I don't think I've made a habit of "shredding" anybody's poems. But thanks to Chris for refusing the temptation to shred my poem all the same. Still, I have to wonder: is he really proposing "there's no accounting for taste" as an adequate replacement to the binary thinking he accuses me of? Would it be a better world if every blogger and critic simply quoted poems they liked with the obsequious headline, "For your consideration. . ."? Wouldn't the proper answer to binaries be not an agreement to disagree but something more dialectical? I also think the word "new" is being used by Chris in a way that I find limited and limiting. I would never propose that "newness" is the sole value to assess a poem by. That's absurdly reductive. But the contemporary poetry that I find most engaging ("what I like") is usually trying to break up reification (a more social way of describing "the frozen sea within us")—ways of seeing and imagining the world that have become fixed and dead and which therefore tacitly support the world/consciousness/the dominant ideology as it has been given to us. Because we are social creatures, and because a certain amount of filiation is inevitable and necessary, traditions or counter-traditions which attempt to break up the dominant ideology are bound to arise. Of course these counter-traditions can then and usually do become reified themselves; and much of the ire directed at Ron and his epigones results, I think, from poets and readers who find his brand of reification more palpable and threatening than that of commodity capitalism, patriarchy, etc.—the guiding structures of a normative discourse in which people still routinely use "man" to mean humanity and poets looking to publish their work have a tome called Poet's Market to guide them. Still, I return again and again to the Pound/Williams/Olson tradition because it is that paradoxical thing, a tradition of the new—or more precisely, a tradition of discovery, which foregrounds the destruction of reification as one of its primary values. (Having broken up the pattern of reification the question, Now what? does tend to arise; and it's here I think that this tradition runs into the most difficulty; the utopias of Pound, et al, are not particularly appetizing or even very democratic; and the Marxism of the Language poets, while to my mind constituting a nigh-irrefutable critique, does not in itself seem to point the way toward a viable polis, in poetry or elsewhere. That's why I'm interested in pastoral as a description of the impulse to resist totalization in the name of bodily, contingent experience.)
Many poets and readers of poetry, of course, have no interest in criticizing the existing structures of feeling (the attacks on political correctness or so-called "schools of resentment" as practiced by Dana Gioia or Harold Bloom are directed toward consolidating existing power). Others who do have such an interest may feel that poetry is already marginal enough, or that their own work is self-evidently sincere enough, to function effectively as an axe against that frozen sea. Some pick their battles. A poem of mine like "'Desire, and Hurt Not'" (the quotes are part of the title) is, I would agree, not particularly "new." A fair number of the poems in Selah rely on sheer lyricism in their attempt to overcome habits of mind and feeling in myself which would otherwise prevent me from having full access to the experiences that occasioned those poems. Others, I believe, are meant to bring larger ideological contexts and questions into the space of the book: Jewishness, masculinity, the family, and the wholly inadequate cultural formations within which we deal (or fail to deal) with death. But plenty of people will read the book and see nothing "avant" about it, even if they're aware of such a category. Does that reduce the question of the new to a fallacy of intention? I rather choose to think that my engagement with several traditions—Language poetry, confessional poetry, Stevens' philosophical lyricism, Whitman's "language experiment," Miltonic grandeur, 17th-century metaphysical poetry, and Elizabethan drama (all of which, in their day, were innovations upon literary forms that were no longer adequate to represent the full range of intellectual and emotional expression) does mark me and the unfinished arc of my writing. For me, articulating a poetics is an act concurrent and concomitant with the writing of poetry, and I hope to cease not until death. "I like it," "I don't like it"—that's not good enough; I need to explain these decisions to myself and I've chosen to do it in public because I'm a poet (that is, I'm like everyone else but more so) and I read poetry and poetics and blogs because I live for those fleeting moments of genuine whole-heart whole-mind connection. Wholeness requires sophistication and articulation; otherwise you have to leave things out.
I'll stop there. There's plenty of other good stuff on Chris' blog to think about. Like whether there can be arcs and functions on the axes I've proposed as approximations of my gut reactions (but my math skills are nonexistent!). And though I've defended thinking in terms of traditions and filiations here, obviously he's got a point about how quickly we pass over individual poems, and even whole poets, because either our attention spans or our vocabularies for close reading (better, "close appreciation") have become so impoverished. So I too regret the apparent lack of hits Jonathan's appreciation project has gotten him. I think his admire/hate list is probably more accurate and user-friendly than my own grids have been for describing my general reactions to poetry.
Incidentally, I'll be off to Chicago on Monday (to hang with my grandparents in Skokie, then AWP on Wednesday). Internet access will be spotty, so get your licks in while you can if you're want me to reply.
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Friday, March 19, 2004
Excellence Abounding
Just received a surprise visit here at the Bookery from Aaron Tieger of fishblog and CARVE and his girlfriend Wendy (whose last name I forgot—sorry, Wendy!), who is about to become a literature professor at Ithaca College. So the innovative poetry community of Ithaca will be acquiring some powerful new allies in the months ahead. Huzzah for community! Down with scenes!
Still in a quoting mood; here are some choice bits from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer which I feel ineluctably apply to the writing of poetry. Sometimes let "images" be images; sometimes let them be words or sounds:
Just received a surprise visit here at the Bookery from Aaron Tieger of fishblog and CARVE and his girlfriend Wendy (whose last name I forgot—sorry, Wendy!), who is about to become a literature professor at Ithaca College. So the innovative poetry community of Ithaca will be acquiring some powerful new allies in the months ahead. Huzzah for community! Down with scenes!
Still in a quoting mood; here are some choice bits from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer which I feel ineluctably apply to the writing of poetry. Sometimes let "images" be images; sometimes let them be words or sounds:
The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.
*
No actors.
(No directing of actors.) No parts.
(No learning of parts.) No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (action).
*
Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.
*
Respect man's nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.
*
An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.
*
Flatten my images (as if ironing them), without attenuating them.
*
To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
*
Radically suppress intentions in your models.
*
Your imagination will aim less at events than at feelings, while wanting these latter to be as documentary as possible.
*
One recognizes the truth by its efficacy, by its power.
*
A whole made of good images can be detestable.
*
Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off elsewhere. Double, triple bottom to things.
*
No absolute value in an image.
Images and sounds will owe their value and their power solely to the use to which you destine them.
*
Where not everything is present, but each word, each look, each movement has things underlying.
*
Let it be the intimate union of the images that charges them with emotion.
*
A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem right, even if it is.
*
Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).
*
Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.
*
Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual ideas.
*
Not artful, but agile.
*
Of lighting
Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them.
*
Debussy himself used to play with the piano's lid down.
*
Reorganize the unorganized noises (what you think you hear is not what you hear) of a street, a railroad station, an airport. . . Play them back one by one in silence and adjust the blend.
*
Retouch some real with some real.
*
To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.
*
Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.
*
Voice and face
They have formed together and have grown used to each other.
*
THE BONDS THAT BEINGS AND THINGS ARE WAITING FOR, IN ORDER TO LIVE.
*
The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. A locomotive's whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.
*
The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.
*
Quality of a new world which none of the existing arts allowed to be imagined.
*
Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises from nowhere.)
*
In your passion for the true, people may see nothing but faddism.
*
Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.
*
Is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?
*
Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.
*
Those horrible days—when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles—are part of my method of work.
Reading "Death in Venice" for the first time. Some delicious quotes; asides on art, mostly, which remind me of similar things in Henry James:
The observations and encounters of a loner who seldom speaks are both more nebulous and more penetrating than those of a gregarious man; his thoughts are more intense, more peculiar, and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions, which might easily be brushed aside with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy his mind unduly; they are deeper in silence, take on significance, become experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the pererse, the asymmetrical, the absurd, the forbidden.
*
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a luscious and treacherous penchant for acknowledging the injustice that creates beauty and for sympathizing with and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
*
Now he had to go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday.
*
Was it not written that the sun diverts our attention from intellectual to sensual things? Supposedly, it so thoroughly benumbs and bewitches our reason and memory that the ecstatic soul completely forgets its own state of being and, with astonished admiration, dotes on the most beautiful of the sunlit objects; in fact, it is only with the help of a body that the soul can then rise to a more sublime contemplation. Amor truly emulated the mathematicians who show tangible pictures of ideal forms to children still unable to think abstractly: the god of love did likewise when, to make the spiritual visible to us, he used the shape and color of human youth, adorning it with all the reflected luster of beauty as an instrument for the memory, and making us burn with pain and hope at the mere sight of it.
*
And then [Socrates] uttered the very subtlest statement, the cunning wooer: he said that the lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the one but not in the other—the tenderest, most sardonic thought, perhaps, that was ever thought, the wellspring of all the roguery and most secret voluptuousness of yearning.
*
Now Eros, we are told, loves idleness, and that alone is why he was created.
*
It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence.
*
Who can decipher the nature and character of artistry?! Who can grasp the profound instinctual merger of discipline and dissipation on which it is founded?! For inability to desire salutary sobering is itself dissipation.
*
He was more beautiful than any words could say, and Aschenbach painfully felt, as so often before, that language can only praise, but not reproduce, the beauty that appeals to the senses.
*
For an instant he had dreamed of tender happiness, but what was that compared with these expectations? What use were art and virtue against the advantages of chaos?
Props to Jeff Clark on the republication of The Little Door Slides Back by no less a press than Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Ever since I first read that book around 1999 or so, I've considered it a small masterpiece of contemporary surrealism—reading it is like walking on a razor rising from the acid pool of Clark's unconscious. A book as influential for me as my namesake's big-deal book Madonna anno domini. Both struck me, and still strike me, as doing post-Language writing that takes gender at least partly into account. It's my belief that the varieties of ecriture feminine that have manifested in this country and Canada is the best demonstration available of the actual efficacy of the Language project—I think the poets associated with How(ever) and How2 have actually partly realized the goal of destroying and remixing patriarchal language, making possible new modes of being in writing and thinking. The work of male poets who participate in some way in this project often seems to me to be more strongly motivated than that which has no further goal than manifesting edginess for its own sake. There's a certain self-conscious Baudelairean sadism that manifests in both of these books—Clark even has a number of poems with the title, "Demonologue," which makes me think he's playing with the maudit's brand of Satanism as a way to talk about the intrusions of the Real. Anyway, it's a great book and you should pick it up if you don't already have the Sun & Moon version (which has a better cover; but I think the design of the text is much nicer in the FSG version). FSG! Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, Carol Ann Duffy, Derek Walcott, and now... Jeff Clark. Who'dve thunk it?
