Denken durch Dichtung

"At times when we believe we are studying something, we are only being receptive to a kind of day-dreaming."
                        —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I used to be a much more unconscious writer. Only my ear, tuned inward to the thousands of books I'd uncritically absorbed, guided what I wrote. I did very little thinking about my writing or what I've learned to call "my poetics." Asked the meaning of a poem I'd shrug and say, "Hey, I just work here." A number of undertheorized notions helped to determine the decisions I made while writing. Rhyme was good but internal rhyme was better. Couplets are more beautiful than quatrains. A poem exists to unfold one or more striking images. Banish cliches. Syntax should be regular unless a linebreak or rhyme demands otherwise. "Prose poetry" makes no sense. The poem should conclude with an epiphany, a reversal, or else dovetail neatly into the beginning. All poems are love poems—or to put it another way, praise is more challenging than negativity. A poem should be beautiful. Poetry = beauty.

The critical attitude which led me to reject these doxa came gradually to me as I began my first grapplings with literary theory (Derrida, Foucault, Said, Nietzsche), and accelerated once I began reading poets working outside the narrow Levine-Hugo-Wright axis I'd defined as "contemporary poetry" (Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, C.D. Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido). I was 27 years old when this process began, so I'd already been writing for a while: poems, plays, screenplays, my Romeo & Juliet vs. Queen novel. So these notions, that I'd gathered who knows where—from reading and re-reading the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry?— were not quickly or easily dislodged. Even now they remain as the deep background which I write against, or toward almost helplessly. Couplets are more beautiful. Of course, "beauty" is now a suspect category and the role of negativity within the most authentic poem of priase is much clearer to me. Probably my sense of being a more critically reflective writer is tied to my growing interest in syntax as the engine of language estranged from communication (which is poetry in one direction and jargon in the other). I'm re-inventing the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E wheel in some ways, of course, and struggling against the fact of my belatedness as each member of a rising generation must do. One must figure these things out for oneself—at least I must. I can't and couldn't be told. Still, I hope my consciousness of syntax and the dialectical knot of logopoeia that it provides access to will save my students a little bit of time. And I mustn't overestimate that critical consciousness I've acquired. "Maturity" always dates itself six months down the line.

Bachelard: "When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection."

Deep in Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen (buy it!). Feeling of admitting too much when I say how deeply I understand it. We grew up in neighboring worlds, still live in them.

Back from Nantucket where the wild wind blew. My girlfriend has two nieces, one of whom is in love with me. We're going to run away together. She's three.

As of today there are now forty-eight Severance Songs. A book! But I'm going for an even sixty. It might be time to get into prose. I feel the sonnet form (usually but not always unrhymed) that I've been working in has become perhaps too instinctive. It doesn't offer as much resistance as it once did. Maybe I should start writing Petrachan sonnets with an octave and sestet. In Provencal.

Received: Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies (speaking of prose), Sara Veglahn's Falling Forward, Juliana Leslie's Pie in the sky, Nick Moudry's A Poem , a Movie & a Poem, Oska Pastior's Many Glove Compartments, Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen, Kent Johnson's The Miseries of Poetry (a haunting hoot), and, edited by Norma Cole, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. I don't usually "receive" books (I have to buy them) but lately I've been lucky enough to do so, usually by exchanging a copy or two of Selah. Still don't know when that book will have a distributor, but I hope those of you ordering copies from Barrow Street are getting them.

More later perhaps when I'm safely ensconced behind my counter at the Bookery.

A reader writes to remind me that it's Rosmarie Waldrop, not Rosemarie. My bad. I'm sticking with "Barrett" for Barrett Watten too, from now on.

Off to Nantucket this afternoon. Coming with me, Emily, and the dog will be some magazines I've recently acquired: the latest issues of No, Aufgabe, and Chain. Kicking myself for not picking up a copy of The Poker (everyone's talking about it!) when I was at Soft Skull on Sunday. The only work-related thing I'm bringing is Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which seems more than appropriate.

Snow on the ground. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

I'm back, with far too much to report. The symposium on Saturday was a great success. After my buddy Sam Frederick presented his paper on Oswald Egger, six of us grad student types did short presentations. I said I would post what I said, but I'm writing this from the Bookery and don't have the texts with me—maybe later. We went in alphabetical order and it was marvelous how, without much prior consultation, the different pieces seemd to be in conversation with each other. One of the most spectacular was a kind of live collage Cathleen Drake made of Sam's paper, Watten's Bad History, and Rosemarie Waldrop's Blindsight. It was a thrill to meet Rosemarie, incidentally, though I didn't get to talk with her much. I did give her a copy of my book, though. (Watten and Lee Ann Brown also got books; I debated giving one to Carla Harryman and then decided that since she and Watten are partners, one was enough. The etiquette for giving away books as yet eludes me.) After our thing, Waldrop, Egger, and Watten gave terrific, unparaphraseable presentations. Rosemarie talked about translation; Egger performed what seemed to be a piece on hesitation hesitatingly; Barrett talked about Leningrad and addressed the Izenberg article tool. He took issue with Izenberg's understanding of linguistics, and during the last panel German Studies prof. Peter Gilgen took issue with Watten's understanding of them; I have no understanding of linguistics whatsoever and therefore couldn't judge. I did have the sinking feeling, however, that it was time to break into a copy of Aspects of Syntax at the very least.

The party wasn't over because after the symposium broke up and I force-fed myself a frozen pizza I headed on over to Gimme! coffee (check out their new store in Williamsburg; it's not on their web page but nonetheless watch this space) to catch the poetry stylings of India Radfar, Jonathan Skinner, and Lisa Forrest. I was a little too tired to give them the attention they deserved; Skinner's reading stood out because he began by reading from a chapbook called The Little Dictionary of Sounds and prefaced each reading by playing a recording of the sound in question: rain, a train going by, chewing and swallowing, etc. Went and had beers afterwards, which turned out to be practice for yesterday. Ah, yesterday.

Yesterday Emily and I arose at an un-Sundaylike hour and were on the road by eight. By noon, crabby and hungry, we were in Brooklyn; after lunch we felt much better and we headed over to Soft Skull Shortwave, where I met the charming Shanna Compton, the formidable Richard Nash, and my co-reader, the charming and formidable Colum McCann. My father, despite a head cold and having seen me in New Jersey last week, was there with my stepmother, and the tiny space was otherwise appropriately crammed with Brooklyn literati and some of Emily's friends who live in the city. I was especially especially delighted to see Gary and Nada, who I'd been too shy to invite except in the broadest, most hinting way. The reading part went very well: I started with some poems from the book, then read a couple from the manuscript that is more or less a companjion piece to Selah, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I followed that with three Severance Songs and ended with two poems from the last section of Selah. I'm getting more comfortable with picking poems on the fly, which keeps me responsive to the audience. It's funny how you can tell what's going over with them and what's simply going over them, even though there are usually few visible or audible responses to what you read.

Colum is a gripping, fiercely lyrical writer: he read part of a short story, one of the first he ever published (he says he's tired of reading from Dancer; I've been looking at it here in the Bookery and it may be the first new novel I decide to purchase in months. He followed that with part of a work in progress about a Polish Gypsy poet, based on a true story; both works featured hyperperceptive young women with tendencies toward self-mutilation—tendencies which seem to have concrete bases in the sickness of their respective societies (70s Ireland and 50s Poland, respectively). He's a born storyteller; unfortunately I missed part of the one about Van Morrison's body odor because, back at the Brooklyn Inn (a beautiful bar; if I lived in Brooklyn I'd spend all my time there; it's probably just as well) my childhood friend Evan Kurowski, who I hadn't seen for more than ten years, showed up, and we did a lot of drinking and reminiscing. Emily and her friends (they'd been doing some non-alcoholic reminiscing of their own) came by and picked me up around six, and we all had dinner at a brick-walled restaurant somewhere in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). It was a great day, but the exhausting culmination of an exhausting weekend, and it's still not over. After a hungover drive home this afternoon, I've got to work here and teach tomorrow morning. Then it's back in the car (with the dog) to drive out to Hyannis and catch a ferry to Nantucket, where we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving this year with Emily's mother, brother, and his wife and two daughters. Phew. Phew again.

Lots of stuff percolating under the surface from all this stimulation, I just know it. Real intellectual type stuff. But tonight it's all I can do to tell you just what the hell happened. Not sure when I'll get to this blog again, so Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Right here, right now.

