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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weapon of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

Urban Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Morning Poem

Oh yeah,

Fuck War.

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

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

Fuck War and its Zombie Parots forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compostition Marble?

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

Yup. There's a typo on the cover.

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

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

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

Composition Marble Is Here!

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

Thomas wonders, "In what sense (if any) are "Westward Ho, or the Migration of Guilt" (Ryan G. Van Cleave) and "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay" (Michael Magee) "in the same neighbourhood" (Josh Corey)?" Well, I don't think those poems are in the same neighborhood; I just see the Van Cleave poem's reprocessed pop culture texture used to tell a story of the return of the repressed as derived from an impulse similar to what I've seen in flarf. Really my thinking about this was influenced by Jasper's idea about flarf as opposed to the lyric abstract of A Tonalism, a dichotomy which places both tendencies within the larger category of a would-be oppositional poetics. In the sketch he provides ("Flarf's odes to A-Tonalism's elegies; pressure of speech to aphasia; plenum to void"), the Van Cleave poem falls clearly on the flarf side. But it's true he doesn't get anywhere near as "inappropriate" as the most daring flarf poems do, like "Their Guys" or "Chicks Dig War." So maybe the je ne sais quois of flarf is not the manic social constructivism but its capacity for activating the squeamishness of its readers vis-a-vis sex, gender, class, and race? It seems to me that social constructivism is the genus of which flarf is a species, and that any poem of that genus succeeds or fails by affectively implicating the reader in its discourse. By pushing hard against the boundaries of the "inappropriate," a poem like "Their Guys" achieves something like an implicative sublime. Your feeling about the poem may be largely determined by whether or not you see its author as a fellow implicatee or as a righteous prosecutor or as getting away with being transgressive (or not getting away with it). In that respect flarf, and social constructivism generally, might require more specific information about the author and his or her intent (the kind gained most readily from membership in his or her coterie) than poems that are received as fitting into a pre-existing context or genre. Call it the intentional fallacy of flarf. It will be interesting to see how it evolves formally—that is, as a mode or modes of language attempting to be adequate to its content, which at this time seems mainly to be "inappropriates" that, almost by definition, resist all legitimate formulation. It's an attempt to think the obscene without reconciling us to it—a neat trick if it works.

Can't help but think that David Hess' essay Two Poems by John Ashbery for Now, posted yesterday on his long-hiatused blog, is somehow relevant to this discussion.

Not exactly flarf but definitely in the same neighborhood: Ryan G. Van Cleave's poem "Westward Ho, or the Migration of Guilt" over at Xconnect. I also really dig this surprising eponymous cross-pollination "Dear A.R. Ammons: An Epistolary Meditation." More fine poems from the latest issue, including two by Kasey, can be read here.

Refreshed. If you're ever looking for peace and solitude with a view of hills and trees, and a wood stove to sit by in the evenings, you could do worse than visit Light On The Hill in Van Etten, New York, just half an hour or so from Ithaca. Very restful and a good place for the gathering of personal resources.

David Baratier tells me that my new chapbook, Composition Marble, has arrived at Pavement Saw Press and copies are en route to me via media mail. Very excited about seeing it. It will be available for purchase from Pavement Saw for the low price of six dollars American in the near future.

On attenuated hypotaxis: I did some reading around in Ashbery's Flow Chart while retreating and came to the provisional conclusion that syntax itself, or at least narrative syntax, is what that poem and much else by Ashbery seems to be "about." Over and over again I noticed hypotactic connectors being used that actually served to disconnect one line or sentence (his generally long lines largely efface the natural tension between line and sentence) from the next, rendering the referents of pronouns (especially "it") impossibly vague. I kept feeling like I was reading a fairy tale that consisted entirely of pleasant, slightly surreal variations on the phrase, "Once upon a time." Here's a random passage from the first section reduced almost entirely to connectors, pronouns, and the occasional verb:

What we are... is both... or else... like.... So it seems we must stay... not quite..., not... though..., if..., not.... Did I say that? Can this be me? Otherwise... one might as well.... And meanwhile...; ...; some episode... and even.... It is time for..., and..., but surely somebody... before..., before... and... instead of... having concluded that... interesting only because... at the very moment..., one of innumerable..., so long as..., subtracted like... and replaced... climate of any day and of all the days, postmillenarian.

