Off to Philadelphia tomorrow—purely for the fun of it. Will see friends, go to some panels, attend a reading or two, and report back.

We interrupt this creeping sense of morbidity to tell you about two more interesting new books from Fence that I received recently, Tina Brown Celona's Snip Snip! and Ariana Reines' The Cow (click here to see 'em). Celona's last book for Fence, The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems, didn't make a big impression on me, though it was entertaining and whimsical. Snip Snip! has more meat on its bones: the whimsy is still there, but I'm more forcibly impressed with Celona's sense of the metaphysics of female embodiment. Her consciousness is saturated with afterimages from the work of Neruda and Paul Klee, while she also appears to have been designing surrealist covers for Vogue and O: The Oprah Magazine in her head. Like Chelsey Minnis, another Fence-published practioner of the gurlesque, she's also acutely self-conscious of the conditions of poetry production, as reflected in this excerpt from the last piece in the book, "Poem for Matt" (the ellipsis is in the original):

A poetry joke: A Language Poet and a Black Mountain School Poet and a Fence Poet are sitting around chewing the fat. What do we have in common? asked the Language Poet? But the Black Mountain School Poet was tired of stupid poetry jokes. He wanted to go to Asheville and smoke pine needles.

The Fence Poet kept getting up and going to the bathroom.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!

...


The old poets are afraid
The young poets will find out
They aren't interesting.
The young poets are afraid
Of getting old.
I have been cold all day, said the lemur,
Hatefully.
When will people talk about my poems?

You can't trust me, I can't help being mean and clever. In a lot of the poems I AM JOKING.

This desperate tongue-in-cheek disavowal of sincerity exposes the bare rusted infrastructure of our poetry moment, caught between the exhaustion of the confessional impulse and the exhaustion of ironic wordplay. The naked desire to be somehow affirmed as a poet thrums like the nerve in a rotten tooth. Brown reminds me a little of Baudelaire, seeking to transform her lowest, most abjected moments into some kind of transcendence. Her language moves nervously back and forth between delighted wordplay (a delight in which she seems somehow ashamed) and an affectively reduced Valley Girl-type plain speech. Both formally and in terms of content she seems trapped in a series of mirrors, unable to stop looking at herself looking at others looking at herself:

Variations

There is some rotting fruit on the ground, a melon and some bananas. The men are sated and lie back on the ground naked. They are interested in each other's athleticism and their interest is not sexual. Where are the women? The women are absent. The colors are green and gold and black (shadow). I want to fight the men who look so tired. I want to revive them and straighten their shoulders. I want to transpose them to another painting and wipe their faces and give them sustenance. I want to give them milk.

+++

The woman has a man's face. She is staring at her parts. Her breasts denote womanhood. She is in gray. She is naked and she props herself up on her arms. The ground takes up most of the canvas. I want to fight her and hide her belly folds. I want to fight myself with all my arms against all my arms. The pain causes me to become rigid and when I fight myself I know I am not coming back. This is totally fine with me.

Brown's book is primarily concerned with evoking the pathos of choosing an identity, or in having one chosen for you. She squirms, she tapdances, she smiles coquettishly while throwing up in her mouth. Ariana Reines' The Cow is fiercer and wilder, embracing the persona of the eponymous ruminant, taking the consumption of (female) flesh literally. Brown flirts with obscenity, or more precisely our fascination with obscenity; Reines is viscerally, exuberantly obscene, yet somehow more in continuity with the hidden obscenity of the Real discovered by modernism and psychoanalysis—I think of Sianne Ngai's essay "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust," but also of the primal scene of modernist poetry, The Waste Land, where the corpse planted in the speaker's garden turns out to be the mass grave of the (feminine?) nature that our civilization perches precariously upon: the cow with her vulnerable eyes and the cattle industry that produces and consumes her is the figure for this. The body is cracked open, violated, marked for death, taboo rather than sacred:

Earmark

She clasped the event to her and proceeded. Fucked her steaming eyehole and ended it. The cracked things was a doomed pidgin, it meant something.

Yesterday. A patience would be ideal. Make an art of it, sere notes winding their way through an air to have become the name of her going. Her name on the list, and some certain information they had.

After a time there is no more accuracy, after a time you can't get the note clean of what it might have been.

Under the skirt of Mother Ginger huddle little boys and girls. A holiday shit stain. His scholarliness justifies those flights

Of fancy you condemn in him. And the gummy hulls of words muzzle the chaw, a kind of cud that will not do. An umlaut could be a cousin's bone,

The poisoned nuance that started everything. It was from eating ourselves. It had to be

Someone else's sickness first, our silence, our good balance, our usefulness. There is something certain creatures long for. To be hacked up and macerated. That's having it come out and go into another body.

