Cahiers de Sadie

Her astonishing vigor: she came out of the womb like that, whole and squalling, head like a sun, squirming strongly. She sucks like a barracuda, her dark blue eyes blank and searching, her cheeks and upper body pink.


How rich and strange the hours; and yet familiar, even banal, something seen on television, advertised for: connection, the best network, I can hear you now.


Our astrologer friend speaks to Emily, who mouths phrases to me that I catch:

beautiful figures displaying the latest fashion—Sun in Aquarius—being a model for anything—Moon is in Libra so it’s an airhead like Josh Sun —Moon trine everything else went into earth from fire—Sun went into Capricorn—No fire, it was all fire last week

As sleep fragments so my usual subdivided self breaks up anew into a sense of continuous being: alive, half-awake, purposive.


Utter softness of new skin. Tiny gurgles and cries as she passes from one layer of sleep to the next. The diaper-full of meconium sticks to her butt and she cries as I wipe it off, too roughly.


Emily large-eyed, exhausted, suffused. Nursing in the new rocking chair in the small hours; I can hear her singing from the next room. Or together we sing a song Sadie heard in the womb, "Norwegian Wood," repeatingly: And then she said / it's time for bed.

Fewer than four days old.


Riding the train away from them: atrocity. What a sick, stupid society. And I'm among the luckiest, spending more days home than not.


Or: sirens outside the bedroom this morning, outside the drawn shade, Sadie asleep on my chest: I disallow the world. Core of bourgeois experience.


Yet she is an avowal, new under the sun, but ordinary; and she marries me to ordinariness, to passing the time with neighbors, making a living, Whole Foods (alas), the elections (Obama now, another novum, a possibility), environmental decay, fears, hopefulnesses.


Half-asleep in a knitted hat too big for her, Emily dozing on my arm, snow falling.

Sadie Gray, One Hour Old

Sadie Gray Corey

A healthy, big (really! 9 lbs., 4 oz.), beautiful girl was born at 5:14 this morning. Everyone's doing well, everyone's tired. Pics soon.

A quiet morning with the contractions slowing, almost stopping. Around 1:30 PM they began to pick up again. Here now at home with our wonderful doula Mary Sommers, in active labor. Emily is beautiful and heroic. Off to the hospital soon.

Labor began around 1 AM this morning. Stay tuned....

Closer

Umbilical cord pacifier?
Giggling?

Doctor Atomic

In the last throes of childlessness, we took ourselves out to the Lyric Opera of Chicago last night for the closing performance of John Adams' Doctor Atomic, a stunning performance piece about Trinity and the dawn of the nuclear age. Before the opera began we were treated to a lecture by Peter Sellars, the director and dramaturg, an elfin figure in a rainbow-colored Nehru jacket, David Lynch's hair, and a stiff brown glove on one hand which I belated recognized as an allusion to Dr. Strangelove and Sellars' namesake. You can get an example of his lyrical rhetorical style (and a few clips of the music) here (scroll down). Sellars made a passionate case for the excesses of opera not simply as Wagnerian Gesamstkunstwerk but as providing space and time for both intense emotion and intense reflection: he finds it the most appropriate medium for dealing with overwhelming and epochal events. Thus this documentary opera, in which the chorus sings lines explaining the construction of explosive lenses—but this documentary is infused with music and a great deal of poetry. As Sellars explained, and as we subsequently heard, the lyrics given to the character of Oppenheimer's wife Kitty (sung poignantly by soprano Jessica Rivera) are taken from the poetry of Muriel Rukeyeser, because history has silenced the real woman, though she was apparently a scientist in her own right. The character of Oppenheimer himself is represented singing back to his wife in lines taken from Baudelaire (lines in which the speaker is continually ravished by the sense of smell: a level of sensuality that further complicates our image of the emaciated, chain-smoking physicist), and, in the tragic aria that closes Act One—one of the truest theatrical experiences I've ever had of pity and of fear—Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14". Sellars and Adams bring in poetry to represent the secret (literally, the classified) subjectivities of highly intelligent and educated people at the center of perhaps the greatest ethical disaster in history.

