Fabulous Furry Freak Brother
        —for Kasey Mohammed

In 1996 in Helena Montana
I discovered a deer head in a Dumpster
with the eyes of Ezra Pound
In spite of the deer head's obvious fascism
and preposthumous anti-Semitic utterances
I couldn't help but sympathize with its imprisonment
in a metal box made for tipping
like something domestic not something wild to be milked
There was some carcass in there too
but mainly it was the eyes thanks to my prying
lid raised to catch the eye of the sun
glaring in deer season not wabbit season
not duck season a time to kill
or to scribble or to speak into a microphone
while the Allies fight their way up the Italian coast
I haven't yet mentioned the horns
made to entangle brush, to engage the forest in the business of deerness
selv' oscura
the deer head gone down to the underworld
to mount itself to some speaking ghost
upside-down on a scaffold over a trench I cut
to fill with whose blood my own
or the reader's
in 2004 100,000 people file by Reagan's coffin
he's still talking up debt
angry eye sad eye deadeye
our aim is true
the gun unloaded

The first really ugly anti-Semitism rears up its head in Canto 22 (I've decided to start using Arabic numerals) when Ez accompanies his Jewish guide Yusuf to the synagogue in Gibraltar (I think—interesting Ulysses connection). The service is described sneeringly, with the rabbi and other participants taking a lot of snuff and grinning mindlessly at each other. It's pretty depressing:

And then they got out the scrolls of the law
And had their little procession
And kissed the ends of the markers.
And there was a case on for rape and blackmail
Down at the court-house, behind the big patio
               full of wistaria;
An' the nigger in the red fez, Mustafa, on the boat later
An' I said to him: Yusuf, Yusuf's a damn good feller.
And he says:
                        "Yais, he ees a goot fello,
"But after all a chew
                                ees a chew."

This is one of Pound's "casuals," in which the detritus of the modern world are portrayed primarily for comedy and disgust (sometimes the two are not distinguishable). Various edifices of Christian art (such as Sigismundo's Tempio at Rimini) are emblems of the "eternal," but the scrolls of the law are casual. So the contempt goes pretty deep. And yet Zukofsky could still say this: "I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in his presence. Nothing he ever said to me made me feel the embarrassment I always have for the 'Goy' in whom a residue of antagonism to 'Jew' remains. If we had occasion to use the words 'Jew' and 'Goy' they were no more or less ethnological in their sense than 'Chinese' and 'Italian.'" Perhaps Zukofsky's secularism insulated him somewhat from the roots of Pound's contempt? Or was he simply blinding himself to the obvious because Pound was in fact his friend and mentor, in spite of everything?

Well. If anti-Semitism (or the uglier, more American sort of racism: blacks are treated more badly than Jews in The Cantos, not even seen as a threat) made me put down each book in which it appeared, my library would be sadly impoverished. So I press on to the Adams and Jefferson cantos. Beyond them, "the Boss," Il Duce. Beyond him, Pisa.

And now for something completely different: the new HOW2. Very impressed by Sawako Nakaysu's translations of the pioneering Japanese modernist Sagawa Chika. There's a sly sense of humor there, and many arresting images (I suppose, to go back to Pound, it's inevitable to derive "imagism" from a language that doesn't use Roman characters; phanopoeia is what's translatable). A kind of surrealism is also at play: "Autumn, sick with yellow fever, is the Arabian script staggering on the windowpane." "A chef clutches the blue sky. Four fingerprints are left; gradually the chicken bleeds. Here, too, the sun collapses." Actually a pretty good description of the death of a chicken rendered somehow noble.

Also a good review of Original Green, a book by Patricia Carlin, one of my editors at Barrow Street.

Granted, "gonads in organdy" sounds like a line from an obscene Simon & Garfunkel song. It's on the cusp between beauty and absurdity.