Of course occasional images and phrases pop out of the general ramble, but these are exceptions to the rule of what the poem directs my attention to: echt narrativity, the experience of Now this, and that, so that, therefore.... Or it's like a staged struggle between rhetoric and poetry, with the occasional flash of poetic condensare and, much more, the destabilized syntax working against the experience of discursivity, while the sheer endlessness of the text and the proliferation of connectors, however frustrated and frustrating, prevents me from assimilating the text as I do most poems: as pockets and flashes of verbal energy that accumulate into a total experience. Though the poem doesn't lack atmosphere, stimmung: it's a peculiar synthesis of exhaustion and nervous energy, in which the stakes are constantly being raised and then as regularly deflated, so that it becomes almost like a maximalist Beckett piece: I can go on, I can go on, oy—look how I go on! That this mode has its pleasures is the most surprising thing about it: I can dip into the stream and be carried along and get almost an experience of pure reading without regard to any content more specific than this spirit of belatedness, middle-agedness, and diffuse wonder. A poem without qualities.

Starting to follow the a tonalist vs. flarf debate as brilliantly summarized by Jasper. I don't know the work of the a tonalists as well as I'd like to, though I've been meaning to get to Brent Cunningham's Bird and Forest for a while now. Right now I sort of unhelpfully lump them in my own aesthetic (dis)organization as the Michael Palmer tendency toward obliquity, the lyric abstract, differance—oh hell I'll go all the way and call 'em Dickinsonian. While flarf is a goofy godchild of Walt Whitman's inclusiveness, his refusal of otherness that can turn over and become a critique of purity and the puritan. This is the not-so-ancient dualism at the heart of American poetry, or at least so my helplessly binaristic mind says. Where things get real interesting is where the intensely inward drive of the Dickinson-tendency tries to socialize itself or organize even on the fantasy level as a collectivity (what the a tonalists are skeptically up to); the opposite number of course being the outward-bound intensely social imagination of the Whitman-tendency being turned inward on itself. We are much more used to the latter than the former, thanks to the legacy of Romanticism (Harold Bloom for one never met a poem that he liked that he couldn't turn into a version of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"—I'm sure he's managed it with Flow Chart) and American pragmatism (how can we make this useful to the rugged individual). I'm not sure I see this actually happening with flarf, but I do think those who accuse flarf of collaboration with capital or of pseudo-ironic identification with racism, sexism, etc., are being sensitive to the classic downside of the Whitman-tendency, which is to overstrenuously celebrate what is and even act positively as a colonizer. This is all speculation based on nothing much more than the discourses surrounding these movements: the real test is the reading of actual poems. But discourses aren't nothing: I for one am fascinated by the opportunity to watch literary movements evolve in real time, struggling to establish their own opposing or apposing relations to the larger field, and to canonicity.

Going on a retreat for a couple of days. Back Thursday.

More can be important. Anne's thoughts on snapshots and how digital cameras have in effect redistributed the value of representation strikes me as a partial answer to Jasper's concern about how blogs might create a social imaginary that substitutes for social action, i.e., genuine collectivity. I'm not a digital utopian, but I do think it's possible that the digital is capable of enabling that more without necessarily subtracting from the value of what is. Increasingly convinced that structural analysis and structural solutions are inadequate without the daily willing of one's values. There is no "outside" and to be placed outside is no guarantee of virtue. We must all in some way individually confront the contradictions of our lives without hoping that some transcendental chess move on our part might remove them.