The opera is all but inert, dramatically: everything builds toward "the shot," the Trinity test of July 16, 1945. We know exactly what's going to happen (as Sellars pointed out, in Greek drama, the place where the polis considered the most terrible questions of human life, the suspense of what might happen is entirely beside the point), and yet there's a terrible tension that builds and builds on the back of Adams' apocalyptic score. A young graduate student urges Oppenheimer to sign a letter to the President opposing the use of the bomb on humans and Oppenheimer declines, telling him (rightly) that the President will never see such a letter. A saturnine Edward Teller speculates about the creation of "the Super" (the hydrogen bomb) and warns of the possibility that the bomb might create intense enough heat to actually ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet (he is proven mathematically wrong, but still...!). The military supervisor of the project, General Groves, confesses his inability to remain on a diet to skinny, politically suspect Oppenheimer. Nothing happens—but everything on the stage and in the music is building to that terrible moment when the era of humanity's possible sudden extinction began—an era that has not ended. The strongest counter-voice to the surge of militarized science is raised by desperate, alcoholic, Rukeyeser-spouting Kitty ("the only sane one," Sellars said wryly)—banished along with all the other women associated with the project to a site 200 miles from Alamogordo—and the Pueblo Indians who worked as maids and janitors at Los Alamos, affirming the continuity of life—the "cloud-flower" of the rain blooming north, west, and south—as a very different and terrible flower prepares to sprout.

The end, or the trailing, of the opera comes with the shot: the entire cast lying on the stage face down, covering their heads; a cataclysmic surge of chords; a human scream (the first I can recall genuinely to curdle my blood) followed by the soft voice of a woman speaking words in Japanese. And the long silence of a stunned audience awakening from imagining the dark, forgotten roots of our present moment. From Muriel Rukeyeser's "Easter Eve 1945," sung by Kitty in the dark moments before the darker dawn:

Whatever world I know shines ritual death,
wide under this moon they stand gathering fire,
fighting with flame, stand fighting in their graves.
All shining with life as the leaf, as the wing shines,
the stone deep in the mountain, the drop in the green wave.
Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine.
Nothing can black that glow of life.

Premises for Creative Writing

"Writing articulates living in contradiction."
—Carla Harryman

Darwin: biological determinism. We are genetic accidents. Marx: economic determinism. We are shaped, produced, and deformed by class. Freud: determination of the unconscious. We are fragments of desire, misdirected by our dreams.

This is the terrain the postmodern writer must navigate, seeking impossible and necessary freedoms.

Liberation by any linguistic means necessary.

In class yesterday, meditating on Harryman's quotation, one of my students said, "Well, good writing's about conflict." Exactly. But some conflict is not out in the open. It stands concealed by our habits, if not our hypocrisies.

We'll be reading Mary Burger, et al, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, an anthology of pieces many of which were originally published in the online journal Narrativity. The vector carved out by these writers is a new alternative to the renunciative pleasures of Language poetry and the New York School's high "I" jinks. Narrative—the relationship to time, and most emphatically the time of the body—is the means they wish to rescue from the fragments of epic history on the one hand and lyrical timelessness on the other. So these writers foreground sexuality and abjection, the "not okay" to borrow a phrase. But to borrow it with a difference: flarf is scatological, whereas the writers associated with narrativity claim for themselves a genuine erotics, "not okay" because of its excess, the pungent body.

The irony of the narrativity writers is more porous, they seem more vulnerable to the world's desiring machines than the flarfists. Pop culture, yes, but also and importantly queer culture, which invites a counterhistory of genuine liberation into the larger despair-narrative of late capitalism. This too is a story, the story of cultural identity politics' victory over the Marxian class narrative. But is there not a negotiable contradiction here?

The body, the body, the body: that's what I, history of a head with wings, continually return to as the stake in new writing. The grubstake, the poker stake. Ante up. A new body, my child's, is about to be born, as my wife and I will be born into a new family romance. We bet on life against considerable odds in the long and medium term.

So: Kathy Acker's "The Killers" and Hemingway's "The Killers" and Acker's "Dead Doll Humility": "(In literature classes in university, had learned that anyone can say or write anything about anything if he or she does so cleverly enough. That cleverness, one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a method of social and political manipulation. Decided to use language stupidly.)"

"I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful."

You better think about it.