Eaten, gemmed with grease and herbs. Whose low language ruined our bowels. Whose lowing eventually meant nothing. We knew we were to become a ream of flesh. Another nothing.

"Gemmed with grease!" I can't recall the last time I came across a text so scarifying, so disgust-ed/ing, that also seemed so verbally alive. Like Brown, Reines is also concerned with the position of poetry and herself as a speaker within poetry, though the sheer force of her negativity seems just possibly to contain its own seeds of regeneration. From the last page of "Transport," toward the end of the book:

It's the same old story and you have to learn to speak the CLAMATO language of the elders or they will fuck you too.

You have to learn to speak the deciduous vocables of the true poets a beautiful whiteness.

The feet of white girls in flipflops. Fake hippie skirts from Forever 21. I hate the fop in me I want to eat a nipple of Venus because I am becoming a magnificent woman. Hurting culture want to bleed faggot

Leg wax high heel lipstick cuntface a marketing job designers wanting the best I want filthier but not to be homeless because I love myself too much bluebell cups in the rain a poetics of the music of the poolside therapy. Hate me. We are still thinking too much.

At this site, at this juncture, we are going to be we are becoming free.

Maybe Beckett is the more appropriate forebear to cite (the phrase "Go go" appears repeatedly, while its last words are "Go on. Go on"), and Stein if Stein were unable or unwilling to recuse herself as completely as she seems to from the matrix of heterosexual desire. Desire/disgust is the axis both of these books travel upon, Brown empahsizing the former and Reines emphasizing the latter. Above all I am impressed by their vulnerability, their angry nakedness. The only book by a young male poet that comes close to this level of lacerated sexed scrutiny that I can think of is Aaron Kunin's Folding Ruler Star—another Fence book. Say what you will about the magazine: as a press I think they're demonstrating some real vision over there, and an admirable willingness to tolerate discomfort. The pleasure of these books is in their sting.

Waiting.

Vulnerablism

Read Andy Gricevich's essay (warning: PDF file) from the new issue of Absent. A gem, and an excellent, more affectively appealing companion to Simon DeDeo's "Towards an Anarchist Poetics" in the same issue. "Reading and writing [vulnerablist] poetry can be a training in the flexibility of thought, a way of making explicit the ordinarily unconscious ways in which we synthesize experience and a weaning of oneself from the demand for completed narratives." That says much better what I was trying to say about anti-absorptive poetry, and even retains a hint of my initial judgment that narratives of completion and closure satisfy less-than-adult needs. I'm interested in the style in which it's written, too: the ends of sentences are more distinguishable than their beginnings. A little like Adorno's prose but (thank goodness) much, much shorter.

"It's precisely the fact that poetry is not politics, that it's always at least one step away from immediate need and external struggle, that makes it a potential source of new possibilities, to be heard from time to time in the silences between the insistent beats of triumph and rectitude."

Vulnerablism is an ethic to which this blog aspires.

Lovely weekend in New York celebrating Emily's birthday and visiting with Mary Jo (who I found in excellent form—look for her newest book, Elegy, from Graywolf in October 2007) and la famille de Camille Guthrie. Sorry to miss the SOON Reading, though—Aaron has a report on it. While in the city, I read an advance copy of Michael Earl Craig's second book, Yes, Master, which I found winningly, darkly surreal, as I did his first book. Many of the poems take the form of twisted, superficially red state narratives whose real interest and pleasure comes from the sudden hairpin turns—as is so often the case with good postmodern poetry, it's the paratactic structure that asks the reader to take little, uncanny leaps from line to line and sentence to sentence. Craig's work is on the lighter side of the spectrum—closer to James Tate than to Ashbery, and closer to either than he is to the more calisthenically demanding leaps of a Clark Coolidge, say, whose parataxis is unified more by sound than by mood and tone, as here. Craig is a balletic comedian, like Chaplin or Jacques Tati (he has Tati in a football helmet suspended in midair on the cover), whose comedy derives from the discomfiture of the human being in a world of perverse objects. That Craig's landscape is that of Montana rather than the urban world of Chaplin serves to remind us, if we needed to be reminded, that the logic of the commodity which animates things and deanimates people is alive and well in the pastoral West:

Because of Roy

Roy could move a lot of sheep.
He moved them off the mountain
with his arms outstretched
at forty degree angles.
Roy never spoke.
He wore navy corduroys.
This annoyed some of the guys.
He walked like a foster child
stepping carefully
and sometimes robotically.
The sheep respected this.
They kept their mouths shut
for once, and flowed down, down,
in a tight and docile band
over the uneven terrain,
because of Roy.