Excellent SOON reading on Saturday night. Aaron Kunin gave an electric performance reading from his collection of "small poems about shame," Folding Ruler Star. That phrase doesn't touch on the book's ambition, though; this description does: "a value-neutral Paradise Lost. In other words, someone who is not god tells you to avoid a certain tree, and you disobey the instruction; the result is shame. Two characters agree that one of them is supposed to worship and obey the other without actually believing that the other possesses any special qualities that would enforce obedience; the first one disobeys the second one and has to be punished." So it's a book about the arbitrary sexuality of the master-slave relationship, which also inevitably points back at the human-God relationship as a sadomasochistic one. This is combined with a topography of the human body inspired by the work of Sylvan Tompkins, who located the affect of shame in the face; as Aaron put it, "Shame is simply casting the eyes down—the basic reading posture." (Surely this notion of the face as the neurological location/processor of shame has interesting implications for the thought of Emmanuel Levinas? But a cursory Google shift does not produce these names in congruity with each other.) The poems themselves consist of poem-pairs, each with the same title, perhaps meant to produce binary struggle between them: which poem-half is the master, which the slave? Aaron reads with intensity, his eyes squinted almost shut, while the poems have a chopped, reticulated syntax that reminds me of Creeley at his most baroque. He concluded the reading with "Five Security Zones," a re-engineering of the blazon (the Petrarchan mode of dismembering the beloved in a poem, i.e., "Your forehead is like alabaster, your eyes are sapphires," etc.) that transforms the erogenous zones of the beloved into five "zones" whose alarms are set off by the poet/lover's attention. (Suggests a subdivision of the area delineated by J.G. Ballard's seuxalized automobile crashes: the erotics of the car alarm.) I caught a quotation from the great seventies paranoia thriller Three Days of the Condor in that poem: "I'm not a spy, I just read books!" A simultaneously anguished and playful statement of the poet-lover's condition, and as good a summary for what Aaron is up to in his first book as any.

John Coletti read second: his low-key, slightly self-deprecating humor made for a nice contrast to Aaron's livewire. He kicked off with other poets' poems: first a couple from a chapbook by Steve Carey with what he says is the best title for a poetry book ever, Generous Subsidy, and then a poem by Simon Pettet. Like these poets, John's poems are short but crammed with surreal, paratactic observations that have an almost synesthetic intensity: "cherry tobacco," "my mouth circling triangles," "I'm a soft flower / with tough roots," and my favorite line from the poem "Hippies" that Aaron did up as a broadside: "Pagans woke up in my skinyard." There's a certain echo of religion as shaping and deforming force in the work, as with Aaron Kunin; John was a Mormon until the age of fourteen. He has responded to that experience mainly with a dry, slightly singed humanism, and the touching faith in the validity of his own experience that the lyric poet requires.

After a reading like this, it's hard not to conclude that there's still a lot of life left in the lyric, and that the poem of the subjective field can still produce a sizable synaptic whallop. I would hazard that this kind of formally torqued lyric still relies, almost classically, on the self as the force-field that hold the poem together. I think of what the critic Brian Reed has to say about "attenuated hypotaxis," quoted here by Marjorie Perloff in a passage on the early, avant-garde T.S. Eliot in her book 21st Century Modernism:

The syntax of "Prufrock" is characterized bywhat Brian Reed, writing about Hart Crane's syntax, aptly calls "attenuated hypotaxis," that is a sequence of "tenuously interconnected" clauses and phrases "possessing some relation of subordination to another element," but with the connections blurred, "inhibit[ing] the formation of clear, neat, larger units" (Reed 2000: 387). Such faux-hypotaxis, Reed argues, was to become, in its more extreme forms, the characteristic mode of John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth and Lyn Hejinian—none of whom, we might add, has claimed Eliot as a precursor. (25)

Hypotaxis and paraxtaxis, of course, are syntactical modes, but we have long been accustomed to stretching the notion of "syntax" beyond the sentence, so that it might refer in general to the arrangement of elements within a text. One could assemble a quick-and-dirty syntactical theory of verse by arguing that one can distinguish the genres of poems by their choice or rejection of the element that stands firmly or hazily at the head of their syntax. That is, a lyric poem presumes some version of the self more or less corresponding with the poet's own subjectivity as its "master clause"; the subordinate clauses then either flow from that master clause in a more or less coherent narrative (hypotaxis); or are disjunctive to a great degree, perhaps constantly appearing to veer on new tacks while never quite leaving the self behind—there's still a recognizable, coherent "I" even if it undergoes sizable transformations, as in an Ashbery poem (attenuated hypotaxis); or else perhaps imitate the master clause through a series of repetitions that do not build on each other in any linear way but which constantly refer back to the center, bearing the same relation to the center and to each other as the spokes of a wheel bear to their hub (parataxis). In all cases, however, some notion of the "I" holds the poem together to produce the lyric effect (though a plural subjectivity is also possible, as in Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which uses the attenuation of its hypotaxis to dramatize the fragility of its "we," its "connection"). What we don't see too much of: poems that are epic or georgic in their orientation—that is, constructive of history or else didactic and instructive. And there are probably other non-lyric possibilities for poetry that I'm not thinking of. But syntax in this sense has a certain limited usefulness for describing what poems do and even how they think of themselves in relation to other poems: does an affinity for parataxis have the political implications that Silliman and others claim for it, or is it just another literary tool as capable of replicating bourgeois subjectivity as it is of disrupting it? And if Reed and Perloff are correct in suggesting that attenuated hypotaxis the dominant mode of lyric postmodernity, what does that suggest in terms of formal options for non-lyric modes, or for what I sometimes think of as the provisional lyric: the poem which proposes an accomodating, inclusive "I," something like the Whitmanian multitude of which no clause will be master?