Our National Life

His charisma leaves a small, oily stain on its handlers: they smudge thumb and forefinger together as a sign. Her charisma barks unattended. His charisma has been validated and certified by leading nutritionists but has not been awarded the FDA's organic label. His charisma waits patiently for the elevator door to shut. Her charisma hurls itself against the childproof gate. His chiseler charisma gleams from all angles, rawbone cheekbone marrowbone shinbone. Her charisma chases its tail. His charisma gets out in front of it. His charisma sweats like a whiteman. Her charisma follows the white rabbit.

To campaign in prose. To take a field in rows.

Hope & Anchor

Brand new for the New Year: Hope & Anchor, my new chapbook of prose poems, now available from New Mexico's Noemi Press. They did a beautiful job.

Between

Between one holiday and the next, between the old year and the new, between the illusion of independence and the illusion of dependence, from these betweens, before fatherhood, hello.

A Russian translator of Wallace Stevens writes to ask me about the significance of "desperate milk" in these lines from "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction":

To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,

Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,

The fiction of an absolute— Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

In the context of Stevens' poem, the beast (who bears a family resemblance to Yeats' "rough beast" in "The Second Coming") seems to represent the crude and horrifying appearance of reality in the first moments of its apprehension: it is reality revealed by the imagination (by the play of language) but not yet shaped by the imagination, so that it is "unlike," neither part of ordinary reality nor yet assimilated to the supreme fiction. The "desperate milk" puts the poet in a curiously maternal role: he (Stevens' poet is always a he) gives birth to the beast or at leads feeds and nurtures it with his strange, "desperate" language until the beast becomes simply "the real," "stripped of every fiction except one, // The fiction of an absolute." The beast represents a curious transitional moment in the transformative process of the poem, and a threat: one may be devoured by what one's vision has released. (For more on "Notes" see this untitled post of mine from February 2005.)

The beast is between: the devouring liminal. Is it Heidegger's Earth, animated—the unprocessed, unreal Real it is death to encounter? Death or transformation: same thing. The man I am will be transformed when my son or daughter is born sometime in the coming month. I will be born with him or her.

My new chapbook, Hope & Anchor, is almost out from Noemi Press. I may have copies on hand when I take part in the Chicago Poetry Marathon this Friday. Fifty-five poets in two hours! Prepare to be overwhelmed.

From The Transformed Man to Has Been, an epic trek. Between: being.

Tonight

In answer to your question: in spite of my willingness, I did not actually learn how to breastfeed. But I learned that breastfeeding is important and that my support for breastfeeding is important. A father lives his life in proximity to the real work.

Anne Boyer read a poem with the title being something like, "Who Is Now Abject Full of Love and History." This is the name of the movement I would like to join, though it's too long.

Why has it taken me this long in life to be riding home late at night in my car on the snow-blown freeway listening to the radio to discover Joe Frank?

Michael Cross is a human dynamo. Where he lives magazines readings and small presses arise from the ground like Myrmidons. Seattle is next.

Kasey Mohammad has his own Wikipedia entry: should I be jealous? No, for his poetry is brilliant and funny and mad in the best way. The last strophe of "ABABA" from his new book Breathalyzer:

Melt away, dissolve, leave not a rack behind; go, be no more; die &c. The section of this poem describes blonde bubble butts, Russian peasant daily life, lords of doom, sauce for pasta recipe, girls who grunt loudly when accounting. I keep wondering if there's a term for this. A&P. A's. AA. AAA. AB. ABA. ABABA. These words are meant to bring to midn the poem "To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with a Plough," by Scotland's favorite poet, Robert Burns.

Everything I read lately including that sounds like Ashbery, which is not a criticism but a fact of parataxis, which rules my world: and and and and and. Read as: and and and, and and and.

Also acquired: Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse by Anne Boyer; cede by Michael Cross; Imitation Poems by Patrick Durgin; Snow Sensitive Skin by Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern. The last two are particularly gorgeous physical objects.

Seriously, why this long to discover Joe Frank? A late-night ruminator on how Helen's beauty implies a continuum, so that it is possible to imagine a face that launches 427 ships.

Good night.

Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, May 1927

I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, & trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions--which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can't manage Symbolism excepnin this vague, generalises way. Whether its right or wrong I don't know; but directly I'm told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.

Anne, Kasey, and Michael

I know where I'll be Sunday the 16th at 7 PM.