While in the city I acquired a couple of used books: a battered fourth printing of Kenneth Koch's Thank You (one day I hope to own the new collected poems, but this is much handier and more portable) and a book that called to me even though I didn't quite recognize the author: Frank Samperi's The Prefiguration. It's a physically beautiful book published in 1971, and at first glance (all I've had time for) seems very early-Poundian in its aesthetic: brief lyric landscapes in a classical Chinese mode vie with scattered bits of Italian that make me think of Dante and the troubadours. Might be a good book to relax with in between bouts of dissertation-writing and paper-grading.

Bob Archambeau has joined the pleasure discussion, to which I don't have much to add right now. But Mark and Eric do. High-ho, high-ho, it's off to work I go.

A Round-Up

Off to NYC this afternoon for a weekend celebrating my wife's birthday. We'll see movies, friends, and the revival of Company. I'm especially looking forward to catching up with some old poet friends: Mary Jo Bang from my Montana days and Camille Guthrie and Duncan Dobbelman (and their little son, Pierre!) from my Vassar days. In the meantime, some things that have caught or held my attention lately:

- The conversation on literary pleasure between Eric, Mark, and myself. I don't have very much new to add on this—I was planning on saying something about the difference between the demands and pleasures of anti-absorptive poetry versus the critical practice of approaching an immersive text anti-absorptively, but Mark beat me to it. I'm intrigued by his call for "a more nuanced, more 'thick' description of the experience & the pleasures of anti-absorptive texts," and I'd like to hear/think more about this. Such acts of description might be more compelling, and more ethical, in acquiring more readers for the kinds of writing I love than the tactic of shaming and scolding people. And as Eric points out:

It seems to me that you're not talking about the ethics of a particular pleasure at this point, but rather the pleasure of acting and thinking ethically. Through essays and other para-poetic work, "anti-absorptive" poets have framed their verse as an ethical / political project. The sensory and aesthetic pleasures it offers, and the intellectual pleasures (of "figuring things out," or simply "figuring") thus have added to them a new, third pleasure: that of doing justly, or developing one's moral sense.

(Hey Eric, how do you make your blockquotes so cool-looking?) I think this is an astute rephrasing of what I was trying to say, though I also have to credit Mark's arugula metaphor and wonder if ethical pleasure isn't in fact supererogatory to the pleasure in difficulty for difficulty's sake. I don't believe that it is, but more needs to be done, as Mark says, to qualitatively describe (if not quantify) the pleasures of the anti-absorptive so that we can make the distinction. Otherwise we're left with de gustibus non est disputandum and "Some people just like spinach."

- Tangentially related: as many of you have heard, Simon DeDeo, late of Rhubarb Is Susan, along with Christopher Douglas, Elisa Gabbert, and Joanna Guldi, have launched a new magazine, absent. So far I've only read a few terrific poems and Simon's manifesto, "towards an anarchist poetics::". I love manifestos, I like the way they can stir the pot, and I'm curious to see what response this one will generate. I myself bristled a bit at the first section, because it seemed to me that he was conflating the power of theory (or more specifically, the Foucauldian theory of power as that which surrounds and penetrates all language, like the Force) with the corrupted language of Bush/Cheney, thus drawing no distinctions between their corrosive/coercive speech and that of literary theorists. There is, of course, a kind of violence in disciplinarity, as Foucault would be the first to remind you: certainly I've had to learn to write and speak a certain way to be accepted into the institutional framework of the academy in which I wish to make my living; still, I believe I have far more discursive freedom than the hapless job interviewees Simon describes overhearing at his local Starbucks. But it does not appear on second look that Simon really intends to start his revolution in the English departments: he has bigger fish to fry.

I'm not fully persuaded by the specific critical gestures Simon makes to show how the poetry he wishes to valorize (his example-poets are Mina Loy, Tom Raworth, and Lisa Robertson) functions as anarchist text, because it seems to reduce to the old Language-y argument that anti-absorptive writing (a more general description than "anarchist" that seems to fit the poems he quotes) permits/demands democratic participation from the reader in the creation of its meanings. More compelling to me is Simon's extremely clear explanation of anarchist poetry as that which seeks either a line of flight from power (all "power" being ipso facto bad to an anarchist) in a kind of primitivism (this has implications for my thinking about pastoral that I'm going to have to, er, think more about it) or fights it, attempting "to batter the language into shapes that cannot be conduits of power." This seems like it could be a very productive path toward understanding what flarf is trying to do (flarf is anarchistic, it seems to me, in the old-fashioned bomb-throwing sense), though I don't quite see how flarfists or any group can avoid becoming power-structures in their own right, if only because every group has an inside and an outside. But perhaps that's just why Simon doesn't consider flarf, but rather three poets (he also mentions Julianna Spahr, Laura Glenum, and Frederick Seidel—whatever else I can say about Simon, I certainly approve of his taste) who are outside any groupings less porous than "Modernism" (Loy), "an avant garde body aligned in many ways with American experiments such as Language Poetry" (Raworth—the object of the clause is actually Raworth's work, not his body, but I like the effect produced), or "a kind of nomad" (Robertson). Robertson is recently on record with her rejection of "community" and embracement of "the real texture of friendship," which certainly seems in line with Simon's anarchist reading of her; it may also have the salutary effect of making anarchism seem more homely and indigenous, as it were: an expression of how many people actually live or wish to live, rather than a doxology. Is friendship a form of the "counterpower" that Simon speaks of, tantalizingly, at the end of his essay? Much to ponder and like in the new absent: I'm looking forward to reading the other essays from Thomas Basbøll and Andy Gricevich next.

