"...your life really matters": Aesthetic Education

Sitting on big news, confronting the task ahead, trying not to fret about my dissertation defense a week from tomorrow. I am about to become a full-time teacher of creative writing—not solely creative writing, but it's a major part of my Lake Forest portfolio. What does that mean? What do I want to accomplish, and my students to accomplish? For a while now I've been meditating on the comments of G.C. Waldrep on that subject just a few months ago on this very blog, the relevant portion of which seems worth repeating here:

After four years of teaching undergraduates, I'm convinced that one reason they come to c.w. classes--one reason they "want to be writers" (so different from actually wanting to write!)--is a desire for "authenticity." They aren't sure what that is, but they are sure it's a problem in our culture, and they see poetry (rightly or wrongly) as one sphere in which "authenticity" (of a putative self) can be achieved and celebrated. Hence your first camp.

What I have tried to get across to my students, increasingly, is that if authenticity of (a) self can be achieved in language, then craft matters. The host culture has sufficiently colonized our brains with language--we are awash in media--that the seemingly simple act of stripping away cliche from one's writing can take years of self-conscious, often discouraging effort. That through solving problems of craft a writer is not distracting him- or herself from that authenticity, but rather finding ways to deepen that authenticity: of voice, of form, and yes, in the end, of self. I'm one of those characters who doesn't know what he means until he sees what he says, so for me the idea of a self coming into being even as the words unspool is a potent one, at least in theory.

I was reminded of G.C.'s theory (and of some of the comments made at the time by Reginald Shepherd and his readers) by the stance of Carol Bly, whose Beyond the Writer's Workshop I read some of yesterday as I was working on the syllabi for the Intro to Creative Writing and Advanced Nonfiction classes I'm teaching this fall. Bly, who has a lot of tart things to say about workshop culture and the "junk culture of the U.S.A." takes a very firm, moralizing stance (some would call it "shrill"—as she herself concedes) about writing: she believes its purpose is or ought to be to change the world, or at least to tell the truth about it. Ethics trumps aesthetics: or rather, following Schiller and Kierkegaard, the aesthetic stance is a phase to be passed through on the way toward realizing oneself as an ethically responsible agent in the world. Bly's voice is cranky and unsympathetic—she paints pop culture with a black, tarry brush like Adorno at his most undialectical—and she comes across as something of a Mrs. Grundy. But she assumes a profoundly countercultural stance when she demands of writing and the workshop that it provide a space in which people can take things seriously, think, and then act. She deplores the reflexive irony and "whatever" posture of American culture, one ideally suited to consumerism and the avoidance of hard choices, even arguably full participation in one's own life. It's a more polemical, harder-edged version of Richard Hugo's "A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters," though Bly would probably deplore the narcissistic spin that statement is susceptible to being given. Though I find her personality hard to swallow, I think it's a position to be taken seriously, insofar as it suggests that the purpose of writing is the creation of meaning—not just on the page but in and for oneself and the community of readers that every writer hopes to find.

The gamble of this notion of aesthetic education—I really must read Schiller's Letters sooner than later—is that an aesthetic education will somehow ineluctably lead to an ethical education. And Bly's assertion that the aesthetic is simply a stage to be mastered and overcome strikes me as highly problematic. One of Bly's core claims in her book is that "content" is overwhelmingly more important than form—she takes a very dim view of formal experiment for formal experiment's sake, and not coincidentally shows very little patience for poetry (she likes Wallace Stevens' idea about the imagination's trumping what's perceived—for her this means a moral imagination that overcomes the lure of sensation, so it's Schiller again in miniature, which I'm not sure Stevens would agree with—but finds his poetry "fussy" and impenetrable). Me, I'd like to see an approach to writing in which neither "content" nor "form" is fetishized, but I appreciate Bly's position more if I translate her "content" into a word that means more for me: commitment. By which I don't necessarily mean "engaged writing" (I'm not against it by any means but I do believe there is a powerful ethical component to writing that denies the authority of the commonplace through displacement rather than naming names) but simply writing that you make part of your life, like one of your limbs, which suffers as you do and hopes as you do and isn't a device for concealing your character defects or projecting a glamorous image into the world. Politics is part of that, but part of the continuum of your life, not some kind of mantle of authority or finger-wagging you pull over your shoulders when you sit down to write (and put away again when you stand up).

The argument for education that moves from aesthetics to ethics is possible, but not rock solid. There's plenty of evidence that aestheticism in the sense of withdrawal from commitment to anything but one's own pleasure and cleverness is still alive and well. On the flip side of the coin is the regularly made assertion that formal innovation alone can have ethical and political force. To be fair, I think this assertion is less often made by avant-garde writers than it is attributed to them—the Language poets are often tarred with this brush, but at least some of them have displayed a thoroughgoing commitment to Marxist theory and praxis both and off the page; many of the attacks on their perceived avant-gardeism or elitism are actually veiled attacks on their Marxism. I don't believe there is any royal road from the appreciation of beauty to right action—the cliche of the Brahms-loving Nazi is evidence enough on that score (and incidentally, I cringed when watching the otherwise very watchable German film The Lives of Others when the novelist character, after playing a haunting piano piece, asked the tendentious and rhetorical question, "Could anyone who had heard such music—really heard it—really be a bad person?" Uh, yeah, they could. Next question). The connection, if it exists, between the aesthetic and the ethical is a tenuous and mysterious one, and too many of the people arguing for it, the conservatives and cultural heritage types, are actually arguing for conformity and the normative. But I am half-persuaded by Bly's notion that it is possible for aesthetic consciousness to be a stage prior to a fuller ethical consciousness, if only because such has been my own experience: my commitment to poetry and writing was a key part of the shift I underwent from uninformed liberal apoliticism in my twenties to the socialism and anarcho-syndicalism I espouse now. It was the critical capacity of writing—a capacity that, when fully and sympathetically engaged, does not spare the self from the scope of its critique, yet does not lay waste to that self—that has helped to activate my sense of commitment to, most fundamentally, myself. Not myself in any isolated or narcissistic way, but myself as part of my place, people, and time.

This concept of education is a secularized version of the Judeo-Christian drama of redemption, in which we take seriously the notion that God and the Devil are striving for the student's soul. Yet we should give the Devil his due: I don't think it's realistic or desirable to ask students or teachers to completely remove themselves from what Bly disparages as "U.S.A. junk culture." Among other things, you'd be depriving yourself of a major source of material: if that junk, our junk, can't in some way be redeemed through creative activity, there's really no hope for anyone outside a monastery (or the Iowa Writers Workshop). And the greater danger is to think that the aesthetic must be put aside like a childish thing to reach the sphere of ethical commitment: you may choose to do so, but I don't think there's much chance of your being much of a writer in that case. You can't write in anything but some sort of form. And to imagine form as a vehicle for content, rather than its transformer, is a sure path to hackdom.