When I am not there I will be grading. When I am not grading I will be thinking about the problem of visionary poetry: poetry which does not proceed from the given to the ineffable, but starts with the ineffable and proceeds to madness, or doctrine.

I will also think about my fatigue with American moralism, how I move ever-closer to the position staked out by Ange Mliko, or how I would be doing so if staking out positions were not precisely antithetical to what Ange seems to be about.

I will think about the zone of autonomy that the aesthetic yet claims for itself, if only as a velleity.

I will plan my pastoral seminar and my poetry workshop.

I will attend a breastfeeding class in the hours before the poetry reading on Sunday.

I will or will not write about these things.

Two Rs

Une saison en enfer. An imaginary etymology: en is "in" and fer is "iron," so hell is in iron or to be in irons, and to be in hell doubles that enclosure. So: a season in in-iron; a season in-in hell.

Or, interiority: not hell is other people but hell is the other people that are the I that is an other.

Radiohead in The New York Times: Thom Yorke's donnish perch at a pub table in Oxford where he and his bandmates live (city of dreaming spires, Jude's Christchurch) moving bits of paper around on a cider-splashed table, the bits that shall become In Rainbows. Thom Yorke's civilized yawp bobbing and filling, the students circulating. Puts it on the Internet: pay what you want. [But the window has closed.]

"O seasons, O castles! / What soul's without hassles?" Worst. Translation. Ever.

As though assembling and disassembling my own plausibly denied youth. The radio-station stoners offered to set me up, toke me, put my head in rainbows—"we want to see what you'll say." No, I said, afraid of the law, of myself, my vocabulary's enough drugs for me. My vocabulary...

Another interrogation: the heavy lids, the loose cravat, the yellow nails, the smirk. His mother just offstage pulling her terrible quills erect. "But why did you resign?" "After the war? Before the war? Which war?" The letters have stopped speaking their colors. Head lolling, amused and unafraid, in the cabbage patch with the other Bibles waiting to be plucked.

Thousands and thousands of us downloading songs that question their own value and putting them in our ears: on trains, on buses, on subways, in the street, in classrooms, in "the peaceful home." Journey to the interior. "I think the train is lost." "How can it be lost? It's on rails!" . Another festschrit of quirks for our consummation. Owen Wilson's wounded head.

A secret verb presides over these paragraphs that mostly seem to concern themslves with the presentation of certain facts about our cultural life. Being poses as becoming in a dark alley. Becoming waits for being outside the stage door, methodically lopping the heads off the flowers in the bouquet.

In a minor key, as it were absentmindedly, we chain ourselves to each other in our tastes. This gregariousness of taste is political yet unpowerful till the generation sets like jello and taste becomes something else. (Blander, more wiggly, cool on the tongue.) Then you may read the tea leaves at the bottom of our leaders' cups. We live in the age of Republican rock and roll and the niche markets of the alternative juggernaut. (Sounds itself like a band.) Transgression is no longer secular. We are beset.

Is he dead or asleep? Neither poet nor soldier but the gun-runner goes between. Festering aftermath we call life.

In their thirties raising families between albums, as Rimbaud never did. Never even raised himself.

Disordered, our senses, OK Computer. Fitter, happier, more productive. Not drinking too much.

There is a leap between continents and centuries that they occupy, the modernists. Village explainers and dwellers. "Where'd you park the car?" Dying fall that reveals the network, the static ants we are, what Gibson gave us: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Above the port. The hero, Case, a failed data pirate, now a quasi-suicidal "artiste" of the fast and loose deal. A new employer and neurosurgery give Case a new lease on life and he goes back to exploring and unfolding the rich fields of data, to penetrating the collective cognitive map of the twenty-nth century's capital.

As though Rimbaud had returned to poetry, armed with all of his guns. "Je reviendrai, avec des membres de fer, la peau sombre, l'oeil furieux: sur mon masque, on me jugera d'une race forte." I will return with limbs of iron, dark skin, a furious eye: from my mask they will judge me as being of a strong race.

We must be absolutely modern.

O seasons, o chateaus,
What soul is flawless?

O seasons, o chateaus,

I've made the magic study
Of happiness no one escapes.

O he is reborn each time
The Gallic cock sings.

But I will desire no more—
It has conquered my life.