- Finally, I'm a little surprised by how much I'm enjoying the latest issue of APR. I'm finding things to like about almost all the poetry I've read in it: Yusef Komunyakaa isn't much on my radar these days but there's a lot of heft and moral grandeur to the excerpts here from The Autobiography of My Alter Ego; Cynthia Cruz is sharp and spiky; a resurrected essay on "Poetic Listening" by Merle Brown has interesting things to say about an odd-seeming couple, Wallace Stevens and Frank O'Hara; Mark Doty, another big-deal poet who I don't read very often, blew me away with his beautiful "Theory of the Sublime" (and I enjoyed the essay on its composition that followed it); Sarah Maclay, who I hadn't heard of before, contributes two prose poems whose whirling rhythms will stay with me; David Trinidad has an enjoyably gossipy, almost trashy account of the friendship and rivalry between Sexton and Plath, along with a more thoughtful examination of their work and influence on each other; Anne Carson introduced me to one of the greatest poems of Denmark, Inger Christensen's It, which I'd never heard of; and Robin Becker sheds some light on Virgil's Georgics as a poetry of sustainability, of obvious interest to me (I was also surprised to discover, though she doesn't say this explicitly, that a significant portion of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech might have been lifted from Virgil: Becker quotes David Ferry's translation on those fortunate enough to avoid "experience of the iron / Hard-heartedness of the law, the Forum's madness, / Insolence of bureaucratic office." Doesn't that sound just like "the whips and scorns of time, / The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, / The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, / The insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes"? Why have I never seen a note on the play calling attention to this?). There's more I haven't gotten to, but I'm impressed with how much better a job APR seems to be doing at being ecumenical than the higher-profile and vastly better-funded Poetry.

My musings on fiction and pleasure have produced valuable responses from Eric Selinger and Mark Scroggins, as well as a tip fromo Ray Davis to check out an old essay of his which reframes the debate in terms of science fiction. I'm grateful for all of these interventions, though I feel closest to what Mark has to say in a passage that Eric rejects:

The deus ex machina here is to invoke a political or (which often boils down to the same thing) moral argument: that anti-absorptive work is somehow bbetter for you, or that it somehow works to change the world (not immediately, not directly, not vulgar-Marxistly) by altering the way you or your readers conceive the world.

In my bones I believe that these arguments are more or less right, tho I have yet to see them stated in a way that I find more than temporarily convincing.

For Eric, all pleasure is equally valid and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or a snob. Whatever my moral/psycho-sexual/pathological choices of metaphor, I too tend to look at pleasure as an absolute good—or it would be more accurate to say that I'm extremely suspicious of those who would regulate or prescribe pleasures. But I have no problem being a sort of carnival barker for the pleasures undreamt of by those who've never been properly exposed to more sophisticated pleasures than the McRib of middlebrow fiction and poetry. Come see the Bearded Lady of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E! Thrill to the feats of daring of the New York School! This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Dark Ride!

Eric is absolutely correct when he says, "Don't think that reading immersive fiction is 'passive'; it only feels that way because the skills it takes come so easily to you, have been so naturalized, that you no longer notice you're deploying them!" But doesn't that suggest an argument based on education: that the anti-absorptive requires the development of a new skill set, one that develops one's critical capacity because it at least potentially resists being so "naturalized"? And wouldn't that be a change in the world, if more people were capable of registering the Other in others and the Other in themselves through cultivating texts that resist "naturalization"? The opposite of the impulse to repeat, "That's just the way it is"? (Cue Bruce Hornsby.) It's certainly changed my world. It feels like an ethical opportunity if not an ethical imperative: a chance to enlarge and develop one's moral senses.

More later if the mood strikes.

