A Letter

Even now that I'm an actual professor, even though I've been working toward the ultimate goal for almost a decade, I still can't quite believe I've made it through. But as this piece of paper attests, I've finally crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is. All that remains is to go to Ithaca (hurray!) in May to pick up the more durable piece of paper in the horribly expensive doctoral regalia I'd better hurry up and order. These new identities, so rapidly and recently acquired—professor, father, PhD—sit uneasily upon my shoulders, though I'm probably the only one who thinks so. (Least of all my daughter, currently wrapped up in her sling against my chest, fast asleep.)

About halfway through Moxley's The Middle Room, and I am surprised anew by her commitment to a thoroughly romantic (and Romantic) poetics—or not only or not merely a poetics, but a way of living. It reads like a nineteenth-century memoir of the late twentieth century, if such a thing were possible, dotted as it is with archaic prepositions like betwixt and o'er—a testimony to the author's nostalgic passions (a phrase that, like wicked interior spy, recurs frequently throughout the book, and always in italics).

Over at Parsifal Press, Simone dos Anjos has posted a review of the book that recommends it "to those literary persons who take themselves too seriously." It's true that the book is characterized by the dry yet tender irony of the adult Moxley toward her younger self—yet "irony" doesn't seem quite right, because Moxley still seems perfectly capable of stepping back into her younger self's skin, so that only the barest daylight shows between "Jenny's" taste for melodrama and the older poet's frank savorings of that drama. Perhaps it goes hand in hand with her romanticism, but Moxley has always impressed me precisely because she does risk taking herself too seriously, a risk many of us are unwilling to take because it would make us too vulnerable. You need a thick skin, or a lot of arrogance, or most simply the courage to risk being hurt, again and again, to present yourself to the world as a serious person who believes in the significance of his/her own life and work (particularly a poet's life and work, which provide few if any social appurtenances with which to shield oneself). Moxley impresses and disturbs because her courage is coupled to what seems like the thinnest of skins: to spend time in the company of her poetry or her prose is to watch her bleed.

It's a lushly written book, very pleasuarable on a sentence level, once you've gotten used to the archaisms. As an account of one poet's sentimental education it gratifies my curiosity to understand from the inside what it must have been like to come to poetry from the communitarian and experimental stance that Moxley encountered as an undergraduate, and which she naturally took to be the path of the poet—very different from the thoroughly quietudinous education I received at Vassar, where the creative writing students pored over Elizabeth Bishop's drafts of "One Art," sat at the feet of bearded male profs, and felt at best a prickly rivalry with each other, at worst indifference. At least that was my experience—maybe I was sunk too deep in Dungeons & Dragons to partake more actively of Vassar's literary culture, such as it was. The two other poets who were there when I was, Camille Guthrie and Renee Gladman (I knew Camille pretty well; I've never met Renee, that I can recall), did go on to be associated with the avant-garde (Camille's first book, as it happens, is published by Subpress, the publishers of Moxley's memoir), so maybe they found more a more challenging aesthetic and a more involving community (with all the attendant romance, rivalry, and performative opportunities) at Vassar than I did.

Why do we become poets? Moxley is able to pin it down to one moment: when she brought the first poem she ever wrote to her mother Jo—the guardian and arbiter of all things literary in that household—and she pronounced it, "very impressive." I can find no single primal scene in my own background to match that, but in the house where I grew up it was my mother as well who was the litterateur and arbiter of taste when it came to books and aesthetic questions generally. Her attention was not always easy to secure; so when she responded positively to my own early attempts at poetry I was goaded to carry on with it. At a perilously young age—fourteen? twelve?—I was determined to become a writer. But I didn't settle, or resettle, on poetry until my middle twenties after failed attempts at a novel sent me back to, yes, the one form of writing that had consistently garnered praise from teachers, friends, a lover or two, and, yes, my mother—who had died some years previous, while I was still in college.

Perhaps it's that intimate response that, if we're lucky, we can get from a reader of our poems, that blooms into a vocation for an art form that your average person seems to hold in a strange mixture of awe and contempt. (Awe because they knew what it could or should have been when they themselves were writing it, as adolescents—contempt because it was they themselves who had written, and they nor nobody else they knew could possibly be a "real poet"?) You need to be an egoistical tyrant to sit down and demand that someone who matters to you read your novel; but we've all sat across from beloved or respected faces and scrutinized them as they read our lines, waiting for the reaction that will bless or damn us.