Such charm! it took soul and body
And scattered every effort.

What can be made of my language?
It causes them to flee, to fly.

O seasons, o chateaus!

Statements

The semester is almost over and I am tired.

Joshua Clover has written a fine review of Rod Smith's new book, Deed.

Joshua Clover's review of Rod Smith's new book Deed includes the following quotation from Stéphane Mallarmé: "There is only one man who has the right to be an anarchist" me, the Poet, because I alone create a product that society does not want, in exchange for which society does not give me enough to live on."

There is a magazine available at my local Borders called Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.

I have been reading an advance reader's copy of Caroline Knox's new book, Quaker Guns, due out next spring from Wave Books.

"Quaker guns" are guns carved out of wood that merchants used to carry to scare off pirates and privateers.

Caroline Knox is a restless and delighting formal innovator.

"Caroline Knox" sounds like its own statement, reminiscent of the Raven at my chamber door.

Certain people have challenged things I've written on this blog recently and I've let those challenges go by, as it were, unchallenged.

"Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are," Gertrude Stein said.

I finished Roberto Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives, the reading of which thrilled me, the finishing of which saddened me.

A novel about the lives of poets that's not insufferably precious seems scarcely possible, but this is what Roberto Bolano has achieved.

From what I understand Roberto Bolano began writing fiction because he was in poor health and wanted to make some money to help support his family before he died at the age of fifty.

It would appear that Roberto Bolano achieved what he wanted to achieve.

For a Haunakah present my wife gave me a copy of Junot Diaz's new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao about an overweight young Dominican man from New Jersey obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien.

It could be my autobiography except for the fact that I was never overweight, or Dominican.

Our as yet unnamed baby moves around a lot in my wife's belly in the evenings.

If I press on my wife's belly I can feel unnameable parts of the baby beneath my hand, this baby with at present two last names but no first name.

The first or "Christian" name is the only name in which gender resides.

Though my wife's last name, and the baby's middle name, is Grayson.

I am also reading Jeffrey Jullich's new book Thine Instead Thank, a new book which, however, tells us that it was completed in 1987.

Jeffrey Jullich's new book Thine Instead Thank begins with an excerpt from a conversation he once had with Bruce Andrews in which the two poets speculate that the genre of poetry in book form is always already defeated as "political outreach."

It would seem to be the presumption of Jeffrey Jullich and Bruce Andrews that political outreach is a desirable goal for poetry.

One has to ask if the pleasure derived from reading these often very funny poems, which can read like flarf avant la lettre, is therefore detachable and separate from political outreach, or if that pleasure is even achieved by the very detachment of language from any such instrumental goal.

The alternative would be that political outreach in itself is a pleasure.

Although a close relative works in the campaign of Hillary Clinton, I find myself attracted to Barack Obama, who is after all now my senator just as Hillary Clinton was precedingly my senator.

There is an undeniable pleasure to be taken from Barack Obama's efforts at political outreach, which include the pleasures of rhetoric and the pleasure of being offered membership in an entity larger than oneself.

A candidate who leads a movement promises this; a candidate who becomes a movement promises this.

We are all a little afraid of disappointment and more afraid of yielding to others' more bitter disappointment.

I am a little afraid of Mike Huckabee's likeability.

There is no necessary end to a succession of statements: one can continue to issue reports, a word that echoes retorts, that echoes echoes.

There may be further blogging, further retort.

There may be a baby who will take up writing someday.

Virginia Woolf on Poetry

Brain rather dried up. But I've been listening once again to Juliet Stevenson reading To the Lighthouse in my car (abridged, sadly), and I was struck by this passage:

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. She knew, without looking round, that every one at the table was listening to the voice saying:
          I wonder if it seems to you,
             Luriana, Lurilee
with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking.

The same but different from Pound's call for poetry to be "nothing you couldn't, in the stress of some emotion, actually say." The sense of own's own articulation, possessing and being possessed by another's language. Discovering what we might be capable of saying, of feeling, of being.

I maintain there are political implications for this moment. Though not, perhaps, the most important ones.

Blooming Belly

Thirty-two weeks and counting.