The only question remaining for me here is whether it is in fact necessary for every creative writing student to remember the aesthetic: it's neither realistic nor particularly desirable to insist on every such student's becoming a professional writer. I want my students to take away from my classes a richer sense of the possibilities of commitment; I want them to risk earnestness; I want them to submit themselves to language and rattle their own cages. But they don't all have to become writers, except insofar as I sometimes conflate "writer" with "person" or "citizen"; that is, someone who takes a critical and creative stance toward their world rather than simply accepting its givens. I think aesthetic play is a path to such consciousness, but once it's achieved, I don't know if it continues to be important save as a source of pleasure—which, God knows, is important enough, and rare enough, if we speak of pleasure in one's own capacities for intelligent feeling and empathic thought ("think with the senses, feel with the mind," as the motto of the Venice Biennale has it). Imaginative pleasure, you might call it, as opposed to the sizzle of sensation that Bly is a little too quick to deplore.

Next I'd like to take up a question of mechanics: is it better to immediately immerse beginning students in the kind of paradigm-testing work that I've come to value most, or should one rather lead them through the garden of more conventional works so that they'll know what the rules are? I'll be thinking out loud about that soon.

"I keep on finding out that my poems know more than I do, very specifically; there’s some kind of wall up that keeps me from finding out what I obviously already know until I’m ready; I am trying to learn how to take them more seriously as information about the present."

New American Writing

There are a lot of things I ought to be doing right now other than curling up with the twenty-fifth issue of New American Writing—a magazine I actually had to pay for at the local Borders rather than part of the mail pile. But I started browsing through it yesterday afternoon before a matinee (the ludicrous, forgettable, rather enjoyable new Die Hard movie—it stirred my nostalgia for big, noisy films that don't overdo the digital effects) and it was too good not to take with me. Maybe I've just been disconnected for a while, but I find it a highly stimulating reintroduction into the energies of the contemporary.

NAW is a centerpiece of what you might call the postmodern establishment of American poetry, as stewarded by Paul Hoover (editor of the still-useful 1994 institutional doorstopper Postmodern American Poetry) and Maxine Chernoff (who has two terrific pieces in this issue, a play of sorts featuring the lovers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and a kind of Dickinsonian ballad in twelve quatrains called "The Commons"—a subject near my heart—"No one goes there now / There is not a place— / our commons but a song / lost as it is sung"). Hoover and Chernoff's magazine constitutes an establishment insofar as it palpably conserves the tradition of postmodern lyric that occupies, I think, the capacious middle ground between the austerities of Language poetry and the ironic "personal" characteristic of the New York School(s). It's a mode I often associate with California, perhaps because that's where I first became aware of it in its various manifestations hard (or abstract, or minimalist: Michael Palmer, Elizabeth Robinson, Rae Armantrout) and soft (more narrative, expansive, "hooked": Robert Hass, Donald Revell, Jeff Clark). But I think it's now accurate to characterize such poetry as the new American mainstream, retaining whatever oppositional force it still possesses only through institutional memory—though it still stands strongly enough as a bulwark against the laziness and anti-intellectualism of the genuine mainstream of American cultural life. Or as Brenda Hillman puts it in an essay I comment on below, "Current aesthetic quarrels and conversations between poets are real enough, and the aesthetically abstract or non-referential lyric poetry may have a different readership from poetry that announces its purposes in more narrative styles, but these issues should concern poets far less than keeping poetry alive in a culture of appalling greed, a culture that doesn't read much of anything, a culture that does business as usual in a time of Enron and retributionist wars."

The issue opens with new translations of some haunting sonnets of Borges, includes a telltale poem by Cal Bedient (one of the most passionate advocates of a return to lyric modernism in contemporary poetry), and includes an essay, "On Song, Lyric, and Strings," by Brenda Hillman, who is as close to the center of the postmodern lyric assemblage (I hestitate to call it a "movement") as anyone, as witnessed by the rather remarkable collaborative review of her most recent book, Pieces of Air in the Epic, published in the latest issue of Jacket. In her essay, Hillman makes a case for the lyric as exceeding and preceding whatever aesthetico-ideological program you want to assign to it:

It's hard to know what lyric means for post-romantics, post-symbolists, post-modernists and post-postmodernists. Lyric is an element in poetry, not a type, rendering human emotion in language; attention to subjective experience in a songlike fashion seems to be key in all definitions of lyric, and when "lyric" has been pitted against "epic" and "dramatic" forms, it has mostly been thought of as short, though it isn't always. Once lyric meant unbroken music, but since the nineteenth century, it may be broken. It cries out in singular, dialogic or in polyphonic protest. There is the question of the individual "singer," not to mention the individual lyre or the famous problem of the solitary self—can't live with it and can't live without it. Since the twentieth century unseated all certainty, the lyric is rendered on torn, damaged or twisted strings. A lyric poet sings boldly and bluntly to the general populace or is visited quietly and obliquely by the distressed hero who needs an oracle.

You can hear a bit of Hillman's own post-romantic commitments in that last sentence; elsewhere in the essay she writes, "Robert Duncan uses the word 'romantic' to recall a process-oriented seeking of original song," and then goes on to discuss the quest for originary "poetization" found in modernist commentaries on Romantic poetry (Benjamin on Holderlin being the primary example). She shows her hand further, claiming "almost all lyric poets are beauty-mongers in some way," and I think of my own attachments to and discomfort with beauty. Ultimately the essay makes a stand for the necessary messiness and fragmentation of postmodern beauty, which Hillman deliberately opposes to the newspeak of our time, wondering "how the outlaw poetic sentence can address itself to the meandering sentence of official bad faith, and so makes again the large claim that poetry, audibility, synesthesia, are weapons with which to oppose the culture that our politics produces, if not the politics themselves. It's a claim I subscribe to provided we detach it from grandness and rhetoric: I think poetry does constitute a form of resistance but only on a micro, cellular level, perhaps only on the most basic level by which life opposes death.

I find less beauty in the poetry in this issue of NAW than I do adrenaline, a jazzing and jangling of the nerves, pleasurable but also anxiety-inducing, like a coffee mug filled to the brim with espresso. I get the high of contact with reality as it's being processed through clever, linguistically attuned minds all seeking for it in idiosyncratic ways. Their language vibrates with a dual awareness of history—the history of now, what I think of as "nap of the earth" historicizing, an aerial view necessarily and perilously close to the surface, under the radar of the large dumb arguments that constitute our everyday comportment—and history's impact on that subjective kernel that each writer proudly or shamefacedly or matter-of-factly carries with him- or herself, the energetic and continual collision of the unconscious with our intolerable Real. Some poets, like Andrew Joron, make the collisions and elisions explicit in their play, as words transform themselves to translate their nervous seeking into the reader's own nerve network:

I, my
        being to begin, my die
To decide my deicide, am

Gone again to distance, & sand, & stand
        by fear
Entranced before the door.

Or do I travel as travail of a veil?

(from "I Am the Door")

Flarf is not outside the task of the lyric as Hillman broadly defines it, as demonstrated by the inclusion of two poems by Rodney Koeneke. "A Birthday Poem for Nada Gordon" praises the Bellydancing Queen of Flarf in ludicrously elevated yet utterly sincere terms for her work "water[ing] the meaty blossoms of excess," "generously spiking our brownies with hashish" and otherwise disordering our capital-confiscated senses:

Pack animals drop from exhaustion daily
in the snowy Himalayas of the everyday;
businessmen enjoy their vinaigrette
at busy restaurants where the unconscious scrunches uneasily in booster chairs.
Above them, cool in the mind's high court you sit
invigilating specialness
the non-fun want eclipsed.