So poets write for/to/with lovers—a truth as embarrassing and necessary as the artist's bare self-seriousness. Both of these facts Moxley refuses to mask even with the garb of eccentricity, and I'm amazed by that. And compelled into following her many-branching paths—I'll be ordering The Line when I'm done with this.

A Lapse

Not much left over. Can't resist the baby talk: we start out speaking normally but by the end of the sentence our inflections shoot way, way up, like those of teenage girls.

Hello world.

With Emily at Starbucks.

Toes!

My father wants to be known as Sadie's "Poppy," but he may be changing his mind now that he knows our president calls his own father by that name.


Reading Silliman's Ketjak, pronounced keh-chak. A ketjak is a Balinese "monkey dance" intended to exorcize evil. It's a long poem in prose in which the same sentences and sentence fragments keep recurring in longer and more complex iterations as each paragraph swells to become much larger than all the preceding paragraphs. An anticipation, it seems, of Ron's employment of the Fibonoacci sequence in writing Tjanting (pronounced chanting, so he didn't move all that far from that idea). Written in the mid-seventies, it was his first demonstration of the New Sentence, something I'm actually more familiar with in practice from reading Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Reading it is like sitting down to listen to one of the jazz CDs—Thelonious Monk, say—that contain many tracks of variation on the same tune, so that your head nods at the return of a phrase, now freshly contextualized by the tide of new text that surrounds it. In that respect it's also like hitting the "refresh" button on the browser of a website that's constantly updated but which always retains some of the same basic elements.

I can see why it would have outraged and titillated and bored when it first appeared; I can see now why some would now find the technique to be uttery canonical, if not old hat—but I never lose sight of the fact that the majority of readers today would find the poem as strange and tedious as the readers of 1975 did. In that respect there is no advancement for art: the avant-garde is permanently avant-garde for everyone except the cognoscenti, the ones invested in expanding (shrinking?) the market for different modes of writing. Once you have your sea-legs, so to speak, there's pleasure aplenty to be found in a text like Ketjak, and very little of the Brechtian dissonance of the New Sentence comes off as dissonance, just as those Monk tunes no longer startle by their breaks and halts. The trouble is that few are interested in acquiring such sea-legs themselves: people are content with the pleasures they already know, for the most part, and don't wish to be seasick before they can stand. The only mechanism currently in place for growing the audience for such writing is the press gang of academia: I can assign Ketjak or a portion of it to my students and explain why it matters and a few of them, at least, will consider the possibility of its being a source of pleasure. But most will not pick up such a text again, I think, and we're back to the non-system of eccentrics' finding their misshapen way toward what they'll discover they need from poetry (bully for them). Perhaps that's best.

My copy of Jennifer Moxley's massive memoir The Middle Room has just arrived; The Irasicble Poet has whet my appetite for it. I'm hungry for a narrative of my generation's (very nearly—I think Jennifer's probably four or five years older) infatuation with and abandonment of and commitment to poetry. Why did we get here? How did we do it, or not do it? Has there been, shall there be, anything new?

Hungry again, in other words, for narrative: red meat. Telling my students this morning Eliot's line about meaning being the meat the burglar gives the guard-dog so that he can accomplish his work. What is that work? The poet as second-story man: he that tells us a second story. Let the first story languish; kick the ladder away.

From the back cover of The Middle Room:

There was a secret force deep in my psyche which, like a Cold War double agent, worked in tandem with my insecurity, a sort of wicked interior spy that emerged at the most inopportune moments to make sport of all my fears and fill me with crippling self-doubt as regards my natural fitness to live the life of the mind.

I feel almost entirely opposite: my wicked interior spy works to make me doubt my fitness to live the life of the body. Life, the life sentence.

Silence, then a lapse into speech, then silence. Rock-a-bye.

A movement, a lull. "Just keep walking," drive, he sd.

Driving.

Utopian Poetics

One can like what one has written while feeling dissatisfied with the way one writes.

I am dissatisfied.

