poem as strange and tedious as the readers of 1975 did. In that respect there is no advancement for art: the avant-garde is permanently avant-garde for everyone except the cognoscenti, the ones invested in expanding (shrinking?) the market for different modes of writing. Once you have your sea-legs, so to speak, there's pleasure aplenty to be found in a text like Ketjak, and very little of the Brechtian dissonance of the New Sentence comes off as dissonance, just as those Monk tunes no longer startle by their breaks and halts. The trouble is that few are interested in acquiring such sea-legs themselves: people are content with the pleasures they already know, for the most part, and don't wish to be seasick before they can stand. The only mechanism currently in place for growing the audience for such writing is the press gang of academia: I can assign Ketjak or a portion of it to my students and explain why it matters and a few of them, at least, will consider the possibility of its being a source of pleasure. But most will not pick up such a text again, I think, and we're back to the non-system of eccentrics' finding their misshapen way toward what they'll discover they need from poetry (bully for them). Perhaps that's best.

My copy of Jennifer Moxley's massive memoir The Middle Room has just arrived; The Irasicble Poet has whet my appetite for it. I'm hungry for a narrative of my generation's (very nearly—I think Jennifer's probably four or five years older) infatuation with and abandonment of and commitment to poetry. Why did we get here? How did we do it, or not do it? Has there been, shall there be, anything new?

Hungry again, in other words, for narrative: red meat. Telling my students this morning Eliot's line about meaning being the meat the burglar gives the guard-dog so that he can accomplish his work. What is that work? The poet as second-story man: he that tells us a second story. Let the first story languish; kick the ladder away.

From the back cover of The Middle Room:

There was a secret force deep in my psyche which, like a Cold War double agent, worked in tandem with my insecurity, a sort of wicked interior spy that emerged at the most inopportune moments to make sport of all my fears and fill me with crippling self-doubt as regards my natural fitness to live the life of the mind.

I feel almost entirely opposite: my wicked interior spy works to make me doubt my fitness to live the life of the body. Life, the life sentence.

Silence, then a lapse into speech, then silence. Rock-a-bye.

A movement, a lull. "Just keep walking," drive, he sd.

Driving.

Utopian Poetics

One can like what one has written while feeling dissatisfied with the way one writes.

I am dissatisfied.

Saw the rough draft of a new documentary about artist-mothers last night. The real cost women have always paid to create. But I was distracted by the art itself and how its expressiveness exceeded whatever the artists themselves or the various talking heads had to say about it. That old envy of the visual, coupled with a swelling disgust for discursivity. Talking heads: stop making sense.

And a longing for the spoken, its power to punctuate a narrative. "How's my hair look, Mike?"

The avant-garde impulse gets swallowed in mists of cynicism. Or is it just historicism? Over at Action, Yes, Per Bäckström offers what appears to me to be a faultless analysis of the use and misuse of the term "avant-garde" in the twentieth century, and makes especially valuable distinctions about the changing face of the term depending on which country (or more broadly, which linguistic tradition—Romance, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-American) speaks it. It's an extremely useful and clarifying intervention in the distinctions we must draw between terms like "avant-garde" and "high modernism"; it will help me when I write my pastoral book. But the piece leaves the poet in me feeling dispirited, a marble in a milk carton bobbing in a millpond, because it all adds up to the end of history, again. Or as Modris Eksteins puts it at the end of this review of Peter Gay's new book, "Stunde Null, zero hour, 1945, with its iconography of the end, stacked corpses and mushroom clouds, is a strong candidate for the last act of Modernism. At that point, Adorno said, history had outdistanced any possibility of representation. Art, historiography, indeed any attempt to capture meaning, had been humiliated by events. Perhaps shopping is indeed all that is left."

Strategies of anti-representation followed Adorno's declaration about lyric poetry after Auschwitz, but Eksteins, taking the long view, sees nothing in the postwar avant-garde (which, per Per, seems to be a term he takes as interchangeablewith "modernism") that isn't a retread of the post-WWI period: for John Cage read Malevich, for Jim Dine read Picabia. Bäckström takes a more nuanced view, writing that "the neo-avant-gardes did not react against modernity, as the historical avant-garde did, but against late modernity. Therefore, they could not possibly use the same strategies as the historical avant-garde," the folks who, to paraphrase Peter Bürger's argument, struggled "to include art as a natural component of life (a richer life)."