But my goodness never mind my malaise—just get your butt down to the SOON Reading here in Ithaca tomorrow at 7 PM with Aaron Kunin and John Coletti (click link for details). In anticipation I highly recommend this interview with Aaron and two reviews of two of John's chapbooks, The New Normalcy and Physical Kind. Come what may in May, today! Okay, tomorrow.

Continuing post-chapter malaise and grading have left me with little to say about poetry. Right now I'm enjoying the rare indulgence of a novel—Norman Rush's Mating, an entertainingly erudite account of a 1980s love affair between a floundering graduate student in anthropology (our heroine and narrator—Rush has been I think justly praised for his facility in conjuring a woman's point of view) and a world-famous development scholar building a utopian community in an undisclosed location in Botswana (shades of the Dharma Initiative!), which I suspect will have comic if not Kurtz-like results. It's the same smarty-pants subgenre of romance novel as A.S. Byatt's Possession (which I also thoroughly enjoyed), with muscular ideas instead of abs causing all the sighing—but no less wish-fulfillment narratives for all that.

On Shanna's advice, I replaced Blogger comments with Haloscan. So far so good... but I seem to have lost all the comments that folks previously posted! I regret that very much. Shanna, any idea how I can get 'em back?

If you haven't already seen it, Tom Beckett's interview with Gary Sullivan is very much worth a look.

I'm going to start moderating comments for a while. I have no problem with criticism of my ideas—I welcome it. But I'm not interested in ad hominem attacks from the anonymous and I won't allow them in my backyard. Take it somewhere else.

The Zukofsky chapter—or at least a first draft of it—is complete! Phew! Ronald Johnson is next and last. I'm three-fourths of a PhD!

Think I'll take the rest of the week off and read poems or something.

Mercutio on the Lam

Recent enthusiasms:

- I Remain: The Letters of Lew Welch, both volumes of which I picked up at the Friends of the Library Book Sale a couple of weeks back. It sometimes makes for sad reading: young Welch goes from being a bright-eyed and ambitious Reed student (who writes a full-length monograph on Gertrude Stein for his senior thesis) to an alcoholic self-hating advertising man in Chicago to a homeless lurker in northern California cabins, and will apparently end with Welch's walking into the Sierra Nevadas and vanishing forever in 1971. The man did a lot of damage to himself, as though in rejecting the stifling norms of 1950s America he was also forced to reject some vital part of his own body. But there's wit and an engaging ingenuousness about the possibilities of poetry too, and an affection for the world and his friends (who included Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder) that has me rooting for him, though I already know the dismal end.

- Geoffrey Nutter's Water's Leaves & Other Poems. I was a fan of Nutter's A Summer Evening too; it and Cort Day's The Chime alerted me to the possibilities today in writing a sequence of short, verbally intense poems (I think I heard somewhere that the two of them in some way collaborated on the ten-line form that they use in those books, though to different ends). Water's Leaves abandons the ten-liner for a more discursive free verse that charges its language through a lush, supple diction and rapid leaps in association, but some of my favorite poems in the book are the short ones that achieve a kind of baroque condensare:

Cadenza

What is the shield of Faith, and the breast-plate
of Hope, to the fruit of the date palm?
For the fronds are like pellucid ramparts.
And the speal-bones used in divination quiver
on the back of his hand, for the future
quivers theron like a feather. The sidewinder
shucked off the shroud like a farm-girl eating maize,
like golden-leafed applique left on the floor.
And you will apprehend a covert thought, that
somehow in the music's pause comes the cadenza,
in the slab-like silence where it seems no music could survive.
You are called upon to listen for it, and when you hear it,
as you will, it will be yours. Fronds sway in the air
over Comb Jelly City.