Saw the rough draft of a new documentary about artist-mothers last night. The real cost women have always paid to create. But I was distracted by the art itself and how its expressiveness exceeded whatever the artists themselves or the various talking heads had to say about it. That old envy of the visual, coupled with a swelling disgust for discursivity. Talking heads: stop making sense.

And a longing for the spoken, its power to punctuate a narrative. "How's my hair look, Mike?"

The avant-garde impulse gets swallowed in mists of cynicism. Or is it just historicism? Over at Action, Yes, Per Bäckström offers what appears to me to be a faultless analysis of the use and misuse of the term "avant-garde" in the twentieth century, and makes especially valuable distinctions about the changing face of the term depending on which country (or more broadly, which linguistic tradition—Romance, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-American) speaks it. It's an extremely useful and clarifying intervention in the distinctions we must draw between terms like "avant-garde" and "high modernism"; it will help me when I write my pastoral book. But the piece leaves the poet in me feeling dispirited, a marble in a milk carton bobbing in a millpond, because it all adds up to the end of history, again. Or as Modris Eksteins puts it at the end of this review of Peter Gay's new book, "Stunde Null, zero hour, 1945, with its iconography of the end, stacked corpses and mushroom clouds, is a strong candidate for the last act of Modernism. At that point, Adorno said, history had outdistanced any possibility of representation. Art, historiography, indeed any attempt to capture meaning, had been humiliated by events. Perhaps shopping is indeed all that is left."

Strategies of anti-representation followed Adorno's declaration about lyric poetry after Auschwitz, but Eksteins, taking the long view, sees nothing in the postwar avant-garde (which, per Per, seems to be a term he takes as interchangeablewith "modernism") that isn't a retread of the post-WWI period: for John Cage read Malevich, for Jim Dine read Picabia. Bäckström takes a more nuanced view, writing that "the neo-avant-gardes did not react against modernity, as the historical avant-garde did, but against late modernity. Therefore, they could not possibly use the same strategies as the historical avant-garde," the folks who, to paraphrase Peter Bürger's argument, struggled "to include art as a natural component of life (a richer life)."

That has always struck me as the fundamental goal for art: or, I have always demanded of art that it transform my life. If art doesn't intervene in life, it no longer interests me. Which, thanks to the clarification of terms Bäckström provides, leads me to reject postmodernism: it is a purely aestheticized reaction-formation, lacking "the Utopian urge to merge life and art, which is the prime mover for an avant-garde." But does that resuscitate what I do as avant-garde? Or neo-avant-garde? Or (shudder) "post-avant"?

I have a visceral response to Ian Keenan's claims that "the act of traversing new territory of expression is both tied to the spirit of the forms that preceded it to that end, but not dogmatically to the forms themselves"; and, "I believe in the avant-garde both as a matter of faith and as an objective analysis of phenomenon." The first statement is both pragmatic and a covert statement of faith in the spirit of the avant-garde that the second statement makes manifest. But I think I have a more useful term, at least for me, and Bäckström gave me the clue for it: utopian poetics.

Form is one intervention. I tell my students how parataxis can punctuate a text, can let fresh air into writing, can let alternatives to the master narrative filter in. Prosody is everything that diverts, spills, overflows, smothers, trickles around, and shines on that relentless question, "What happens next?" But my students still want to know what happens; they want, themselves, to happen. I too want this, and so we are utopians together. But what's the technique for this? What's its content?

This second singing a mangled medley of Beach Boys tunes to my daughter. "Sloop John B." "Good Vibrations." "Wouldn't It Be Nice."

If the thinker swallows the writer, if the formalist swallows what aches. Discomfort of several skins. Two heads. Then, "other horrible workers will come."

Mon coeur mis à nu. What Poe wanted to write.

We want the poem to be something, to take us somewhere. To have some life beyond both ordinary language and artsy self-awareness. To mean and be, or at least go.

(Is an addiction to generalities my difficulty? People cry, "Enough generalizing, let's talk about poems!" Yes, but there's an obvious hunger for the general, for perspective, for mapping our moment so as to live it/write it better. "The theme is creative and has vista.")

Typing one-handed, my left pinky finger in Sadie's mouth. Bodies in real time.