These poets are resurrection-men and -women, raiding the graves of "post-romantics, post-symbolists, post-modernists and post-postmodernists" to assemble their ungainly, occasionally gorgeous creatures with their organs on the outside, to remind at any rate this reader that he has a pulse, neurons, hormones, ears, and a tongue. And I'm not sure it's fair to ask more of poetry than that, though we do, of course, we ask the moon, we ask for some sensation, some friction, of what we're pleased to call "the self" rubbing up against "the world," hoping for sparks, or to discover there's no separation, or that there is. Lots more for me to absorb here; I want to close with the first stanza of Lisa Samuels' poem, "Open your eyes to the terrible sculpture of bedclothes," a poem and title representative of the impulses I've tried to describe here:

Kenneth Koch held three oranges, waiting for the bus.
The oranges were self-mesmerized: each was one side of his
four-sided-self. He was taking the bus to present his ideas.
He had to keep his sole awake (fourth side) awake.

Coming Home

Yes, Ithaca is home. Arrived yesterday evening in hallucinatory blue skies, the local climate of gentle hippies and spaced-out kids immediately asserting itself. But it won't be home for very much longer, and that fact keeps me from feeling fully landed here. Home is this enormous pile of mail: student loan consolidation offers, a soup recipe from my dad, Vassar's alumni magazine, NYSEG bills, notice of not-having-won a book prize, Robert Strong's snail-mail blog, or SNOG, though this one is labeled "BOG" (toward the end I like this: "Art: recognizing good mistakes. Craft: anticipating around bad mistakes"), issues of the London Review of Books which I don't remember subscribing to but am glad to have, copies of my own books from a defunct job application, and the following new items I wish I had time to read: Michael Scharf, For Kid Rock Total Freedom (Spectacular Books); the second issue of Practice: New Writing + Art; Soft Targets 2.1; Gunnar Björling, You go the words, translator Fredrik Hertzberg (Action Books); and Pleiades 27:2. Nothing I'd like better to sit in the back yard and page through all these, and perhaps I will.

We have about a month to enjoy an Ithaca summer, during which time I must prepare to defend my dissertation and to teach my Lake Forest classes; we make the move in mid-August. Plus there are all the friends to hang out with and play D&D with and read poems with before we say goodbye. And with everything else that's going on there's writing: where to find time and space for it, including writing this blog—which has strayed, I feel, from its initial impetus and bounds, and may stray further if it continues. After all, I began it in 2003 with the hope and desire of making stronger bonds between myself and the larger literary world from this island of Ithaca. In Chicago I will no longer have such isolation (whether it was real or perceived) to overcome: there is a large and vibrant community of poets there, and strong institutions to work with or against. Of course urban poets blog, maybe even most of them, but the impetus must shift, coming perhaps more from a desire to be heard than from a desire for inclusion. And there's the chasm that I must navigate between student and professor, journeyman and "master," someone with students of his own and a task of his own superadded to the most basic task of writing. "All is, if I have grace to use it so, / As ever in my great taskmaster's eye."

***
A select handful of European photos:

A travelers' self-portrait in the Newark departure lounge.


Me with a statue of Dr. Johnson's cat, Hodge.


Roman pillars and the Colosseum.


The statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori.


Emily poses in Calcata, the medieval village north of Rome inhabited entirely by artists and craftspeople.


A view in Umbria.


The courtyard of Agriturismo Marciano, where we stayed for four nights, on the northern edge of Siena.


The ancient Etruscan Gate in Volterra.


Emily with a view of Tuscany.


Obligatory view of Florence.


The beach at Vernazza, one of the five villages of the Cinque Terre.


I gatti di Vernazza.


View of Riomaggiore.


Piva, trattoria-owner and troubadour, in action in Vernazza.


Obligatory view of Venice.


A Venetian door-knocker.


The grave of Peggy Guggenheim... and her pets.


The Bridge of Sighs.


A view from the tram in Trieste.


Me and James Joyce.


The Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia in Trieste.


My Triestine friends Michela and Mario.


Miramare.


Vorticist-ish statue of Duke Amedeo of Savoy, an honorary citizen of Trieste who fought for Mussolini, in the park at Miramare.


Vienna powerlines at dusk.


Bust of Mahler inside the Vienna State Opera House during one of the intervals at a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin.


"Fear eats the soul": motto on the safety curtain at the Opera House.


"Art is my hobby." In one of the courtyards of the Museumsquartier, Vienna.


The Hundertwasserhaus.


The Secession Building—locals call it "the golden cabbage."


A curiously nautical ornament of the Secession Building.


Freud's cigars, as displayed at the museum at Berggasse 19.


Outside Vienna state radio.


The blue (?) Danube with a view of Margaret Island, Budapest.


A statue of the world's greatest author in Budapest's City Park.


The Chain Bridge by day.


The Chain Bridge at night.


Fisherman's Bastion in Buda.


Entrance to the Gellert Baths.


Gellert Baths interior.


Marchers in a parade of Hungarian ethnic minorities, Saturday June 23, 2007.


The church-like Great Synagogue in Pest.


Weeping Willow Holocaust Memorial. Each "leaf" has a victim's name inscribed upon it.


Detail from the Weeping Willow.


A menorah from the Jewish Museum honoring Napoleon for giving civil rights to the Jews.


The view from Fisherman's Bastion.

London Fog

Back in London, where it's cool and gray and all the news is of the torrential rains and flooding they had in northern England yesterday, a major contrast with the almost tropical heat of Budapest. It was a very full four days there: one of the best things I did was rent a bicycle with which to pedal all around the city (well, the flat, Pest side of it anyhow), enabling me to get around quickly and see much more than I would have on foot or even using public transportation. And biking along the Danube is an experience everyone who visits the city should try. It also provided me with my only opportunity to get to know a Hungarian a little bit: Tomas at the bike shop courteously offered me some soda water when I returned the bike the next day and I ended up hanging out in the shop chatting with him for most of the afternoon. A solo traveler ought to be extroverted to have the fullest experience of places, and I'm not always, so I welcome these opportunities when they arise. I also continue to think fondly of my Triestine hosts Mario and Michaela, who showed me so much of their haunted, beautiful city and also got me to eat cuttlefish, octopus, and whole fried sardines for the first time. If I'd been lucky enough to meet a Viennese person or two I might have a warmer impression of that city as well.