On the back cover John Yau proposes the following over-the-top rhetorical question: "Could it be that Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein met in Elysium and had a sun named Geoffrey Nutter?" It's accurate, though, to see Stevens and Stein as two points of the compass that rotates around Nutter's work. Here's a poem that could easily kick off a volume entitled Harmonium II:

El Arco Iris Olmec

Talking about the Mayan rapture
rain fell on an ancient civilization
just as it now falls on the green grass
it has abandoned. Many were eating papaya
every morning, just like I was.
Many one's child got lost in the market
and were dozing for hours in vegetables pushed
into pyramid candles and prisms like I was.
The instress eats them away like beowulf.

Then someone buying a papaya rooster.
All frisson in its plumage, all unusable like ghosts.
Fifty thousand wraiths glow orange above the hills
and then a rainbow. Something agave
is revived. The shadow
of a luna moth behind the window.

More rarely is Nutter overtly Steinian, but I hear Stein, maybe via Lisa Jarnot, in this poem, as self-parodic in its attempt to name the beloved as Yau's blurb is:

Giant Water Bugs

I'm talking to giant water bugs... and they're built.
Yes, they're beautiful; yes, I'd marry them all if I could.
My moods change all the time.
I am a white car shooting a blue spotlight into the sky!
Then I am a small animal with wet hair, a cat with feathery wings.
You're beautiful, astonishing, unbelievable, amazing,
     hypnotic, terrific.
You're giant, enormous, bigger than a tree, of marvelous stature, a
towering, giant flowering bird!
What's that flaring out of the sun-rooted rigs?
A tree of great stature.
With what loveliness you loom with rapture over me.
There is nothing like you anywhere.

It seems to me that the true love child of Stevens and Stein in our time has to be John Ashbery, and often reading this book I got the same pleasure of tickled synapses that I get from Ashbery's whimsical, death-haunted late work. But if Nutter's an Ashberian he's at least very good at it, and I get the sense of a genuine wonder—at the world and at the mysterious sources of inspiration—struggling through the chinks of his ornate verbal surfaces. There's a there there, in other words, an imaginative landscape (the "instress") that feels like Geoffrey Nutter, a private Oz. I liked visiting it.

- If "enthusiasm" can encompass grief, there's my mother's poetry that was on my mind all this Mother's Day weekend. My mother loved poetry, wrote poetry, read my poetry; I have often felt myself to be somehow living her afterlife for her. Sometimes I return to the collection of her poems that my father and one of her closest friends put together and had bound, inexplicably, between mauve covers. Are they good poems? It doesn't exactly matter to me, because this is the landscape of poetry as it was given to me. My mother gave me to understand poems as evocative, in the fullest senses of that word: summoning, recalling, naming, voicing. Most of her poems don't have titles: here's a kind of ars poetica that she wrote:

I have (wr)it
A coming
sort of Poe am
I think, therefore
(you know the rest)
ing in the bosom of the
sea (oh say can you)
I mean everything
I say is real
camp-ing on the old
tent round circuses
and bread
and Caesar in partes tres
divided is conquered
poor Mercutio
Anyway it's all words.

I was haunted for years by that single line, "poor Mercutio," for the way it completely revised Romeo & Juliet, turning the archetypal tale of star-crossed lovers into an elegy for Romeo's fey and gorgeous friend. I actually went so far as to try and write a novel about Mercutio in my early twenties, Mercutio on the Lam, in which the Mercutio character (now a troubled high school student in Verona, NJ) tries to escape the fate that's written for him. As it happens, he was obsessed with the band Queen, which made me feel a strong sense of connection with Dan Nester when I first met him. The novel's now sitting in a box gathering dust under the bed. But as a record of my mother's reading, the poem is priceless to me. There's another poem of hers whose lines seem to me to contain an entire novel, under pressure as it were. Perhaps someday I'll try to unfold it:

They walk the battlements
visors down
it is a truce, though wary

none is left
unscarred

the doctor and chaplain
are roaring in the kitchen

Even as I wake
I am fully conscious of history
Still asleep
he squeezes my thigh with affection

I move away
and watch a cardinal,
which turns out to be
a fall leaf,
through my window