I love sonnets (q.v. the ongoing discussion between Mike, Jonathan, Kasey, and Tim). I probably got into the University of Montana because of some very New Formalisty sonnets I wrote about my distant cousin, the boxer Barney Ross. I still like some of the maneuvers I had to make in order to force narrative into the essentially lyric/argumentative form of the sonnet; I think, too, that I demonstrated a little bit of the necessary self-consciousness Tim talks about by attempting to reproduce Chicago gangsterese in some of the poems—a dialect as stylized to our ears as Renaissance thees and thous. Mike (and Chris Lott) says there's no intrinsic value to the new, which makes no sense to me, because our moment is new, or at least contemporary. But either you believe there's a conversation to be advanced or you don't. Either you believe that the 21st century must be addressed in a 21st century idiom (which is never purely new, of course, but the accumulation though not the culmination of every previous century's idiom), or you don't.
My ongoing project Severance Songs consists entirely of mostly unrhymed sonnets (though I've been introducing Keats to the Cremaster Cycle in some of my most recent poems, adapting Keats' rhyme words to Barney's bizarre fleshscape). Sometimes I play with narrative, or more often refer to narrative; but I have to say that I think the sonnet is ill-adapted to narration, and in any case narrative is precisely the thing I go to poetry to escape from. The linear story with a beginning, middle, and end is so much the dominant mental formation of our culture that even slight deviations in the forms where it is most expected (as in Pulp Fiction's chopped-up chronology) are praised and vilified for seeming radically new. The imperatives of narrative ("then what happened?") obscure what I think of as poetry's much broader mandate, now unavoidably summarized for me by Drew's aphorism, "Poetry has the capacity to deal with the nonevents of life in a way that other art forms couldn't possibly manage." So why drag events (or rather, the representation of events) into an art form supremely well equipped for the kind of epistemological and ontological investigations that representational forms can only pursue in the most incidental fashion?
My ongoing project Severance Songs consists entirely of mostly unrhymed sonnets (though I've been introducing Keats to the Cremaster Cycle in some of my most recent poems, adapting Keats' rhyme words to Barney's bizarre fleshscape). Sometimes I play with narrative, or more often refer to narrative; but I have to say that I think the sonnet is ill-adapted to narration, and in any case narrative is precisely the thing I go to poetry to escape from. The linear story with a beginning, middle, and end is so much the dominant mental formation of our culture that even slight deviations in the forms where it is most expected (as in Pulp Fiction's chopped-up chronology) are praised and vilified for seeming radically new. The imperatives of narrative ("then what happened?") obscure what I think of as poetry's much broader mandate, now unavoidably summarized for me by Drew's aphorism, "Poetry has the capacity to deal with the nonevents of life in a way that other art forms couldn't possibly manage." So why drag events (or rather, the representation of events) into an art form supremely well equipped for the kind of epistemological and ontological investigations that representational forms can only pursue in the most incidental fashion?
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Big fat books purchased from the discount rack at the Cornell Store for just $6.98 each:
Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life (North Atlantic Books, 2000)
Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan UP, 1998)
Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the POet as Homosexual in Society (Black Sparrow, 1983)
Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell UP, 1991)
Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen, eds., Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan UP, 1999)
Lord knows what all these books were doing remaindered together at Cornell of all places—but I'll take 'em.
Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life (North Atlantic Books, 2000)
Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan UP, 1998)
Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the POet as Homosexual in Society (Black Sparrow, 1983)
Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell UP, 1991)
Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen, eds., Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan UP, 1999)
Lord knows what all these books were doing remaindered together at Cornell of all places—but I'll take 'em.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Many new blogs join the blogroll. See for yourself....
I never used to pay a lot of attention to Drunken Boat, but it just became fabulous. Check out work by my old Montana friend Sarah Gridley, plus blogland's own Aaron McCollough (you can actually hear his voice!). Beautiful, beautiful poems, from both of them. Plus nifty videos and web art and photos and audio and an interview with Norman Mailer (whose relevance I am re-assessing post-Cremaster).
Also, I took Tony Robinson's quiz. Perhaps he'll post the results soon....
I never used to pay a lot of attention to Drunken Boat, but it just became fabulous. Check out work by my old Montana friend Sarah Gridley, plus blogland's own Aaron McCollough (you can actually hear his voice!). Beautiful, beautiful poems, from both of them. Plus nifty videos and web art and photos and audio and an interview with Norman Mailer (whose relevance I am re-assessing post-Cremaster).
Also, I took Tony Robinson's quiz. Perhaps he'll post the results soon....
Regrids
I am justly chastised by Jordan for "perpetuating the funny-serious binary." He's right: humor is more of a continuum, with the explicitly sidesplitting (and perhaps vulgar) on one end and the unintentionally funny at the other—not necessarily in a camp sense, rather that a "strong reading" is required to literally "see the humor." Oh, and I screwed up, Gary, I did mean to put your book (not YOU, not even all your poetry, just that book) as -x, +y. My mistake. No one describable as "the Lester Bangs of poetry" could ever be -y.
Here's another, perhaps equally tendentious version of my grid:
Maximalist
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Beautiful——————————————————————————————————Sublime
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Minimalist
This obviously leaves humor completely to one side, but it's a homologous x-axis in that it seems to have something to do with tone, which is closely tied to intent, as opposed to the y axis which is more empirically recognizable. What strikes me about this grid is how much of what I can loosely call postmodern poetry is weighted toward the sublime end. To invoke Kant in a literal-minded way, the sheer volume of avant-garde production (compared to the one book every five years or so model that seems typically quietudinous) (and which tends toward maximalism without being identical with it, since one can publish many many short poems) presents readers with the mathematical sublime, while the action of indeterminacy (still the major move in post-Language poetry, though I think poets like Jarnot and Moxley are choosing a more tangled, "metaphysical," even Donne-ian approach, which fascinates me) imitates the dynamic sublime in confronting the reader with the awesomely unlimited abyssal power of the signifier. Beauty is more often the obvious goal of quietudinous poets, but I'm always drawn to innovative poetry that demonstrates a commitment to beauty in sound and/or image: Barbara Guest strikes me as a n exemplary -x, -y poet on this new grid. Ronald Johnson's earlier poetry seems -x, +y (and yet he so often works by subtraction!); ARK is an interesting limit case because the monumental whole is +x, +y while the individual components, which don't really "add up" to anything but a sense of mathematical/cumulative awe, are exquisitely turned -x, -y poems.
I don't intend these grids as anything other than images of the provisional ledges by which I gain a toehold on the new poetry I come across. They are meant to come dialectically undone under pressure.
I am justly chastised by Jordan for "perpetuating the funny-serious binary." He's right: humor is more of a continuum, with the explicitly sidesplitting (and perhaps vulgar) on one end and the unintentionally funny at the other—not necessarily in a camp sense, rather that a "strong reading" is required to literally "see the humor." Oh, and I screwed up, Gary, I did mean to put your book (not YOU, not even all your poetry, just that book) as -x, +y. My mistake. No one describable as "the Lester Bangs of poetry" could ever be -y.
Here's another, perhaps equally tendentious version of my grid:
Maximalist
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Beautiful——————————————————————————————————Sublime
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Minimalist
This obviously leaves humor completely to one side, but it's a homologous x-axis in that it seems to have something to do with tone, which is closely tied to intent, as opposed to the y axis which is more empirically recognizable. What strikes me about this grid is how much of what I can loosely call postmodern poetry is weighted toward the sublime end. To invoke Kant in a literal-minded way, the sheer volume of avant-garde production (compared to the one book every five years or so model that seems typically quietudinous) (and which tends toward maximalism without being identical with it, since one can publish many many short poems) presents readers with the mathematical sublime, while the action of indeterminacy (still the major move in post-Language poetry, though I think poets like Jarnot and Moxley are choosing a more tangled, "metaphysical," even Donne-ian approach, which fascinates me) imitates the dynamic sublime in confronting the reader with the awesomely unlimited abyssal power of the signifier. Beauty is more often the obvious goal of quietudinous poets, but I'm always drawn to innovative poetry that demonstrates a commitment to beauty in sound and/or image: Barbara Guest strikes me as a n exemplary -x, -y poet on this new grid. Ronald Johnson's earlier poetry seems -x, +y (and yet he so often works by subtraction!); ARK is an interesting limit case because the monumental whole is +x, +y while the individual components, which don't really "add up" to anything but a sense of mathematical/cumulative awe, are exquisitely turned -x, -y poems.
I don't intend these grids as anything other than images of the provisional ledges by which I gain a toehold on the new poetry I come across. They are meant to come dialectically undone under pressure.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Mired
You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're
normal, but deep down you really just want to
strip off your clothes and roll around in
chicken fat.
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla
Check out Deborah's gorgeous Queen of Chain poems, posted in response to my question about poetry based on Cremaster. I haven't seen the Queen yet, but I will on Wednesday. Come to think of it, Deborah's poems have always been Barney-esque; I'm thinking especially of Cremaster 2 with all the bees.
Also a belated blogroll welcome to the st*ar nosed mole.
Yow, customers!
You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're
normal, but deep down you really just want to
strip off your clothes and roll around in
chicken fat.
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla
Check out Deborah's gorgeous Queen of Chain poems, posted in response to my question about poetry based on Cremaster. I haven't seen the Queen yet, but I will on Wednesday. Come to think of it, Deborah's poems have always been Barney-esque; I'm thinking especially of Cremaster 2 with all the bees.
Also a belated blogroll welcome to the st*ar nosed mole.
Yow, customers!
I like Aaron's little dog grid quite a bit, though I can't quite "read" it. I can see it as an index of the image, with the different dogs suggesting different emphases: the lower right dog seems to represent allegiance to the experience of representation (with the flash preserved); the upper left dog is a version of pointillism; the lower left dog is cubist or perhaps simply the will toward abstraction; and so on. But how these little dogs speak to "the mind's ear" is unclear to me; I can't hear them barking. Gary's version is more of a black hole (remember that Disney movie from the early eighties, The Black Hole? With the faceless robots? Scary!) representing perhaps poetry's infinite ability to lightlessly absorb grids. Which can hardly be gainsaid.
Flipping through Clayton Eshleman's new book Juniper Fuse, enraptured by his use of this Hart Crane quote. It's from a prose poem, "Havana Rose":
Flipping through Clayton Eshleman's new book Juniper Fuse, enraptured by his use of this Hart Crane quote. It's from a prose poem, "Havana Rose":
And during the wait over dinner at La Diana, the Doctor had saiid—who was American also—"You cannot heed the negative—, so might go on to underserved doom . . . must therefore loose yourself within a pattern's mastery that you can conceive, that you can yield to—by which also you win and gain that mastery and happiness which is your own from birth."A beautiful dialectic of mastery and surrender; a twentieth century updating of Wyatt's "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind."