Biking around Budapest, visiting the parks, going to the movies (I saw Stranger Than Fiction in English with Hungarian subtitles; it was much better than I'd been led to expect, and Dustin Hoffman's slyly poststructuralist literature professor is my new role model), hearing concerts (free shows on Saturday night by a group of Hungarian folksingers, one of whom played the French horn, and a ska band called the Brooklyn Funk Experience; I also found myself in a studio of Magyar Radio yesterday evening for a live recital of songs by Kodaly, Ravel, and Brahams), and eating food tantalizingly similar to yet ineffably different from that prepared by my mother when I was a child, I found myself wondering what my life would look like if I'd succeeded in going there for a Fulbright year as I attempted to do in 2000. Would I still have made it to Cornell and met Emily? Would I have attained something resembling proficiency in Hungarian? The most difficult language I've ever tried to study, even casually--in Italian I could get by, I don't speak German at all but I can at least follow the logic of the language and recognize many words--in Hungary I knew how to say "Good day," "Thank you," "The bill please," and "I don't speak Hungarian," not much else. There are very few cognates and the syntax is almost completely detached from word order, so you need to learn not just new words but a new logic to reach even the beginner's level with the language. The Hungarians at least don't really expect foreigners to know their language, and occasionally seemed touched or at least amused by my mumbled "Koszonom" and "Jo napot." My rather sketchy Fulbright plan involved studying and translating Hungarian poetry--I don't know about present-day Hungary but historically it's been a country where poets have been tremendously esteemed and influential figures--the legislators of choice in a country whose "legitimate" rulers were so often occupiers and oppressors. One of the most famous Hungarian poets, Sandor Petofi (apologies for not attempting the diacritical marks), almost singlehandedly launched a (failed) revolution in 1848 by reading a nationalist poem on the steps of the National Museum. On the plane from Budapest this morning I devoured the astonishing memoir of another Hungarian poet, Gyorgy Faludy, whose English title is My Happy Days in Hell; his poetry and translations of Villon made him a celebrity in his twenties, something unimaginable in a Western country. (His life story is remarkable: fleeing the Nazis, moving to American and joining the U.S. Army, then going back to Hungary after the war against all advice and being imprisoned in a forced labor camp under the most inhuman conditions imaginable, surviving only because of the affection and resourcefulness of his fellow prisoners, saved by the death of Stalin--the memoir ends there, I wish it had gone on. He was a fascinating man--an egotist, but the most charming sort, deeply ethical but unconventional, and apparently bisexual to boot. He only passed away last year, so he lived to see a free Hungary.) And there are innumerable streets in Budapest named for poets, as well as statues--there's one of Attila Jozsef, perhaps the most depressing writer who ever lived, just a stone's throw from the Hungarian Parliament. It's impossible to imagine Americans honoring poets to the same degree, much less a poet of despair like Attila.

Looking for my mother, that's what this comes down to: wandering the streets of the Jewish quarter, wondering exactly where the photo I have of her as a little girl in the ghetto (wearing the yellow star) was taken; wondering if the Hungarian tradition of poetry somehow influenced her own writing or at least her desire to write; trying to breath in something of the air she first breathed. Her Budapest is really unimaginable to me, unrecognizable in spite of the architecture, food, language: imagine being born into a world of terror as she was, your parents taken away from you, your first memories being those of compression in the ghetto with thousands of other Jews terrified for their lives. And then to live with that memory, and the memories of your parents that they never speak about, in a country that prides itself on forgetfulness and the new--growing up in Queens. And none of this is the real story, it's just a mythology I've constructed retrospectively that bears me up in some mysterious way. In some ways that myth has become more precious to me than the truth--otherwise I'd try harder to make contact with my remaining Hungarian relatives. Maybe I'm readier to do that now, having walked those streets.

London, a delicious and very expensive afterthought to this trip, this petit-grand tour. I spent most of it in bed finishing Faludy's memoir. Perhaps tomorrow Emily and I will stroll along the Thames, and tell each other the stories of our nine days' adventures apart.

Mitteleuropa

Vienna was unspeakably hot for the first two days: then a titanic windstorm blew through early Thursday evening during which I fortunately happened to be taking a nap at the hotel; they seemed like hurricane-force winds to me. It cooled things off considerably and when I arrived in Budapest the next evening things weren't nearly as sweaty as they'd been. I've now visited three cities bearing the stamp of the Habsburgs: monumental architecture arranged more or less symmetrically with the predominant landscape (Trieste--the curve of the sea; Vienna--the low hills; Budapest--the Danube and the hills of Buda to the west, the plain of Pest to the east). All three cities have tortured political histories; all three were more or less bastions of the middle-European culture to which Jews contributed so much that they--we--made the mistake of believing assimilation was possible, had even taken place. All three bear the mark, for me, of a terrible absence. In Budapest that absence is personal: my mother was born here in 1942, and just two years later was forced to move to the Budapest ghetto with her grandparents, while her own parents went to the camps (which they both, miraculously, survived). So it's a strange place to be a tourist, to snap pictures of and stare at--certainly one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen, maybe even more beautiful than San Francisco, which along with Paris has always stood at the top of my list. I haven't actually visited the Great Synagogue or ghetto yet--that's on my list for tomorrow.

Vienna I haven't much to say about just now. It's beautiful, too, in its way, but somehow colder (in spite of the heat). I was moved by my visit to the Freud museum, and I love the art of the circle of Schiele and Klmit--the latter's Beethoven friezes in the Secession Building are stunning. I've seen some incredible art on this trip, and I hope it all filters down somehow--all this sheer weight of data I've accumulated--to some level where I can actually think about it, take it in, make it part of me somehow. Central Europe, I recognize you, somehow, and I feel lonely too.

Triste Trieste

Venice was the first Italian city I saw to truly enchant me, the way Paris did the first time (so far the only time) I ventured there. The architecture is fantastic, and the ubiquity of water is both mesmerizing and ominous (you can almost see the city sinking in real time), but what I think is actually the most substantive component of its magic is the total absence of cars. Suddenly to remember that streets were once for human beings first and last--albeit in this case human beings with digital cameras, wearing tasteless T-shirts and talking in loud American accents that make you suddenly wish to be Croatian, a New Zealander, anything but a countryman to such crudeness. Ultimately what I think I'll rememember and love best about my brief time there (aside from getting lost, as Split Foster suggested) is the Biennale: after total immersion in Roman and Renaissance art, it's a relief to be confronted with the shock of the contemporary. We saw too many remarkable things to itemize here, but we were both impressed by the high quality of such an enormous volume of sculpture, paintings, videos, and installations from all over the world. One especially nice thing about the Bienniale is that not everything is concentrated in the tail of the fish that is Venice (at the Giardini and the Arsenale)--just wandering around the city you can't help bumping into a few exhibitions. For example, yesterday before leaving (and at this point I was quite weary of the crowds, heat, and humidity) I found myself in the Mexican pavilion, in which the most hi-tech possible artwork by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer had been tucked into a crumbling palazzo; I also stumbled upon new work by Brit bad boy Damien Hirst (a rather underwhelming and obvious allegory, I thought, of pharmaceuticals as the "new religion" of our day--seems like a tone-deaf choice given how powerfully we are all in the grip of the old religion right now.

Emily and I parted ways yesterday: she's off to Crete to study artmaking and I'm wandering through the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yesterdays wanderings wound up on the tiny island that composed the original ghetto--the only island in Venice in which there are no doorways opening out onto the canals. It's shockingly small for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews who once lived there. There are a few living Jews visible, clearly religious types, and a stark Holocaust memorial put up by the city. After that I was quite tired of Venice, but it took some doing to get away from it all--two hot and crowded boat rides before I could gather up my things and make it to the station. Caugh the 4:10 train to Trieste, on which I had the great good fortune to be seated next to Mario e Michaela, a young Italian couple who live there, with whom I conversed in broken English and Italian for the entire two-plus hour ride. She's a PhD candidate at the universtiy here, studying chemistry and pharmaceuticals; he's a civil engineer. They were incredibly sweet and generous with me--after we got off the train they helped me find a hotel (their intentions there at least were good--more on that in a minute) and I have a date to meet them for dinner at 8 tonight. It's nice to have that to look forward to and not to feel as alone as one sometimes can when traveling.