Utopia is negative and positive at the same time: it's noplace, and it's also always a negative image of whatever it is in our actually existing world that inhibits human flourishing. We write from and toward what we can't inhabit, except retrospectively. Now Sadie's being nursed by her mother, and the moment of misremembered songs and my finger-substitute (dry breast of the father) is in the past. It's got a half-life now, a glow.

How to write my way back toward lived experience, something messy, precious bodily fluids. The Narrativity writers, whose Biting the Error has been the main text in my creative writing seminar, also strive for this. As theoretical essays they show how their lives—often queer lives, or women's lives, or Marxist lives—have changed their writing. Between the lines—and in some of their non- or extra-theoretical texts—we read how their writing changed their lives. Utopians, every one. (Canadians, too, some of them, or denizens of the Bay Area—national and quasi-national spaces that have taken on a utopian luster for me in the past seven years.)

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." I love the themselves. I love the are.

Baby Blogging Bonanza

Any thoughts I might have about poetry will probably have to wait until spring break. In the meantime, for famished Sadie Gray fans:

My cousin Rachel instructs Sadie in the finer points of flying.

And here she is with us practicing her best Superman moves.

Proud papa and mama and a somewhat stunned-looking Sadie.

Emily models her baby sling (baby not included).

At brunch this morning with my grandparents at a hole-in-the-wall cafe in Skokie.

That sling is more comfortable than it looks.

Your faithful correspondent at the computer with his special assistant standing by.

Reading to Sadie. That's either The Green Lake Is Awake or Hotel Lautreamont.

The New York School works as well or better than Mother Goose when it comes to soothing the little ones.

The flying Wallendas--I mean, Ross and Kerry, our dear friends from Ithaca who stayed with us a whole week cooking us meals, rearranging my books (really), and making us laugh.

Here are Kerry and Emily adoring the little one in all her naked glory.

Sadie and her sleepy daddy sharing a moment (and a robe).

Ross, Sadie, and Sadie's hat.

Since we moved in there hasn't been a moment to arrange my books more than haphazardly. Kerry brought her welcome rage for order to the task of alphabetizing my poetry books. Here I am, checking her work.

When all else fails in the sleeping baby department, our trusty friend the clothes dryer usually does the trick.

Briefly

Once again I shall shamelessly piggyback on Bob's blog to point at his post of praise for Robyn Schiff, who kicked a lot of butt reading here at Lake Forest yesterday (and also proved a charmingly formidable presence in my poetry writing class that morning).

And here's a picture of Sadie with her Grammy Ellayn, who was visiting with us (and being unbelievably helpful) last week and the week before:

That's all I got.

New Web Ventures of Note

- Feminist poetics makes a big fat splash at Delirious Hem, featuring critical writing from Esther Belin, Susan Briante, David Buuck, CAConrad, Michelle Detorie, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley, Rachel Levitsky, Joyelle McSweeney, Sina Queyras, Linda Russo, Sandra Simonds, Carmen Giménez Smith, Elizabeth Treadwell, Catherine Wagner, and Christine Wertheim.

- UpRightDown modestly describes itself as "a game," which asked of its players to all write pieces based on the same scenario:

THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn’t tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

The bait has been taken by poets, fiction writers, and other weirdos worth your while.

I had hoped to be at the reading in the city featuring Gabe Gudding, Kent Johnson, and Tawrin Baker this evening, but the lure of new fatherhood was too strong. Can you blame me?

A rather dramatically lit photo that Emily took. Clearly we have a future dancer or conductor on our hands....

I may have more to say about the subject of the last post; I may not. But for now I direct you to my colleague Bob Archambeau's trenchant assessment of the post-avant brouhaha, inspired in part by the generational musings of Ray Bianchi, who succeeds in making me ever more eager to read this.

Post-Mainstream

Okay, first of all: the obligatory adorableness:

&

Now that we've got that out of the way: on his blog, Paul Hoover recently sought to engage my July post about New American Writing, the magazine he edits with his wife Maxine Chernoff, in which I made the claim that the writing published there represents the "postmodern establishment." To quote myself, "Hoover and Chernoff's magazine constitutes an establishment insofar as it palpably conserves the tradition of postmodern lyric that occupies, I think, the capacious middle ground between the austerities of Language poetry and the ironic "personal" characteristic of the New York School(s)." Paul's response to my post basically agrees with that statement, and raises the question of what it might mean to pursue avant-garde strategies in the wake of the collapse of the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" of American poetry: the strong antagonism between an academic inside (master signifier: the AWP) and an anti-academic outside (the New Americans, the Langpos) has collapsed almost entirely in just the ten years or so that I've been a publishing poet.