Adjustments

What little time I now have for poetry—reading and writing it—I find on the commuter train, a new textural dimension of my life. Every weekday morning (except for Mondays, when I sometimes drive) I rise in the gradually increasing cold (which offers a kind of spurious relief from my fears of global warming) and stand on the platform at Main and Chicago Streets in Evanston, facing the sun that rises on my right shoulder. The shock of the urban is still with me after three months here, though neither Evanston nor Chicago have anywhere near the level of street intensity that I associate with the ur-city of my childhood, New York. Still it's a discombulation and a rush to find myself jostling with the other reverse commuters (outbound in the morning, inbound at night) onto the sleek silver Metra train, to find a seat (I prefer the upper level, solus, facing the direction of travel), settle in with my briefcase on my lap, and slip a slim volume out of it to read until the Lake Forest stop, thirty-five minutes later. The inside of the train is quiet in the morning, except for the occasional hissing tenor of someone's earphones or the conductor calling, "New riders, up top!" Evening trains are another story: crammed full of people talking loudly to each other or into their cellphones, I find it easier to concentrate on fiction, generally some novel I've borrowed from the little lending rack that the Lake Forest Public Library keeps thoughtfully stacked inside the train station there. Mostly it's thrillers and romances, but last month I grabbed a copy of Robertson Davies' The Manticore and was persuaded enough by its Jungo-Canadian oddity to reread the whole Deptford trilogy. This week it was Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying: heavy-handed and leaden in its prose but still utterly affecting in its portrait of African-American life in 1940s Louisiana. I've attempted more ambitious prose on the train—I'm finally reading Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and I was amused the other morning to see a buttoned-up buisnessman reading it while waiting on the opposite platform, Chicago-bound—but as a hardcover it's not an ideal commuter's volume.

(As content perhaps it's another story: the novel depicts innumerable picaresque wanderings and encounters, yet never suspends for a moment the atmosphere of doom and fate that hangs over characters who can only play at autonomy. They're all riding the twentieth century Latin American train, whether in Mexico City or Barcelona or Paris, and they can't get off.)

At any rate I've had time for some poetry: the new issues of Chicago Review and Xantippe, and now a couple of books I've long meant to get to: Kimberly Lyons' Saline and Bradley Paul's The Obvious. I've sung the praises of CR often enough; here I'll just say that I was particularly moved and excited by the continuation of C.D. Wright's "Rising, Falling, Hovering"; the wholly unexpected Book V of Ronald Johnson's Radi Os; Georges Perec's still-relevant call "For a Realist Literature"; and Allen Grossman's pervesely elegant "On Communicative Difficulty in General and 'Difficult' Poetry in Particular: The Example of Hart Crane's 'The Broken Tower'" (I aspire to somehow unite the concerns of Perec and Grossman in my own writing). The new Xantippe demonstrates Kristen Hanlon's almost pitch-perfect editorial ear: it's a splendid mash-up of postmodern lyric and antilyric. Standouts in the first camp: Julie Carr's "(Equivocal)," Karla Kelsey's "As Fire Unto Fire," Sharon Lynn Osmond's "Door to the River" (I would gladly use this poem the next time I was trying to teach the concept of ekphrasis), and Sandra Miller's "Ad Halcyon"; the anti-lyricists of note are Jasper Bernes (with several poems that appear in Starsdown), Tanya Larkin's "Market Day" and "Villa Maria," Kasey Mohammed's disconcerting "The Poordom" (successful example of the kind of poem in which a coinage or abstraction is made to bear increasingly heavy fardels of metaphorical weight), and Rodney Koeneke's "Eerie Wampum" and "Larry's House of Brakes" (okay, that last one has a big lyric push inside it: "a heroic and enormous effort to nudge the myth forward").

Also of note in the new Xantippe: excerpts from Lisa Jarnot's forthcoming Robert Duncan biography, and a mess of book reviews, many of which I'm happy to see are of books more than two years old but which nevertheless deserve attention: the Lyons book (that's why I took it off the shelf), Brenda Iijima's Around Sea (I'd like to reread that now that my head's flush with Thoreau), Rachel Zucker's The Last Clear Narrative (might give me a little insight into the experiential territory of pregnancy and motherhood), and Dan Bouchard's Some Mountains Removed (in which the reviewer, India Radfar, surprisingly and usefully compares Bouchard's versions of pastoral with Bernadette Mayer's).

