The (Conceptual) Pleasures of the (Conceptual) Text

Buzz Spector (American, b. 1948)

Conceptual Art, 1996

Torn paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Place performs.

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

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

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

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

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

Shelley "Action" Jackson.

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

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

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

Go Read

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

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

Literary Announcements

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

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

Send:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"the poetry of self-promotion"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: these are strategies of failure.

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

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

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

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


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

A Note on Greenfield's Tracer

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

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

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

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

I wanted to talk

Give it up, the voice said


    The voice

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

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

   that is the voice is

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

This was not a place; this was an event:

   I was measured by it

little remained or time, but there was none other

to gauge besides me, remanded into what should be

forgotten (the stones would never remember)

   I wanted to be   not me

and there was   no other there

without me,   though I insisted in the falsity

no other was there—only the dispersal of

my own self




un-wildering where I went

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

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

Everybody’s Got One

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

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

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

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

Is this an opinion?

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

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

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

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

A New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prose's Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eckhart Tolle IS John Ashbery

That's the conclusion I drew from reading Adam M. Bright's article "Here, Now: Eckhart Tolle Takes the Stage" in the new magazine The Point, "a Chicago-based print journal devoted to rigorous intellectual essays on contemporary life," that I picked up at the newsstand before boarding the train to work this morning. (Parenthetically, I love taking the train to work; I love that there's an actual newsstand—a very well-stocked one—at Chicago and Main in Evanston.) The article is an appreciative look at Tolle's philosophy that addresses the fact of skepticism toward New Ageism and gurus in general but doesn't really try to argue or persuade the reader; in so doing, Bright adopts Tolle's stance as his own without really trying to convince of his critical distance. "Escaping thought and returning to Being is my life’s purpose if I believe it is. It’s a blank-faced bovine god if you believe it’s not."

But what fascinated me most about the piece was how its description of Tolle's spiritual practice—and I do believe it's a spiritual practice, though it boggles me how Bright could neglect its obvious connections to various strands of Eastern mysticism and meditation practice in general—amounts largely to disidentifying the self with the mind, and how well this seems to describe the poetic practice of John Ashbery. Tolle tells his audience that they must step back from the interior monologues that accompany all of our actions, to view them dispassionately as "possessing entities," and to step into "a depth in that still alert space between thoughts and that is here, now." Isn't that "between thoughts" where the action happens in an Ashbery poem and its bewilderingly sinuous, pseudo-hypotactic sentence structures? Consider this little chunk of Flow Chart:

The incubus awoke from a long, refreshing sleep.
A lot of people think they have only to imagine a siren for it to exist,
that the truth in fairy tales is somehow going to say them. I tend to agree
with dumb people who intervene, and are lost; actors of a different weakness
who explain the traceries of fallen leaves as models for our burgeoning etiquette,
a system that does't let us off the hook as long as we are truth and know it,
the great swing of things. And of course it may yet turn up.
I couldn't believe he said it. But that's the way we lived. It existed.
I've been at this stand for years and I think I see how the wool
is pulled over our eyes gradually, so that each of us thinks of ourselves as falling asleep
before it happens, then wakes to a pang of guilt: was it that other me again?
Why did I take my mind off the roast, as it turned
hypnotically on its spit, and now it's charred beyond recognition?

As with many Ashbery poems this excerpt seems to adopt the neurosis of modern postindustrial life as its subject matter, but it's Ashbery's form—the emptied-out conjunctions that coordinate without coordinating, subordinate without subordinating—that actually give us the feel of dipping into the stream of consciousness without ever capturing or summarizing or taking firm hold of that consciousness, as a cupfull of muddy water bears an at best metonymic relationship to the Mississippi River.

I don't know if Ashbery lives in the state of nirvana-like bliss that Bright ascribes to Tolle, if he actually places his "self" within what Tolle calls "presence" as opposed to "the mental story of me." But I've often felt my own response to his poetry mirrors somewhat Bright's response to Tolle: frustration at my inability to conceptualize what any given poem seems to be up to gives way to delight in what Ashbery has called "the experience of experience," a delight homeomorphic with boredom. Tolle's persona eerily mirrors this: as Bright writes, "Tolle’s charisma, the magnetic quality of his personality, is almost an anti-charisma. He’s made himself so boring, punched so far through the back end of dullness, that we feel his simplicity must represent some incredible inner power." Anyone who's ever actually been in Ashbery's presence or heard him read might nod with recognition at this.