Exciting readings from Lee Ann Brown and Carla Harryman at Cornell yesterday, and reasonably well attended considering that a) the reading was held in the bowels of the rare books library, which is undergound; b) it was basically unpublicized except for flyers that appeared in English Department mailboxes that morning. Lee Ann spoke and sang; I liked the way she read the epigraphs from The Sleep That Changed Everything to us: "Louis Zukofsky says. . . ." For a moment these poets and thinkers are alive again and in conversation with her and us. She sang two ballads, one of which was about Susan Smith, who drowned her children in a lake and blamed the crime on an imaginary black man. Her new baby, Miranda Lee, and her husband (ooh, his name escapes me—but I liked him a lot, a large, gentle-seeming man who paced up and down in the back of the room with Miranda for most of the reading) came up at the end to perform part of a Noh play the two of them had collaborated on—a perfect combination of her childhood in Japan and North Carolinian heritage. (Her soft southern accent came as something of a surprise, given how very New York School-y her first book, Polyverse, is.) I was impressed to see the three of them up there, half-chanting, half-singing, Lee Ann bouncing Miranda Lee on her hip to the rhythm. Carla Harryman read a "play" (in the Steinian sense) whose title I didn't catch ("Mirrorverse"?) that was a terrific tumble of voices, competing urgently with each other, so that the total effect was the sublimation of anxiety into joy. I wish more Cornell people could have seen it; among other things, it was an inspiring example of two women at the top of their form, practicing a difficult art and making it seem as natural, or more natural, than motherhood.

Dinner afterwards with some of my fellow grad students, Joel Kuszai, Jonathan Monroe, Barry Maxwell (who's in Comparative Literature at Cornell), Lee Ann, her husband, and the baby, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Rosemarie Waldrop (who arrived after the reading). Gave copies of my book to Barrett (I actually called him "Barry," if you can believe that) and Lee Ann and then fretted a bit over the protocol of this. Should I give one to Carla and Rosemarie too? Probably. Barrett (that's my compromise) held forth on various topics and our end of the table had an interesting conversation about Vietnam's role as a dividing line between the generation of the New Americans and that of the Language Poets. According to Barrett, the ethical demand upon his generation (to go to war or not) required a kind of (existential?) decision that the New Americans had never had to make—that they were held, and held themselves, to a higher standard of consequence than the previous generation. That's why, he claimed, the earlier generation could get away with all kinds of bad behavior whereas the peccadilloes of the Language Poets are scrupulously unforgiven. He also mentioned the resentment his generation felt toward the New Americans' attitude that theirs had been the heroic time; I pointed out that this was how many members of my generation felt about his. In the end we agreed that this talk of generations tended to be sloppy and invidious—but it's still fun. He also gave me some good ideas for my dissertation—reframing pastoral for me as a moment of retirement from political power in which one refreshes and reconsolidates one's ideals, before going back out there and assuming power again. The best classical model for this is the Duke in As You Like It, but there are interesting parallels in the life of (for instance) Charles Olson, who renounced national Democratic politics in favor of trying to poetically configure the smaller micro-polis of Gloucester into a model for a new democracy. Much grist for my mill.

Today's the presentation. I'm going to read three poems for it: one from my book, one more a work of poetics, and one from Severance Songs. More pastoral, basically. I'll post what I say here or maybe over at As/Is. That's an exhausting blog to keep up with; as other contributors have remarked, one's one piece is quickly "erased" by the flood of others' postings. Perhaps not an unworthwhile experience. There's no way for me to keep up with its total output; I tend to just scroll through it now and then looking for phrases that catch my eye. Today I like Li Bloom's "Don't stare at the new girl".

Here's the final chunk of Kim's "Pollen Fossil Record" missing from the linked page provided below. It impressed me enough to type out in full:

duration

"This is to be sung"
"This is to be done"

The lyric undertakes the task of deciphering and embodying a "particularizable" prosody of one's living.

And in that process, inside the procedures of work and work proceeding: node and pressure point, song making and song gesture. Track: descant, sedimentations, tributaries in any several directions. Show stress, show beat, show alterations in pitch and accentuals. Tempo ruptured, emended. A valence of first and further tongues. Elements of the lyric and its mediations. The duration of the now, the now occurring, that manifests a time before.

A line's shape, vector, and motion interpolates perception and meter

A measure, a page, the book to embody the multivalent, the multidirectional—a cathexis of the living instant to the acuteness of history

Each sound trace, each demonstration of the line, each formal enunciation: aperture: conduit: coming into articulation, into the Imaginary—the lyric as it embodies the processual

The poem may be said to reside in disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces, and it is the means by which one notates this provisional location that evokes and demonstrates agency—the ear by which the prosody by which to calibrate the liberative potential of writing, storehouse of the human

To probe the terms under which we denote, participate in, and speak of cultural and human practices—

To mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in social space

Josh's Poetry Adventure Weekend

A recap of what's happening:

- Today I'm moderating a discussion of a paper written by fellow grad student Ryan Canlas titled "Subalternity, Ethics, and Commons: Some Preliminary Notes." In the paper Ryan examines whether poetic representation might not be capable of doing more justice to the subaltern position (not speaking for it or assimilating it into a bad humanist project which, according to Badiou, reduces human beings to the lowest common denominator of their potential to be victimized), with Myung Mi Kim's Commons as the text in point. He seems to conclude that the last section of Commons, "Pollen Fossil Record" (read part of it here) by being more of a "poetics" text than the poetry which proceeds it, demonstrates the necessary failure of pure poetry without some kind of supplementary exegesis. It's a good, provocative, and interesting paper, though I don't think he gives quite enough credit to the potential meaningfulness of Kim's text even without he supplement. I will take him to task on that today.

- Right after the roundtable (I will probably be late) I'm rushing over to Kroch Library (the postmodernist light-filled underground structure paradoxically situated under the modernist gloom of Olin, the graduate library) to hear Lee Ann Brown and Carla Harryman read. Yippee I say. There just might be a dinner with the poets afterward. Barrett Watten and Rosemarie Waldrop and Oswald Egger will all also probably be there.

- Tomorrow is the symposium in honor of Egger, titled "(Dis)locating Poetries: Transatlantic Connections." My friend Sam will present a paper he wrote on Egger's work. Six grad student poetry types, including me, will give extremely brief "responses" which will probably have nothing to do with the paper but just be exploratory statements on poetics and the notion of location. I may say something about pastoral. After a break, Rosemarie Waldrop will present something called "Strangeness, Irreducible?" Egger's paper is "To Observe the Obverse." (This will be the first time I've heard him speak; I attended a workshop he's been giving in the German department, but it was in German. I understand just enough German to know that he was saying interesting things.) Barrett Watten bats clean-up with "The Person in Leningrad: Collective Ideas and the Avant-Garde." Sounds somewhat similar to what he did at the Modernism conference. I wonder if he's aware of the Oren Izerman piece? (Izerman, it turns out, has written an entire dissertation on the subject.) Finally, there will be a panel with all the "name" presenters. And lots of coffee.

- Sunday of course is the big Frequency series reading in Brooklyn with Colum McCann. Scroll down or click here for particulars. We'll spend the night in Brooklyn and return to Ithaca Monday. Phew! If any of you New York types (Gary? Nada? Nick?) were to pop by, I'd love to see you.

That's the news, ladies and germs.

After literally months my copy of Glissant's Poetics of Relation has finally arrived. Perhaps not coincidentally, tomorrow I'm going to talk a little bit about Kristin Prevallet's "Writing Is Never by Itself Alone:
Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics". I'd be curious to learn what other people think of this text—almost as curious as I am about what my students made of it. Of course I won't have time to read the Glissant for a while, but I think it could be important to my notion of pastoral as the locus amoenus of encounter. Still haunted though as to whether my big idea's been done. Read a short article by Judith L. Schwartz called "'The World Is the Greatest Thing in the World': The Objectivists' 'Immanent' Poetics" (she wrote the dissertation on Oppen and pastoral). The article, at least, is not nearly as highly theorized as what I'm planning—no trace of Heidegger, much less Adorno— and of course she has nothing to say about D.H. Lawrence on the one end or Ronald Johnson on the other. Still, it's got me jittery. The fetish of originality! The originality of fetish?

Crazy poetry week. On Friday I'm moderating a discussion of a fellow graduate student's paper on Bourdieu, Spivak, and Myung Mi Kim's Commons. On Saturday I'm taking part in a one-day symposium in honor of visiting German poet Oswald Egger: Barrett Watten, Rosemarie Waldrop, Lee Ann Brown, and Carla Harryman will also be in the house. And then there's that reading I keep mentioning.

Here's the official word on my next reading:

Sunday, November 23 at 2:00pm


The FREQUENCY Series presents
Colum McCann & Joshua Corey


Soft Skull Shortwave
71 Bond Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 643-1599
http://www.softskull.com/shortwave.php


Colum McCann is the author of Dancer, This Side of Brightness, Everything in this Country Must, Songdogs, and Fishing the Sloe-Back River. He has won the Grace Kelly Memorial Foundation Award, the Hennessy Prize, the Rooney Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and has been a finalist for the IMPAC award. His most recent novel is Dancer, which earned the following praise from Publishers Weekly: "A chorus of voices breathe new life into the story of Rudolf Nureyev, one of ballet's greatest performers, in this vibrant, imaginative patchwork of a novel by Irish expatriate McCann. Faithfully capturing the pathos and grim poverty of the Soviet Union at mid-century, McCann also reveals a splashy tabloid affinity for the excesses and effects of fame and notoriety. ...[Dancer] is a lovely showcase for his fluid prose and storytelling skill.