More Cantos today: I plan to finish the "Draft of XXX" and maybe push a little beyond. The book's been lying face-down on my desk and I have to say that the back cover copy is a little obnoxious. "Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: 'They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry.'" Well, okay. But then: "William Carlos Williams said: '[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them.'" I kind of like the Heideggerian "discloses," but the rest of it feels overwrought. The insistence on "making" seems hyperbolic; what poem isn't "made"? (Poeisis, to make—we get it!) Then there's a quote on the bottom ascribed to John Crowe Ransom: "Pound's Cantos is a modern classic that everybody has to know." By this point I'm ready to join the Jimmy Doesn't Read book group. But I am, in fact, a modernist scholar in training, so that gets me to flip the book over again and stare at that big black cover. THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND. Somehow more impressive than any blurbs. The Alps.... And there's all that history—not the history in the book, but the poetic history it makes possible: Oppen, Zukofsky, H.D., Olson, right up through Du Plessis, Watten, and Bruce Andrews. So I open it, and I read:

                    Night of the golden tiger,
And the dry flame in the air,
                    Voices of the procession,
Faint now, from below us,
And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle,
                    Like dark wine in the shadows.
"Wind between the sea and the mountains"
 The tree-spheres half dark against sea,
                    half clear against sunset,
The sun's keel freighted with cloud,
And after that hour, dry darkness
Floating flame in the air, gonads in organdy,
Dry flamelet, a petal borne in the wind.
Gignetei kalon.

A beautiful thing is born.

One of the first poems I ever wrote that got positive attention, when I was fifteen or so, was called "Night Canto." It won some high-school prize. I thought "Canto" was a magical word.

Reading the new CROWD at the Bookery tonight; some good stuff in it. Moved by Timothy Donnelly's "The New Intelligence"—a brief excerpt:

I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality

keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling
a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkardness
on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.

I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete
refused to apologize.

That's love, man. It's invigorating simply to hear it described. The magazine generally contains the right mix of names I know (always a factor in browsing journals, probably a comfort factor but also to see the very latest by poets I admire—in this case the names include Peter Gizzi, Matt Rohrer, Elizabeth Robinson, and Tomaz Salamun) and new discoveries. Stefania Heim's "Some Sails" offers "quick indigenous shifts." Travis Nichols fears the "clear human voice." Ron's poet for the day, Lisa Lubasch (whose How Many More of Them Are You I could never quite get into), has a remarkable movement to her cumbersomely titled poem "Drafts from Three Positions, 3 (Maturity Enrich Like a Metrics of Experience)." There's a cartoon from Craig Thompson, author of the great graphic novel Blankets. Laurie Sheck gets Stevensian with "the troubled headland / Of the self" in "Poem." And Matthea Harvey has an interesting looking essay with a great title, "The Rose Is an Estate in Sicily: On Miniaturizaton, Magnification & Vision." I'm going to read it now.

Perhaps I will reassess Peter Streckfus' Reagan poems now. Goodbye to the likeable bastard. (Not Streckfus.)

Two new books out from Barrow Street, my editor Lois Hirshkowitz's 3.14159+ and Evelyn Reilly's Hiatus. They have surprisingly edgy covers; I like the bar code on the front like that. The overall format is reminiscent of Krupskaya. I'm looking forward to reading them both; I've never heard of Reilly before but she has an interesting background. I'm also hoping this will mean broader distribution for Barrow Street titles in general. Still to come: the new contest winner, Christine Scanlon's Ectoplasm, which was picked by David Lehman.

Catherine—we too are watching The Office for the first time. We are horrified and delighted.

Enough with the D-Day porn, please. The Good War gave birth to the military-industrial corporate complex as we now know it, and the Russians did more bleeding to end fascism than we can even imagine. Bah, humbug. I remember when I first read Catch-22 at the tender age of eleven or so I wondered at Heller's cynicism. Weren't Yossarian and company, you know, bombing Nazis? Nowadays, of course, it's clear that we have Milo Minderbinder for a vice-president. Another seminal text of WWII cynicism was Slaughterhouse Five. Which means we're now at, what, Slaughterhouse Nine? Slaughterhouse n? Feh.