Trieste is a beautiful and melancholy city, gracefully arched against the Adriatic Sea on a narrow margin of land between Italy and Slovenia, which is visible from anyplace you can see the sea. It's strange to be in Mediterranean weather and surrounded by Italian speakers where the buidlings are all quite Austrian in style--Mario says when I get to Vienna I'll find the architectural style familiar. My little pensione is just off Trieste's own Canale Grand, which is not a Venetian canal but just a ribbon of water that runs through a rectangular plaza in which some small boats are moored, with a gigantic church at the end that looks surprisingly like a nineteenth-century version of the Pantheon. Had pizza for dinner and tried to retire early, but I quickly discovered the evils of the last available 45 euro room, namely a single window through which a lot of noise (dishes crashing and clattering from the restaurant below) and mosquitoes, but no air, traveled. No fan, either. So I was up all night practically, getting bitten all over and trying to relieve the stuffiness by applying wet towels to my body. It got so bad at one point that I got up and found the manager, who nodded understandingly, clapped me on the back, and said, "Yes, that's the only room without a fan," then sent me groaning back to bed. This morning I was prepared to move on, but they say they're going to put me in a room with two windows and a fan tonight for just ten euros more. Let's hope for a better night's sleep tonight because I'm getting up early to catch the train to Vienna.

But, Trieste. Today I wandered hither and yon in perfect, though hot weather for most of the day. Said hello to the charming little statue of James Joyce that they've placed on a bridge over the Canale--a life-sized bronze with a book under his arm and a pensive expression on his face, looks as though he'd bid you buon giorno as you pass. Took what I think is the last tram or streetcar--Joyce loved those--in Trieste up into the hills for some spectacular views of the city and harbor and then down again. Then caught a bus over to Miramare, the palace built in 1860 by the unfortunate Archduke Maximillian, brother to the emperor, who made the fatal mistake of agreeing to be named "Emperor of Mexico" in a failed scheme to turn Mexico into an Austrian colony, an adventure which ended up with him being executed by firing squad before he ever got properly to enjoy the place. The palace is a beautiful carved cube of the local white stone, karst, perched on a promontory over the sea with a splendid view of the city in the distance. There's also a nice park that Maximilian had put in which I wandered through, footsore at this point. Finally caught the bus back into town and walked along the sea road (another Via Cavour) before ending up at the fabulous Piazza of Italian Unity where there's this crazy fountain and many cafes of considerable vintage, in one of which I am typing this now.

The Wrong Foot

After frenetic days in Florence it's a relief to have landed in Vernazza in the Cinque Terre region of Italy, where we landed a room with a terrace that looks out on the Mediterranean. Of course I myself may have landed a little too hard: this is a village of steep stairways and two days ago I took a bad step and sprained my right foot pretty good. Spent the entire day yesterday recuperating and it's still tender to walk on today. But it's not preventing us from appreciating the beauty and intimate feel of this little town--when we arrived Sunday it was crammed with tourists, but for the past several days it's been quite low-key and Emily seems to have made friends with half of the residents. We had an exquisite evening last night after dinner at Trattoria di Piva, a little seafood place run by the eponymous Piva, who likes to play his guitar and sing for the customers after nine o' clock. This was special enough, but then a group of Austrian and Italian tourists that Emily had met earlier in the day dropped by, and one of them pulled out his own guitar, which he played with virtuosic skill. So a little party (with lots of grappa and limoncello) was improvised right there on the narrow street and lasted until after midnight. You can't buy or manufacture experiences like that.

Today, due to my limited mobility, we will probably just ride the boat back and forth between the five towns and then settle for dinner in one of them. Having little to do but read yesterday, I read all of the short stories in Miranda July's new collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. I enjoyed her film, but the faux-naif stance she takes toward human relationships and sexuality begins to feel a lot like shtick after reading a couple of the stories. It's all a little twee for my taste; at the same time, she deploys a couple of tricks that it would probably be useful to introduce creative writing students to. And of course it's never easy to write well about sexuality and the strangeness of desire, so I give her points for exploring that territory.

The rest of the day I alternated between squinting at the sea and getting lost in Hopscotch, which is beginning to justify the hyperbolic cover blurb by one C.D.B. Bryan (who?), "The most magnificent novel I have ever read." Among other things, it's a kind of instruction manual for its own production, thanks to the frequent interventions of a fiction Italian novelist named Morelli, whose musings and prescriptions make up many of the "expendable chapters" of the book. What with this and the Perec and Pynchon waiting in the wings, I find I've devoted this trip to immersion in the great twentieth-century postmodernists--though Cortazar, writing in the mid-1960s, I think feels himself to be more of a belated modernist, or someone sifting through the collaged ruins of modernism trying to get at the creative destruction of literature that Derrida, Barthes, et al were writing about almost as beautifully at the same time. It's a fine lesson on integrating one's intellectual and existential concerns into/with/through/against narrative--the tragic love story that composes the main plot being so often the pretext for philosophical overreaching, and vice-versa.

This is getting expensive. Next stop will be Venice, where I hope to glimpse a little bit of the Bienniale, already fortutiously in progress.

Florence is hot. Michelangelo's David is as stupendous as you've been told. The Botticellis in the Uffizi dazzle the inner and outer eyes. It's impossible for me to get away from mere tourism with all this--just being whirled and dashed from one astounding piece of art or architecture to another. We're both exhausted and amazed all of the time. Wishing now for a hammock somewhere cool and grassy (green space seems remarkably hard to find in Italian cities). May have to settle for a hotel room nap.

Reading Cortazar's Hopscotch in fits and starts--it's a romantic Joycean ride, a modernist corker, the kind of thing they don't write any more, or do they? More on this and other subjects later.

What's happening in the world?

In Siena, where I'm shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Sarah Hannah, one of the editors of Barrow Street, who only a few months ago was generous enough to take an interest in Severance Songs, and with whom I enjoyed a brief correspondence. She has a new book coming out this fall and it's strange and terrible to realize once again how the things we create may live on and even speak on after us, without actually being us.

After two days in the wondrous citadel of Calcata (the one-hundred-percent accurate article about the place that inspired us to go there can be found here), we drove north and passed through a bit of Umbria and stopped for the night at a magical country inn, La Locanda del Gallo, south of the town of Gubbio. It's spendy, but I would recommend it to anyone traveling in Italy, and further recommend that you stay more than one night if you can. The setting is remote and hauntingly beautiful, less worked over than the Tuscan landscape we're seeing now (though that too is very beautiful of course). They served us a marvelous dinner of fettucine with truffles, salmon, and delicate pork cutlets. The next afternoon we drove through astonishing mountains and villages (my favorite, where we didn't take time to stop, was Cortona) to Siena and a little agriturismo on the northern edge of town. We'll be here for four days, so it's our first extended stay anywhere since Rome, and we're grateful. Writing this from an internet point just a hundred meters from the Piazza del Campo, maybe the most beautiful public square in Italy. It's all hallucinatory and yet real, with hundreds of fellow turisti to remind us that we're only passing through this medieval dreamscape.