Joshua Corey is the author of Selah, which won him the Barrow Street Book Prize for 2003. Robert Pinsky says: "With Selah Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets (Jennifer Clarvoe, Joanie Mackowski, Cate Marvin come to mind) who apply the fundamental poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the reader through Corey's extravagant, playful, fantastical and profuse otherworld."

For the full Frequency Series schedule, see http://www.shannacompton.com/frequency.html.

Hope to see each and every one of you there.

The book, if I may so, is gorgeous. I stared and stared at it. I still stare at it. On my own shelves it fits nicely between Gilian Conoley and Hart Crane. I sold my first copy after the reading to a lovely woman named Norma who had brought half a dozen prepubescent girls with her who were taking part in some kind of arts project for their school. Three of them came up during the open mike and did a rap song about the Three Little Pigs. The reading was lovely and reasonably well attended, perhaps twenty folks. My old friend Sarah Avery, who curates the series there, gave me a very warm and generous introduction. My dad and stepmother were there and I basked in Fatherly Approval (it's like crack when it comes at you directly like that). Emily was there and she was dressed so beautifully that a number of people filing in asked her if she were the featured poet. There's a bagel shop attached to Cleo's and when I left I got a free bag of bagels. I realize my chronology is all screwed up but what can you do? I'm tired.

The next day we went into the city and I tried to visit the Jewish Museum on a Saturday; bad idea. Went to the Guggenheim instead but didn't much care for the main show there, a retrospective of James Rosenquist. Now I don't know much about art, but I know postmodern crap when I see it. It just all seemed so obvious, though I know in the 50s and 60s it must have seemed pretty radical. There was a fun exhibit on the drawings and caricatures of Federico Fellini, however, and I also liked the Kandinskys and Klees in the annex (was strangely mesmerized by one rather atypical Kandinsky, "Fern" [Far Away]). Overall a bust. I did have some fantastic Indian food though, and got to see some of Emily's close friends. Today we went to the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship where my ideas about religion were permanently warped as a child. Emily and I sat for a while on a bench there dedicated to the memory of my mother, Judith Montag Corey (1942-1991). The book is pretty much a work of mourning for her, so it felt like coming full circle. Very peaceful for a change. It will be strange to go on reading these poems for months and years to come; I'm already so far from where I was when I wrote them. That's what's amazing about the said. Adorno:

Expression that has been objectivated as language endures; what has once been said never fades away completely, neither the evil nor the good, neither the slogan of "the final solution" nor the hope of reconciliation. What accedes to language enters the movement of a humanness that does not yet exist; it is compelled toward language and alive only by virtue of its helplessness. Stumbling along behind its reification, the subject limits that reification by means of the mimetic vestige, the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life, which subverts the subject to ideology. The inextricably of reification and mimesis defines the aporia of artistic expression (Aesthetic Theory 117).

So now I have this book and pretty soon so could you. Barrow Street will have them next week and not long after that Small Press Distribution (with any luck) will start putting it in stores, including Amazon. In the meantime you can order direct from Barrow Street (just click on that link to the left). Or, if you're a poet with a book I want to read (you know who you are) send me an e-mail and we'll swap. I love swapping. Let me know if you want me to sign it for ya.

To coin a phrase...

Tonight's the Night

Okay, in case this link still isn't working, here are the facts about my reading tonight:

Where: Cleo's Cafe, 68 Raritan Avenue (aka Route 27), Highland Park, New Jersey. Cleo's phone number is (732) 828-3474 and they have their own website if you need more information than that.

When: 8:00 PM

What: I'll be the featured reader and there will indeed be copies of Selah for sale. Followed by open mike.

How Much: It's free, so you can save your pennies for lattes.

That's all I know, and all you'll know too, unless you come! Hope to see you there.

Great horny toads! I have been promised ten hot-off-the-presses copies of Selah in time for my reading in New Jersey this Friday! That's right—come to my reading and you could be one of the first owners of my first book anywhere anytime.

Another milestone: this morning I filled in the last page of the notebook I've been writing poems, dissertation notes, and quotations in since May. I'm off to the office supply store to buy another. There's just no replacing something you can write by hand in; I do wonder, though, how blogging has changed my relationship to the more conventional notebook. Probably the handwritten one has a lot more of other people's writing in it, whereas on the blog I either just link to other people's work or else feel compelled to offer something spontaneous, if not original.

Spent the morning with George Oppen's The Materials and was duly stunned by it; I'd never read the whole book through. On to This In Which. Many of my ideas about pastoral seem to apply to what Oppen is doing. But I'm not the only one: it was with a sinking feeling I learned earlier this week that a Judith L. Schwartz from Temple University wrote a dissertation titled "'The common experience': George Oppen's objectivist pastoral" in 1999. Here's her abstract:

This is a dissertation about the relationship between pastoral poetry and the poetry of George Oppen. George Oppen was an Objectivist poet. Objectivist poetry is based in the thought of Louis Zukofsky, who wrote, in 1931, that poets should encounter the world with “sincerity,” or with a mind that avoids subjectivity and mediation, attempting instead to “think with things as they exist.” The result of sincerity is poetic “objectification,” which renders these moments of encounters with reality into poetic form, considering these poems to be “objects” in the world. While pastoral poetry is often conceived of as decidedly formulaic poetry about shepherds in a rural setting, in fact the ancient pastoral of Theocritus and Virgil offers thematic and even formal complexities that link to the experimental work of the Objectivist poets. In this dissertation I explore the link between Oppen's Objectivist poetry and pastoral poetry, investigating how Oppen engages and revises its themes, forms, and problems. The relationship between Oppen's poetry and pastoral poetry lies in particular in a poetic “processing” of inherently oppositional issues pertaining to a conflict between the “real” and the “ideal” that occurs in representation.

There's not really enough there for me to discover if we're actually mining the same territory or not. My notions of pastoral have much more to do with the convergence of these thinkers' concepts:

- Heidegger's clearing and fourfold, earth vs. world, the artwork as that which "worlds";
- Deleuze & Guattari's nonstriated nomad space;
- Leibniz's monad;
- Kristeva's semiotic;
- Adorno's negativity, hibernation, "mimesis," historicism, resurrection of Kantian natural beauty;
- Lacan's critique of psychoanalytic pastoral—that which posits a "natural path" for the drives;
- Habermas' ideal speech situation;
- Empson's proletarian fantasy—"about the people but not by or for them";
- Lawrence's stripped, liminal space of encounter between self and other

I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out. I know I shouldn't worry excessively about this—it seems unlikely that I'll reproduce somebody else's dissertation, Pierre Menand-like. Maybe I should let Oppen go, though. Everyone writes about Oppen these days. And why not! Here's one of the many poems from this morning that took my breath away—there's a secret polysemic lushness in the syntax and line breaks that belies the rumors of Oppen's austerity:

The Tugs of Hull

Carrying their deckhands' bicycles
On deck beside the funnels,
Coming alongside in falling snow
As we had moved thru areas of falling snow
In shrunk northern curvatures
Of seas that are not East nor West—. Was it there, you told
       of the man and the wate of the Ganges,
The man with the domestic pitcher pouring the Ganges
Back? We imagined the Ganges
The warm belly of a girl swelled
Like India under the slacks. One might think himself Adam
Of the edges of the polar mist until the small black tugs of
       England
Came to fetch us in.

I can see why Oppen might sometimes be mistaken for an Imagist, or (much worse) a Deep Imagist. But "pouring the Ganges / Back"? Astonishing. Better than any other poet I can think of, Oppen lodges non-conceptual cognition (Heidegger would call it Denken; Adorno, um, wouldn't) in and among his images, permanently disturbing them like a bell that never quite dies away.
Coming alongside in falling snow

Have you heard of this Joshua Carey character? Click on the link if you want to hear him read this Friday.

More evidence that Daniel Nester and I are the same person:

- He responded to the Izenberg article at almost the same time I did;

- He has taken note of the theological parable of the invisible gardener at roughly the same time I wrote a poem using that idea, which is now posted over at As/Is;

- We both wrote a book about Queen, except that his is probably good and mine isn't. Oh wait, I more or less said that already.

We Will Rock You?