The comparison for me highlights the nigh-invisible separation between genius and charlatanism that dogs the reputations of both men. Yet I am more skeptical about Tolle than Ashbery. I suspect Tolle's teaching probably does bring about actual good in people's lives, whereas I'm not sure Ashbery's influence has been entirely healthy for poetry. But I think the effort to conceptualize what Ashbery is up to is good and necessary: his writing is a kind of puncture or suture in our discourse that generates critical thought and perhaps pushes it into more open and dialectical directions, even if "You have it but you don't have it" ("Paradoxes and Oxymorons"). There seems to be no such effort to think Tolle, who presents himself in a profoundly un- if not anti-intellectual way, and Bright's article doesn't ultimately do much to challenge this.

400,800

The number of visits to this blog since its inception in January 2003. Thanks for stopping by.

Nel mezzo del romanzo

I heard an interview with Zadie Smith on the radio the other day—she has a new book of essays out, and coincidentally is about to give birth—and she talked about writing novels and how beginnings were painful and endings exruciating, but the middle was something else again: it was... narcotic. To paraphrase how she put it, when you're in the middle—which doesn't necessarily mean the geographic middle of the finished book—your spouse might be telling you s/he wants a divorce and all you can think about is whether "rummaged" or "rifled" is the better word. You're lost in the world of sentences, and the actual world loses its usual opacity.

Then there's this quote from the essential new book Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, in a letter from Paul Hoover to Albert Flynn DeSilver. DeSilver's previous letter had outlined various projects from building a house in Marin County to various literary and artistic works, including a "Novel" (the scare quotes are his). In Hoover's response he talks about his single novel, which met with some success (and was the occasion for a entertaining book of poems, The Novel, a bemused meditation on the prestige of the form), adding "I know that novels were never mine to do." And then there's this: "Novels steal attention from poetry, long prose also.... The theft is of time and labor, not of inspiration."

"The theft is of time and labor, not of inspiration." I know Paul is only speaking for himself here, but it confirms my experience of the past eight months. Writing Miramare (a working title), I had some expectation that the novel would become the open repository of everything I was thinking and feeling, vampirically absorbing other energies. Because the last time I attempted a novel, in my early twenties in New Orleans (1993 - 1996), I definitely experienced Zadie Smith's absorptive "middle." The writing was real—the story, my characters, the music I listened to while writing (florid stuff: Prokofiev, Queen)—while the rest of my life, which frankly at that time was something of a disaster zone, faded by comparison. I didn't write any poems—didn't, at that time, think of myself as a poet any more, though I'd been writing poetry seriously since I was fifteen—and often, didn't even write the novel, which became too big to face, since I'd staked everything on it. When I finally had to give it up as a bad job I lost my mind a little bit, at one point even finding myself in a military recruiter's office. I almost joined the Marines (hard to picture, I know), but very fortunately moved to Montana and started writing poems again instead. Such are the hazards of fiction writing!

Of course I'm older now and a little less naive about writing and its limited powers of replacing life. And what I've found is that this time, writing a novel hasn't taken anything from me except a little time that I wasn't using anyway (the half-an-hour to hour or so before I go to bed each night). I'm still writing poems—not at any breakneck pace, it's true, but at about the same rate as usual when there isn't a larger book project I'm deliberately writing toward—and I even have a little energy for thinking about scholarly matters from time to time. (Just now David Lau's review of terrific-sounding new books by Norma Cole and Andrew Joron in the latest issue of Lana Turner has greatly clarified for me what I was trying to say in my UIC talk about epistemology versus ontology in contemporary poetry—that's grist for another post.)

What consumes life is life: teaching, advising students, administrative duties, being a husband and father, etc. In an interview between Jennifer Moxley (who also has a new book out) and Daniel Bouchard in The Poker #8 a few years back, she speaks of the dilemma of the fact that "language takes up time." "Is the time that it takes to articulate your life—is that a good deal? Should you just not articulate it? You know, is it taking your life away from you?" This follows an arresting exchange and image:

Jennifer: ....so every time you create a narrative, every time you create grammar, syntax, you destroy time.

Dan: You destroy it? Lose it?

Jennifer: Well, you can't get it back.

Dan: But not in the sense of wasted.

Jennifer: No, I wouldn't say wasted. But um ... if you can imagine the image of a human being disintegrating from top to bottom, and, if you're a writer, what you're building up next to you is text, right? So pretty soon you'll be gone and the text will be left. But there's a sense of is that experience or is that something else?