The other thing that bothers me about much of the contemporary American fiction I've read is the condescension shown to the characters. When Russo writes about the hapless ex-wife of his sympathetic if nebbishy hero in Empire Falls we are invited to feel superior to her, to shake our heads at her inability to recognize her folly in throwing over a good man for the sake of a blithering, dishonest chump. Perhaps that's just a function of comedy: "Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain." But even if you hold with Aristotle here, there is genuine pain in the portrait of this character—most especially in her alienation from her sensitive daughter—and pain in the book which (spoiler alert) ends with a school shooting. Empire Falls is a tragicomedy, and in an almost classical way Russo emphasizes fate, as symbolized by the Knox River whose course was changed by a local millionaire only to end up sweeping away that millionaire's widow in a flood decades later. But I find myself impatient with the schematics of this. The book is more memorable for its evocation of a small world, which is as I've said Russo's specialty. It's why I actually think the bagatelle Straight Man is his most successful if least ambitious novel, because it's almost purely comic.

I dislike Russo's fiddling with tragedy because it seems to depend on a constriction of what's possible. You might call his portrayal of poor people stuck in their ruts a form of versimilitude, but it seems willful to me, like the predicaments of some of Hardy's characters (I sometimes feel that the Wessex novels are nineteenth-century versions of the Kobayashi Maru test from Star Trek): the character's every chance of escape from his or her situation is cut off so that we can see them squirm. I suppose my complaint isn't much different from D.H. Lawrence's in his marvelous and idiosyncratic "Study of Thomas Hardy." And Lawrence in fact points the way toward the mode of fiction I have the most respect for. His most exciting novels are polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense: Women in Love presents us with vividly strange characters with passionately opposed belief systems, and the novel gives us a struggle between and among those characters that seems in no way predetermined by the novelist's own convictions. The world Lawrence builds is open-ended: he does not pretend to master the fates of each character or to understand their folly as just folly. His characters strive to be as intelligent and critical and perceptive as Lawrence himself does. It's a strange sort of fiction—we aren't likely to recognize Women in Love as "realistic" in the ordinary sense of that word. But it's intensely realistic and gripping in its portrayal of the struggle to found a basis for one's own identity, and for one's relations to others, when the given social roles available to us (sometimes for reasons of class, sometimes of gender) fall short. In Aristotlean terms, Lawrence's characters are not of a "lower type" than us, nor are they the higher types to be found in Greek tragedy: they are like us, but profoundly dissatisfied with that condition. There's a rigorous morality to that, or rather the potential for transcendental morality (in the Kantian sense of discovering the necessary preconditions for morality) that attracts me.

Should I ever attempt to write another novel (a first attempt at high school tragicomedy, written in my early twenties, is hiding in a box under the spare bed), I would want it to make full use of novelistic resources: otherwise I might as well just call it prose. And it seems to me that the greatest of those resources—tantamount to world-building—is the ability to accurately describe and manifest the struggle of individuals who are permitted the same resources, and the same fundamental unknowing, as the author possesses.

For my fellow job-seekers: a Lacanian take on the academic job search by Geoffrey Wilson: "MLAlienation."

Freakishly warm weather in Chicago and now back in Ithaca—if it's global warming, it's a case of the frog luxuriating in the pot before the first lethal bubbles form. I've been reading realist fiction by acclaimed middle-aged white men recently. First it was Tobias Wolff's Old School, because I'm a sucker for boarding-school stories (though I never attended one), then Richard Russo's Empire Falls. Wolff's is interesting because it's transparently the autobiography of the particular writer he became, one who almost literally navigates the Charybdis of personality (in the forms of Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway) and the Scylla of ideology (in the form of Ayn Rand) to strike at the heart of a kind of self-exposing authenticity achieved, somewhat paradoxically in the story, through an act of plagiarism. Really it's a book about piety, and one's patience for that sort of thing depends largely on whether you yourself have the kind of religious feeling for literature that Wolff's narrator does. Though in his case, that religious feeling is linked to a powerful case of class envy: Wolff's narrator is from, one gathers, a working-class family in the Northwest, and is part Jewish besides, so the tony Northeastern private school he attends in the early 1960s is part of a project of self-invention that is ironically completed by his expulsion. In its sly way the book is a manifesto for the kind of antimodernist storytelling that it is such a fine example of, but it's the self-consciousness required by a manifesto, even a covert one, that makes it most interesting to me.