Almost out of time--I hope to post something a little less in the ordinary vein of travelogue sometime in the next few days.

Hello from Rome, where Emily and I are wrapping up a five-day stay. What can I say about it that hasn't been said? It's dirty and magnificent and I'm typing this just a stone's throw from the Colosseum, which is as staggering as you've heard. Il mio italiano has proceeded from nonexistent to very bad, but I enjoy trying. Tonight we're off to a little village called Calcata and the next day we'll explore Umbria. Assuming our somewhat shady car rental guy doesn't let us down--we're waiting for him to return with our little hatchback.

Just finished Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, a book about artists, murder, and Hawthorne's great subject, guilt, that made for a peculiar introduction to the Eternal City. His Puritan severity toward Rome and the Catholic Church at times approaches the comical, but he's obviously deeply impressed in spite of himself--the splendid pageantry and sheer historical weight of Rome pose a problem that's not particularly easy for him to solve. I am thinking now that I might give the theme of innocents abroad to the nineteenth-century American lit class that I'll be teaching this fall, because there's something endlessly fascinating about the American confrontation with Europe and the failure or near-success of anything like actual sympathy between citizens of the new and older worlds. Of course as tourists we notice that most pungently when in the presence of other Americans (i.e., constantly), who suddenly seem so large and loud and clueless that you must inure yourself to the embarrassment. The unwillingness of some people to learn even the simplest words of courtesy--per favore, grazie--is astonishing. For their part the Italians we've met are unfailingly generous and graceful, but seem to lack a certain straightforwardness that I take for granted in my fellow Americans. Maybe that's just my own "innocence" being made visible.

I'll write again most likely in a few days from Siena. Andiamo!

Finished drafting my final dissertation chapter last night. Think I'll celebrate by going to Europe.

And by the way: it turns out our prospective landlords screwed us over but good by trying to rent us a place that the present tenants have no intention of vacating. If you hear about any great two-bedroom apartments for rent in the Evanston area within walking distance of the train, drop me a line, willya?

Europa

Thanks to everyone who's written over the past week with best wishes and book suggestions—it's more and better advice than I could possibly follow. I may cheat with three books—at the library sale I picked up my old teacher Eamon Grennan's translation of Leopardi, which is slender enough not to notice and may help me with my Italian. Plus, depressing old Leopardi might make an interesting tonic to contrast with the sun-drenched Italy we're expecting to find. Other leading candidates at this time include the portable Thoreau, Cortazar's Hopscotch, Hawthorne's Marble Faun (both because Nada suggested it and because I'm teaching a 19th-century lit class this fall), and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (far too big at 1,000+ pages, but the James Joyce-reading Serbian cabdriver we met in Chicago strongly recommended it).

Back from a fast and frenetic trip to Chicago, where we put a deposit down on an apartment in Evanston in a sweet spot between Lake Michigan and the commuter train. Now we barely have time to turn around before flying across the Atlantic on Thursday. I thought I'd post our itinerary here on the off chance that we might intersect with one of you Gentle Readers:

May 24 - 26 London
May 26 - 31 Rome
June 1 Calcata
June 2 - 4 Gubbio
June 4 - 7 Siena
June 7 - 10 Florence
June 10 - 14 Cinque Terre
June 14 - 17 Venice

That's the honeymoon segment. After this Emily's off to Crete and I'm on my own. So what follows is less an itinerary than my hazy idea of what cities I'll visit in the order in which I'll visit them:

June 17 - 20 Trieste and/or Ljubljana
June 21 - 25 Budapest
June 26 - 29 Vienna

Most of the above is subject to change without notice.

This blog will likely be dark while I'm traveling, but it's possible I'll find time for an update here or there. Also, Emily and I have talked about creating a travel blog together—if that happens, I'll let you know where to find it.

Unfinished business: a week ago Jen Scappettone and Will Cordeiro rocked the SOON house. Jen's poetry is a force; Will refused the mediation of the podium in theatrically delightful ways. Looking forward to having Jen as a neighbor in Chicago.

Farewell, addio, slovo, viszontlatasra, abschied!

Question

If you were going to travel for a month and wanted to pack as light as possible, but nonetheless could not survive without reading matter, what books would you bring?

A Bigger Announcement

I am delighted to be able to tell all and sundry that I have accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest College for this fall (where I shall have Blogland's very own Robert Archambeau as a colleague). So not only are Emily and I preparing for a major European trip for next week but we're also preparing to move. Leaving Ithaca will be hard—this town has been very, very good to and for both of us—but I am thrilled to finally become a full-time teacher and we're both excited about the opportunities that the Chicago area will present. I am especially pleased at the prospect of joining one of what the Chicago Postmodern Poetry site will show you is one of the liveliest and most interesting communities of poets in the country.
And let's not forget the food: my dad is from Chicago and I was raised with a reverence for the Chicago-style hot dog (you haven't lived until you've had one of these with the sport peppers, tomatoes, and an entire pickle laid on top, mustard yes ketchup absolutely not, the whole dusted with celery salt), deep dish pizza, ribs, and other delights. I will probably have to start going to the gym to compensate.

A Big Announcement

So it's time I told you that Emily and I are heading off to Europe in two weeks time for a full-scale honeymoon (as opposed to the lovely but abbreviated trip to Canada we took right after getting married last September). We're starting in London, then we're off to Rome, Gubbio, Siena, Florence, the Cinque Terre, and Venice. It doesn't stop there: Emily will then head to Crete for a creativity workshop and I'll be Eurailing it in Austria and Hungary. (It may seem odd to spend a week and a half apart on a honeymoon, but we're a very modern couple. Emily didn't change her last name, either.) We're very excited and a little overwhelmed at the prospect of a month of travel. Any tips, advice, cheap hotels, or must-see sights that you'd like to tell us about are welcome in the comments box.

Upcoming SOON Reading

Coming to the State of the Art Gallery in downtown Ithaca this Saturday, May 12 at 7 PM, it's Jennifer Scappettone and Will Cordeiro!

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly, forthcoming from Litmus Press, and of a chapbook of graphic stills, Abluvion Almanac, out this spring from Outside Voices. Her poetry, prose, and translations from the Italian verse of Amelia Rosselli have recently appeared in Zoland Annual (Random House, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for a New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), 2nd Avenue Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, Chicago Review, Dusie, and P-Queue. She is now at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups commissioned by Atelos Press, and on a special issue of Aufgabe devoted to contemporary Italian experiment. She works as an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Chicago.

Will Cordeiro is a former NYC Teaching Fellow and co-founder of the Brooklyn Playwrights Collective. Several of his one-act plays have been produced in off-off-Broadway venues, and he has had a staged reading of his full-length verse play, The Errors of Eros. In addition, he has been a staff theater critic for offoffonline, and continues to write art and theater reviews for other publications as well. His poems have been published in such journals as the Brooklyn Review, Baltimore Review, Paradigm, and Dirt: A Journal of Contemporary Arts and Letters. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell, working on writing a long poem, Hymns, and an opera libretto.