The ancient hubris of poets produces this Faustian bargain: give up some portion of your life to writing, and immortality might be yours. Or who [Time's] spoil of beauty can forbid? / O, none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Whether or not you write that image, that human image in Moxley's vision, will disintegrate. And the text you stack up in your image supplements that disintegration—more life is not part of the bargain. What you get to keep is only a kind of attentiveness. Or that narcotic that Smith talks about, which Jennifer talks about too: "the space of writing is more interesting than doing anything else. It becomes kind of addictive, it feels more alive, and I think that that's a little bit scary and threatening."

In some ways that's what my novel is about. Just as Severance Songs is about the struggle with beauty, with an[aesth]eth[et]ics, in addition to whatever else it may be about, Miramare is about time and memory, and the way they dissolve into each other when the reader's eye moves across the page, creating the illusion of living more than one life. In that respect it's a form of therapy, but specifically a writer's therapy, which always only has one sort of "cure" in view: restoring the possibility of future writing. This is my path to the next work, which I think will probably be poetry again.

I am in the middle. Not I hope in that narcotic sense, but in a literal sense (I feel myself to be halfway through a first draft) and in Dante's sense, the middle of my way, in which I am necessarily lost, so that I may find it again.

Novel Writing

"And now it’s time for novel writing, which today comes from the West Country, from Dorset."

Narrative is so fundamentally different from lyric. This is kind of obvious, but writing both of them, I'm amazed by the different muscles they employ, and the different satisfactions they produce.

The pleasures of poetry are the pleasures of simultaneity. I read a line of verse, and it's like a chain reaction of little detonations: the sound play, the layers of reference (in the line's structure, diction, proper names, etc.), the manifestation of images, and the instantaneous revisions of the preceding lines created by the double-jointed syntax made possible by line breaks. It's an intensely vertical experience, though this feels less the verticality of the words themselves (most poems, of course, are narrower than the page they're printed on, unless they're very long-lined) than the vertical layering of a palimpsest or of one of those old biology textbooks with overlays for the skin, musculature, circulatory system, and skeleton (often these depths are presented unequally and with simultaneity, so that even on the first page you can see the bones of the hand, the red fist of the heart, the striations of the quadriceps, etc.).

With narrative it truly is one damn thing after another. Words and details accumulate like grains of sand in an hourglass; though you'll never remember all of them, though many of these details are all but designed to be forgotten, they nevertheless heap up into the foundations of characters, places, plots, themes, weathers, worlds. Right now I'm working on a chapter (though I hesitate to call my units of composition chapters—they're more like sections, or threads) in which one of my narrators (I have several) is about to meet the woman who will change his life. That's the moment: if I were writing a poem, I might present it directly, or even more likely ellipsize it and present the aftermath through a few coordinated details.

But because it's a narrative I write toward this event, filling in the moments of my character's lonely life in an overheated studio apartment in Washington Heights in 1971, conscious of growing suspense as this woman's presence is intimated without her actually manifesting. Every night I sit down to write thinking Now, now she will appear, and yet she never quite appears. And yet none of what I'm writing is filler: the words are grains of salt or sand for the event to stand on, but also I hope savory in themselves, and they work to evoke what I find most attractive about novels (and rare in poems), the feeling of immersion in a world.

But I no longer seek complete immersion; the "vivid, continuous dream" that John Gardner said it was a novelist's duty to conjure. I don't want the words to disappear as easily as they once did. But neither do I want them, as I usually do with poems, to remain primarily words, striking upon the eardrum and memory, vivid morsels like Proust's madeleine, which must lose its present-tense existence in the moment of recollection. Instead I seek a kind of flicker effect, a sense of the grain of the form, as might a filmmaker who simulates scratches on the emulsion or chooses black-and-white so as to make the film's filmness part of its content. I want my readers sweltering in that room full of fug and flaking leaded paint, high above February streets dusted with the dry, fine snow that real cold can bring; but I also want them caught in the coils of my sentences (my narrator's sentences), feeling in their unfolding syntax his characteristic mix of melancholia, hopefulness, and delirium.

And so with any luck narrative ceases to be a single line and becomes dual, parallel, multiple, a train track the reader straddles or hops between on her ride toward some sort of resolution of the story and of the languages it gets told in.