Russo's novel won the Pulitzer and was thus almost guaranteed to be mediocre: I still found pleasure, though, in Russo's facility in conjuring the small-town Northeastern Rust Belt world that has been the main character of all his novels with the notable exception of Straight Man, a hilarious academic satire. World-immersion is for me the most primordial pleasure of reading fiction—I think of the "vivid, continuous dream" that John Gardner called for—and it's a pleasure diametrically opposed to the Barthesian bliss of language: an imagistic dream virtually requires the disappearance of the language, sheer transparency. But it's also a distinctly bodily pleasure, if only in the negative sense: one morning, groggy from my own dreams, I picked up Empire Falls and immediately fell into the story, my eyes moving rapidly back and forth as though I were still in REM sleep, ignoring my system's cries for the usual morning dose of coffee. If dreams are, as many believe, a means of absorbing stimuli so as to keep you from waking up, then reading immersive fiction works similarly on me, so that I forget to eat or go to the bathroom or even to move my limbs. That's why such fiction is the best tonic for flying on airplanes: for several years I flew without discomfort by reading and rereading the Aubrey-Maturin novels. When I do notice the language in a book like Russo's, it's generally an infelicity, a speed bump: an ambiguous pronoun, a clumsy simile, which I'm sure the author would revise if he could so as to go back into the dream. (The single deliberate resistance the text offers to the reader takes the form of occasional italicized interchapters: but as the content and tone of these interchapters doesn't actually vary from that of the main text, one merely strains one's eyes in irritation trying to fall asleep again.)

All this is antithetical to the pleasures I seek from poetry, or from fiction that foregrounds the language through the beauty or ugliness of its sentences. Most readers (on airplanes or elsewhere) are after the infantilizing dream-state, and yet I can't blame others or myself for wanting to be nurtured by certain reading experiences rather than pricked into greater consciousness. A healthy diet, so to speak, probably requires both. But isn't the moral content that creeps into my language here interesting? Immersive fiction as trans-fats, innovative writing as leafy greens. I am loath to become a scold, urging children to read Language poetry because it's good for you. Is the pleasure of anti-absorptive writing simply the masochistic pleasure of self-denial, of anorexia? Is it a "higher" pleasure because further from the pleasures of the flesh? And yet the anti-absorptive is closer to the body of language than immersive fiction is: we savor the materiality of phonemes and syntax and sentences, provoked into the kind of apperception that requires us to look up from the book now and then and figure. One type of reading is active and closer to writing; the other is passive and demands our submission—there's a masochism for you.

So you could turn it either way: one's own stance is what determines whether a text will provide jouissance or pleasure. This is all commonplace enough. As a writer, though, I wonder about the writer's pleasure, since what doesn't please oneself probably won't please others. The pleasures of anti-absorptive writing are manifest to me, because one thinks into the language—but if anyone's a masochist in this scenario, isn't it the author of absorptive fiction, whose language is at best a tool, at worst an impediment, designed to disappear into the reader's dream? Where's the fun in that? It probably comes not from language, but from the elements of the dream: one must abstract oneself from primary concerns with idiom and syntax and instead focus on the larger linguistic constructs that we call plot, character, setting, etc. There's pleasure enough: and for me, it's the pleasure of world-building that has the greatest appeal.

What I wonder, then, is what combination of the two modes is possible. World-building would seem to require a writer to peer through language toward what he wants to represent, whether those representations are achieved through meticulous research or first-hand experience or both. The best example I can come up with of a world built out of language as such—the anti-absorptive world—is the one that's always before my eyes these days, Ronald Johnson's ARK. Here is language that wants to be literal without ever being less than itself: here is a structure that communicates, like a concrete poem, primarily its own structureness. The experience of reading ARK is the experience of wandering through a world, but one's eyes are always wide open, else you'll trip over the ambiguities of his symmetrical syntax. His is the complexity of interwoven surfaces, with none of the "depth" we seem to perceive in the submarine fictions of a Russo or an O'Brian or a Tolkien. This too, finally, is dissatisfying: but what might an ark make possible, what survives from it once the waters have receded? I aim to find out.

Happy Thanksgiving from Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Today I'd like to give thanks for the moral and imaginative vision of Adrienne Rich:

But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, There is no alternative."

And we should not omit the following paragraph, which is the one many would most wish omitted:

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images - is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism - a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented.

Goodbye, Robert Altman. And thanks.

Why did nobody tell me that Rodney Koeneke has a blog? Or that he's changing the way he pronounces his name?

Also, I'd like to alert you to the publication of Danielle Dutton's Attempts at a Life, forthcoming in March from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Christian Peet sent me an advance copy: it's a gorgeously produced book, but of course it's the content that's really grabbing me. She calls them stories but I think of them as prose poems, and I'm taken with the first one, "Jane Eyre," which is a bent retelling of the novel that engages, I think, with the powerful sense of identification that most women (and quite a few men) have with its uncannily "real" heroine. It's a kind of wreading that foregrounds subjectivity as an activity, as recognition. I'm trying it myself right now with a piece called "Les Miserables"; I'll post it when it's ready.