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Anthony Robinson joins my blogroll, and has some bones to pick about my little grid below. I already said it was subjective, but with that major caveat out of the way:
1) Feel free to put Chaucer on the grid, but the thing about most dead poets, especially the long dead, is that their historicity tends to trump this (obviously spatial) method of classification. I already know what Chaucer is "for," and don't need therefore to "place" him this way. Which doesn't mean I couldn't learn something from doing that or that it isn't kind of too bad that I can no longer read Chaucer "naively." The naivete of my little grid is, I think, its primary virtue and limitation.
2) Chaucer and Koch are both -x, +y. Do they have anything else in common? A more interesting comparison that comes to mind is Spenser and Koch; I'm thinking of Koch's book of apostrophes to abstract entities, which for me parallels the oddities that result from the extreme anthropomorphization that goes on with Spenser's allegorical figures. (Spenser is +x, +y though).
3) "Funny" and "serious" are for me entirely questions of tone. To be more precise, in the "experimental" work that I'm applying this grid to, the x axis describes the spirit in which logopoetic play, in all its varieties, is embarked upon. When Susan Howe etymologizes a word, she tends to be +x; when Lisa Jarnot structures a Steinian repetition of "little hot chickens," she's being -x. Which does not mean that the poem in which she does this has no "serious" or political intent. I'm tracking a particular effect (or affect) which helps me manage the ever-expanding library of contemporary poetry that I'm carrying around in my head.
4) I have no idea if anyone other than me would find this model useful. But I put it up because I'm curious about the means people employ to manage the sheer prolificness of the innovative poetry scene. When you attune your antennae to small press publishing, it's hard not to feel overwhelmed. I should point out too that I do not particularly favor any one of these vectors—there are poets in all four that I value. Plus the setting of bounds immediately creates a zone beyond bounds: poetry that defeats this mode of classification becomes immediately especially interesting to me. Jarnot is already complicated, as I noted below—and you can see how I've tried to domesticate her a little bit above; an unfortunate side-effect of systems-making, even a deliberately crude and rudimentary system such as this one. But I'm intrigued by poets who might dialectically confound these categories. Are there Baroque Minimalists? Austere Maximalists? The x vector seems more a question of that tone/intent distinction: funny writing for serious ends (the reverse is hard to imagine, except as parody).
I hope people will come up with/admit to their own grids and post them!
1) Feel free to put Chaucer on the grid, but the thing about most dead poets, especially the long dead, is that their historicity tends to trump this (obviously spatial) method of classification. I already know what Chaucer is "for," and don't need therefore to "place" him this way. Which doesn't mean I couldn't learn something from doing that or that it isn't kind of too bad that I can no longer read Chaucer "naively." The naivete of my little grid is, I think, its primary virtue and limitation.
2) Chaucer and Koch are both -x, +y. Do they have anything else in common? A more interesting comparison that comes to mind is Spenser and Koch; I'm thinking of Koch's book of apostrophes to abstract entities, which for me parallels the oddities that result from the extreme anthropomorphization that goes on with Spenser's allegorical figures. (Spenser is +x, +y though).
3) "Funny" and "serious" are for me entirely questions of tone. To be more precise, in the "experimental" work that I'm applying this grid to, the x axis describes the spirit in which logopoetic play, in all its varieties, is embarked upon. When Susan Howe etymologizes a word, she tends to be +x; when Lisa Jarnot structures a Steinian repetition of "little hot chickens," she's being -x. Which does not mean that the poem in which she does this has no "serious" or political intent. I'm tracking a particular effect (or affect) which helps me manage the ever-expanding library of contemporary poetry that I'm carrying around in my head.
4) I have no idea if anyone other than me would find this model useful. But I put it up because I'm curious about the means people employ to manage the sheer prolificness of the innovative poetry scene. When you attune your antennae to small press publishing, it's hard not to feel overwhelmed. I should point out too that I do not particularly favor any one of these vectors—there are poets in all four that I value. Plus the setting of bounds immediately creates a zone beyond bounds: poetry that defeats this mode of classification becomes immediately especially interesting to me. Jarnot is already complicated, as I noted below—and you can see how I've tried to domesticate her a little bit above; an unfortunate side-effect of systems-making, even a deliberately crude and rudimentary system such as this one. But I'm intrigued by poets who might dialectically confound these categories. Are there Baroque Minimalists? Austere Maximalists? The x vector seems more a question of that tone/intent distinction: funny writing for serious ends (the reverse is hard to imagine, except as parody).
I hope people will come up with/admit to their own grids and post them!
Friday, March 12, 2004
Here's the method of classification I tend to find most useful for contemporary poetry (apologies for the way your browser may screw this up; it's supposed to be a classic squared + sign):
Maximalist
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Funny——————————————————————————————————Serious
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Minimalist
Obviously this purely spatial model omits the question of history and lineage. But I sometimes wonder if we're all not a little too obsessed with history and lineage—why am I always grubbing around looking for parents (or better, grandparents)? Why my Anxiety to Proclaim My Influences? This little axis is a much better representation of the way in which I tend to "place" a given poet when reading their work. The historicism/lineage approach tends to come into play prior to this, when I choose a given magazine or book to read because it bears the traces of a history which I'm already interested in. But when I'm actually reading, somewhere inside my brain that poet gets assigned a point (a single poet may hit multiple marks of course, especially across a career). Michael Palmer scores +x, -y; a book like Gary's How to Proceed in the Arts is a -x, -y; hardcore langpos like Ron or Barrett Watten score very high in the x, y zone; Jarnot's Black Dog Songs is -y but highly motile along the x axis; and so on.
Not sure how much analysis this structure will bear, but it's a fairly accurate representation of my most visceral subjective judgments.
Maximalist
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Funny——————————————————————————————————Serious
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Minimalist
Obviously this purely spatial model omits the question of history and lineage. But I sometimes wonder if we're all not a little too obsessed with history and lineage—why am I always grubbing around looking for parents (or better, grandparents)? Why my Anxiety to Proclaim My Influences? This little axis is a much better representation of the way in which I tend to "place" a given poet when reading their work. The historicism/lineage approach tends to come into play prior to this, when I choose a given magazine or book to read because it bears the traces of a history which I'm already interested in. But when I'm actually reading, somewhere inside my brain that poet gets assigned a point (a single poet may hit multiple marks of course, especially across a career). Michael Palmer scores +x, -y; a book like Gary's How to Proceed in the Arts is a -x, -y; hardcore langpos like Ron or Barrett Watten score very high in the x, y zone; Jarnot's Black Dog Songs is -y but highly motile along the x axis; and so on.
Not sure how much analysis this structure will bear, but it's a fairly accurate representation of my most visceral subjective judgments.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Okay, maybe it's not really a good poem, and I didn't realize how old it was. I don't know why I should find myself in the position of defending Ploughshares, but check out the table of contents for their Winter 2002-2003 issue. C.D. Wright was the guest editor and poets I admire in the TOC include Caroline Crumpacker, Christopher Janke, Erin Moure, Brian Teare, and Liz Waldner (there's also some nonfiction by Eleni Sikelianos and a marvelously strange play by Thalia Field). So there.
Aaron's ruminations on Patchen and satisfaction have got me thinking. The attraction to a poet who's no longer on the avant radar reminds me of my own attraction to Delmore Schwartz's work—although Patchen's brand of creaturely affirmation is rare there. It's more the unabashed Freudianism linked with the quasi-Shakespearean language and the ethical handwringing that gets me—Delmore Schwartz as the Jewish Berryman.
The question of satisfaction might be rephrased as one of affirmation. One of the reasons I'm obsessed with pastoral is that I see it as being opposed to the (capitalist/patriarchal/war-ridden) world-as-given and thus profoundly negative; but it is also a positive representation of creaturely enjoyment and satisfaction (though not luxury). Patchen's poem is a perfect little urban pastoral that way. But I'm also convinced that the most interesting 20th century pastoral is found in the work of the Objectivists and their heirs--that the poem which prioritizes being over meaning is closer to the fantasy of natural fulfillment that pastoral represents.
I tend to find affirmation/satisfaction more readily in language that conveys lushness rather than that which attempts to represent a situation of satisfaction—such as Stevens' divine but near-meaningless lines, "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!" But then of course we're pushing past mere satisfaction into the realm of the sublime (the mathematical overflow of semantics, the dynamic power of sound). So "satisfaction" tends more toward the Kantian beautiful when it's in a poem—that which pleases universally without a concept. Within the poem it's more like the pleasing, since the speaker has an interest in his own sexual and gastronomic satisfaction. But as a representation culminating in the line "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful," it might be beauty.
No, I don't think satisfaction with the world-as-given is "allowed." But plenty of poets provide visions of a functioning microworld (based in the body but not in biopower) that implicitly rejects Ideological State Apparatuses, or the Deleuzian "segmentary," or total administration, or whatever you'd like to call it. The New York School poets were very adept at this; particularly O'Hara and Schuyler but I also see it in Barbara Guest and of course Ted Berrigan. I'm sure this list could be expanded. But again, I think the divide comes between a representation of direct, sensual satisfaction and language which pleases in this way—which is beautiful rather than sublime via indeterminacy or excess. Is "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful" a beautiful line? I think it might be for me if it weren't the last line, or if through some other means it didn't have to bear the weight of an epiphany, the solution to the riddle of the poem. I prefer my riddles unsolved—better, unriddled.
The question of satisfaction might be rephrased as one of affirmation. One of the reasons I'm obsessed with pastoral is that I see it as being opposed to the (capitalist/patriarchal/war-ridden) world-as-given and thus profoundly negative; but it is also a positive representation of creaturely enjoyment and satisfaction (though not luxury). Patchen's poem is a perfect little urban pastoral that way. But I'm also convinced that the most interesting 20th century pastoral is found in the work of the Objectivists and their heirs--that the poem which prioritizes being over meaning is closer to the fantasy of natural fulfillment that pastoral represents.
I tend to find affirmation/satisfaction more readily in language that conveys lushness rather than that which attempts to represent a situation of satisfaction—such as Stevens' divine but near-meaningless lines, "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!" But then of course we're pushing past mere satisfaction into the realm of the sublime (the mathematical overflow of semantics, the dynamic power of sound). So "satisfaction" tends more toward the Kantian beautiful when it's in a poem—that which pleases universally without a concept. Within the poem it's more like the pleasing, since the speaker has an interest in his own sexual and gastronomic satisfaction. But as a representation culminating in the line "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful," it might be beauty.