Over at the Poetry Foundation, Reginald Shepherd has raised a remarkable storm of controversy in his efforts to define the bogeyman of the "post-avant," a specter that has long haunted the blogosphere and a term that, depending on who you talk to, originated either in the spirit of parody from the poison pen of Joan Houlihan, or the spirit of sober earnestness from the stone tablets of Ron Silliman. The subsequent dispute between Reginald and his interlocutors (Ange Mlinko bringing the sharpest edge, in every sense, to her comments) seems to be between a view of the post-avant as a "third way" between avant-garde and mainstream, and a view of it merely as a style of our period, with all the flexibilities and fetishizations attributable to a style. I agree with Ange when she argues that to be avant-garde is a political position before it is an aesthetic one: that it assumes a negative, outsider's stance toward aesthetic establishments and institutions. If, as she goes on to claim, there is no longer any meaningful "outside" in American poetry, the avant-garde is emptied of its content and becomes a style at best and a pose at worst: one more chip to be played in the increasingly disorganized game of Texas hold 'em that is our boundaryless poetry present.

So [to paraphrase Ms. Jane Dark] the notion of the post-avant as a "third way" is indeed subject to the same criticism that the political Third Way is open to: that it's really just the "first way" (i.e., hegemony) with an updated sales pitch, Quietude with a human face. Yet from my perspective, the crisis we're a part of now has less to do with the disappearance of the outside than it does with the disappearance of the inside. That is, literary culture (not just poetry!) no longer has a meaningful relation with our culture-in-general, which in itself no longer seems to serve the function of legitimizing political power that it used to do (but it may still have a role in legitimizing markets). Put another way and more locally, many poets associated with the "post-avant" now have tenure track academic jobs; but I would argue such positions no longer constitute a meaningful "inside" because neither American culture nor American poetry center on academia any more, and haven't for quite some time. An endowed chair at Harvard or Penn just ain't what it used to be: the cultural capital accruing to a Bob Perelman or a Jorie Graham is microscopic in comparison with the capital enjoyed by previous generations of poets and profs from Mark Van Doren to Lionel Trilling, or even to Perelman (still "outside") and Graham (very much "inside") as recently as the 1980s. The flip side of this is a tremendous democratization: it's harder than ever to write a book of poems that will make any sort of splash in the larger culture, but it's easier than ever for talented poets, academic and non-academic, to find an audience (if not the audience) via chapbooks, small presses, and the Web.

So it seems to me that poets of every aesthetic stripe save perhaps the most conservative (the ones approved of by Adam Kirsch, say, or the ranks of the poets-laureate) are best described as post-mainstream, because the center of the cultural margin is still the margin. Almost any sort of poetry writing or poetry life counts as countercultural in a manifestly postliterate society. But that doesn't mean we get to reclaim avant-garde status because a literary avant-garde has to attack the literary establishment, and the latter simply doesn't exist any more, at least not in the sense that "establishment" ought to have (i.e., bearing some intrinsic relation to power). This doesn't mean that poets have stopped competing for status and recognition; nor have I resolved, or adequately raised, the question of literary culture's relationship to the marketplace. But it seems clear that the game has changed, and more radically than we've realized, in just the past decade or so; and I'm not at all convinced that what will take the old culture's place will much resemble the field we're all still half-heartedly running up in down in, with the avant-garde guarding one goalpost and the reactionaries guarding the other (while proclaiming loudly that there is, in fact, no game taking place).

What we're left with is style: mere aesthetics. And that's not such a terrible thing, if only because of the enormous freedom it offers poets and readers; and because it throws us back upon what Ron recently said in his response to a Poetry Foundation questionnaire (the simple fact of which tells us that the Foundation can't be what we once thought of as an establishment, nor can Ron be what we once thought of as avant-garde): "Whether you are a new formalist or a slam poet, a visual poet or a language writer, the absolute materiality of the signifier, the physicality of sound and of the graphic letter, is the one secret shared by all poets to which nonreaders of poetry seem literally clueless." Ours is a language art, and whatever else we are likely to become as a species, it seems unlikely that we'll become post-language. So there's room for the new—and perhaps, an outside—after all.