Time to prepare for class: The Winter's Tale, which is for me one of the most moving of Shakespeare's plays: the scene of Hermione's resurrection brings me to tears every time. Not sure how well it's playing with my students.

Last week Cornell's English Department was visited by David Hinton, the poet and translator of classical Chinese poetry. I was going to blog about it but Julie Phillips Brown (an MFA/PhD student here who's read for SOON) has gone and beat me to it. Generally been slow on the trigger with blogging lately. The semester's winding down (or rather, up) and keeping me in a busy and distracted state. Normally busy-ness is an kind of aid to concentration, like the prospect of hanging, but not lately.

I am at least getting some work done on my Ronald Johnson chapter: right now I'm thinking about his engagement with Concrete Poetry, and I've been immersed in books on the subject, especially Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View, which the good people of UBUWEB have archived in its entirety along with a vast wealth of hard to find texts on experimental poetry—I never realized the depth of their collection before, it's an invaluable resource. I don't know why it didn't quite consciously occur to me before, but of course Concrete Poetry has obvious affinities with Objectivist writing, which in turn of course derives from Imagism and "No ideas but in things," etc. From another angle, Concrete Poetry (and I am mostly thinking of the texts I've found in Solt that are part of that 1950s-60s movement, not visual poetry more generally) is just a more radical form of the fundamental avant-garde art technique, montage: the constructivist syntax that determines connections between elements of a collage or constellation (Eugen Gomringer, the Swiss-Bolivian "founder" of CP, called his early work "constellations"—I don't know if he was aware of the Frankfurt School's concept of the same name) is magnified or refracted so as to break up the syntax on a level smaller even than that of the line—even the "syntax" of the individual word or phoneme. By these lights some of late Zukofsky has begun to appear to me as a kind of concrete poetry: 80 Flowers achieves its compressed and ambiguous syntax in part through the concentration of each "flower" into the space of five "words" (hyphenates permitted) and eight lines, claiming for itself something of the telegraphic immediacy of the concrete poem even as the syntax denies or rather radically slows access to whatever a "flower" might have to "say."

What has this got to do with pastoral? In part, I think it's the naivety deliberately assumed by the concrete/Objectivist/Imagist poet, and the naivety of the claim that one can transform something so slippery as language into an object as available as a billboard. This also points toward the problem all pastoral poetry has in drawing the line between critique and commodification: the image that puts us in the presence of "nature" may reject and negate capitalist exploitation or simply be another manifestation of it, like the Marlboro Man. Some form of rigor—mayhap the "slowing" I referred to in Zukofsky—is required to produce the valuable sort of pastoral. The plain-speech rebellion against rhetoric of Williams and Pound seems pretty much exhausted by now, and most plain-speech pastoral poems nowadays just read like miniature vacations, with little or no critical bite unless an oppositional context can be found for them (a chapbook of plain pastoral from a small press will seem more valid to me somehow than a perfect-bound one—but how legible is that shift, really?). Some kind of torque on the language is required. I guess this whole project has been an attempt to find a formal or constructivist affiliation for this mode of writing. It seems most likely that it would succeed when the naivety is tactical rather than genuine—when the poet is "foolish like a trout," in Richard Hugo's phrase. One may say these things about the immediate objectivity of the poem, just as one may put elegant language into the mouth of a shepherd—but in the service of some goal that goes beyond mere nostalgia for some imaginary pre-modern way of being. Nostalgia as a means, not an end—what good is it to say, with Emerson, that words are fossil poetry (and isn't that the sentiment that the desire to objectify the poem stems from)? What shall we do with these fossils, besides dig them up? Shall we use them to prove evolution? Or to claim that we haven't evolved at all? Shall these bones live? And what could that mean, what would that look like?

But no matter where the concrete poet stands with respect to semantics, he invariably came to concrete poetry holding the conviction that the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time. In other words the concrete poet seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion and repetitious emotional content; of its servitude to disciplines outside itself as an object in its own right for its own sake. This, of course, asks a great deal of what used to be called the reader. He must now perceive the poem as an object and participate in the poet's act of creating it, for the concrete poem communicates first and foremost its structure. (Solt)

What, in short, to make of Johnson, whose pastoral is of the liveliest, most delightful sort—but who appears completely uninterested in critique or social engagement? What to make of someone so in love with surfaces? Do I force depth upon hiim by finding allusions and symbols and all the other "burdens" in his work that Solt claims the concrete poet wishes to discard? "Structure" is undoubtedly what interested the writer of ARK, who plainly states his desire to produce something non-discursive, an anti-Cantos. He communicates a structure. But what does this desire to communicate structure first and foremost itself communicate?