No, I don't think satisfaction with the world-as-given is "allowed." But plenty of poets provide visions of a functioning microworld (based in the body but not in biopower) that implicitly rejects Ideological State Apparatuses, or the Deleuzian "segmentary," or total administration, or whatever you'd like to call it. The New York School poets were very adept at this; particularly O'Hara and Schuyler but I also see it in Barbara Guest and of course Ted Berrigan. I'm sure this list could be expanded. But again, I think the divide comes between a representation of direct, sensual satisfaction and language which pleases in this way—which is beautiful rather than sublime via indeterminacy or excess. Is "Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful" a beautiful line? I think it might be for me if it weren't the last line, or if through some other means it didn't have to bear the weight of an epiphany, the solution to the riddle of the poem. I prefer my riddles unsolved—better, unriddled.
My lord, what's happening in Spain?
And as long as I'm talking about the news, RIP Spalding Gray. The news was as sad as it was unsurprising, especially after I read this. I saw him perform his monologue "It's a Slippery Slope" in Missoula about six years ago. He was always one of those artists who excited me because the seeming simplicity and directness of his approach made what he was doing seem radically new. I have similar feelings now about Matthew Barney, having seen Cremaster 3 last night. Wow, man. Of course there's nothing simple or direct about what Barney does in his films; they're as baroque and complex as an cut-up of Escher prints and Eraserhead would be, in full color yet. But I do get a strangely similar feel of the most direct possible access to the artist's unconscious—which is not to say there isn't a considerable amount of ironic and formal mediation, wildly on display in Barney's work and visible as visual discretion (the plaid shirt, the table, the glass of water) in Gray's. Seeing them in action gave me that feeling I get from the best poetry, a feeling called inspiration by any other name.
As near as I can tell, Cremaster 3 is "about" the aggression behind the masculine cabal that stands behind masculine/capitalist acts of creation, however beautiful the works themselves, such as the Chrysler Building, might be. Anyway. Astonishing images, some quite disturbing. Quite a bit of verbal humor too, in the credits and in the levels of "The Order." Has anyone written poems inspired by Barney? It seems too obvious an angle to pursue, but you could do a lot with the figure of Aimee Mullins (the beautiful model/athlete with no legs below the knee) alone. And there's two more movies to go!
And as long as I'm talking about the news, RIP Spalding Gray. The news was as sad as it was unsurprising, especially after I read this. I saw him perform his monologue "It's a Slippery Slope" in Missoula about six years ago. He was always one of those artists who excited me because the seeming simplicity and directness of his approach made what he was doing seem radically new. I have similar feelings now about Matthew Barney, having seen Cremaster 3 last night. Wow, man. Of course there's nothing simple or direct about what Barney does in his films; they're as baroque and complex as an cut-up of Escher prints and Eraserhead would be, in full color yet. But I do get a strangely similar feel of the most direct possible access to the artist's unconscious—which is not to say there isn't a considerable amount of ironic and formal mediation, wildly on display in Barney's work and visible as visual discretion (the plaid shirt, the table, the glass of water) in Gray's. Seeing them in action gave me that feeling I get from the best poetry, a feeling called inspiration by any other name.
As near as I can tell, Cremaster 3 is "about" the aggression behind the masculine cabal that stands behind masculine/capitalist acts of creation, however beautiful the works themselves, such as the Chrysler Building, might be. Anyway. Astonishing images, some quite disturbing. Quite a bit of verbal humor too, in the credits and in the levels of "The Order." Has anyone written poems inspired by Barney? It seems too obvious an angle to pursue, but you could do a lot with the figure of Aimee Mullins (the beautiful model/athlete with no legs below the knee) alone. And there's two more movies to go!
Monday, March 08, 2004
My knee-jerk reaction to Ron's test is to try and find something interesting in Ploughshares. How about this? Wouldn't be that out of place in Kiosk, I'm thinking.
Ron's constant categorization of poetry into us & them (there seem to be multiple "usses" but only one "them") strikes me as an example of how what starts as a convenient method for winnowing chaff becomes an end in itself—it's the dialectic of enlightenment all over again. I myself am swayed by the names of authors, blurbists, publishers, and the look/feel of a given book, magazine, or website. There's just too much stuff being published to not do this. But I think it's my responsibility as a reader to extend the antennae a bit further, to be at least prepared to receive signals from other sources. The anonymous "test of poetry" is too artificial; far from directing my attention more to the text itself, both Ron and Zukofsky's tests return me to the compulsive catbird seat of identity establishment: who wrote this? Better I think to listen to the advice of friends (and I certainly count other bloggers as friends, at least for this purpose); and better to not entirely shut one's ears to the "official" culture, however maddening the episodes this exposes you to might be. I certainly don't expect to do without Lucie Brock-Broido just because she's published by Knopf (and has several times appeared in Ploughshares!), reviewed in the New York Times, and dissed by Ray McDaniel (though I grant he makes some valid and interesting points, particularly about the "anonymity" of Brock-Broido's own work—that is, the exclusion of the language and furniture of modernity). Which is not to say I'm interested in pluralism for its own sake: I think the energy mustered by partisanship is too valuable a resource to be squandered. I'm just more interested in partisanship for kinds of writing than in partisanship against other kinds.
Ron's constant categorization of poetry into us & them (there seem to be multiple "usses" but only one "them") strikes me as an example of how what starts as a convenient method for winnowing chaff becomes an end in itself—it's the dialectic of enlightenment all over again. I myself am swayed by the names of authors, blurbists, publishers, and the look/feel of a given book, magazine, or website. There's just too much stuff being published to not do this. But I think it's my responsibility as a reader to extend the antennae a bit further, to be at least prepared to receive signals from other sources. The anonymous "test of poetry" is too artificial; far from directing my attention more to the text itself, both Ron and Zukofsky's tests return me to the compulsive catbird seat of identity establishment: who wrote this? Better I think to listen to the advice of friends (and I certainly count other bloggers as friends, at least for this purpose); and better to not entirely shut one's ears to the "official" culture, however maddening the episodes this exposes you to might be. I certainly don't expect to do without Lucie Brock-Broido just because she's published by Knopf (and has several times appeared in Ploughshares!), reviewed in the New York Times, and dissed by Ray McDaniel (though I grant he makes some valid and interesting points, particularly about the "anonymity" of Brock-Broido's own work—that is, the exclusion of the language and furniture of modernity). Which is not to say I'm interested in pluralism for its own sake: I think the energy mustered by partisanship is too valuable a resource to be squandered. I'm just more interested in partisanship for kinds of writing than in partisanship against other kinds.
Sunday, March 07, 2004
At the beginning of the seminar he taught last semester on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Prof. Peter Hohendahl said that he believed Adorno had become a "classic," by which he seemed to mean a text that no longer directly engaged our intellectual environment (it was no longer an "intervention"), but rather had become part of that environment's foundations, the necessary backdrop for understanding that which was not yet classic (he seemed to imply that this was the status of Habermas' text) and which was still active in the struggle to make/understand our world ("how everybody is doing everything," in Gertrude Stein's parlance, which incidentally goes to the root of the too-easily effaced Aufhebung between making and understanding). I believe a collorary to this proposition is that one may take two basic approaches to reading a "classic": reading it as background, as intellectual history, as a secondary source to a more primary (that is, contemporary) text; or one may engage it directly by reading it "against the grain," which is to say "close reading"—treating the text as a literary text. Literary texts themselves may be read as classics—I take any straightforward explication of, for example, what Eliot and Pound were up to in The Waste Land as a "classic" reading; they may also be read against the grain, which is probably ninety percent of the Eliot explication industry (New Historicist readings, postcolonial readings, and so forth). The problem that I'm experiencing now arises from trying to write about texts which have an undeniably "classic" status for the post-avant community (Oppen, Zukofsky, Olson, Johnson) but are still virtually unknown to the literary community at large (represented synecdochally in this case by English departments). A fair amount of interpretive labor is still required on my part simply to understand and explicate what someone like Oppen was up to: I have to distinguish objectivist from symbolist modes of writing, explain the often negative presence of the political, trace the influence of Heidegger, etc. But a large number of poets and a smaller number of critics have already more or less internalized all this stuff: they have been influenced by Oppen, often in fundamental ways, without having mustered the kind of large-scale critical investigation to transform him into an acknowledged classic. I guess I'm talking about the unfinished labor of canon formation, which becomes especially problematic in the case of writers (and their self-appointed descendants) who seek to undermine the hierarchical and institutional structures that make canons possible in the first place.
This is the sort of problem that disappears if you look at it from the right angle, and this angle is easily accessible to me when I wear my poet's hat: it's enough to me to intuit and respond to the nearly astral influences shed by a canonically "unknown" (unknowable?) poet like Ronald Johnson without producing a treatise on his poetics. But my other hat, that of the literary scholar, is really only fun to wear when I'm able to assume a text's classicness so I can skip the labor of explication and go right to the kind of speculative improvisation that reading-against-the-grain encourages. It is my continued and perhaps naive hope that it's posssible to do this sort of writing as a scholar, footnotes and all. Certainly a large part of the pleasure I've already derived from my dissertation research ("research" never seems like quite the right word, since I'm not delving in archives; it's almost more like a highly disciplined variety of daydreaming) comes from reading texts against the grain of their "classical" context: when I turn Lawrence into an Objectivist or locate a momentary rejection of Christian transcendence in Eliot's Four Quartets I get a lovely little frisson. It's also true that the status of these texts qua classics means that I can do what I like to them without fear of "damaging" them or inhibiting their canonicity; this might even be my explicit goal. But when I write about Johnson, I do want to enter him into the canon, or at least a canon: I want my reading to lead to further readings. This might be a fundamentally different critical task, requiring other faculties than those the clever graduate student generally relies upon. It's probably no coincidence that the best writer on Johnson I've been able to locate is Guy Davenport, whose style is erudite without ever being academic, and whose essays invariably make me want to read whatever writer he's discussing, be it Johnson or Archilocus. This genre of writing is closer to the review than it is to the critical essay. But what does it mean to write a "review" of Discrete Series or RADI OS? A willful travesty of temporality in answer to the travesty of these writers' having gone unreviewed in their own time?
I am starting to put together a little essay on Johnson's ARK, and perhaps thinking of it as a review will provide me with the elbow room that I fear treating him as an undercanonized classic will deprive me of.