Next time, I hope to think through the seductions of realism, and why it is that I've been unable to resist them, in spite of a healthy suspicion of the claims usually made on realism's behalf.

After Form Fails

That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song:

After form fails a furling, reports dying

away, look away. The panicle sprouts from the clavicle,

from spinal grimace, ribs fasicled by the itch of a glance
that struts the struck organ feeling out a musty

boom, branching beneath a witch’s hands,
stone melody, capillary cracks reach the trunk,
sink rootward, birth a sneer—burnt leaves

swirling, surling in a downstreamed capacity
for the history of planks, knit brows, wrung
fingers letting loose the bloody handkerchief

to be found. And after all this force evolution
still has its job to do, mentoring the soil or honoring

the split sky, though irradiated, defining a pair of eyes

as the interrupted light they bridge by raising.

Very late revelation or discovery that what these poems are about, if they're about anything other than what each is individually about (love, war, rage, impotence), is form. The form of the sonnet, which each poem evokes by being fourteen lines long; and form's capacity or incapacity to deal with, adapt, respond adequately to the postmodern life of their author, circa 2001 - 2008, aka The Bush Years. The Odyssey frame I tried building around the poems was a crude attempt at narrativizing what's already implicit in the poems' struggles with the sonnet form: form as a refuge as necessary as it is corrupt and imperfect.

A solace for pained thought that it insulates, poetic form is like the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from infection but also severs it from the chaotic life of the body, which is "out there" while the brain hunkers down in its carapace. Attempts to break that barrier are suicidal: the results are encephalitis (swelled head), epilepsy (ecstasy), MS (short circuit), and Alzheimer's (disappearance).

Form attacks form. In the rupture, the space between, fleeting possibilities of action--of the subject--might appear. Or else the subject might be, like a replicant fleeing its incept date, dead before it leaves the table.

Body questions body: uneasy in possession of and by it, these poems like ungainly dancers (like Berryman's dancer at Henry's bier, let some thing fall out well) collide limbs, torsos, reach up searchingly, contract into defensive crouches, clownlike, stumbling, or else self-consciously graceful, gracile, pursued by the lagging spotlight of the reader's attention between densities of logo-, melo-, phanopoeia.

The sonnet is dead; long live the death of the sonnet.

After form fails, more form.

The Leap

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

In my intro to creative writing class this past Tuesday, a student asked a crucial question. Roughly paraphrased, she said something like, Okay, I see the value of paratactic and dissociative writing. But how can we learn to write that way?

I think maybe what she meant was, How do you know, when you break the rules, that you're doing it right?

I think of Dylan's, "to live outside the law, you must be honest."

And I think of the leap I ask my students to make from texts centered on the writer—writing for yourself, expression—to texts propelled toward a reader—direct presentation of the thing, machines made of words, construction, all that good Modernist stuff.

And these lines from Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuuum:

We must destroy syntax by placing nouns at random as they are born. And:

We must abolish the adjective so that the naked noun can retain its essential color. And:

(GREEDY SALTY PURPLE FANTASTIC INEVITABLE SLOPING IMPONDERABLE FRA-GILE DANCING MAGNETIC) I will explain these words I mean the sky sea mountains are greedy salty purple etc. and that I am greedy salty purple etc. all that outside me as well as in me absolute totality simultaneity synthesis = the superiority of my poetry over all others stop

Marinetti was a Fascist, of course, like Pound. But at least it can be said of Marinetti that his work got less interesting the more Fascist he became.

The moment, the leap comes when you learn to materialize the signifier. When words are visible in their essential colors. Then even adverbs (which I ban) are okay, because they are no longer dead circuits but curious arcs of electricity that cause verbs to bristle differently, like a dog's fur stroked the wrong way.

How to teach this beside procedure.

I don't think much of Robert Bly these days, but I remember my mother's yellow yellowing copy of Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations that I took down from the shelf one day as a teenager and it did lead me deeper into what I mean. And he helped me to articulate why Stevens was my favorite poet.

Bly: "a poet who is leaping makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance."

I'm less interested in these days in psychic substances. My preferred term for the leap in modern poetry, parataxis, stays on the surface, leapfrogging unlike elements from a mix of materials social, psychic, mediated, gathered, scattered, and overheard. As Wilde said, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

It's difficult to keep students on the surface. Often I ask the question, What's the difference between poems and prose? I get various right answers: it's rhythmic, it's compressed, etc. I point at the page: Look at all that white space! Look at that ragged margin! Weird, right?