I've just added a link to Daniel Nester's blog, which has the subtitle, "Daniel Nester's Blog of Poetry, of Queen, of All Things in Between. That'd Be Me." As you may know, he is the author of God Save My Queen: A Tribute, a book which I have not yet read but which I have, quite possibly, already written. Or rather, I have written a book (or nearly all of one) who main character is completely and utterly obsessed with Queen, to the point of having named himself Freddy Mercury (not that's Freddy with a Y, not the bonafide IE). The false intimacy created by his having a blog and being just a click away, plus what appears to be consonance in our ages (judging from this photo) makes me have the urge, for the first time in years, to haul this brick of a DOA novel out from under my bed and make a copy and send to him, if only as a kind of fan mail (again, for a book I have not read, though I'd like to), a validation of his obsession. What makes this stranger is that I myself have never been a huge fan of the band (though I can sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in its entirety when drunk) but my character Freddy was. Freddy was meant to be a kind of reincarnation of Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet; the whole misbegotten novel was a reimagining of the play in a Verona, New Jersey high school (with the delicious initials VHS) from his perspective, only instead of getting killed in the middle he gets sent to an insane asylum/rehab center after attacking the novel's Tybalt character (a closeted quarterback). At the end of the book he escapes and hijacks the high school's production of West Side Story, instead forcing them to perform a rock opera he has written which gives new lyrics to Queen tunes. You know, as I describe this it doesn't sound that bad. Even if I were interested in resurrecting the novel, though (I was 24 when I wrote it), it would probably drown in the sea of post-Columbine literature that's been littering the "new books" table at The Bookery across from my usual post.

Anyhoo. A shout out to Daniel Nester and his musico-literary obsessions.

Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

I'm interested to see Jonathan rather than Silliman or some other react to the big, juicy bait that the Oren Izerman article offers. Like Jonathan, I fail to understand how he could so completely separate the aesthetic from the ontological and ethical spheres; as I noted, his endorsement of beauty in Michael Palmer's writing, a poet he certainly includes under the Language umbrella, seems a direct contradiction of his argument. It seems to me now that any poem has to clear a space for itself, make a Lichtung, and this action is always an index of the generative capacities of language itself. I'm starting to read Habermas' Legitimation Crisis and I think he has some useful things to say in this context about language and how somehow removing what he calls "systematic distortion" (another term, I think, for reification and the distortion effects it extends to meaning) and domination from the place of discourse (or creating a new such place?) is the only way for truth and freedom to re-enter it. Here's a quote describing "the ideal speech situation" from the introduction by Thomas McCarthy, the book's translator:

[Habermas'] thesis is that the structure is free from constraint only when for all participants there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ speech acts, when there is an effective equality of chances to assume dialogue roles. In particular, all participants must have the same chance to initiate and perpetuate discourse, to put forward, call into question, and give reasons for or against statements, explanations, interpretations, and justifications. Furthermore, they must have the same chance to express attitudes, feelings, intentions and the like, and to command, to oppose, to permit, and to forbid, etc. These last requirements refer directly to the organization of interaction, since the freeing of discourse from the constraints of action is only possible in the context of pure interaction. In other words, the conditions of the ideal speech situation must insure not only unlimited discussion but also discussion which is free from all constraints of domination, whether their source be conscious strategic behavior or communication barriers secured in ideology and neurosis. Thus, the conditions for ideal discourse are connected with conditions for an ideal form of life; they include linguistic conceptualizations of the traditional ideas of freedom and justice. "Truth," therefore, cannot be analyzed independently of "freedom" and "justice" (xvii).

The ideal speech situation is clearly a kind of nirvana that, as McCarthy goes on to write, "are rarely, if ever" actually achieved. But it seems like this zone might be what Izerman is claiming the Language poets are gesturing toward; Habermas formulation has the advantage, however, of not excluding content (maybe this is what Izerman claims is lacking from Language poetry: not the aesthetic in terms of the artistically appreciable but the transcendental aesthetic—what can be perceived, phenomena). Clearly it's beyond the capacity of any poet to singlehandedly establish such a speech situation on the page; only a community of writers could hope to achieve such a thing. But I think Habermas offers a fascinating description of what a certain kind of poet, such as the Language poets' Objectivist predecessors, is trying to achieve by renouncing subjective domination over objects and also in trying to make the networks of relation and domination that the objects of the poem exist in more visible. The fictional "ideal speech situation" of Habermas, free from conscious and unconscious sources of domination, sounds pretty darn close to what I've been thinking of as the space of postmodernist pastoral, in which writers at least try to fantasize a deliberately miniature utopia in which these conditions of speech prevail.

I have never read anything by J.M. Coetzee, but it is clear I will not be able to go on ignoring him much longer. His latest "novel," Elizabeth Costello, sounds remarkable; I just read a review of it in The New York Review of Books. And in the same issue there's an extraordinary poem that he translated from the Dutch:

Basho
Cees Nooteboom

We know poetic poetry the common dangers
of moonstruckness, bel canto. Embalsamed air, that is all,
unless you turn it into pebbles that flash and hurt.
You, old master, polish the pebbles
that you fling to bring down a thrush.
Out of the world you cut an image that bears your name.
Seventeen pebbles for arrows a school of deathly singers.
See by the waterside the track of the poet
on his way to the innermost snowland. See how the water erases it
how the man with the hat inscribes it again
preserves water and footprint, capturing the movement that has passed,
so that what vanished is still there as something that vanished.

Nearly as cool as 86 the Onions is The End of the World, thanks to my friend Jeremy.

Two unexpected "selah" sightings tonight. First, the letters page to the latest Poets & Writers inexplicably has the header, "Selah, Selah." Next I picked up and read "A History of the Lyric" in Peter Gizzi's new book Some Values of Landscape and Weather and saw the word again. Spooky, huh? It is Halloween, after all. . . .

I hope I won't get in trouble quoting the haunting (no pun intended) conclusion to Gizzi's poem:

Coda

When the sky came down
there was wind, water, red

When the sky fell
it became water, wind
a declaration in blue

When the end was near
I picked up for a moment, joy
came into my voice

Hurry up it sang
in skiffs and shafts
Selah in silvered tones

When the day broke open
I became myself
standing next to a door

In my dream you were alive
and crying

As long as we're talking about good poems, I'd also like to call your attention to some kickass new work in Indiana Review by Karen L. Anderson and Deborah Wardlaw Pattilo.

Still don't know what my costume's going to be yet.

Fascinating article in the new Critical Inquiry by one Oren Izenberg: "Language Poetry and Collective Life." He produces an acute analysis of what supports an opinion that I've often heard expressed, and have expressed myself on occasion: the ideas behind Language poetry (as expressed in numerous essays, interviews, and manifestos) are fascinating, the poetry is dull—and not just dull, but dull in enormous quantities. Here is what looks to be Izenberg's thesis paragraph:

"Language poets are experimental, that is, because they treat their poems not as semantic tokens or as aesthetic objects but as examples, and it is the curious nature of an example that while there must be enough of them to warrant an inference, in no single one of them is it self-evident what the example is an example of. Language poems are social in that what they take poems to be examples of is the unique capacity to produce language altogether and thus to announce—as nothing else at the moment seems to be able to do with the same persuasiveness—the existence of something fundamentally human on which the very possibility of social life can be predicated. Language poetry considered under this description is simply not a literary practice, for it does not produce objects that belong to any category of language use. Nor is it, properly speaking, an aesthetic practice, for it is not oriented toward aisthesis, or perception. It is, rather, an ontological and ethical practice. Language poets produce poetry that is precisely equivalent to language, where language is considered as a kind of creatural knowledge or potential; therefore Language poets tend to treat the objects of their art—poems—as epiphenomenal evidence of a constitutively human capacity fo free and creative agency that is the real object of their interest" (Critical Inquiry Vol. 30 No. 1 [Autumn 2003]: 135-36).

It's a sweeping article, centered on an application of Chomsky's theory of generative grammar (which is in passing succinctly explained for the first time in a way that I could understand) and linguistic competence to the work of the Language movement in general and the Davidson-Hejinian-Silliman-Watten collaboration, Leningrad. In some ways I think he's basically correct, but even he admits that it is possible to take these poems as aesthetic objects; while singling out a passage from Tjanting as an example of "the overall thinness or insubstantiality of the poems Language poets have made. One might call this quality their anaesthetic" (134) he later admits that it's possible to carry out the Language project as he sees it while "reintroducing into Language poetry a more traditional lyric sensibility." This is in reference to Michael Palmer, "a poet whose work, incidentally, I find quite beautiful" (156) and for someone with my own lyric sensibilities that "incidentally" seems far from incidental. Not all Language poetry is intent on defeating the judgment of taste; perhaps what's missing from Izenberg's argument is a consideration of the sublime chora that saturation in Language poetry can provide for its readers. I should point out that he does validate the overall project in a somewhat backhanded way; it's just hard to imagine one of the practitioners he discusses wholeheartedly concurring. It would be interesting to read some responses to this article, especially from Mr. Silliman himself.