This is the sort of problem that disappears if you look at it from the right angle, and this angle is easily accessible to me when I wear my poet's hat: it's enough to me to intuit and respond to the nearly astral influences shed by a canonically "unknown" (unknowable?) poet like Ronald Johnson without producing a treatise on his poetics. But my other hat, that of the literary scholar, is really only fun to wear when I'm able to assume a text's classicness so I can skip the labor of explication and go right to the kind of speculative improvisation that reading-against-the-grain encourages. It is my continued and perhaps naive hope that it's posssible to do this sort of writing as a scholar, footnotes and all. Certainly a large part of the pleasure I've already derived from my dissertation research ("research" never seems like quite the right word, since I'm not delving in archives; it's almost more like a highly disciplined variety of daydreaming) comes from reading texts against the grain of their "classical" context: when I turn Lawrence into an Objectivist or locate a momentary rejection of Christian transcendence in Eliot's Four Quartets I get a lovely little frisson. It's also true that the status of these texts qua classics means that I can do what I like to them without fear of "damaging" them or inhibiting their canonicity; this might even be my explicit goal. But when I write about Johnson, I do want to enter him into the canon, or at least a canon: I want my reading to lead to further readings. This might be a fundamentally different critical task, requiring other faculties than those the clever graduate student generally relies upon. It's probably no coincidence that the best writer on Johnson I've been able to locate is Guy Davenport, whose style is erudite without ever being academic, and whose essays invariably make me want to read whatever writer he's discussing, be it Johnson or Archilocus. This genre of writing is closer to the review than it is to the critical essay. But what does it mean to write a "review" of Discrete Series or RADI OS? A willful travesty of temporality in answer to the travesty of these writers' having gone unreviewed in their own time?
I am starting to put together a little essay on Johnson's ARK, and perhaps thinking of it as a review will provide me with the elbow room that I fear treating him as an undercanonized classic will deprive me of.
Thursday, March 04, 2004
Hear, hear Yingpow's eloquent defense of blogging, and, more importantly, her expression of the general American loneliness which I would argue besets poets all the more strongly because they are unwilling or unable to drug themselves out of feeling it the way most folks do. Nobody gets to "be a poet" without living with the pain of a limb in perpetual thaw. I've had the good fortune of institutional support now for years after finishing my Montana MFA, which has given me time to figure out a strategy for living as a poet (also time to run up thousands of dollars in debt, but that's another story). I wonder if it would be possible to teach the stuff I've picked up in a directed way—perhaps the best an MFA program could do would be to foster an atmosphere in which people felt safe enough to express these concerns and fears. Must think more about this.
Saw the first two movies in Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle last night. Very intense, very David Lynch in Eraserhead mode. (I wonder if they can be said to have mutually influenced each other.) My favorite moment comes at the end, when (a surprisingly effective) Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini leans down from the stage to inquire of the mysteriou Fay, "Madam, what is your discipline?"
What indeed.
Saw the first two movies in Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle last night. Very intense, very David Lynch in Eraserhead mode. (I wonder if they can be said to have mutually influenced each other.) My favorite moment comes at the end, when (a surprisingly effective) Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini leans down from the stage to inquire of the mysteriou Fay, "Madam, what is your discipline?"
What indeed.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
So I'm standing there in the polling booth, looking at all the switches, and I realize: I don't want to vote for Edwards. He's just as weasely as Kerry is on gay marriage and Iraq; he just doesn't have as long a record of weaseliness. Who is the candidate who most closely represents my own views (short of a complete restructuring of our government into a parliamentary system)? Who is the candidate who won't do any damage to the eventual nominee (Kerry), yet who just might push the party a bit further to the left if he can bring some delegates to the table? It's Kucinich. It was Kucinich the whole time.
I voted my heart and it felt good.
I voted my heart and it felt good.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Need a narrative to sustain me now. Drifting among pieces of poems from Norma Cole, Lisa Fishman, Rosmarie Waldrop. Brief scalding baths in their intelligence. But I spent most of the evening finishing a novel by Charles Baxter, Saul and Patsy. A book of modest ambitions, I thought as I was reading it, but it turns out to be yet another response (less bloody than most) to the Columbine massacres. A satisfyingly miniature world. So many novelists depend on the construct of the village to make their plots work: a limited number of characters mattering to each other. But how many of us still live in villages? Maybe we all still do and what dissatisfies me about these works (and most fiction) is how it doesn't pay the right sort of attention to how nowadays we make and will our villages. Blogland the obvious example, though the Buffalo-listers (won't you stay home tonight?) decry us as boutiquists to their public square, which somehow in their rhetoric manages to combine the virtues of manfulness with vulnerability. We are all vulnerable enough already, I think. It bores me. The problem bores me. No: not the problem, but its setting. An insufficiency of foil.
Rosmarie Waldrop, from her poem "In a Flash" in Love, Like Pronouns:
Barney's Cremaster cycle has come to Cornell Cinema this week, and it sounds like I'm ready for it.
Rosmarie Waldrop, from her poem "In a Flash" in Love, Like Pronouns:
1Reminds me of the beginning of Clark Coolidge's At Egypt: "I came here. I don't know you here." Brilliant. The givenness, the inheritance, of position. This goes back to what Gary was saying about marking. Which has sent me back to Bruce Andrews from the library today. I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up. Exactly. or, Social Romanticism. Yes. Writing is fighting is the already holey body, hiding the reader's face in its sleeves.
There were fragments. I was born.
It was not justified. I
learned: the impenetrability of bodies.
But a penetrating look? To "surge
before." To haggle ill-equipped.
And "that other" opposed to.
Desire. I was calm between my selves.
Barney's Cremaster cycle has come to Cornell Cinema this week, and it sounds like I'm ready for it.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Reading Nada and Gary's great epistolary epic Swoon again here at work, and I thought I'd share with you the ten things Nada wants (or wanted) from a relationship:
Incidentally, whatever mystery "Jane Dark" wants to preserve by her pseudonym has been pretty much given away by her. Just click on the "nominally my boss" link over here. But a pseudonym (heteronym?) may still possess the residual value of deferring (differancing?) identity-in-general when it no longer conceals identity-in-particular. Hm.
An addictive read, Swoon. Aside from the happy ending, one thing I like about it is that it takes the form of an actual epistolary dialogue. I love reading writers' letters, but you usually only get to read the Great (Wo)Man's letters and not those of his/her correspondents.
Still in a bit of a post-exam drift. Today I started to read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and then put it down again. Two books of poetry that I seem to be perpetually rereading at the moment are E. Tracy Grinnell's music or forgetting and Sally Keith's Design. (My friends Karen and Jerry are visiting Sally in Rochester this weekend, actually). The book I'm reading most attentively (in the conventional beginning-to-end sense) is The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell's manner is a little irritating at times, a little fusselly (sorry, couldn't resist), a little arch. But it's a must read if you're interested in modernism. I'm struck most by his claim about the intense literariness of the War—how, thanks to the absence of TV and radio, literature and literacy were enjoying an intensity of prestige that had been and has never again been equalled. A sick but unmistakable sense of nostalgia washes over me when I read this. Media is, quite literally, a means of connection. There's a distinctive pleasure to be found in connecting with one's culture, particularly when that culture has produced something you can almost wholeheartedly embrace (for me lately and surprisingly it's been hip-hop: the Black Eyed Peas, Outkast, and the Grey Album--believe the hype). But there's a particular intimacy of connection (and how much of this intimacy derives from its exclusivity?) to that found in print, particularly poetry. I recognize the world of Swoon as being the world I actually live in, though to find oneself outside it contemplating it obviously puts that perspective sous rature. Swoon,, or the Grinnell or Keith books, make up for what they lack in immediacy quite literally: in their mediacy, their particular sensual and intellectual (no. 8) way of conveying weltanschauung, which is ultimately more compelling and necessary to me than the "message" being conveyed.
In other words: just now down the hall from the Bookery, a saxophone player at Moosewood was playing "I Just Called (To Say I Love You)." The only call we ever want to hear, right? But can we hear it when, as now, it comes served between thickest slices of aural cheese? "Only connect," sure—but are you willing to accept the charges?
1) resonanceThis is a pretty damn good list. But I wonder if I would put the same things in the same order. "Resonance," however, is deep and mysterious enough to be at the top of anyone's list, I should think.
2) mutual adoration
3) mutual respect (to include trust)
4) levity
5) shared time
6) shared tasks (some concept of our common good/common goals?)
7) world expansion
8) stimulation (intellectual, physical)
9) mutual curiosity
10) freshness
Incidentally, whatever mystery "Jane Dark" wants to preserve by her pseudonym has been pretty much given away by her. Just click on the "nominally my boss" link over here. But a pseudonym (heteronym?) may still possess the residual value of deferring (differancing?) identity-in-general when it no longer conceals identity-in-particular. Hm.
An addictive read, Swoon. Aside from the happy ending, one thing I like about it is that it takes the form of an actual epistolary dialogue. I love reading writers' letters, but you usually only get to read the Great (Wo)Man's letters and not those of his/her correspondents.
Still in a bit of a post-exam drift. Today I started to read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and then put it down again. Two books of poetry that I seem to be perpetually rereading at the moment are E. Tracy Grinnell's music or forgetting and Sally Keith's Design. (My friends Karen and Jerry are visiting Sally in Rochester this weekend, actually). The book I'm reading most attentively (in the conventional beginning-to-end sense) is The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell's manner is a little irritating at times, a little fusselly (sorry, couldn't resist), a little arch. But it's a must read if you're interested in modernism. I'm struck most by his claim about the intense literariness of the War—how, thanks to the absence of TV and radio, literature and literacy were enjoying an intensity of prestige that had been and has never again been equalled. A sick but unmistakable sense of nostalgia washes over me when I read this. Media is, quite literally, a means of connection. There's a distinctive pleasure to be found in connecting with one's culture, particularly when that culture has produced something you can almost wholeheartedly embrace (for me lately and surprisingly it's been hip-hop: the Black Eyed Peas, Outkast, and the Grey Album--believe the hype). But there's a particular intimacy of connection (and how much of this intimacy derives from its exclusivity?) to that found in print, particularly poetry. I recognize the world of Swoon as being the world I actually live in, though to find oneself outside it contemplating it obviously puts that perspective sous rature. Swoon,, or the Grinnell or Keith books, make up for what they lack in immediacy quite literally: in their mediacy, their particular sensual and intellectual (no. 8) way of conveying weltanschauung, which is ultimately more compelling and necessary to me than the "message" being conveyed.
In other words: just now down the hall from the Bookery, a saxophone player at Moosewood was playing "I Just Called (To Say I Love You)." The only call we ever want to hear, right? But can we hear it when, as now, it comes served between thickest slices of aural cheese? "Only connect," sure—but are you willing to accept the charges?
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Yesterday I was on an intellectual high, aided and abetted by a very strong, very large cup of Gimme! coffee (really the consistently best coffee I've ever tasted). I decided it was time to stop dodging Derrida. I haven't made a sustained attempt to read him since I was at Montana ("White Mythology," Spurs, and assorted bits and excerpts from Margins of Philosophy). But reading Spivak's wonderful preface to Of Grammatology has helped me realize how much he is in the deep background of everything else I've been thinking since I started grad school; I ignore him at my peril. Right now I'm struck by the resemblance between Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's differance; I suspect that many large volumes on this subject have been written and will continue to be written. Naturally I started trying to fit him into my notion of pastoral—is the Virgilian locus amoenus a site of bricolage from which the dream of "engineering" is deferred? I fear I must sound impossibly naive. But still I'm looking forward to reading the whole book. I also devoted part of yesterday to reading Ronald Johnson and forming some ideas for how he fits into my dissertation; in some ways he represents the telos of modernist pastoral as I'm defining it.