You know what, there's some goddman beautiful stuff in the first couple dozen Cantos. I tend of course to focus on the pastoral moments. Huzzah for "Tian the low speaking," from XIII:

And Tesu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order,"
and Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is."
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
"With order in the observances,
          with a suitable performance of the ritual,"
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
          after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound:
          "The old swimming hole,
"And the boys flopping off the planks,
"Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins."

My favorite Canto thus far is XX, the noigandres Canto. Which means something like "to ward off pain or boredom." I also love the phrase "Ligur' aoide," by which Pound means "sharp singing," as of the Sirens. The passage through which Pound plays with the answer to Levy's question, "Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!" is incredibly beautiful:

Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered,
By the clear edge of the rocks
The water runs, and the wind scented with pine
And with hay-fields under sun-swath.
Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata.
You would be happy for the smell of that place
And never tired of being there, either alone
Or accompanied.
Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard.
Sandro, and Boccata, and Jacopo Sellaio;
The ranunculae, and almond,
Boughs set in espalier,
Ducciou, Agostino; e l'olors—
The smell of that place—d'enoi ganres.
Air moving under the boughs,
The cedars there in the sun,
Hay new cut on hill slope,
And the water there in the cut
Between the two lower meadows; sound,
The sound, as I have said, a nightingale
Too far off to be heard.
And the light falls, remir,
from her breast to thighs.

Pastoral as boundary between nature and civilization, myth and enlightenment. The former manifests a page later, a renewable resource with teeth:

                         Jungle:
Glaze green and red feathers, jungle,
Basis of renewal, renewals;
Rising over the soul, green virid, of the jungle,
Lozenge of the pavement, clear shapes,
Broken, disrupted, body eternal,
Wilderness of renewals, confusion
Basis of renewals, subsistence,
Glazed green of the jungle;
Zoe, Marozia, Zothar,
                         loud over the banners,
Glazed grape, and the crimson,
HO BIOS

A vision of the Lotus Eaters ("Lotophagoi") follows. Adorno and Horkheimer:

Self-preserving reason cannot permit such an idyll—reminiscent of the bliss induced by narcotics, by which subordinate classes have been made capable of enudring the unendurable in ossified social orders—among its own people. And indeed, it is only an illusion of bliss, a dull aimless vegetating, as impoverished as the life of animals. At best, it would be an absence of the awareness of unhappiness. But happiness contains truth within itself. It is in essence a result. It unfolds from suffering removed. The enduring Odysseus is therefore right not to endure life among the Lotus-eaters. Against them he asserts his own cause, the realization of utopia through historical work, whereas simply abiding within an image of bliss deprives them of their strength. But in being exerted by rationality, by Odysseus, this right is inevitably drawn into the realm of wrong. His immediate action is one which reasserts domination (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 49).

Pound's Cantos are impaled on the horns of this dialectic: the poem which creates the image of bliss is asked itself to do historical work. Does this wrong the poem (and does the poem wrong history)? Or is it the kind of work Pound asks his poetry to do that dooms it to its fragmentary success (Pound's success being his failure to establish a monolithic fascist utopia, even within the bounds of the text)? The painted paradise at the end of it. These lapidary moments shining from the solidified muck of the poem (a haunting image from XV: the shield with Medusa's face is used to petrify the soil enough for the poet and his guide to walk on), these survivals gleam in the black sea of print, that peculiarly archaic New Directions typeface. It may simply be a hypertrophic case of the stone set off by foil, "bright metal on a sullen ground." Of course I haven't yet reached Pound at his most prescriptive; the grumblings about usury are just getting underway.

We begrudingly begin to enter a skyscraper someone else made
by convincing ourselves we're erecting it. It doesn't afford us
a better view. Those shadowed by it were not essential.
We are all on top and the bottom doesn't cave in.

                                    —Chris Stroffolino, "The Comedy of It All"

"We gaze at the mess as if / We've made it. If we didn't think we made it / We wouldn't see it as a mess." Chris Stroffolino, "Forecast of Characters."

The war has infected us all.

Oh, and a Fourier Series poem is up at 42opus.