"...of the life, or of the work..."

For the first time in many years AWP is happening without me, but I don't miss it much. Sadie Gray is the new magnet to align my filings; she's worth all the schmoozing in the world, and much more besides. This morning I said to Emily, "I'll never write a greater poem than her," and that seems self-evidently true. Baby, remember my name indeed: if only she'll remember, what else could I require of fortune and men's eyes? A great reorganization is taking place.

In my younger and more vulnerable years I saw my life as grist for writing, as redeemable only by writing, sometimes in the most literal terms: every day I produced pages was a day I had earned the subsidiary right to exist. I drifted along like a wilted balloon, barely touching the ground, unbearably light: Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad. Gradually I began to take on ballast: institutional support, awakening of intellectual desire, passionate friendships, love, marriage. Now a child completes my awakening to the earth and it's more clear to me than ever that my work and writing exist to serve my life and not the other way around.

Perhaps that bars the door to greatness? Or to unfold the full quotation from Yeats: "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark." Not quite so clear as it appears at first glance: the intellect must choose, not the heart or soul; one foregoes a heavenly mansion, not an earthly one. And I think of another Irishman's rueful (or was it triumphant?) claim: "I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works." More practically, of course "getting a life" means less time to write; but the real damage, if there is any, is inflicted by the middle path of bourgeois family life, which necessarily restrains you from pursuing the more glamorous extremes (though if the sleep deprivation an infant puts you through doesn't count as a systematic derangement of the senses, I don't know what does). Or most simply, the intense and necessary selfishness of the devoted artist is thwarted by the radical decentering family life requires. Put in evolutionary terms, my species-being now asserts itself over any notions of individuality I may have had: I exist as a vessel for my genes which I must now safeguard in the person of a single nine-pound person. Sadie Gray comes first in all my thinking now--no, that's not accurate--she's prior to thinking, she's a transcendental condition of my most ordinary acts, and my writing consciousness as well. I come toward or go away from her, like the sun, like gravity, whatever else may preoccupy my mind.

Of course the pursuit of immortality, or greatness, or what have you, has always been a mug's game, and all the more so in the field of literature. It seems clearer than ever that the love of books has become an eccentricity, and that literary fiction is now nearly as far from the center of cultural gravity as poetry is. If I were setting out now to forge the uncreated conscience of my race I'd create a series for HBO. But from another perspective the death of the Author (some salt-and-pepper eminence being quizzed by Dick Cavett) is really only the death of certain apparatus of canonicity and distribution: the big publishing houses are now nearly as irrelevant to cultural activity as the record companies have become to music. It's easier than ever to find readers and harder than ever to assign some kind of exchange-value for that readership; and so we write for the thing itself, to be read. Which is as much to say that writing, cultural labor, now exists as a means toward living (not making a living)--and so I have the perhaps inaccurate sense of living a post-literary life in time with my post-literate culture. Post-literary: the death of literature as means to something else. Are new possibilities, new purities of expression now possible?

I kid, of course; or I push it, or exaggerate. The game is still the game, as Daniel Plainview's descendent Marlo says on The Wire (glory of 19th-century television, though a diminished thing this season). People are still scrambling for cultural capital: academia remains the major preserve in which writing serves as a form of accumulation, convertible into prestige which translates directly into dollars (if only it translated into euros!); someone reading this now still dreams of making a splash with the Great American Novel, if not the Great Postmodernist Poem. And there remains the question of who reads us, and how many: does it matter if most of my readers are themselves poets? Is it so inglorious a thing to perhaps occupy the position of the band that launches other bands? So many of us writers keep going because we have this crazy faith in the possibility of being the butterfly in Bali that starts the hurricane in Florida. And so many of us are also teachers who come to work each day hoping to meet the student who will in some way carry our literary passions beyond our own necessary obsolescence.

Which brings me back to my little girl, my throw of the dice that will never abolish oblivion but stands for possibility all the same, and whose relationship with my writing is yet to be discovered, though it's already taking place.

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.