But that was yesterday: today I'm a slug. I was up late commenting on student poems and after I got home from teaching found myself unable to do more than read the article about Lyle Lovett in the new New Yorker and futz around gathering the materials for a certain notorious remixing of rapper X with pop group Y. I usually feel guilty about this sort of thing, but damnit, in this case copyright law is standing in the way of art. Now I'm going to bliss out listening while thumbing through Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which somehow seems appropriate enough.
But that was yesterday: today I'm a slug. I was up late commenting on student poems and after I got home from teaching found myself unable to do more than read the article about Lyle Lovett in the new New Yorker and futz around gathering the materials for a certain notorious remixing of rapper X with pop group Y. I usually feel guilty about this sort of thing, but damnit, in this case copyright law is standing in the way of art. Now I'm going to bliss out listening while thumbing through Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which somehow seems appropriate enough.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
It Figures
You're Prufrock and Other Observations!
by T.S. Eliot
Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
The mysterious Jane Dark joins the blogroll. I've also decided to push Edwards instead of Kerry. I think the first John is the one the Republicans are really nervous about. And let's face it: in this culture, a long record of almost anything appears to be a liability in electoral politics. It may take one handsome Southern boy (who can at least speak in complete sentences) to defeat another.
I think Bush's gay marriage amendment might backfire on him. Kerry is on the right track when he says it's a distraction from Bush's appalling domestic record. Either candidate just might have a shot if he simply doesn't lie there like a dead fish in the face of the Republican vitriol machine.
I think Bush's gay marriage amendment might backfire on him. Kerry is on the right track when he says it's a distraction from Bush's appalling domestic record. Either candidate just might have a shot if he simply doesn't lie there like a dead fish in the face of the Republican vitriol machine.
Monday, February 23, 2004
Why hasn't anyone ever told me what a terrific magazine Chicago Review is? I picked up the new issue in New York and it seems to be just about everything I've ever wanted in a literary magazine. The poetry is of a very high order: so far I 've read the work by Camille Guthrie*, Ed Roberson, Stefanie Marlis, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Joan Retallack, and Karen Volkman (her sonnet project, which I imagine will be a book one of these days, fills me with wonder and envy). In addition to the poem there's a very moving essay/talk by Michael Palmer, "Poetry and Contingency: Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought." There's probably no poet of his generation that I admire more than Palmer, and I think a lot of the poetry in this issue is touched by his aesthetic: a profoundly ethical wit rendered in sparsely musical and suggestive language, like headlights flashing through a window to make the bedroom strange. There's also some interesting looking prose by Gerard Roth and Viet Dinh, and a couple of other essays I'm looking forward to reading, particulary Joshua Weiner's "The Apprenticeship of Dr. Williams." There are many reviews, including one of Jennifer Moxley's The Sense Record, a book with which I have become somewhat obsessed. She's one of the rare contemporary poets I'm aware of whose sensibility, whose difficulty, resembles that of John Donne: her muse is not indeterminacy but a rage for the syntactically accurate poetic process. (I'm getting a similar vibe from Elizabeth Willis' more playful Turneresque.) Best of all is the blog-like "Notes and Comments" section at the very end, which includes a brief memoir of the late Stan Brakhage, a review of a Max Beckmann show at the Tate Modern in London, Andrzej Stasiuk's reflections on Poland's membership in the so-called "coalition of the willing," and some charming reports on poetry readings in Chicago by Matthias Regan, John Taggart, Michael Heller, Trevor Joyce, Tom Raworth, Jennifer Walshe, Mark Salerno, and Lisa Jarnot. All this for just six dollars! Sign me up!
* It seems that every couple of years I get in touch with Camille and her husband Duncan Dobbelmann (two very talented poets), then lose touch again. Camille and I once shared an Academy of American Poets prize back when were at Vassar together. If by chance you have her or Duncan's e-mail address, would you please let me know?
* It seems that every couple of years I get in touch with Camille and her husband Duncan Dobbelmann (two very talented poets), then lose touch again. Camille and I once shared an Academy of American Poets prize back when were at Vassar together. If by chance you have her or Duncan's e-mail address, would you please let me know?
Back from NYC and New Jersey, where I gave readngs at the Ear Inn and the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, where my mother was once a member and my dad and stepmother still are. I feel more than a little ambivalent about Unitarianism, given that I identify as a (secular) Jew, but it was a very important place in her life and it felt right to read there. Some of the women who had been part of a poetry group she'd led were there for the reading, and they said sweet, moving things afterward—one described my mother as a "poetry shaman," which sounds about right. Sometimes I imagine that my life as a poet is my mother's afterlife. In one sense at least, that's literally true.
Both readings went very well (you were missed, Shanna—but I will indeed see you at AWP). But in some ways the most memorable evening was Friday night, when Emily and I, two of her best friends, and their boyfriends, went out on the town in Brooklyn. Almost everyone had something to celebrate: I had passed my A exam; Jen and Rachel both had new jobs in the film industry; Rachel is five months pregnant and her partner Al couldn't stop beaming about it; and Emily was recently promoted at her job. We went to a brand new restaurant in Cobble Hill called Blue Star, where Al and Rachel are friends with the chef, a manic Deadhead with a genius for what I can only call gourmet white-trash cooking (example: a delicately fried pastry filled with macaroni and cheese served with garlic mashed potatoes). He wouldn't let us order anything; instead plate after plate of delicious seafood and three bottles of wine came without our asking. I enjoyed oysters for the first time, and king crab, and lots of wine. Afterward came another first time: karaoke at the Hope and Anchor (our host: a transvestite named Kay Sera) where I tore into Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" like I had been born to sing it. You hadda be there. Maybe now I'm ready for Dan's karaoke big time—but I do think a hefty minimum amount of alcohol will be required.
Both readings went very well (you were missed, Shanna—but I will indeed see you at AWP). But in some ways the most memorable evening was Friday night, when Emily and I, two of her best friends, and their boyfriends, went out on the town in Brooklyn. Almost everyone had something to celebrate: I had passed my A exam; Jen and Rachel both had new jobs in the film industry; Rachel is five months pregnant and her partner Al couldn't stop beaming about it; and Emily was recently promoted at her job. We went to a brand new restaurant in Cobble Hill called Blue Star, where Al and Rachel are friends with the chef, a manic Deadhead with a genius for what I can only call gourmet white-trash cooking (example: a delicately fried pastry filled with macaroni and cheese served with garlic mashed potatoes). He wouldn't let us order anything; instead plate after plate of delicious seafood and three bottles of wine came without our asking. I enjoyed oysters for the first time, and king crab, and lots of wine. Afterward came another first time: karaoke at the Hope and Anchor (our host: a transvestite named Kay Sera) where I tore into Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" like I had been born to sing it. You hadda be there. Maybe now I'm ready for Dan's karaoke big time—but I do think a hefty minimum amount of alcohol will be required.
Friday, February 20, 2004
Here's something I wanted to post as a comment to the discussion of reviewing that Aaron is continuing at his blog—but my comment was too long, dagnabit:
Hey Aaron—just wanted to say that I do agree with you about the value of a "cultural materialist matrix," aka history. What one ends up arguing with is the Ptolemaic effect of the reviewer's perspective becoming the central organizing principle of that matrix. I guess I'd like to see critics be a little more dialectical about their own stances. The polemical bent of most critics tends probably from the paranoia you speak of (something I am certainly not immune too)--and perhaps there's also a tradition in cultural criticism of fighting tooth and nail for "your side" and leaving the more judicious judgments and syntheses for those who come after you. I find myself wondering here, in my formalist way, if there might not be a useful distinction between the "review" and the "review essay." The latter would leave more room for pontification and tendentiousness (in the best possible senses of those pejoratives), while the former would commit itself to a more intimate encounter with the work itself. But obviously you can't be that neat--every book comes encased in a context or "scene." Once you start noticing the difference between a book by FSG and a small press book; once you know more about the "good" poetics of blurbist A versus the "bad" poetics of blurbist B, you can't ever go back. After such knowledge, what forgiveness, right? Gotta go now, but I'll keep thinking about this.
Hey Aaron—just wanted to say that I do agree with you about the value of a "cultural materialist matrix," aka history. What one ends up arguing with is the Ptolemaic effect of the reviewer's perspective becoming the central organizing principle of that matrix. I guess I'd like to see critics be a little more dialectical about their own stances. The polemical bent of most critics tends probably from the paranoia you speak of (something I am certainly not immune too)--and perhaps there's also a tradition in cultural criticism of fighting tooth and nail for "your side" and leaving the more judicious judgments and syntheses for those who come after you. I find myself wondering here, in my formalist way, if there might not be a useful distinction between the "review" and the "review essay." The latter would leave more room for pontification and tendentiousness (in the best possible senses of those pejoratives), while the former would commit itself to a more intimate encounter with the work itself. But obviously you can't be that neat--every book comes encased in a context or "scene." Once you start noticing the difference between a book by FSG and a small press book; once you know more about the "good" poetics of blurbist A versus the "bad" poetics of blurbist B, you can't ever go back. After such knowledge, what forgiveness, right? Gotta go now, but I'll keep thinking about this.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Thinking about Ronald Johnson, as so many other folks are doing these days, I came across this piece, "Hurrah for Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets". It retrospectively becomes the source for the name of my teaching blog, too. I will point my students toward it. Some wonderfully aphoristic sentences: "Content finds Form, as a leopard prey"; "Face the sun, your shadow will be sharper"; "Let sound gender sense"; "Learn to use words first—later you'll have ideas"; "Sometimes the hand has an eye in the palm, as the American Indians remind us. Grab a frontier!"; ". . . Pound, H.D., W.C.W., Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and Lorine Niedecker all leave you on your own horse, but teach you how to ride"; and—I will dedicate this one to my friend Richard—"Be an enthusiast."
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
It is of course possible to be both ABD and a broken man. Still in recovery, but stay tuned.
A few changes to the links at right are visible. Adieu, Howard. Hello, John. I will probably never be as excited about you as I was about the Mad Doctor, but you've got to bring the one who knows how to dance.
I'm also extending a warm welcome to Aaron McCullough.
And I will remind you that I'm reading at the Ear Inn this Saturday at 3 PM. Details are available by clicking here.
A few changes to the links at right are visible. Adieu, Howard. Hello, John. I will probably never be as excited about you as I was about the Mad Doctor, but you've got to bring the one who knows how to dance.
I'm also extending a warm welcome to Aaron McCullough.