My Political Dream

I'm sitting on a kind of grassy knoll with a bunch of young people on the Cornell campus, looking down onto a paved area where some kind of Republican rally is being held. Three stepladders have been arranged in a row with about ten feet in between them and a plank laid across the top. Sitting in the middle, strangely small and child sized, with his back to the crowd, is Rush Limbaugh. A man in a suit is haranguing the crowd. "Makes you feel small, doesn't it? Maybe it's too much multiculturalism!" Arnold Schwarzznegger climbs up onto the ladder on the end and stands precariously on the plank, also with his back to the crowd, but at enough of an angle so his profile is visible. I become angered and step into the circle around the ladder: "This muscleman can't solve our problems!" But the ringmaster and a couple of his assistants are helping a third man onto the ladder, a grinning bespectacled guy with long arms who I don't quite recognize. Bill Gates? But he's more or less liberal. Maybe it's Rumsfeld. The arrangement of ladders seems certain to fall; suddenly alarmed, I say, "Gentlemen, I cannot advise this!" But the monkeylike guy with glasses is now perched on the ladder, grinning, the only one facing us. The crowd is longhaired and lackadaisical, generally indifferent to the spectacle. A heavyset woman wearing a long, low-cut gown turns to me—she has a sore visible at the top of one breast. "Don't worry so," she says. The dream fades.

A paternalistic advisory. . . . While sublimely silly, the link I provided earlier to 86 the Onions does contain imagery that some might find offensive—especially in the workplace. Caveat surfer.

I just fixed that link you must all click on. A mouse!

Should I drive three hours to Buffalo for the Bottom: On Shakespeare conference? If something's happening that you'd definitely attend if it were in Binghamton, why does Buffalo seem too far away? He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

As a clumsy dodge against accusations of blogger fatigue (which has apparently taken down both A Sorter and Ululations in my absence) here is my latest summary of progress toward my 'A' exam (which, coincidentally, appears likely now to be partly focused on "A"):

Topic Area One: Aesthetics and Ideology

I’ve made the most progress in this area, having read the relevant portions of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, all of Jameson’s Marxism and Form, and am currently embarked on reading Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in Prof. Peter Hohendahl’s seminar on that text. The aesthetic formation that I approach this work in light of is Heideggerian, drawn from my readings of such essays as "The Origin of the Work of Art," "The Thing," "The Question Concerning Technology," etc., as well as certain inferences I’ve made for the aesthetic consequences of Being and Time. I would describe the question that I want to ask, as it’s currently taking shape, as one that pits existential aesthetic priorities (artwork as a path to subject formation) with and against materialist social and political imperatives (the objective world as it is reflected or negated by the artwork and its inevitably ideological position in a given historical moment). The beautiful subject versus the sublime object of society might be a glib way of putting this.

Topic Area Two: "Pastoral"

This is proving to be the most problematic area to define, because I find I am largely uninterested in pastoral as a genre. My pastoral is the expression of a particular form of the utopian impulse that is always in the background of the reading I do for Topic One. Pastoral as narrative function interests me (Empson’s notion of the double plot) insofar as this acts both to mirror a given social situation (of "the city") and to negate it in favor of a proletarian fantasy (of "the country"). It’s pretty obvious that I need to read Raymond Williams’ book on this subject. But the complex of ideas I’ve named "pastoral" has more to do with the subject’s fantasy of realizing his or her own "nature" while in relation with the society that, at least since the rise of industrial capitalism, has replaced nature. This has led me unexpectedly to the work of D.H. Lawrence, whose poetry I have written about in a paper that I presented at the Modernism Studies Association Conference in Birmingham (I also wrote about Gertrude Stein). Lawrence interests me because for him, the realization of the subject’s inner nature can only come about in relation with an Other which is not a representative of the society that has conditioned everything about the subject that is not "natural" to him. Lawrence becomes the epicenter of a strain of thought about subjective authenticity that for me reaches back to Whitman, encompasses Stein and Williams, and reaches forward to the Objectivists and more difficult-to-place figures like Ronald Johnson. It also requires understanding of psychoanalysis (which provides the basic concept of what I’ve been calling "inner nature" under the name of the unconscious) and the ways in which psychoanalysis has been deployed both to foster a utopian reconciliation of inner nature with objective society (Marcuse) and to debunk any such reconciliation (Lacan). It seems to me that this complex of ideas, which I still find easiest to think of as "pastoral," is rooted both aesthetically and historically in modernism, and has only a tangential relationship to the English tradition of pastoral poetry (though the tropes of such poetry are constantly surfacing, often in a highly self-conscious manner, in the work of these writers).

Topic Area Three: Objectivism and After

This topic essentially becomes the second half of the pastoral topic, in which I read the work of the second-generation modernists with an eye toward giving an account of their attempts to realize a utopia that, as the name of the major movement I’m focusing on suggests, is focused on the objective world and not on the individual poetizing subject (collective subjectivity is something else again). I see Zukofsky as the central writer here, because "A" describes a complete dialectical process: reacting, with Pound and Williams, against symbolism he focuses the first half of his long poem on an objective world comprehended through Marxist dialectics. But after World War II he turns his back on the larger objective world and creates a more modest utopia based on the family romance between himself, Celia, and their son Paul. I’m nowhere near finishing "A", so this preliminary evaluation is bound to change. Oppen’s work will also be important, especially because he embodies the contradictory position of a Heideggerian existentialist with Communist/materialist political commitments. There also appears to be a curious chiasmic relation between his way of interfacing politics and poetry and Zukofsky's; whereas Zukofsky at first decides that the point of writing poetry is to change the world, Oppen decides changing the world and writing poetry are incompatible modes of being. Both, arguably, renounce an activist engagement with politics (though they by no means abandon their critical political stances) in order to resume writing after WWII.

I also want to read Basil Bunting’s Briggflats (you see that I want to maintain the narrow bridge between American poetry and the more idiosyncratic texts of English modernism), which has obvious pastoral connotations, and end with a consideration of Ronald Johnson, who more than any other poet I’m aware of performs the emergence of "nature" (inner and outer) in his language.

So I haven't blogged much lately. So what? Neither has Shakespeare.

That's adapted from a card one of my officemates at Cornell has on the door.

Click, don't walk, on this fabulous link. Fwench fwies!

Another piece of Fourier Series, "L’AMITIE," has been published over at Chimera Review. They've done a beautiful job with it.

Yet another excuse not to provide any of my own content arrives in the form of Ron Silliman's notes regarding the Poetry & Empire retreat he and lots of other poets I esteem greatly took part in this past weekend. Go read it. I've been reading Marx and haven't got anything more interesting to say at the moment than Gee, the workers really should seize the means of production.

I've been backchanneling a bit with the estimable and inimitable Kent Johnson over some questions regarding the heteronymic strategy toward avant-garde writing—avant-garde as Peter Bürger defines it, as that which challenges the institutions (and perhaps all institutionalizing tendencies) of art. This is entirely distinct from modernist and postmodernist strategies aimed at renewing language, which can be and usually are confined to the space of the page—this work stretches the bounds of what's institutionally acceptable but offers no real resistance to it. Anyway, Kent has given all this a great deal of thought, and if anyone deserves recognition for actual avant-garde praxis nowadays, he does. I highly recommend his lucid and useful accounting of the current poetry scene in the Coyote magazine interview that's been "reprinted" by VeRT. Check it out if you haven't already.

At this moment the ad banner at the top of The Ingredient, probably taking its cue from her use of Woody Guthrie's motto for his guitar ("This machine kills fascists"), is for Mein Kampf. "Find the best deals! Compare prices on all products from across the web" sez one. "Free Super Saver Shipping. Millions of titles, new & used," sez the other.

I am fascinated and appalled.

You've just got to check out my students' blogs.

The interview with Nick has helped me to recontextualize him and more fully understand his notion of time travel. What he has to say about the interrelatedness of everything—and the simple importance, for poets, of other people who are not poets—seems incredibly obvious and yet of course it needs saying. I also like to see him making acute observations that are not immediately situated in the literary and meta-literary; his description of how and why men talk to each other, and the role of psychonanalysis in perpetuating the deadness of that speech, rings true. How far we are from freely espousing. Men are so conditioned to take the erotic as the only zone in which emotion can be expressed that there's inevitably a little homosexual panic in the presence of another man's (naked!) emotion. Even gay men aren't immune from this. There happens to be an Edward Gorey postcard near my desk here at The Bookery depicting two Edwardian gentlemen, with Lawrentian quantities of facial hair, reclining on a couch facing each other, their hands laced together at the middle to form an arch that mirrors the bend of their knees. And there's a verse:

Were yout but mine, we'd sprawl supine
   Across a chintzed settee;
And slabs we'd take of pounded cake
   And swigs of Q.R.V.

Certainly it's homoerotic, but it's more a picture of fellowship, comradeship, Whitman's adhesiveness. In our eagerness to claim Whitman as a modern gay man (which is of course a much-needed correction to a century of willful blindness about his sexuality) we are apt to forget the possibilities he suggests for love between men that is not primarily sexual. I doubt any kind of bonding can happen between human beings without a libidinal investment of some kind, and maybe that's the source of the anxiety. As the economic language indicates, a relationship is an investment, and you could always lose your shirt. Better to invest in model trains, or your job, or shares in Post-Po-Faced Boy Inc.