A beautiful day has become, I imagine, a beautiful evening. I have to imagine it because I'm stuck here at The Bookery. Outside the Ithaca Festival has begun: musicians, food stands, craft booths, and other miscellany in celebration of "ten square miles surrounded by reality." This seems to mean slightly more business at the store than usual, but only slightly. Folks must do their serious book buying during the day. But they do buy them, even the wacky things I insist on stocking. Renee Gladman's The Activist has sold, I'm glad to see. I've just gone through the SPD catalog doing my part to keep the shelves cutting edge. Hopefully I'll be here when they arrive: it's fun to stack up all the new books at once and give each on a glance before I shelve it.

Tonight I'm looking through the newest Yale Younger Poet, Peter Streckfus. His book The Cuckoo seems like a vast improvement over the last dozen or so Yalies (though I do have a soft spot for Loren Goodman's Famous Americans). Lovely images are rigorously and surprisingly confined by form, then released by wit. Here's his poem, "Ode":

The most beautiful thing in my life today. A nut brown flea
floating in the middle of a lake underlain with white flowers.
                                                            My bowl of tea.

The armor glistens, its equine head and legs stammer
in this new element, knocked by arrow or hammer

                                                  that fatal moment in the field.

That's rather nice, isn't it? Like a tiny samurai movie. He has a few poems referencing the career of Ronald Reagan that aren't too successful. I like when the wit flirts with creepiness:

Encephalitis

If your drop of lemon juice leaves the lemon in your hand and the oyster doesn't wriggle upon being touched by the juice of the lemon you should not eat it for the oyster is not whole in its mind.

It's a book with lots of world in it, particularly fragments of Buddhism, Basho, and general Japanophilism. A blurb on the back from Arthur Sze perhaps defuses charges of Orientalism. What the book really seems to practice is a brand of aestheticism that hopes to make contact with reality by referencing another culture whose traditions and rituals were once matters of life and death. We Westerners are probably unable to see the apparent seriousness around the Japanese tea ceremony any other way. That there are rituals in our own lives every bit as important, but less colorful due to our casual intimacy with them, is difficult to remember. It's easiest when traveling back in time: I cringe when I think of the clothes my mother let me wear in junior high. Who knows how much grief I would have been spared if I'd stopped wearing those horizontally striped polo shirts a size too big for me? Anyway, this is not meant to dis Streckfus; I think I deploy similar manuevers in my own poems often enough. I try to remember that it's not the real Asia refracted through a poem like my "She Is Made a Gift to the Emperor," but a palpable fantasy of it. Is this clear to readers? Probably not. A similar activity, but one less fraught with cultural imperialism, is the co-optation of past Western cultures—really even just simple allusion. When a bit of Shakespeare manifests in one of my poems, it's meant largely to activate the reader's sense of the past, of a world not like ours that we nonetheless fit for our purposes. Hm. These thoughts may stem from my current reading of, yes, Ezra Pound. Yes, I'm reading The Cantos. Completionist madness? I'm certainly not looking forward to all the warmed-over Confucianism; the Malatesta bit is already boring me and I'm not even in double digits yet (well, actually I'm in four digits: Canto VIII). But there's also some achingly beautiful stuff in there: no one writes better about the sea except Pound's protege H.D. So much flows from Pound; not coincidentally, I find thinking in the wake of Heidegger to be very useful and stimulating, though I'm often bored by Heidegger himself (and of course his politics are as bad or worse than Pound's; Pound at least, arguably, expressed remorse for his activities). Should everyone read The Cantos? I would never say that. But I think there's a very real sense in which it can be said that any poet who does page as field, or who incorporates others' texts into their work, or who uses poetry to think about history, or pursues (perhaps even non-disastrously) a political engagement in their poetry, already has. Maybe he isn't speaking to you, but I feel pretty directly addressed by Basil Bunting, here:

On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Well, it looks like things are moving toward a peaceful resolution here. Lesson one has to be relearned again and again: tone is impossible to control in an e-mail. I read things that weren't there and other people heard things not said by me. The larger issue that I am wrestling, wrestling, wrestling with is power. Like many of us, my self-image has not caught up to my adult reality: it's all too easy for me to return mentally to the 4th grade lunchroom. I have not always taken responsibility for the influence I may have or even the threat I might be perceived as simply because it doesn't usually occur to me that I have any real power. But I do, of course—anyone with a public voice does—and that means taking responsibility, treading lightly where I need to and knowing I can be effective on my own behalf or on the behalf of others. It also means recognizing that I will inevitably be attacked for simply having a modicum of power, whether I exercise it consciously or not. This is hard for me to come to terms with. In spite of cultural-studies instincts that tell me "everything is political," I am not by nature a very political person. I have no taste for intrigue or conspiracy, even in a good cause. (Fourier would say I rank low in the "cabalist" passion.) While I realize in the abstract that people might talk unkindly about me behind my back, it doesn't occur to me to be on guard about such a thing. In fact the en garde position is entirely foreign to this would-be avant-gardeist (or avant-garde sympathizer). Malice shocks and dismays me every time because I refuse to concede that my ambition (to be a better poet, to be a well-published poet, to influence the world for the better, and not least to get and keep a good job) means that I am taking the food out of someone else's mouth. Why should poetry, of all ridiculous things, be tied to an economy of scarcity? I want to believe that there's turf enough for all who want it—better, that we can each build the structures we need on the "land" we already possess. Naive? Probably. But without such naivety, how to preserve the open-heartedness which makes my life worth living and my poetry worthh writing? That might be lesson two, a far more difficult trick.

Thanks to all who have expressed support—especially appreciated given the necessary vagueness of my complaint. It's difficult to understand the depth of misinterpretation that I've been subjected to; I can only assume that I've become the unwitting object of a few people's free-floating ressentiment. Well, since I can't really say any more, I won't. But thanks. We will resume regular posting shortly.

Depressed. Can't go into details about it, but some efforts at community building here in Ithaca have backfired seriously—paved with good intentions and all that. It's literally incredible to me that I could be perceived as a threat by anyone, but I guess that it's naive in the extreme for me to expect that everyone will take my good faith on face value. I need a thicker skin and keener ears for this business, sadly.

Nonetheless, the Auberginians shall forge ahead.

Okay, so I'm trying to teach myself InDesign in order to render the aubergine anthology with the insouciant beauty that it deserves. For the record, I'm listing all the participants one more time:

Tim Botta, "Fried Flowers of Aubergine"
James Collins, "In Defense of Aubergine"
Shanna Compton, "Purple Heart"
Nicole Cordrey, "The Effort of Living"
Joshua Corey, "[Subcutaneuous, interstitial: two rules]"
Alan DeNiro, "Siege Mentality"
*Julie Dill, "Audrey Ostriker Loves Luther Vandross"
Jilly Dybka, "Auberginian Sonnet"
Noah Eli Gordon, "Poem"
Paul Guest, "Summer Ending In"
Shafer Hall, "A Catalan Atlas"
Michael Helsem, "[the Lord of Dark did of huge]"
Geof Huth, "White with Winter"
Mark Lamoureux, "Aubergine"
Scott McDonald, "Aubergine Haiku"
Catherine Meng, "DOCUMENT 19 one riff short"
K. Silem Mohammed, "Truck Waffles"
Daniel Nester, "I'll Have You (Club Mix)"
Katey Nicosia, "Mad Apple"
Gary Norris, "An Egg Plant"
*Anthony Robinson, "Obligatory five minute sonnet on unrequited something"
Michael Schiavio, "Before Gabriel Blows His Horn"
Matthew Shindell, "Aubergine"
Laurel Snyder, "Poem which can end in no ending but this ending"
*Adam Strauss, "[Last semester I'd said I'd roast Aubergines]"
Jason Stuart, "Expat Math"
Maureen Thorson, "The aubergine libertine in his green limousine"
Mark Yakich, "To My Young British Poets"
*Tim Yu, "Poem: To Americans Abroad"

Although I have included a few poems (marked by an asterisk) that don't actually end in the word "aubergine," that really was the idea and I reserve the right to exclude them if space doesn't permit or what have you. Though it's not too late to revise, if you have a mind.