And I will remind you that I'm reading at the Ear Inn this Saturday at 3 PM. Details are available by clicking here.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Okay, you're probably sick of hearing about the damn review by now, but you can finally read it online as a PDF right here or at Barrow Street.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Friday, February 13, 2004
I am increasingly impressed by the nuanced and thoughtful writing being done over at Gary Norris' Dagzine. Some of the same issues that have concerned me in recent weeks, especially the role of the market in poetry publishing, the latter being a category he emphatically wants to expand to include blogging and other non-print means of publication. He also dismantles the Jeff Menne review of Richard Greenfield's book that I called your attention to yesterday. Gary's perceptions are razor sharp, though I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions. I think Menne's attempts to "place" Richard are well-intentioned and preferable to the style of reviews (such as those common to Poetry) which simply assume in an un- or underspoken way both the book's place in an (invariably hierarchical) tradition, not to mention the reviewer's authority to define that tradition. Perhaps as usual the solution must be a dialectical one, in which the reviewer practices a kind of "full disclosure" of both the book's and his or her own relation to the larger poetry world as they understand it, without (this is the tricky bit) allowing that triangulation to dominate their reading of the text. This requires, among other faculties, a sense for the ways in which texts (I would almost say this is the baseline requirement for "good" writing) resist being so triangulated.
It's a lot to ask from a reviewer, which is one reason I've resisted taking up that task in a formal way. Which of course shows how I've come to understand the blog, or at any rate this blog, as a constitutionally informal space. Other poetics blogs with a more formal edge (I'm referring of course to Ron) come under attack on a fairly regular basis I think in large part because they offend other bloggers' sense that blogging shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's a mistake. Blogging like any other medium or form carries with it certain guiding connotations, just as the sonnet carries with it connotations of argument and erotic pursuit, whatever its actualy content. There is a dailiness to blogging in its purest form that mitigates against its being an ideal transmitter of "finished" wriiting—but that doesn't keep Ron and now, I think, Gary from using it that way, and using it very effectively. Myself, I think I will stick to what you might call advanced blurbing—little linguistic snapshots which will, I hope, provoke a few of my readers to buy them. I don't plan on blurbing books I don't like—that's why I call it blurbing. Almost a homonym for blogging, blurbing is a much-despised medium (the review of Selah this week begins with a complaint about blurbs). But a really good blurb is ideally situated to do the kind of work I think is demanded of the reviewer: the name of the blurber commences the act of triangulation, while the text provides an (never the) entryway into the book being blurbed. And sheer proximity (by being on the back cover of the book in question) both demystifies the "objectivity" claimed by the Poetry-style reviewer and also prevents the blurbist's take on the book from reifying the book itself—because the book is right there to be opened and read. Of course the blurbs I do here won't enjoy this advantage; the best I can do is link to where you can buy the book in question. Which is what I and all blurbists want: for my readers to support the poetry that I find exciting and necessary.
It's a lot to ask from a reviewer, which is one reason I've resisted taking up that task in a formal way. Which of course shows how I've come to understand the blog, or at any rate this blog, as a constitutionally informal space. Other poetics blogs with a more formal edge (I'm referring of course to Ron) come under attack on a fairly regular basis I think in large part because they offend other bloggers' sense that blogging shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's a mistake. Blogging like any other medium or form carries with it certain guiding connotations, just as the sonnet carries with it connotations of argument and erotic pursuit, whatever its actualy content. There is a dailiness to blogging in its purest form that mitigates against its being an ideal transmitter of "finished" wriiting—but that doesn't keep Ron and now, I think, Gary from using it that way, and using it very effectively. Myself, I think I will stick to what you might call advanced blurbing—little linguistic snapshots which will, I hope, provoke a few of my readers to buy them. I don't plan on blurbing books I don't like—that's why I call it blurbing. Almost a homonym for blogging, blurbing is a much-despised medium (the review of Selah this week begins with a complaint about blurbs). But a really good blurb is ideally situated to do the kind of work I think is demanded of the reviewer: the name of the blurber commences the act of triangulation, while the text provides an (never the) entryway into the book being blurbed. And sheer proximity (by being on the back cover of the book in question) both demystifies the "objectivity" claimed by the Poetry-style reviewer and also prevents the blurbist's take on the book from reifying the book itself—because the book is right there to be opened and read. Of course the blurbs I do here won't enjoy this advantage; the best I can do is link to where you can buy the book in question. Which is what I and all blurbists want: for my readers to support the poetry that I find exciting and necessary.
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Please read this insightful review of Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, brought to my attention by New-Brutalist-in-Chief James Meetze by way of consigliore Catherine Meng. The review implies that I'm a New Brutalist by association, or rather that Richard is by associating with me. A thing that makes you go "Hmmm."
Look for me and Richard along with poetry superstars Nils Michals and Brian Teare in Chicago next month.
Look for me and Richard along with poetry superstars Nils Michals and Brian Teare in Chicago next month.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
In other news, I'm getting ready for my big February reading at the Ear Inn. Verrry exciting.
Waves of goodwill are flowing from Pleasant Street tonight toward wherever Sarah Goodyear lives. (The link takes you to a review of the collaborative effort of Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks.)
Waves of goodwill are flowing from Pleasant Street tonight toward wherever Sarah Goodyear lives. (The link takes you to a review of the collaborative effort of Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks.)
It perhaps bears saying that I am the sole author and instigator of the free blurbs. I'm thinking of making this a regular Cahiers de Corey feature.
Selah has just received its first review, in no less a publication than Time Out New York—and it's very, very good. I'm ecstatic. The review's not available on the web yet, but I'll post a link when it is.
Woo-hoo!
Woo-hoo!
Monday, February 09, 2004
Free Blurbs
The title poem of Jerry Estrin's Rome, a Mobile Home haunts me with the urgency of what it describes ten years after it was published:
Hung Q. Tu builds Structures of Feeling that plumb irony without smartassness, "Pure as the driven news," like clicking refresh a thousand times on a webcam covering a WTO riot. I'm struck by the sheer usefulness of this book: it's a guidebook for deportees to George W. Bush's America:
The title poem of Jerry Estrin's Rome, a Mobile Home haunts me with the urgency of what it describes ten years after it was published:
17Radiance floods from the ample white space of Lisa Fishman's Dear, Read which, as Brenda Hillman notes, "call up the traditions of Dickinson, Niedecker, and Riding." Emotional lineation, short sentences aglow, like a female Creeley stabbed by desire without guilt:
Each no is a progress rendered by capital
A history of Kuwait, Bullion City
A history of pleasantness can be arranged
Stacks of stolen loot still steady our metaphysical Mercedes as
we zoom to the border still being carried away
Bullet holes in the glass of Iraq
A politics for the present
With its repertoire
This picture is on strike
FiresYedda Morrison's Crop is a horrorshow of alienated labor reinventing itself as alien eros, a broadband indictment with "endless anonymous capacity for entrance," engaged, hilarious, an incitement, completely beautiful, and sadly unreproduceable here (by me).
J. played guitar and sang. J. lay me on the kitchen counter,
made me see myself in shadow.
In the dark, J. sang and sang. In the light, J. sang.
First it was night when J. brought me home.
Then it was day. Translucent, I sang.
Hung Q. Tu builds Structures of Feeling that plumb irony without smartassness, "Pure as the driven news," like clicking refresh a thousand times on a webcam covering a WTO riot. I'm struck by the sheer usefulness of this book: it's a guidebook for deportees to George W. Bush's America:
fly me to the moon fiscal Disney rideOr, from "More LBJ":
ball club isn't in reference to stars
crisis centers alter ego put bombs to sleep
Bahrain
this kind of publicity you have to pay for
E-1, E-2, E-3 . . . items or atoms harem scare'emWhat is Lisa Jarnot up to? Her Black Dog Songs (a gorgeous object before it's anything else, with a blurb from Stan Brakhage somehow confirming the book's status as an image) go car-camping in Gertrude Stein's K.O.A., bearing knapsacks-full of linguistic odds and ends that, she, MacGuyver-like, assembles in an instant into whatever's most needful—weaponized love poems, mass romantic destruction—with just her own bare hands, a mesmerist's broken watch, and the beguiling truth-lariat of syntax:
palm dead ahead
Fonda the clan
showroom den (of iniquity)
everybody splashes their satellites in the Indian ocean
camouflaged spotter
magnified golfers
California wave
after wave
house dressed
"keep that away from me"
temptation
painstaking accidents
low hanging merchandise
cafeteria evolved
zero sum banter
Indian Hot WingsWallace Stevens, thou should be living at this hour! But the creepiness is so often betrayed by tenderness, or perhaps it's the reverse. I'm going home to read this to my dog:
for George W. Bush
The chicken wing factory is lit up in flames
and the flames are the wings of the little hot chickens.
The little hot chickens are the lampshades of the night
glowing inside the burning of dawn.
The dawn light is chicken-light for little white chickens,
The chickens are white like the glowing of coal.
The coal light of chickens are the white light of chickens.
The chickens are burning and bright in the sun.
The sunlight and lampshades are brighter than chickens.
The dreams of the chickens are bright as the sun.
The chickens are filled with the hot coals of lampshades.
The chickens are burning, the chickens are done.
Greyhound Ode
Go to sleep little doggie
while the moon is still foggy
and the wild dogs all bark
by the light of the moon
by the moon little doggie,
under streetlights so foggy
while the wild dogs all bark
by the moon by the moon
at the waters so foggy
little dog little doggie
go to sleep little doggie
by the light of the moon.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Great things are happening downtown as I write this—a marvelous convergence of poetic and publishing energies. Two panesl this morning, both of which managed to do an amazing job of providing both macro and micro views of small press publishing, experimental poetics, and community building. They've all been so different. Joel Kuszai read a paper on how individual poetry communities might model themselves upon criminal syndicates, and suggested that the power thus achieved could, for example, be used to drive a corporate textbook publisher out of business. (It's nothing personal, it's just business.) Mark Weiss of Junction Press spoke extemporaneously about the experience of creating and running his one-man press, which has produced a number of remarkable border-crossing projects (quote: "When you turn a junction upside-down it becomes a boundary") representing the work of poets from Baja California (including blogworld's own Heriberto Yepez), Trinidad, Cuba, and elsewhere. Julianna Spahr, who I've long wanted to see in person, turned her experience at Buffalo and with Subpress into a kind of parable. In the first half of her talk she spoke of how the "heroism of a cold place" and a general obsession with male modernist writers was eventually countered by the magazine she and other women started there; in the second half she spoke of the utopian ambitions behind Subpress and its limitations as a model for collective publishing (1% tithe vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy, no one person actually in charge of advertising or distribution, unwillingness of poets to choose cheaper galley publishing format, etc.).