They agree with me that it's weird.

I show them all kinds of paratactic stuff. I ask them to write poems that repeat phrases, that braid associations, list poems. Today we'll try some Google-sculpting. They like it, they get it. They don't get it, they don't like it. I persevere.

I believe this is valuable for writers and for non-writers. Seeing what's in front of our noses. Ringing the coin on the table for its true note. Biting, like the book says, the error. I persevere.

I was born and raised into a sense of distance from language, a distance that bred affection and longing. Wordplay is literally my mother tongue. We amused each other endlessly with rare birds of speech.

Now I put that experience, that inheritance, into each semester, shoulder queerly to the wheel. I persevere.

One day I will give their adverbs back to them. Today, even.

Can you push someone into leaping. Can you pull.

"...an easy chair sitting deep in the woods..."

"...at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking."

Isolato

Actually, that's very far from what I am, as teacher and family man. And Facebook keeps me well in touch with a wide range of peeps. That said, I have increasingly fewer impulses of the sort that lead me to blog here, leading to an endless succession of posts about how little I'm blogging here.

Still I'm not quite prepared to retire the old Cahiers. If nothing else it archives the growth of one poet's mind over more than half-a-decade, which some readers have valued. And every now and again I am moved to communicate something without the mediation of a magazine or editor, and this blog makes that possible.

What I'm not so interested in these days are the teapot-tossing tempests that for so long were the life of this blog and poetics blogging in general. Arguments about flarf or conceptual writing or the freakin' School of Quietude just aren't doing it for me these days. Having a child clarifies time, like butter, into something rich that you don't want to waste. I still absorb ephemera, as it were thoughtlessly, but I don't have to produce it.

On my mind: how to bring my teaching life in better concord with my writing life. Last semester I found something of a modus scribendi, keeping up with my classes and grading and still having something left over for at least half-an-hour every evening. Then over the summer I had acres of time to spend and misspend. Now the shock of autumn has made it hard to find my way back to daily writing, which leaves the novel tossing and turning like a fitful sleeper trying to get back to his dream. I'm not too worried about it--there's enough momentum at this point that I feel that the story, or stories, are always there. But it nags at me all the same.

At least I'm writing poems again after a considerable hiatus—poems of a different stripe than my Ithaca diary, and wilder and more shaggy than the Severance Songs, which I'll keep tinkering with right up to the moment Tupelo finally demands the manuscript. Sent a few poems out the other day after not doing that for a long while.

Somehow to bring writing and teaching into closer accord, so that one isn't stealing from the other. To be able to bring my interests of the moment into the classroom. And I've been inspired by my students too--the especially bright and ambitious ones that clustered around my door for a while last spring were instrumental in moving me to try fiction again. They helped me recapture a little of the old ingenuousness, while still being smart as hell.

I've been sick post-birthday, and today I took down off the shelf the sort of monstrous theoretical tome that I used to read for pleasure--something I'd acquired in my Ithaca days and never opened--Geoff Waite's Nietzsche's Corps/e. Published in 1996 it feels at once like the product of another era and also completely relevant to my desire to find the doorway out of postmodernism. Badiou seemed to offer one way but I'm starting to think that he's an idealist at heart, in spite of all his talk about radical secularization. That pushes me back toward Marx, and trying to understand my own anti-Marx/bourgeois/romantic impulses. Waite has written a wide-ranging and scathing polemic on what he insists on calling Nietzsche/anism; his hyperbolic claim, quoting Georges Bataille, is that "Nietzsche's position is the only one outside of communism." It's a fervent attack on left Nietzscheanism (i.e., post-structuralism) without being reactionary, as most such attacks usually constitute themselves. Probably out of date. But it's fun to re-immerse myself in such an intellectually penetrating yet wide-ranging text, stylistically reminiscent of a more serious Zizek, and more pleasurable than Badiou by a long shot. It's also hooking me up again with my Frankfurt School-formed self after a summer dawdling in the mires of mathematics.

Also reading:

- José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the first Saramago I've read—I've been turned off by the descriptions of books like Blindness, which made them sound schematic, but this is lush and atmospheric, a treat.

- Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax, editors, Letters to Poets. The kind of refreshment I used to go to blogs for: candid, searching, often breathtakingly smart letters between older and younger poets on how to survive and perpetuate the writing life. So far I've been particularly moved by exchanges between Brenda Coultas & Victor Hernandez Cruz, Truoung Tran & Wanda Coleman, and Jennifer Firestone & Eileen Myles. Highly recommended.