I haven't opened the Lyons yet—the book has merely graduated from the shelf to the briefcase, where it will ride around with me until I've absorbed it in the literal fits and stops of the train. This morning I read half of the Paul book—I recognize in him a kindred Stevensian ephebe. His poems present a kind of daylit surrealism to the reader. Ashbery and the language poets represent one degree of poetic movement that's lodged almost entirely within language; you come down from that mountain to the degree that your words attach themselves to representable images and situations (in Grossman's terms, you embrace more and more the violence of representation, a curious index of poetic value that logically redescribes the most abstract poems as pacifistic). As John Yau describes him in a back-cover blurb: "In locating the speaker in words, rather than placing him (or her) in stories, Paul compels the speaker to contempalte whether words lead one to knowing someone else or to recognizing further mysteries." But the shapes of stories, or the habits of knowing associated with narrative, are more strongly discernible in Paul than in the poets of higher elevations—at the same time he's above the linguistically quiescent narrativity of a Charles Simic or Russell Edson. To wit:

Frantic Lights, Terminal Lights: The Man Who Invented Paper

Paper was made because Tsai Lun
said it should be made.
He was adamant, like a fable,
yet vague, like a fable.
The rabbit asked "Why?"
and "In what city?"
and as the blanket proffered its answer
everyone said "You're a blanket,
stop talking." Inane,
peregrine, all those things.
All was bright
in the bay window's yawp:
that is how I remember our street.
The bricks were brown
and the sidewalk was plugged with elms,
like Tsai Lun saying
"We didn't know it would be light green,
but we knew it would be a moth."

So Paul is a child of Stevens and Ashbery insofar as he deframes his sentences and disorients the reader; but the whimsical consistency of his voice prevents you from getting too disoriented (that's how one kind of reader sees it) or it prevents you from becoming sufficiently disoriented (that's how another kind of reader would put it). There's a lightness here that delights but also threatens to disanchor the poetry from sources of greater power (the extrapoetic institutional context for a poem that Grossman talks about: Rome for Horace, Anglican theology for the metaphysicals, academia for Grossman himself, etc.). You might also simply ask what occasions these poems. My instinct is to celebrate the poet's freedom from any obvious context—after all, that's why most political poetry is bad, because it's too dependent on the immediate context that gives it the illusion of use-value. But it may also disencumber a poetry to the point of rendering it minor.

Since Mark recently expressed nostalgia for the days of work in progress, here's something I scribbled on the train this morning. No title yet:

This person sat smally kicking his legs against the stall, while above him loomed The Looming Carl. This person could not meet The Carl's eye but went on shrilly kicking. The Carl was one of those people who assume that all other people feel just as they do; he had a toothache; he roared Open your mouth and opened his own; his tongue lolled horribly. This person kicked faintly the stall, which I might as well tell you was really The Carl's left shin. For why should we hold secrets from each other: from this person, from I who write this beside a pot of yogurt at daybreak? I'll teach you, The Carl howled, beating his mitts against the stall doors—and he did, and he did, and he did.

I'd like to second Mark's recommendation of Emma Bee Bernstein's (what a great name! the daughter of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein) and Nona Willis Aronowitz's GIRLdrive. They're on an inspiring trip.

Some of their posts raise the possibility of male feminists: it's not a title I feel I necessarily have the right to, but I am going to be the father of a daughter who will have to struggle for her own power and freedom in a culture that is routinely violent toward women. Or of a son who will have to come to understand his privileges and find his own path toward the renunciation of such violence. My influence and example will be crucial in either case, and not just in a philosophical way, but in the day-to-day work of meeting his or her needs: changing diapers, cooking meals, defusing tantrums, telling stories. So I will at least claim the right to call myself a fellow traveler of feminism.

Will I have a girly daughter, or a butch one? Will my son be gay, or a football player (or a gay football player)? We have no idea who's choosing to incarnate with us. I hope he or she will find room enough to become whom he or she needs to be with us. But I'll have feelings about his or her choices, too.

Reading the blog of Bernstein & Aronowitz, women just a little older than my students, I feel a kind of paternal wishfulness. That is to say, I hope that my daughter grows up to be like them. Or that my son is wise and strong enough to attract the company of women like them.

I am changing right in front of my own eyes.