Thinking about this makes me realize exactly what I've missed from not being a sports fan. The heartbreak, sure (incidentally my hat is off to Jim Behrle for his graciousness in defeat), but also the passionate community. It's easy to deplore the fact that so many men are only comfortable expressing emotion about the fates of sports teams (and it's usually teams, right? does anyone get as excited about a win by Pete Sampras or Tiger Woods as they do about the Nicks or the Islanders? [I realize athlete-icons like Muhammed Ali are the exception here]), but that only makes me feel the more impoverished for not sharing in it. There are people on the planet tonight in states of elation and deep gloom because of the success and failure of groups of men who they'll most likely never meet, who mostly aren't even from the geographical region they're supposed to represent. The game is a fiction; the emotions are real; male bonding is a real fiction. Which is simply to say, we need the eggs.

Anyway, Nick's ideas about time and dailiness as opposed to the monolithic nature of most literary production are valuable, and come very close to the definition of avant-garde (as opposed to modernist or postmodernist) that I'm getting out of a book I'm reading, Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde. Here's what Jochen Schulte-Sasse says in his introduction to the book: "Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter the institutionalized commerce with art" (xv). Tied in with what Ron said today about the interview and about blogging as a genre, I see the potential for blogging, which is daily without being entirely ephemeral, as a mode of attention and conversation which absolutely undermines the existing institutions, primarily academic, of poetry and its criticism. (This is why I'm surprised by the hostility to blogs Barrett Watten expressed in his Birmingham talk; as Ron points out, blogs are flexible enough to encompass both "serious intellectual projects" and The Jim Side—if we needs must make such invidious distinctions. I've got to go ahead and e-mail him to ask for a copy so I can see exactly what he said.) Of course, when a blog is ancillary to a conventional acapoetic career—like mine is—we see once again how no technical innovation is sufficient by itself to make a revolution. Still, my consciousness of what poetry can do—my imagination, in a word—has been expanded tremendously by this experiment we're all conducting in talking past each other. And how refreshing—in the full, drenched sense of that word—it's been to see the range of what's expressible expanded in the teeth of what Nick describes as the fate of finished-product writing in this culture: "Thus an opportunity for expressing and communicating one's feelings and experiences could now be subsumed under the universally acceptable and obsessive competitive drive for achievement and personal power and recognition." Instead we have a conversation that, at its best, goes on both between one poet and others but also between the poet and his or her internal others (this manifests in Nick as "writing from notes but also ignoring them, in a kind of improvisational way").

So long live ambient discourse and the riskers of boredom. Long live the blogs.

The saddest story about an octopus you've ever heard.

I saw the page proofs yesterday. By the end of the month there will be a book where no book was before. Selah fever... catch it!

Here's information on three readings I know about for sure that will be happening in the upcoming months:

Friday, November 14 at 8 PM
The Cleo's Poetry Reading Series at Cleo's Cafe in Highland Park, NJ. I don't advise clicking on the link.

Sunday, November 23 at 2 PM
The Frequency Reading Series at Soft Skull Press, 71 Bond Street, Brooklyn. With fiction writer Colum McCann.

Wednesday, December 10 at 7 PM
Celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of Barrow Street Press (and the Winter 2003 issue of Barrow Street) at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, NYC. This one'll cost ya: $25 entrance fee, ouch. But you get a free copy of the magazine and all the hors d'oeurves you can eat.

If your bookstore, sewing circle, co-op board, or English department is interested in hearing me read, please drop me a line.

"In that grapesuit I look like a total jackass."

Please welcome the salutary bitterness of Malevolent Owls to my blogroll.

"The book is the key, and I hold it."
       —Jennifer Moxley, "Where Was I Going"

My book cover came from the printer today, and it's beautiful. I showed it to a couple of people and they said, "So serious!"—referring to my author photo. I tried to explain that when I smile in photos, my cheek and neck inflate to about four times their natural size.

Barrow Street has put up a page where you can read blurbs, gaze at a (rather inaccurate) image of the cover, and yes, buy the book, right here.

Thoughtful response to Friday's post by Henry Gould, who as ever sticks to his purist's guns. I have to think more about his argument, but I'd like to raise the question that I think falls into the gap between our two positions: what is the role of community for the poet? It seems to me that every poet, and every poetry, imagines a community, of readers if not necessarily of other writers; every poem creates the idea of its audience. I have a longing for filiation with other poets, but this is contradicted by the tendency of, as Henry says, "ideological formations to make claims on poetry." But it seems to me that ideological formations are always making claims on our poetry; it's simply a question as to whether we can come to consciousness about what they are, so that we might be able to choose otherwise. I'll always prefer the company of a poet who wears his or her politics on their sleeve to one who claims to be beyond politics. That's living poets. My favorite dead poets are exempted because, however "apolitical" someone like Stevens may have claimed to be, history allows me to situate him in a precise way; I understand where he's coming from. And with that understanding I can suss out what it is in his poetry that appeals to me and is still of use. There remains, of course, a powerful irrational component—the vision thing—which I remain open to, almost against my will, regardless of what card a poet carries.

The great poets always embody contradictions, and I can find poetry that carries ethical along with aesthetic weight even in those writers who were in the grip of anti-semitism and sympathy for fascism: Pound, Eliot, and Lawrence all speak, at least at moments, for values I cherish. Their poetry does "transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range," but the untransmuted world remains; in fact its presence is heightened in its absence from the poem. And so a poet's attitude toward his or her particular, historical world is always going to be crucial to me, as a reader and as a writer. The "originality" that Henry elevates into something of a fetish-term for the best poetry is literally invisible without an understanding of the poet's situation in his or her time. And so a poet who actually makes and registers in their poetry some effort to understand their own context (it may be demonstrated by logopoeia, allusion, or discursivity) has the most of my attention. The news from poems: just that. The history of the present moment that only a profound effort of linguisitic attention (from someone who knows how to listen to their culture) has any hope of producing.

"What [in the work of the modernists] has so often been described as a new and deeper, richer subjectivity is in fact this call to change which always resonates through it: not subjectivity as such, but its transfiguration. This is then the sense in which I propose to consider modernist 'subjectivity' as allegorical of the transformation of the world itself, and therefore of what is called revolution. The forms of this allegory are multiple; yet all the anecdotal psychologies in which it finds itself dressed—in their stylistic, cultural and characterological differences—have in common that they evoke a momentum that cannot find resolution in the self, but that must be completed by a Utopian and revolutionary transumation of the world of actuality itself."
        —Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, p. 136.

Have I mentioned my trip to the Saatchi Gallery yet? It's in the old County Hall building along the Thames, a formidable Victorian structure that's been invaded by such emissaries of Cool Britannia as Damien Hirst (formaldehyded shark), Chris Ofili (he of the elephant dung Virgin Mary), Marc Quinn (six pints of blood ahead), and Tracey Emin (make your bed!). Much of the work is reflexively obsessed with its position in the art world, its status as art meant to trouble such concepts as "status," "as," and "art." (You can view some of the pieces in the collection, fortunately or unfortunately without the smug little bits of explanatory text that are posted in the actual gallery, here.)Seeing so many works by comparatively few artists, all working within the comparatively small scene of British art, brought forward the outlines of the British art scene qua scene, which in turn served to raise my awareness of any "scene's" sceneness. I was reminded in some ways of the discomfort I felt a few years ago when I picked up a copy of The Germ at Cody's in Berkeley (I had just arrived in the Bay Area) and read an interview in the back with one of the Gizzis (was it Peter?) which consisted in large part of his memories of various characters and moments in the history of the avant-garde poetry scene. I don't remember which scene particularly, which is part of the point: I didn't know who was being referred to and my feelings of exclusion were almost palpable, manifesting even in the grainy feel of the cover with its eccentrict pseudo-eighteenth century artwork.

Of course I didn't let this put me off permanently. And I don't know how poetry, or any medium, could assist in building community without exclusion; every us needs a them. Arguably, I was able to follow a path into the community that The Germ and other avantish publications had made manifold for me, materializing like a plate-glass window I hadn't known my nose was pushed up against. A willingness to open and surrender yourself is required that isn't any more humiliating than "submitting" to magazines and book publishers. (I am reminded at this point of a great show This American Life did once about how people who, their first day on the job or in school or wherever, make a tremendous effort to pretend that they've always been there—listen to it here.) There is always that awkward moment, brief or protracted, of becoming avant-garde, an anxious category of being if ever there was one. Bob Perelman's Birmingham talk touched on this, the careful curatorship of "the new" practiced by longstanding avant-gardes—the Steve Evans vs. Fence controversy is his signal contemporary example of this. Evans' point, if I recall correctly, is that authentic avant-garde communities are formed in concert with radical social and political practices that are necessarily predicated by a community-formation based on something other than aesthetics. To be introduced to an avant-garde aesthetic divorced from the social (assuming Evans would even concede that such a thing can exist) in the pages of a magazine like Fence or VOLT is to come from a position of hopeless naivety which can all too quickly metamorphose into opportunism and self-commodification.