The second panel featured Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (two of the four editors of Pom-Pom, Jonathan Skinner (editor of Ecopoetics, and Brendan Lorber (editor and bandleader of the irrepressible LUNGFULL!). These guys were great. Jen and Allison spoke of their magazine's unique model of poems that only respond to other poems that have been in the magazine (a version of what Charles Bernstein calls "wreading"). Jonathan talked about his fascinating project to produce a magazine of poetry of the Outside, in the widest possible sense—I suspect he and I could have a lot of things to say to each other about pastoral. In fact at one point he made reference to the "complex pastoral" of urban writing, citing Brenda Coultas' marvelous Bowery sequence (first published in Ecopoetics, now available in her book A Handmade Museum) as an example. Brendan Lorber read a terrific essay which will be printed in LUNGFULL! 13 about the number 13 as an abstract symbol of fear, and this symbol's relationship to an older, matriarchal conception of society that existed before a period of environmental scarcity led to the rise of patriarchy and a system in which those at the top have a vested interest in artificially maintaining conditions of scarcity. These ideas aren't new, but he synthesizes them wonderfully into something that I think simply everyone ought to read. Perhaps it will be available at his website soon.
As I was listening to all this I was struck once again by the fact that Brendan, Jonathan, and I form a recognizable "type" of young white male poet, and that I probably have more in common with them than I do with 99.999999% of the human beings on this planet. I am attracted and repelled by them as manifestations of the same genus, led to magnify minor differences in order to preserve a notion of my own specialness. In their presence I get a little nervous, as if afraid that we might touch each other and disappear in a matter/antimatter explosion. Back home, I find that I'm comforted by the similarities while seeing the differences as much more profound than I had. What's similar about us is a manner, a comportment that mixes bemusement with determination. And the desire to make a meaningful life outside the debased corporate values that we're usually too immersed in to notice, as fish don't notice water. Which is of course a point of similarity that binds us to many kinds of people, all over the world—people whose fear, as Brendan suggested at the end of his paper, cannot last forever.
The second panel featured Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (two of the four editors of Pom-Pom, Jonathan Skinner (editor of Ecopoetics, and Brendan Lorber (editor and bandleader of the irrepressible LUNGFULL!). These guys were great. Jen and Allison spoke of their magazine's unique model of poems that only respond to other poems that have been in the magazine (a version of what Charles Bernstein calls "wreading"). Jonathan talked about his fascinating project to produce a magazine of poetry of the Outside, in the widest possible sense—I suspect he and I could have a lot of things to say to each other about pastoral. In fact at one point he made reference to the "complex pastoral" of urban writing, citing Brenda Coultas' marvelous Bowery sequence (first published in Ecopoetics, now available in her book A Handmade Museum) as an example. Brendan Lorber read a terrific essay which will be printed in LUNGFULL! 13 about the number 13 as an abstract symbol of fear, and this symbol's relationship to an older, matriarchal conception of society that existed before a period of environmental scarcity led to the rise of patriarchy and a system in which those at the top have a vested interest in artificially maintaining conditions of scarcity. These ideas aren't new, but he synthesizes them wonderfully into something that I think simply everyone ought to read. Perhaps it will be available at his website soon.
As I was listening to all this I was struck once again by the fact that Brendan, Jonathan, and I form a recognizable "type" of young white male poet, and that I probably have more in common with them than I do with 99.999999% of the human beings on this planet. I am attracted and repelled by them as manifestations of the same genus, led to magnify minor differences in order to preserve a notion of my own specialness. In their presence I get a little nervous, as if afraid that we might touch each other and disappear in a matter/antimatter explosion. Back home, I find that I'm comforted by the similarities while seeing the differences as much more profound than I had. What's similar about us is a manner, a comportment that mixes bemusement with determination. And the desire to make a meaningful life outside the debased corporate values that we're usually too immersed in to notice, as fish don't notice water. Which is of course a point of similarity that binds us to many kinds of people, all over the world—people whose fear, as Brendan suggested at the end of his paper, cannot last forever.
Friday, February 06, 2004
SPD Opens Outler in Ithaca, New York
That's what it feels like tonight—a huge stack of books that I've been ordering in dribs and drabs over the past eight months suddenly descended upon us today. In one stroke we've become the store with the finest selection of innovative poetry within a two-hundred mile radius. So come one, come all, to The Bookery and do a little browsing. Consider it a permanent continuation of the Small Press Culture Workers conference happening tomorrow. Y'all are just lucky that I'm broke, because if I had the money I'd buy all of these (except the ones I already had).
In strictly alphabetical order:
That's what it feels like tonight—a huge stack of books that I've been ordering in dribs and drabs over the past eight months suddenly descended upon us today. In one stroke we've become the store with the finest selection of innovative poetry within a two-hundred mile radius. So come one, come all, to The Bookery and do a little browsing. Consider it a permanent continuation of the Small Press Culture Workers conference happening tomorrow. Y'all are just lucky that I'm broke, because if I had the money I'd buy all of these (except the ones I already had).
In strictly alphabetical order:
George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003)Hurry in before I win the lottery and buy them all.
Dawn Michael Baude, egpyt ( Post-Apollo, 2002)
Anselm Berrigan, Integrity & Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999)
Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002)
Ted Berrigan, So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958-1979 (Blue Wind Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nest (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge w/ art by Kiki Smith - Endocrinology (Kelsey St. Press, 1997)
Adrian Blevins, The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003)
David Bromige, As in T as in Tether (Chax Press, 2002)
Norma Cole, Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn, 2002)
Kevin Davies, Comp. (Edge, 2000)
Jordan Davis, Million Poems Journal (Faux Press, 2003)
Jerry Estrin, Rome, a Mobile Home (Roof, 1993)
Lisa Fishman, Dear, Read (Ahsahta Press, 2003)
Graham Foust, Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2004)
Nada Gordon, V. Imp. (Faux Press, 2003)
Arielle Greenberg, Given (Verse Press, 2002)
Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003)
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2004)
Katy Lederer, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002)
Aaron McCullough, Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002)
Bernadette Mayer, Jen Hofer, Danika Dinsmore, Lee Anne Brown, The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001)
K. Silem Mohammed, Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003)
Laura Moriarty, The Case (O Books, 1998)
Yedda Morrison, Crop (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Tosa Motokiyu, et al, eds., Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1997)
Jennifer Moxley, The Sense Record and Other Poems (Edge, 2002)
Philip Nikolayev, Monkey Time (Verse Press, 2003)
Bob Perelman, The Future of Memory (Roof Books, 1998)
Deborah Richards, Last One Out (Subpress, 2003)
Elizabeth Robinson, Harrow (Omnidawn, 2001)
Barry Schwabsky, Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003)
Steve Shavel, How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold (Verse Press, 2003)
Ron Silliman, N/O (Roof Books, 1994)
George Stanley, A Tall, Serious Girl (Qua Books, 2003)
Brian Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003)
Chris Stroffolino, Stealer's Wheel (Hard Press, 1999)
Sotere Torregian, "I Must Go" (She Said) "Because My Pizza's Cold" (Skanky Possum, 2002)
Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Atelos, 2003)
Hung Q. Tu, Structures of Feeling (Krupskaya, 2003)
Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn, 2003)
Hannah Weiner, We Speak Silent ( Roof Books, 1996)
Hannah Weiner, page (Roof Books, 2002)
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Can't seem to stop feeling tired. This is one of those weird limbo periods—between the writing and the oral component of my exam. It's a long intermission and I can't decide if I should go out to the lobby for candy or if I belong behind the curtain with the stagehands frantically arranging the props.
Looking forward to Jane Sprague's conference here in Ithaca on Saturday. And this afternoon Larissa Szporluk is reading in the English Department. But part of me just wants to lie on the couch and watch daytime TV until it's nighttime.
Looking forward to Jane Sprague's conference here in Ithaca on Saturday. And this afternoon Larissa Szporluk is reading in the English Department. But part of me just wants to lie on the couch and watch daytime TV until it's nighttime.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Good news? Bad news? Who knew?
| You are 40% geek | You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. |
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Selah is going to be reviewed next week in Time Out New York. Then on Monday, I'm going to be reviewed by my dissertation committee.
Little nervous.
Little nervous.
Monday, February 02, 2004
The Same River?
Finishing the exam has left me in a fragmented sort of mood. Here are some choice selections from a copy of a shiny newish translation by Brooks Haxton of Heraclitus' Fragments—the last seems particularly apposite:
Finishing the exam has left me in a fragmented sort of mood. Here are some choice selections from a copy of a shiny newish translation by Brooks Haxton of Heraclitus' Fragments—the last seems particularly apposite:
8
Men dig tons of earth
to find an ounce of gold.
10
Things keep their secrets.
14
Now that we can travel anywhere,
we need no longer take the poets
and myth-makers for sure witnesses
about disputed facts.
17
Pythagoras may well have been
the deepest in his learning of all men.
And still he claimed to recollect
details of former lives,
being in one a cucumber
and one time a sardine.
24
Hunger, even
in the elements,
and insolence.
31
Without the sun,
what day? What night?
32
The sun is new
again, all day.
38
Thus in the abysmal dark
the soul is known by scent.
45
The mind, to think of the accord
that strains against itself,
needs strength, as does the arm
to string the bow or lyre.
50
Under the comb
the tangle and the straight path
are the same.
52
The sea is both pure
and tainted, healthy
and good haven to the fish,
to men impotable and deadly.
58
Good and ill to the physician
surely must be one,
since he derives his fee
from torturing the sick.
59
Two made one are never one.
Arguing the same we disagree.
Singing together we compete.
We choose each other
to be one, and from the one
both soon diverge.
64
Though what the waking see is deadly,
what the sleeping see is death.
66
The living when the dead
wood of the bow
springs back to life, must die.
67
Gods live past our meager death.
We die past their ceaseless living.
69
The way up is the way back.
72
Moisture makes the soul
succumb to joy.
74
Dry, the soul
grows wise
and good.
77
A man in the quiet of the night
is kindled like a fire soon quenched.
82
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.
84
Goat cheese melted
in warm wine congeals
if not well stirred.
90
Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.
92
Although we need the Word [logos]
to keep things known in common,
people still treat specialists
as if their nonsense
were a form of wisdom.
98
To a god the widsom
of the wisest man
sounds apish. Beauty
in a human face
looks apish too.
In everything
we have attained
the excellence of apes.
105
Yearning hurts,
and what release
may come of it
feels much like death.
108
Not to be quite such a fool
sounds good. The trick,
with so much wine
and easy company, is how.
121
One's bearing
shapes one's fate.
128
A sacred ritual
may be performed by one
entirely purified but seldom.
Other rites belong to those
confined in the sodden
lumber of the body.
130
Silence, healing.
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