Innovation Versus Elegance, Part Two

Here's the original question as posed by Bernadette Mayer to Bill Berkson in a letter dated May 10, 1981, along with Berkson's reply:

Is elegance opposed to innovation?

Pretty iffy, I'd say. I don't believe it as a rule. Duncan McNaughton tried to tell me that, that my poems would be better deeper if I gave up being elegant. But I feel not elegant enough, and I also feel that if elegance exists in art it is a deep quality like character or part of the character of the work. Can we name a single innovator whose innovations are of value whose work at any point lacks elegance? Well, early Cézanne (before he innovated) and a lot of Williams has no elegance whatever. In music, a lot of raw music is more elegant (country blues or Cajun) than the refined versions of the same material. Innovation being a reaction against dull flatness or vulgarized mechanical "cheap imitation" style is always the revelation of furthered elegance. (WCW's problem was an awkward flatness but it wasn't dull.)

Interesting that, in his comment on my original post, Reginald Shepherd suggested that my model for prose mixed with verse (as a congeries of "poetic rapture and expository discourse" should rather be Williams' Spring and All (which I do love) than Dante's La Vita Nuova. But I think he'd probably concur with Berkson's claim that the dichotomy set up by Mayer's question is a false one. I particularly like that last, non-parenthetical sentence of Berkson's: "Innovation... is always the revelation of furthered elegance." At the same time I continue to wonder about the distinction to be made between the cooked and the raw in poetry—Reginald doesn't like the word "messy" but I do because it suggests an expansiveness and tolerance for the collection of contradictions that oneself is (and the world too, of course). Maybe I just like it because it's so frankly in tension with my own fastidiousness.

Still too looking for the distinction to be made between verse and prose, or poetry and prose, or most starkly, poetry and writing. Is poetry a subset of writing or something entirely other (the magazine after all is Poets _&_ Writers)? Certainly many writers who ought to know better drop poetry entirely from their discourse and assimilate "writing" into "fiction" (some of the coverage of Cynthia Ozick's riposte to Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus has noted this slip on her part). The common-sense approach is to regard fiction and poetry and that strange anti-being non-fiction as subsets of "writing." But culturally, poetry often seems to bear the peculiar burden of being considered the other of what's normally considered "writing"—that is, instead of being seen as a component of literacy, much less an aesthetic phenomenon, it's reserved for ritualistic and therapeutic purposes. Then there's "writing" as it appears under the sign of post-structuralism, as an unfinishable process subsumed under the word "text" (something woven or in the process of being woven), which stands opposed to still prevalent notions of the poem as a work, something monumental—or monoglossic, to use Bakhtin's term, which involves us from another angle in this question of genre since for Bakhtin it's not writing but "the novel" that provides the supreme possibility for heteroglossia. From this perspective "writing" may take the form of poetry but poetry is not always or even usually "writing," and "writing" which happens to assume the form of poetry retains a surprising capacity to shock, discomfit, or bore those who expect poetry to primarily serve some more or less utilitarian function (including such utilitarian functions as "self-expression" or "uplift").

So I would describe myself as someone interested in "writing" who also has a sizable investment in poetry, or who has moved from poetry toward "writing" without quite being willing to renounce those qualities that the very purest "writers" (I'm thinking particularly of Kenneth Goldsmith as he's entertainingly manifested himself over at the Poetry Foundation's group blog, Harriet) would like to challenge or leave behind. I'm interested in heteroglossic poetry, whether literally (poetry that incorporates other langugages, dialects, and modes or classes of speech) or otherwise (forms of poetic heteroglossia that intrigue me include poems that deal elegantly with the mundane and quotidian, or with the brute facts of the desiring and perishable body, or with the various modes and incarnations of history). I think it's worth approaching these questions of genre from this more existential angle: to interrogate forms and modes for their ontological and epistemological possibilities. I take Wittgenstein's claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world extremely seriously. And yet it's also possible to imagine "limits" as necessary bounds against chaos, and to love and wish to conserve traditions of expression and form while also standing up for innovation (and elegance!) against the dull flatness and mechanical vulgarity that hems so much of us and our culture (literary and otherwise) round.

Say Yes to Excess

The new issue of Action Yes is up and features all of the papers and presentations from the "Post-Avant: Strategies of Excess" panel from the Atlanta AWP earlier this year. All but one: at that time I was unable to present my little paper on the postmodern baroque because of the perfidy of Northwest Airlines; this time technical difficulties have prevented my paper from joining those of Anne Boyer, Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, K. Silem Mohammed, and Jed Rasula. But never fear: my essay will appear in the summer issue, keeping the theme of excess alive well into the ecstasies of autumn. In the meantime, check out what my panelmates said.

Also new, also interesting: a zine called Harp & Altar. I like their "Manifesto": "We believe what is written in the books, but now we want to see for ourselves."

Innovation Versus Elegance

I've been reading Bernadette Mayer and Bill Berkson's correspondence and interviews as collected in What's Your Idea of a Good Time? from Tuumba Press. One question asked was something like, "Do you think elegance and innovation are mutually exclusive?" Something I've been worrying at, because it gets at the heart of a tension in my own work: the desire for highly polished surfaces versus the desire to get gritty or the willingness to be messy.

On Friday the a capella San Francisco supergroup Chanticleer came to Ithaca, of which one of my oldest and dearest friends, Eric S. Brenner, is a member. They are virtuoso performers and seeing them gave me the thrill that seeing any artist at work at the top of his/her/their game does, aside from the beauty and playfulness of the music itself. They are currently touring with no fewer than three separate repetoires, including the brand-new And On Earth, Peace: A Chanticleer Mass. It's wonderful music, but what's most compelling about the project is the fact that it was composed piecemeal by different contemporary composers of different backgrounds; I'm particularly interested in the "Credo," the most Catholic moment in the Catholic mass, which was written by an Israeli composer named Shulamit Ran. Talk about threading the needle: it incorporates Hebrew into the mass! Less successful—or perhaps just less elegant—is another section which invokes "Muslims and Christians and Jews" as participants and interlocutors in the mass. But I find myself wanting to draw a connection between the Chanticleer mass and the Berkson-Mayer question, because here are artists being asked to innovate within a rigid classical structure.

There are some poets whose pleasures are primarily instigated by their virtuosity, and only secondarily by what visions, experiences, or ideas they have to offer: for me this list would include Auden, Paul Muldoon, Heather McHugh, Mary Jo Bang, and Caroline Knox, to name a few. They err on the side of artifice and formal innovation, and their work either succeeds in ravishing me utterly or else seems slight; there's little ground in between. Then there are poets for whom the pleasure and drama primarily comes from the tension between the linguistic resources available to them and the difficulty or abstraction of what they are trying to express or construct: I tend to group Language poets and their followers and fellow travelers in this category. Another grouping whose work stimulates and challenges me would be poets for whom the disruption or challenging of elegance and/or "the poetic" is one of their primary energy supplies: this would include some of Frank O'Hara (but he usually achieves a tossed-off elegance) and most of the second- and nth-generation New York School poets (Ted Berrigan, Mayer herself, Alice Notley come to mind) and also the flarfists.