The Saatchi artists are in a similar position to the editors of and writers who've appeared in Fence (I am one of them); not because they, with postmodern shamelessness and elan have willingly entered a scene that takes its name from an advertising executive, but rather because they have become identified with each other by submitting to and appearing in the same magazine and not by cohering within a geographically or politically or even aesthetically defined space. We didn't make the magazine but found it within a historically pre-existing landscape; now we must take responsibility for making it or be accused of bad faith. I am perfectly willing to accept this responsibility; I acknowledge that I came to the avant garde (I define this by an embrace of what I can only oxymoronically call traditionally avant garde values; I do not claim to be avant garde) through the back door of what Rebecca Wolff undercritically called "weirdness" and not through an enlightened politico-critical position. What I deny is any imputation that, having come in the back way, that I should be refused the front parlor or secret speakeasy den where the revolution is being plotted by those who laid the cornerstones to the house. Less flowerily (there's a Lawrentian phrase if ever I coined one), I simply want to argue that it is possible and, for me at least, creatively necessary for the Fence writer to develop a social-political position within his or her writing even if that writer was initially and only attracted by—shock of shocks!—their perhaps poorly understood pleasure in the "weird" texts first encountered in Fence, Conduit, Columbia Poetry Review, or any number of journals that publish the work not found in Poetry and The New Yorker, etc.

An aesthetic community is always and by definition more than a merely aesthetic community, because community is always a polis. And I've found the aesthetic community that's loosely formed around these magazines and blogs to be as non-hierarchical as I could wish; as far as I can see, you pay your ticket to enter simply by being interested enough (there are barriers to anyone's acquiring this interest, but that's a discussion for another time). From Skanky Possum to Nada & Gary I see people, some with MFAs and some without, coming together and making stuff happen without becoming or wanting to become "The Patron" (you can see a version of Ashley Bickerton's painting if you click here and scroll to the bottom) that Evans accuses Wolff of being. Once you're aware of this community of intersecting scenes, you belong to it. And you will be put in the position of rejecting or embracing what is other to you every time you check your e-mail inbox.

Evans' critique retains a good deal of force; it's out there, a dark planet troubling any will toward thoughtlessness on my part with its gravity well. No freedom without rigor, no play without impacting and being impacted by other people. No form without a force that one must assume a critical consciousness of and responsibility for, else you become another brick in the wall, another node in the Matrix. No solitude. What meaning will I make of being numerous? The question is urgent and inescapable.

By the way, Selah has finally gone to the printer. When copies are available for sale I swear you will be the first to know.

Reading Nicole's blog fills me with respect for those who actually know the (quite wonderful) names for plants and flowers and trees and things. My upbringing was so thoroughly suburban that I managed to evade both street-smarts and an intimate knowledge of the outdoors. Strange that I'm so drawn to the concept of pastoral when I know so little about actual nature; or not so strange, given that pastoral is always a fantasy of nature with only tenuous connections to the real thing. In classical poetry it's the georgic and not the pastoral where Virgil or someone struts his knowledge of agriculture. Pastoral is an attempt to reconcile or efface culture in favor of the nature within, which puts it in the realm of psychoanalysis and Rousseauist revolution. I may have to drop the entire concept and just go straight to the texts that interest me. Reading Jameson's Marxism and Form again makes me want to dialecticize my criticism—to understand my own investment in whatever interpretive lens I happen to choose—and not just burble happily along picking hermeneutics at random.

Maybe I'll read some poems now.

My old friend Nicole Cordrey (we co-edited the University of Montana's literary magazine, CutBank, for a year together) has a blog! She's had it for a while, actually. I am proud to belatedly add it to the blogroll.

She has a Boston Terrier named Miles and a big old dog of no particular breed (or is she a German Shepherd?) named Sunday. Sunday and my dog used to chase each other around Nicole's back yard in Missoula. The good old days.

"Images exist solely to spread their own news."

Back in the you ess ess eh. Trying to catch up with all the blogs, which is a little like going to the mustiest of musty rooms in my hometown's public library where the week's newspapers were stored, slowly warping and filling with air. Serve immediately! That's how it ought to be with blogs.

You're all dying to hear about my trip to England, I know, but there's too much to recap about Things I Did and too little to relate about Things I Thought and Felt. Traveling alone puts me in a hazy state of mind, unanchored as I am from my daily context, without even the interior of a car slowly accumulating empty Coke cans to serve as a touchstone. I thought this trip would be an opportunity for introspection (as if I needed more) but my usual self-consciousness was replaced by a kind of placeholder self, to which I could murmur such observations as, "Nine hundred years is a long time," and "Kenneth Branagh's American accent is good, but sometimes he sounds like a smart American and sometimes he sounds like a stupid American." What else can I offer. English food is bad but not as bad as reported. English bookstores were strangely uninteresting to me, perhaps because they offered the same stuff you see at American bookstores—also, most if not all of the ones that sold new books were chains. The poetry sections were dismal: the glories of the Anglo-Irish tradition (Blake, Yeats, Auden, et al) were mixed in with "modern" stuff that seemed either tendentious or "light" or tendentiously light. Dreadful stuff. I did lust after a copy of Tom Raworth's collected poems, with its appealingly plain jacket, but it was 20 pounds or so and would have added considerably to the weight I was lugging. One thing the English do well is Shakespeare—the productions of Cymbeline (Stratford RSC) and Twelfth Night (the new Globe in London) were flat-out some of the best Shakespeare productions I've ever seen. Kind of wish I'd given this dance performance I saw Friday night a miss (work by a choreographer named Cathy Marston; it was lovely but not electrifying) and gone to see Pericles at the Lyric in Hammersmith instead.

Bob Perelman has e-mailed me a copy of the talk he gave, "Old Modernism: News and 'the New' in Williams' 'Asphodel,'" and I'm going to read it over and then perhaps report on what it says. I've also got Barrett Watten's e-mail and I'm going to ask for a copy of his talk, "Disinformation and Modern Authority"; in passing he slammed the practice of blogging and I hope he'll give me permission to quote that bit and then maybe y'all will have some thoughts on it. In the meantime I've got to catch up on reading my students' poems and stories and dig into the draft introduction of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory for seminar tomorrow. And do a final revision of the paper I presented so that it can get graded, already.

Still a bit jet-lagged but from the other end, so to speak. Midnight at seven PM.

That Is No Country for Old Men

I'm 33 today, staying in a grotty hostel in London not far from Bloomsbury. Having a marvelous time. The paper went well on Sunday; on Monday I went to Stratford and visited the various Shakespeare shrines, including the RSC, where I saw a thrilling production of Cymbelline. On Tuesday I went to Warwick Castle in the morning and early afternoon and London that evening. Yesterday I visited the British Museum, the Tate Modern, saw Kenneth Branagh in David Mamet's not-so-great Edmond, and got a ticket to be a groundling at the Globe Theatre's production of As You Like It for tonight. Today, the Tower of London. Tomorrow, perhaps Cambridge. That's the news for now; I'll come back to the conference and the things I saw and did there when I get home.

The Drugged Balloonist

I don't know why this vast quantity of white space is appearing above my posts. But it fits nicely with the first plenary lecture of the conference last evening, "Modernism in Midair." Steven Connor made lots of interesting points about the treatment of air by various canonical modernists (Lewis, Woolf, H.D., and Eliot) as something that can be shaped and sculpted yet is often ignored in its omnipresence. I could tell you more but I seem to have mislaid my notebook; I'm hoping it's back at the B&B I'm staying at, which has tiny but comfortable rooms. It's a fair distance from the city center, so that and jet lag means I've missed the first two panels of the day, and now it's already lunchtime. When I come back I think I'll go to a panel called "Modernism, Beasts and Bestiality" which offers the first of several papers being delivered on Lawrence: "Becoming Fox, Becoming-Fascist: D.H. Lawrence and the Great War." Lawrence's critical stock may be on the rebound; this paper is by a fellow from the University of Iowa, and at the reception last night I met a Japanese scholar who has some interesting things to say about radio and cinema as they are featured in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I don't feel entirely at home at this conference. Partly that's because it already seems to have broken up into groups that know each other from previous such events; but mostly it's because I'm still not wholly comfortable in my scholarly skin. I was much more relaxed at AWP as a poet among poets. Then again, I also knew lots of people there. So perhaps my anxiety is purely social. I kind of wish I were delivering my own paper a bit sooner because then I might feel that my credentials had been established. Then again, I've been realizing lately that so much of the power that we might attribute to "credentials"--publications, a job title, or anything else associated with an impressive c.v.--is literally so much air. The people who speak with confidence about what interests them are always the most impressive, and that confidence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how established or powerful they are or are perceived to be. Of course establishment helps, as does the attitude of sparse, sincere rebellion that I've observed from some graduate students. In neither camp as usual I float along, like the drugged balloonist, amnesiac but with his reasoning powers intact, that Bertrand Russell used as an example of someone who, deprived of preconceptions, would be better able to understand Einstein's theories than an ordinary person. Conroy began his lecture with this, but right now I feel it's something I'm living, though my preconceptions aren't gone so much as getting further and further away in this strange place of sleep deprivation.