I thought there was more but there ain't. No poetry to speak of except of what I get glancingly out of Poetry (which by and large continues to be dismayingly anodyne in its actual poem choices, though the prose discussions are lively) and the latest Denver Quarterly (which has the opposite problem: an exciting house style that becomes too insistently recognizable after a while).

And so ends this latest ramble. Blogging begets blogging, but in this case it may beget more silence, exile, and cunning—the powers of concentration that I need if I'm to restore writing to its rightful place in my day.

"The boiling point of things"

Today, three years of marriage. May all who desire it find wedded bliss soon.

Six years of blogging, slowing never stopping. In difficult transition from writing to writing.

Two years in Chicago, only beginning to discover its wonders. Last weekend: the Red Moon Theater's thrilling and funny outdoor performance, "Last of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan." Playing again this weekend; if you can go, do.

Turning the page of my thirty-ninth birthday in a couple of weeks. Forty years on the planet. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita....

Nearly twenty months of Sadie Gray Corey, but it feels so much longer, an epoch. It is longer: nine months of anticipating her arrival must be incorporated into my experience of new life. Twenty-nine months. She speaks in full sentences already, her face is different every day, she's not sleeping too consistently, she delights and astonishes for her living, by her living. Thank you.

Eight months of a Democratic administration that never ceases to disappoint. "The art of the possible," "the perfect is the enemy of the good," "bipartisanship," "pragmatism." I'm sick of these words and terrified of the tea-baggers, the birthers, the truthers, the gun-toters. If they don't accept the legitimacy of the system why should we? Abolish the Senate. Abolish the Electoral College. Abolish state governments. Enhance the power of municipalities and localities. Let it change. Let it go.

Some six months since my tirade against fiction, some six months of writing it myself, wearing the itchy skin of an untested novelist, finding just minutes a day to write an ever-ramifying and baroque story incorporating elements of detective fiction, Jim
Jarmusch movies, grad school bull sessions, Holocaust drama, unrequited love, tourism, soap opera, romance, Romance. How long can this go on? It goes on.

An eternity of waiting for things to settle down, moments realizing they never will, gratitude for this.

Books finished and unfinished over weeks and months: Badiou, Laird Hunt, Adam Sisman on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Jacques Roubaud (poetry and fiction), Claire Messud's deadpan 9/11 novel The Emperor's Children, Richard's terrifying Tracer, The Book of Disquietude and Pessoa & Co.. Poems encountered and re-encountered via teaching, so far: Whitman's Song of Myself and "This Compost," Dickinson's "Tell all the truth" and "A narrow Fellow," Mallarmé's "Coup de des," Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," Stein's "Picasso" and Ponge's "L'orange," Gary Snyder's "Smokey the Bear Sutra" and Archy the cockroach's "what the ants are saying." Roubaud, from Exchanges on Light: "Light is the boiling point of things."

Redmoon's lesson: every mask has at least two faces, and the dance of death is still a dance.


So hello, autumn.

UIC

Had a fine time last Friday playing the part of poet-in-residence on the University of Illinois-Chicago's terrifyingly brutalist campus. Met with some students to discuss their work (and they are a sharp bunch), then did a reading that evening in which I read two things for the first time: a few of the poems from my June verse diary that I posted here, and a couple of pages of the novel-in-progress.

I joked after the reading that the novel represented my betrayal of poetry, but that's actually far from the truth. What it really has brought about is my semi-abandonment of this blog. What with teaching and family responsibilities, not to mention occasional other gigs like this one, I find that my spare writing energy goes into propelling myself into the imaginative universe of my characters and the constellations of words and scenes that they inhabit.

To get back to blogging--not that anyone's necessarily been holding their breath--means integrating that writing into blogging's dailiness, as my poetic and scholarly practice was once so integrated. But so far I've felt the need for at least a thin veil of privacy around my fiction writing. Perhaps as I begin to expose pieces of it to readers (or listeners), I'll be able to bring some of my process here.

I'll be back on the UIC campus again this Friday for a colloquium talk I'm calling "Unknown Knowns, or Poetry Traverses the Real," in which I distill my summer takeaway from reading Badiou and other sages. It will be at 3 pm in the Hull House Museum if you're nearby and interested.