These may not be terribly interesting or satisfying categories, but they help me in trying to understand what moves me—and what has movement—in poetry, and how it is that I instinctually gravitate to formal virtuosity yet am constantly provoked, and sometimes shocked and delighted, by shaggier work. Sometimes I think it all comes down to Dickinson and Whitman, and the paradox of my own makeup that they represent for me: I am viscerally thrilled by Dickinson's agility and intensity, but find Whitman's ungainly, rambunctious mode of engagement with both himself and the larger (American) world more fun to think about. She's Latin, he's Italian; she's Hebrew, he's Yiddish; she's New England, he's Brooklyn; etc. Of course Dickinson is marvelously irregular and elliptical, while Whitman's catalogues gesture toward precision, but I still find the dialectic they present useful for thinking about American poetry in general and my own aesthetic impulses in partiocular.

Fourier Series represents, in part, an attempt to synthesize, or rather present in mixture, both tendencies: grids of short-lined, high-tension lyrics are broken up by prose "landscapes," presenting a slightly more schematic version of the old contest between line and sentence that charges verse. In some ways the model book for me in expressing these impulses would be Dante's Vita Nuova (sonnets interspersed between prose sections that purport to explain the poems but often don't) or the Japanese haibun. (Emily and I are traveling to Europe in a few weeks for our long-delayed honeymoon, which presents an ideal occasion for haibun.) But it may be more a question of the long line, or the page-as-field, or the disjunctive poem, versus more regular verse. Or it may really come down to attitude: fierceness, profanity, and the palpability of bodily experience versus a smooth surface corrugated by the tension of tamped-down forces. Bernadette Mayer herself presents an interesting working-out of this dialectic in her sonnets.

I suppose that it's the tension between form and content that we mean by the very word "art"—a tension somehow missing from its companion word "craft," which to my mind connotes the ideal subdual of one's ragged edges toward some utilitarian end. I like the danger of art: the high-wire act of virtuosity, or the uncertain quantity of seriousness and satire, or—hardest for a spectator to bear, and most rewarding when it works—the presentation of human vulnerability.

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true —
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —

The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

Apparently there's a bespectacled photographer on the interwebs who shares my name, but with a definite article in front. Who is this guy? He takes great photos.

The Corey.

Congrats to Mark on his upcoming Zukofsky bio. Click the link for details.

Life is chaotic just now. Please stand by....

American Small Press Poetry

I recently entered my collection of small press poetry books in a competition held by the Cornell Library. Didn't win, but I thought some might be interested in the little essay I wrote to introduce said collection:

For as long as I can remember I've been a haunter of bookstores and libraries. But I didn't begin to accumulate books in a serious way until I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1999 to begin a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. It was there that I developed my interest in alternative American poetry, and started buying as much of it as I could afford. What do I mean by "alternative"? Contemporary poetry isn’t on many people's radar these days; even highly literate denizens of English departments don't always know much about what's going on in poetry. The poets who do break through to something like mainstream attention—John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, and Billy Collins come to mind—actually represent fairly narrow swatches of what's been possible in American poetry for the past fifty years. These are the poets published by the big publishing houses, whose books actually stand a chance of being reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. But it's actually the small and really small presses in this country which have done the most to keep something like a living tradition of poetry alive. I should say rather "traditions," because the glory of American poetry is its multiplicity, the range of its techniques and styles and preoccupations. I have tried, in building up my collection, to accumulate as broad a swathe of these alternatives as one poor graduate student can.

San Francisco has been an alternative poetry mecca since before the time of the Beats, and I arrived there hungry to learn what my new city had to teach me. I visited Green Apple Books and City Lights in the city; I carried armloads out of Moe's and Serendipity in Berkeley; I uncovered treasures at the late lamented Wessex Books in Menlo Park. In these bookstores, and in conversations with other poets and poetry aficionados, I discovered numerous alternatives to the large-press poetry that had heretofore dominated my sense of the possible. At first I was most intrigued by the legacy of the Language poets, a tightly knit group that had gotten its start in the Bay Area in the 1970s and which had gone on to become the most controversial, contentious, and just plain difficult movements in American poetry since the days of Ezra Pound. The Language poets sought in both their writing and in their chosen modes of publication and distribution to challenge the prevailing hierarchies of American poetry, which at that time (and to some degree still even today) privileged a poetics of the "I"—what critic Charles Altieri has called the "scenic mode" of American poetry, in which a speaker looks out into a landscape and discovers—himself (or herself). For the Language poets, how you said a thing was as meaningful or more so than what you said, and the poems they produced were spiky, hard to follow, sometimes gleefully obscene, sometimes austerely beautiful. Their work attempts to enlist the reader as a comrade in challenging modes of meaning-making that have been hijacked by advertising and corporate media—and by an American poetry mainstream that was too often reflexively apolitical and anti-intellectual in its biases.

The Language poets sought nothing less than the seizure of the means of meaning production, and if their project was quixotic, the scope of its ambition was thrilling nevertheless. Uninterested in the New York publishing world (which would have rejected them out of hand, anyway), they created their own small presses and samizdat-style magazines and distributed them across a network of sympathetic and interested readers that now spans the globe. Browsing the bookstores, reading the spines, I learned to look for the press's name before even taking note of the title or author: O Books, Roof Books, The Figures, Edge, North Point Press. Since many of these publishers continue to operate, I began to discover new poets, some of them my age or close to it, who had learned what the Language poets had to teach about do-it-yourself meaning-making. I also began to discover a heritage for American poetry that was far richer and more complex than the narrative I’d been taught (it began with T.S. Eliot, skipped forward to the "Confessional" poets of the 1950s, and then petered out into the easygoing piety of the aforementioned scenic mode). Behind the Language poets were the "New Americans," first put forward as a group by Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology of the same name. I discovered the Black Mountain School of poetry, centered around the work and teaching of Charles Olson and the radical college in North Carolina that he'd taught at for a few crucial years in the 1950s alongside Robert Creeley, John Cage, Josef Albers, and Merce Cunningham. The poets of the San Francisco Renaissance—Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser chief among them—brought a queer sensibility to their investments in the English literary tradition, and wrote poems stained with a baffling and exhilarating outsider's mysticism into their poems. The poets who were associated with the art scene in New York in the 50s and 60s, known as the New York School, brought a fierce, yet whimsical integrity to the task of writing poetry, and fostered one of the most enduring and pleasurable avant-garde movements in American poetry, one that continues to this day. More recently I’ve been fascinated by the practitioners of "flarf," a movement that like Language poetry pushes hard against the boundaries of the acceptably "poetic," but does it with more pop-cultural panache. And then there are the strangers and outsiders, the founders of one-poet movements or the participants in trends that were never recognized, or have yet to be fully born.

In two short years I spent nearly all of my disposable income on books of poetry published in the past five decades. Only a few of these would qualify as rare books, but I think I've built up a genuinely rare collection that surveys a broad swathe of what's been most significant and vital in alternative American poetry. There are holes and gaps: I am increasingly conscious of the odd provinciality that comes of being a citizen of empire, and would like to strike out into reading and collecting the poetries of other languages and traditions. Still I retain my commitment to taking the pulse of poetry by centering my reading and collecting on what's published by the small presses. My book collection, like many people's is a physical manifestation of my consciousness and the number of connections I'm able to make. I hope it continues to grow.

Meta-Free-Phor-All.

Sobering.