News from the Department of Unsettling Coincidences. And yes, my middle name happens to be Michael.

Someone found this blog with the search term "cheap HEADstones."

It was a pleasure to have Shanna Compton and Ryan Murphy up to Ithaca for the SOON series last night. The mysterious Mr. Murphy read first: if you saw the profile of him that appeared in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers then you know about his "one-shots": chapbooks and broadsides that are each attributed to their own imaginary publisher. They're not available on the Web or in any stores that I'm aware of except for McNally Robinson in Greenwich Village: Ryan calls this "anti-marketing," by which I think he means that remaining a bit mysterious actually intensifies the demand for what he publishes. He was kind enough to gift me with what I presume to be one of his own one-shots of his own work, a handsome chapbook called Poems for the American Revolution whose publisher is given as "The Dutchess County Department of Occupational Training," along with the somewhat more conventionally published Down with the Ship from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, a product of the MFA program of the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Ryan read from both books and I was particularly taken with the chapbook, whose six short poems are titled after famous figures from the American Revolution but whose content is obliquely and tenuously determined by those titles, which serves to suggest new possibilities for what we might mean by an American revolution, even if only a turning in place. I like the incantatory qualities of the first poem, "Revere":

Bombardier, you laid the tracks
For our hundreds of eyes
Spine for flowers, spit azalea

The lush lawn of the vacant girls' school
Tuesday is Sunday only
No one is dreaming

Bunker Hill, I-98, the harbor subs
Like the face of a watch.
I should like to wake you, minute by minute

Clatter through the restless green night.
Bombardier, with your lantern eyes
And lantern head

If
If if
And by sea.

Shanna was next, and I've already had a bit to say about the pleasures of her work. She read a few poems from Down Spooky (including, I'm pleased to say, "Post-Texas Expressive Heat," quoted in full in my review) and then more recent work from a promising sequence called For Girls, inspired by a 19th-century manual of etiquette written by a Mrs. E.R. Shepherd which purports to tell young women how to be young ladies. Here's the poem that Aaron ably transformed into a broadside (really a trifold) for the occasion (I use asterisks to represent the breaks, but you should try to envision three columms, side by side):

You can carry, girls,
a little distance

your influence
to the new side

your awakened study
of formation, requirements

*

First then, girls, you should
fasten onto your shoulders

a strap for purpose
for industrious earnest

pressure, for attending
to the demands of nature

Think of it
as a uniform

outside of which
you'd be too apart

*

All rooms have doors
& also windows

I haven't actually
heard that said, but

a draft might come
at right angles

toward the animal
part of you

the portion you've
bitten raw

I look forward to seeing these poems collected in a book, as I suspect they eventually will be. Thanks to both our readers, their significant others Kira and Shawn, and the folks who come out to hear a little poetry on a very rainy Saturday night.

Caustic empathy.

Poetry does a far better job of coming to grips with contradiction than the political prose I've been hacking at all morning. To wit: Rick Snyder's exceptionally useful "The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf" that's up at Jacket. His take on Nada Gordon's V. Imp—really, the poetry itself that he reproduces there—moves me deeply. I'm going to reproduce the passage from “Foreword: The End of Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism, and Terrorism" that Snyder quotes here:

Mule and Ostrich took a walk in the vale of tears. Their minds were elsewhere.

“Tread lightly and accurately,” Ostrich reminded Mule. Mule nodded solemnly.

The hoi-polloi stormed around them, rending their garments: Brooks Brothers suits, red suspenders, tallises, green headresses, burkas. Everyone was spewing so much vital fluid that their faces, hands, and chests had gone all viscous.

“No one had a clue,” said Mule, lowering his head and pawing at the rubble, his mane and eyelashes thick with white dust. “I feel so mournful.”

“Don’t you still want to take the language somewhere else?” Ostrich asked, swerving his head around to stare cross-eyed at Mule.

“Of course I do,” sighed Mule, “I’m a beast of burden. That’s all I know how to do. But right now I wish we had hands so we could hold hands.”

“That’s liberal humanism,” said Ostrich, looking ruefully at his leathery talons and Mule’s splayed, yellowing hooves.

“So?” said Mule, his lip quivering.

Yes, Mule. Yes, Ostrich.

In what could be the biggest policy divide on the panels, Senator Barbara Boxer, the liberal California Democrat and environmental advocate, is in line to take control of the Environment and Public Works Committee from Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has disputed the existence of global warming.

“He thinks global warming is a hoax and I think it is the challenge of our generation,” said Ms. Boxer, who said she has a cordial working relationship with Mr. Inhofe. “We have to move on it.”

You can't tell me that's not, at least potentially, a change for the better.