That has always struck me as the fundamental goal for art: or, I have always demanded of art that it transform my life. If art doesn't intervene in life, it no longer interests me. Which, thanks to the clarification of terms Bäckström provides, leads me to reject postmodernism: it is a purely aestheticized reaction-formation, lacking "the Utopian urge to merge life and art, which is the prime mover for an avant-garde." But does that resuscitate what I do as avant-garde? Or neo-avant-garde? Or (shudder) "post-avant"?

I have a visceral response to Ian Keenan's claims that "the act of traversing new territory of expression is both tied to the spirit of the forms that preceded it to that end, but not dogmatically to the forms themselves"; and, "I believe in the avant-garde both as a matter of faith and as an objective analysis of phenomenon." The first statement is both pragmatic and a covert statement of faith in the spirit of the avant-garde that the second statement makes manifest. But I think I have a more useful term, at least for me, and Bäckström gave me the clue for it: utopian poetics.

Form is one intervention. I tell my students how parataxis can punctuate a text, can let fresh air into writing, can let alternatives to the master narrative filter in. Prosody is everything that diverts, spills, overflows, smothers, trickles around, and shines on that relentless question, "What happens next?" But my students still want to know what happens; they want, themselves, to happen. I too want this, and so we are utopians together. But what's the technique for this? What's its content?

This second singing a mangled medley of Beach Boys tunes to my daughter. "Sloop John B." "Good Vibrations." "Wouldn't It Be Nice."

If the thinker swallows the writer, if the formalist swallows what aches. Discomfort of several skins. Two heads. Then, "other horrible workers will come."

Mon coeur mis à nu. What Poe wanted to write.

We want the poem to be something, to take us somewhere. To have some life beyond both ordinary language and artsy self-awareness. To mean and be, or at least go.

(Is an addiction to generalities my difficulty? People cry, "Enough generalizing, let's talk about poems!" Yes, but there's an obvious hunger for the general, for perspective, for mapping our moment so as to live it/write it better. "The theme is creative and has vista.")

Typing one-handed, my left pinky finger in Sadie's mouth. Bodies in real time.

Utopia is negative and positive at the same time: it's noplace, and it's also always a negative image of whatever it is in our actually existing world that inhibits human flourishing. We write from and toward what we can't inhabit, except retrospectively. Now Sadie's being nursed by her mother, and the moment of misremembered songs and my finger-substitute (dry breast of the father) is in the past. It's got a half-life now, a glow.

How to write my way back toward lived experience, something messy, precious bodily fluids. The Narrativity writers, whose Biting the Error has been the main text in my creative writing seminar, also strive for this. As theoretical essays they show how their lives—often queer lives, or women's lives, or Marxist lives—have changed their writing. Between the lines—and in some of their non- or extra-theoretical texts—we read how their writing changed their lives. Utopians, every one. (Canadians, too, some of them, or denizens of the Bay Area—national and quasi-national spaces that have taken on a utopian luster for me in the past seven years.)

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." I love the themselves. I love the are.

Baby Blogging Bonanza

Any thoughts I might have about poetry will probably have to wait until spring break. In the meantime, for famished Sadie Gray fans:

My cousin Rachel instructs Sadie in the finer points of flying.

And here she is with us practicing her best Superman moves.

Proud papa and mama and a somewhat stunned-looking Sadie.

Emily models her baby sling (baby not included).

At brunch this morning with my grandparents at a hole-in-the-wall cafe in Skokie.

That sling is more comfortable than it looks.

Your faithful correspondent at the computer with his special assistant standing by.

Reading to Sadie. That's either The Green Lake Is Awake or Hotel Lautreamont.

The New York School works as well or better than Mother Goose when it comes to soothing the little ones.

The flying Wallendas--I mean, Ross and Kerry, our dear friends from Ithaca who stayed with us a whole week cooking us meals, rearranging my books (really), and making us laugh.

Here are Kerry and Emily adoring the little one in all her naked glory.

Sadie and her sleepy daddy sharing a moment (and a robe).

Ross, Sadie, and Sadie's hat.

Since we moved in there hasn't been a moment to arrange my books more than haphazardly. Kerry brought her welcome rage for order to the task of alphabetizing my poetry books. Here I am, checking her work.

When all else fails in the sleeping baby department, our trusty friend the clothes dryer usually does the trick.

Briefly

Once again I shall shamelessly piggyback on Bob's blog to point at his post of praise for Robyn Schiff, who kicked a lot of butt reading here at Lake Forest yesterday (and also proved a charmingly formidable presence in my poetry writing class that morning).

And here's a picture of Sadie with her Grammy Ellayn, who was visiting with us (and being unbelievably helpful) last week and the week before:

That's all I got.