The rhythm of that line, "the doctor and chaplain," has bothered me for a long time—it seems to me the stanza ought to go, "the doctor and the chaplain / are roaring in the kitchen." But that's not what she wrote. She never to my knowledge published any of these poems, except perhaps in the newsletter of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship to which she belonged. But she knew a thing or two about literary politics:

Bronx Cheer

last time I saw
my friend, the poet,
he was emceeing a cataclysm
his exuberant beard
alive with words
in his eye
righteousness

       "the hieroglyphs swam quickly up the Nile"

I have heard
he is published
and clean-shaven

Hardest to read are the poems written in the year and a half before she died from cancer—it was the second time she'd had cancer:

When I die
it will be
from surfeit
of daily detail
and vagrant
cells
chewing their way
to my core

but not
of
passion

I am not afraid
of death
but of
the long
dying.

Are these poems? I really don't know. They're epigraphs she wrote for herself, maybe. Here's one of my favorites, dated eight months before her death:

I have never tasted
Sweeter lips than yours

O melancholy
O patience on her monument
O jocund day
O Niobe, all tears
O the bones of rivers
O tempora, mores
O life!
Oh shit.
Ole!

Good poems or bad, my mother is the mother of my writing. Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

Right now this is the level of discourse I'm up to: Heckuva Lost episode last night.

If anyone reading this is interested in going to a writer's conference, I'm told that the deadline is fast approaching (May 17) for applying to the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and scholarships are available for poets to work with Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Arthur Sze or C.D. Wright (the fiction faculty are Ron Carlson, Michelle Huneven, Antonya Nelson, or ZZ Packer). I never officially attended it, but I did visit some friends who were attending for a couple of days back in 1999 and it seemed to be a great time. It's one of the strongest faculties you'll find at any such conference—plus it's in an absolutely beautiful area. Click on the link for application details.

Papers to grade—sometimes I think that's "grade" in the sense of "To level or smooth to a desired or horizontal gradient." Sigh.

Home from New York, some quiet hours on the grass with the new issue of n + 1, that convocation and collocation of mostly earnest mostly young mostly male writers and thinkers, whose collective ambition nourishes and disquiets within the scope of features titled "The Intellectual Scene" (this month: a scary appraisal of how we are collectively and individually not yet scared enough of global warming), last quarter's "Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop" (the micro and macro brilliantly contained in the band that wrote our youth's paranoid soundtrack right up till September 10, 2001—who steps into the gap now that "they" really are out to get "us"?), or the new editors' symposium "American Writing Today," an admirably inclusive if ultimately prose- and novel-centric survey whose bleakness and pessismism is belied by the writers' own critical energy—that ambition that wants to mestasticize something borrowed, something blue (the European psychological novel which is also the nonfiction memoir which is also the novel of social research, all three categories epitomized for the writers generally by the late great W.G. Sebald—not an American, not even a writer of English) into something new. Oh yes, a little poetry does sneak in: Stephen Burt, our village's premier explainer, offers a few pages of his characteristically gentle incisiveness (he locates the key break between postwar poetry, which had and wanted a "center," and the contemporary centerless, in 1973: from the Age of Lowell to the ages of the Ashberians), while Philip Connors' entertaining memoir piece, "My Life and Times in American Journalism," quotes some poems by Frederick Seidel that appeared in the Wall Street Journal while Connors, queasily, was an editor there. Pretty good poems, too: Seidel hadn't previously been on my radar, but a quick Google (is there any other kind?) finds a review that labels him "probably the last American decadent", a label that belies the anguished moral energy behind the second poem Connors quotes, a post-9/11 poem spoken in the voice of a terrorist that does not try, as Martin Amis recently did, to domesticate hatred and nihilism: the Other stays Other, and if there's a glimmer of recognition it's of the Other in ourselves. I believe it's from Seidel's Area Code 212, which is apparently Dante in reverse, beginning in Paradise and ending in Inferno:

I don't believe in anything, I do
Believe in you.
Down here in hell we do don't.
I can't think of anything I won't.

I amputate your feet and I walk.
I excise your tongue and I talk.
You make me fly through the black sky.
I will kill you until I die.

Thank God for you, God.
I do.
My God, it is almost always Christmas Eve this time of year, too.
Then I began to pray.

I don't believe in anything anyway.
I did what I do. I do believe in you.
Down here in hell they do don't.
I can't think of anything we won't.