Birmingham is exploding with energy but jet-lagged me is not. Plus the computer I'm using—free e-mail terminals at the central library—is about to disconnect me. So all I can say right now is:

- Aisle seats seem like a good idea but on international flights but they're not, because everybody going by to the bathroom brushes against you or bangs your elbow and keeps you awake.

- Burton Hatlan, who used to edit Sagetrieb and is here in part to announce the rebirth of Paideuma as a magazine dedicated to modernist poetry generally and not just Ezra Pound, sat across the ailse from me and probably discovered the same thing.

- Ben Friedlander is also here and I hope to make his acquaintance.

- Barrett Watten is here and I plan to attend a panel that he's co-chairing.

- Birmingham is exciting and young and very cosmopolitan feeling. I look forward to exploring it.

- Did I mention the jet lag?

There you have it. More updates to follow.

That link to Octopus, if you're as slow as I am, is at left. And though I don't have any work up there just yet why not check out Chimera Review while you're at it.

Wish me bon voyage—tomorrow I fly to the Brum. I hope there's a good movie on the plane. And I'll tell you the news from Blighty when I can.

A nice little chunk of Fourier Series is now up at muse apprentice guild.

The paper's done; now I have to chop it down into something I can present in twenty minutes. Can't quite believe I'm getting on a plane in 48 hours. I don't even have a guidebook yet. Most likely after the conference ends on Sunday I'll head up toward Edinburgh. Maybe I should pay the obligatory pilgrimage to Stratford first. I'm taking suggestions. The blog will most likely be dormant while I'm gone (until October 5), not that it's been so very active lately. But if I do find an Internet connection that's not too expensive I'll post a little travel piece for y'all.

Actually used to say "y'all" when I lived in New Orleans. Lost the habit now, but it's a very useful pronoun. Kind of a more intimate plural, as if the connotations of "tu" and "vous" in French were reversed.

Deeply belated link to Octopus Magazine now at right.

No hurricane but it's been breezy and rainy. And Dopey. The other four dwarfs are nowhere in sight. Wait... is that Grumpy?

D.H. Lawrence has eaten my brain. I've written dozens of pages and thought about this for months and only today did I realize that the basic intuition I've been working on points in a blindingly obvious direction. Stein repeats the rose and so does Lawrence. Stein gets all the attention for repeating it and transforming its intensity, it possible planes of reference, in a single line. But Lawrence repeats the rose (in one case, a particular breed, the Gloire de Dijon) in the titles of five poems and achieves something very similar. Both of them, I argue, are trying to transform the relationship the poet normally has with the beloved of lyric, and they do this by turning the typical trope of lyric love, the rose, into something rich and strange, the better to realize their own strangeness as subjects. Or something like that. I've been working on this too long. And one week from Sunday I'll be reading an extract of this to a more or less international group of academics in some room in a hotel in Birmingham, U.K. Eek.

So many good comments over at the Possum Pouch on the Houlihan controversy. Catherine's response is one of my favorites; there's something touching about how she uses Houlihan's first name, a certain surprising intimacy that helps me pity her more than I'm angered by her closed little mind. I mean, to claim to love poetry and to then almost certainly shut yourself off from so much that is great in it. Like Bernadette Mayer for instance. To take a break from Lawrence and Stein I've been reading my copy of ABernadette Mayer Reader, which I picked up somewhere years ago and never actually read. Jeez but she's terrific (though it's true many of the poems don't help me forget Stein. I do think my students will be looking at a couple of her poems out of the Hoover Postmodern Poetry anthology, which I happen to think is really good. Next time I teach I may just make my students buy the whole thing.

Tonight's the night... at the Bookery.

Jeremy in Uzbekistan!

An interesting question.

I'm writing my paper. In the meantime, go read lime tree.

I'm coming out for Howard Dean. Except for the gun thing he's a candidate I can stand (behind). A Dean-Clark candidacy is the most powerful Democratic ticket I can imagine, with Clark's southernness and generalness making up nicely for Dean's northernness and unmilitariness.

Plus my grandfather's name is Howard.

Jonathan Mayhew has defended the tactic of pointing the finger at Ms. Houlihan's poems well enough that I don't have to. But I will simply add that Houlihan defines herself as a poet and her poetry is therefore fair game. I even think we're obligated to consider her poetry in this case, because it's something that we can demonstably show that a) we know where to "locate" her work in a way she doesn't know how to locate the work she criticizes; b) we can show that even by what we presume are her own standards it's just not that good.

Joan Houlihan, a somewhat more intelligent and less self-impressed version of conservative critic William Logan, has been getting a fair amount of attention in blogland lately. But I find her criticism more irritating and less entertaining than Logan's, and her habit of choosing the poems or lines of poems as representative (as the Skeptic has pointed out) destroys, in my mind, whatever authority she presumes to create. The proof is in the pudding, folks: check out her own poems. I don't dislike all of them and she has an ear; but she's plowing a narrow, narrow stretch of the wide open field that is poetry, and it's sheer temerity on her part to expect the rest of us to do the same.

Very excited about the convergences of Gould, Bach, Young, and especially Meng over at Portholes Redux. Tonight's the Night!

I haven't gotten anywhere near being up to listing my own personal top ten list, as so many other bloggers are doing. It was hard enough to come up with my "staff pick" for the store. Caught between the desire to choose something from my own personal canon (which is nebulous) and the desire to promote something reasonably cool, I grabbed Karen Volkman's Spar, which has many thing I admire in it. Also admirable is Tina Brown Celona's The Real Moon of Poetry which I read in its entirety during my shift this evening. I have to confess to a vague suspicion of a book that can be consumed in one sitting, but I found its strange and somewhat sinister whimsy, and her foregrounding of the problem of preserving the Romantic impulse in the form of poetry (Romance surviving the rainbow of its will, so to speak), quite compelling. Another Fencebooks book, Joyelle McSweeney's The Red Bird, also held my attention for a while; I'll want to read some more of it next Friday.

     "Only—pardon me—I do not quite comprehend you. You see, never has it fallen to my lot to acquire the brilliant polish which is, so to speak, manifest in your every movement. Nor have I ever been able to attain the art of expressing myself well. Consequently, although there is a possibility that in the—er—utterances which have just fallen from your lips there may lie something else concealed, it may equally be that—er—you have been pleased so to express yourself for the sake of the beauty of the terms wherein that expression found shape?"
     "Oh, no," asserted Chichikov. "I mean what I say and no more. My reference to such of your pleasant souls as are dead was intended to be taken literally."
              —Gogol

I've been pretty much absorbed with teaching (c.f. the new blog) and my paper (after a lot of kerfuffle I've decided to go back to the original impetus for it, which was the odd similarity between Gertrude Stein's rose and D.H. Lawrence's; I've decided that they both were doing interesting things with the rose [which I also treat as a metonym for lyric itself] that provide an alternative modernism-ation of lyric to the models proposed by Pound and Eliot [all that hardness and impersonality] and exemplified, in my view, by Williams' "The rose is obsolete" from Spring and All). I've also decided with slight misgivings to take a class, though I wasn't planning on it: a course on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. I'm reading it anyway for my 'A' exam so I might as well. When is that exam? I've got to deal with that, but it's not going to happen until I get back from England, where all my thoughts begin to bend.

There was a party last night at the A.D. White house to welcome the new English department grad students. I was astonished to run into Evan Winet, a guy I used to hang out with at Vassar whom I haven't seen for almost exactly ten years. He's a visiting prof in the drama department and specializes in Indonesian theater. The world is both small and round.

Closing time in twenty minutes and I'm not in the poetry section, alas. So back to Dialectic of Enlightenment....

For Bacon as for Luther, "knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation." Its concern is not "satisfaction, which men call truth," but "operation," the effective procedure. The "true end, scope or office of knowledge" does not conssit in any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for the better endowment and help of man's life." There shall be neither mystery nor any desire to reveal mystery.

Adorno's pessimism (I know, he was really a secret optimist, but I'm talking about tone) is so bracing. He's at his best in this vein in Minima Moralia, of course. It's damn refreshing to read him in a bookstore where anyone at any moment might ask me if we have a copy of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and It's All Small Stuff). He has a capacity for taking himself seriously that I find as admirable and perplexing as I do Jorie Graham's.

No surprises here....

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test