And here is Kent's response (see below):

Josh,

Thanks for this reply. We are of similar political minds, in the broad
sense.

But in terms of the poem, I would want to say that the last stanza is
not to be taken so literally as you seem to have it... I don't know any
poets who would do such things, as the political portrait painted there
at the end should make clear. It's all a fairly fantastic projection, to
say the least. The hyperbolic disjuncture in the last section (i.e., the
"alignment" of a "Poets Against the War" poet --I was in the anthology,
remember!-- with the torturers) is strange, admittedly, hopefully
disturbing to some extent, and even at some deeper levels --levels
beyond the protocols of ideological "alignments"-- true, yes.

But again, certainly not in a literal sense... It's meant, rather, to
take the poem elsewhere, beyond the expected and proper parameters of
our political "good behaviors," which we are usually so eager to affirm
(as you do in your reply, and as I do all the time, much more than you,
probably), in our polemics and our poetry. The poem wishes to unsettle
that easy, self-congratulatory relation to the ideological, and point,
as I said, toward other spaces less comfortable to acknowledge-- spaces
that are present everywhere: in our private lives, in our poetic
communities, in our dreams, and so on. None of which is news to many,
I'm sure, but I don't see any reason why such "news" can't be in
"political poems." You could say men and women die everyday for lack of
the self-acknowledgment of such news, don't you think?

And not that we should stop the straight partisan work and writing we
do(!), and not that I have a handle on what those "darker spaces" are
made of, or how this weird, little, fleeting poem came to be, or what
the exact purposes of its energies are... But it does seem to have
struck a nerve-chord with many readers these past few days, and that
makes me feel glad it got written.

tu amigo,

Kent

More later if the spirit moves me.

Kent Johnson solicited my thoughts on his now infamous poem, "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or 'Get the Hood Back On.'" Here they are:

Hi Kent,

I have read the poem. I guess I want to say I'm glad to see you doing that thing you do. But you know, the petty rivalries of American poets look like pretty venial sins compared with the acts at Abu Grahib. And I find your alignment of poets with the soldiers who committed that acts to be a dubious one, since I happen to agree with those who argue that these soldiers were not acting as individual agents but were carrying out an all-but-written mandate from the Defense Department. Poets are as guilty of living off the embers of a dying imperium as any other American, but very very few of us are agents of the state. Even an NEA grant or a job in a public school or university is hardly equivalent to being a soldier in an army. If I or any other poet feels personally indicted by that penultimate paragraph--and sure, I feel indicted, why not admit it?--that probably has more to do with my reflexive willingness to consider my own culpability, aka the much-maligned phenomenon of liberal guilt. But I'm not going to waste a lot time on this emotion; instead I'm going to do my small part in booting the hell out of office those people without any such reflex. That is, those with severe and arbitrary limits on their empathy, which is the real failure of all the personae you present in the poem. Which is not to say that I think a President Kerry is going to make everything hunky-dory or do much of anything to alter the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy. I'm going to work after he's elected to move him to the leftward; I want to see Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader in his cabinet; in short, I want a better compromise than we've got now. Because what we've got now is fucked. And if I have anything to thank Geo. Bush and company for, it's for raising my awareness of my complicity in evil, and for stimulating my desire to do good. Which may or may not have anything to do with my practice as a poet. It probably does. It has already certainly impacted that other much-maligned phenomenon, the subject matter of my poems. What necessary alignment exists between the form of reproduction I choose for those poems and their form/content is something I'm still actively investigating. For now, I choose to build locality into my practice--to foster community. The geopolitical for now remains confined to that odious cellblock, subject matter. At least it's not longer wearing a hood.

Your friend,

Josh

On a Memorial Day when we as a country can't seem to remember a damn thing, it seems particularly appropriate to add Kirsten Kaschock to the blogroll. "You are living on the site of an atrocity."