How beautiful thy feet with shoes.
Struggling barefoot over dunes of snow forever, more falling, forever, Jews
Imagine mounds of breasts stretching to the horizon.
We send them to their breast, mouthful of orison.

I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat.
I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.
When the blue blackens and they amputate, I fly.
I am flying a Concorde of modern passengers to gangrene in the sky.

I am flying to Area Code 212
To stab a Concorde into you,
To plunge a sword into the gangrene.
This is a poem about a sword of kerosene.

This is my 21st century in hell.
I stab the sword into the smell.
I am the sword of sunrise flying into Area Code 212
To flense the people in the buildings, and the buildings, into dew.

I can't believe that poem made it into the Wall Street Journal. It was another world, a recognition scene, if only for a moment.

So I am thinking like the editors darkly and brightly on a bright sunny afternoon, having returned from area code 212 which seemed at once the longed-for mosaic of difference and a consumerist carnival stuffed with caricatures, everyone skating on an invisible river of money, talking about real estate in the shops and on the subways and in actual garden apartments. Me and Emily registering to be householders, but what sort of house...? Had a panic attack in Bloomingdales that turned into a migraine; ABC Carpet was better (saw Michael Cross of Atticus/Finch there) but what do its many flatscreens promoting the Al Gore movie mean as one bauble among many in the phantasmagoria of beautiful deracinated objects? (The woman in charge of partnership registries there told us in all seriousness that the store does a lot of benefits—for example, it hosted a party for Vanity Fair's "green issue.") We are weaving and winding our way toward the wedding through a maze of material expectations. And don't we want it to be beautiful? We do we do. But what exactly is "China"? And why do we need it?

It is almost six, not too late to go whack a bucket of balls sunsetward. And who do we become but who we are? Is there any future for the lyric? Is there such a thing as a lyric future? Our garden is the space between us: let it become charged with some sort of language, with what's proper in Mark Greif's sense. His contribution to the "Politics" section of n + 1 includes a proposal for the redistribution of wealth that would guarantee a $10,000 income to every American while taxing 100% of the earnings exceeding $100,000 of any American. It's impossible and impossibly beautiful, because it's upheld with a notion of the proper. What I call pastoral:

True property is that which is proper to you: what you mix your hands into (Locke), what is characteristic of you and no one else, and would change state in anyone else's possession. It is your clothes, your domicile, the things you touch and use, the land you personally walk. Property is the proprium, a possesion which becomes like a characteristic; it starts as if it could belong to anyone, and comes to be what differentiates you. If it wears the mark of your feet and the smudge of your fingertips, your scent and your private atmosphere, then there is indeed something special and inviolable about property, even where it has come into your hands inequitably, by inheritance or a surfeit of income. The diamond worn at the throat every evening must share a certain protection, under the law, with the torn cloak that keeps some shivering person warm.

This is distinct, however, from all wealth which is not capable of being used in the ordinary necessities of a life or even the ordinary luxuries. From any wealth that cannot be touched or worn or walked every day by its possessor, which neither comes from nor enables the mixing-in of hands but always and inevitably exists as a kind of notional accumulation of numbers, the protection of the proprium withdraws. When you have more houses than you or your family can live in, more cars than you can drive; more income in a year than can be spent on what you or your family can actually use, even uselessly use; then we are not speaking of property anymore, not the proprium, but of the inappropriate and alien—that which one gathers to oneself through the accident of social arrangements, exploiting them willfully or accidentally, and not through the private and the personal.

Because I am a poet, and because I think change always begins with the self—or rather, the field in which one mixes one's hands—I will be thinking about this as a morality, as a political economy that might apply to the social field of writing and to writing itself. The proprium may be a new way to think what gets too quickly confused with privilege, which drags down the spirit in guilt and accumulation. More to think on. Meanwhile, school's out. The summer's here. The wedding—its proprium, its field of connection toconnection, its place of first permission—is to come.

End of classes + finishing off the Zuk chapter + getting ready for a weekend in New York = no time to blog, much less to ponder Johannes' response to my major/minor musings (again with the T.S. Eliot comparisons!) or Jessica's Deleuze et Guattari thesis, much less the new-to-me phenomenon of lensing.

May or may not make it to any NYC readings but I am looking forward to this.

Huzzah to the immigrants' rights marchers. If virtual solidarity counts for anything, count me in.