Barack Obama for President

The urgency of electing this man—with his curiosity, his compassion, his steadiness, and his pragmatism tempered by idealism (not the other way around)—seems to me blindingly obvious yet worth saying and repeating. Only fear of his otherness, which the Republicans are pushing hard, would seem capable of derailing him now. I hope it won't happen. I've read all the polls, I've heard many anecdotes, and I think it won't happen. Barack Obama is our next president. But will he win a powerful enough mandate to counter the vitriol, hatred, and cries of illegitimacy that will be coming from the radical right-wing margin that dictates the agenda of the so-called mainstream? If you thought the wingnuts were at their nuttiest during the Clinton years, you ain't seen nothing yet.

So let's vote for him in vast and overwhelming numbers. Let's see all the new voters that the pundits are so skeptical about actually show up at the polls. Let's suspend for just a moment our natural skepticism and believe, not in Obama the man, but in what he's come to represent. Not so much a new politics, for I don't recognize the "Obambi" figure that Roger D. Hodge laments in his extraordinarily cynical "Notebook" piece in the latest issue of Harper's. Obama's thrown plenty of elbows: this has been the most efficient, ruthless, anti-Roveian campaign a Democrat could wish for. I hope and expect that Obama will play the game that needs to be played—not a post-politics (as another Harper's piece suspects and fears) but a politics that effectively mobilizes the majority of the people to act in and fight for their own best interests: a well-managed economy that is also a green economy; a foreign policy that wins friends, influence, and partners; health-care as a human right; peace. Will Obama bring about these things? Almost certainly not. But he might be the tipping point which helps all those thousands of people who've turned out to see and hear him realize their own power, contra Hodge, and take new responsibility for their own destinies.

Michael Schaivo has said all this more eloquently than I, so go read him and forward that to your friends and relatives on the fence. And go vote.

Touch

An unhealthy obsession with political blogs, plus keeping up with three classes and spending time with my family, has left poetry (and this blog) in the dust. This worries me a little. It's not that I think the world thirsts for my opinions, but rather that the blog has been my primary means of engaging with poetry for so very long. And if neglecting the blog had somehow led to my writing or reading more poetry that would be an acceptable bargain, but it hasn't. Instead the only poetry I read is the poetry I teach: very good stuff (Whitman this week and Dickinson next week in my nineteenth-century class; Ginsberg this week and Gwendolyn Brooks next week in my modern poetry class), but by no means new to me. Which doesn't mean I won't make discoveries reading Song of Myself for the umpteenth time, but my role as a teacher does tend to confine me to reading for the clearest through-line that I can offer my students, as opposed to getting caught up in eccentric eddies as I would be if reading for my own pleasure and advancement.

On the other hand, engaging in the contemporary for the contemporary's sake may be the most rapid path to irrelevance. Getting the news from poems doesn't mean reading the latest poems as though they were the newspaper (or Juan Cole or Talking Points Memo). Having for a while been most engaged by the poetry of news, or the pomo poetry of poets striking tragical-comical-pastoral poses amid the potpourri of capitalism, I now feel my inclination drifting toward a more Romantic stance. Which leaves plenty of room for political engagement and critique, but doesn't depend on a shielded persona, either. The contemporary poets who've been my most steadfast mental companions are those who—I hate to resort to workshop-speak, but it seems inevitable—stake themselves in and on their poems. Julianna Spahr, Lisa Jarnot, Jennifer Moxley, Claudia Rankine, Lisa Robertson, Alice Notley. It's not too much to say that these women are some of my heroes for writing smart, thorny, sometimes luxurious and sometimes threadbare verse in which I feel the presence of a living person who situates her whole mind and body in a world I recognize anew through her vision. They bare their injuries to the reader, but not to feed her prurience a la the Confessional poets; they're simply unwilling to play the fundamentally adolescent game summed up in the warning phrase, "Be cool."

It's strangely difficult to think of contemporary male poets who do this, whose work isn't suborned in some way by the need to shield their egos. (Heterosexual male poets, I should say: I would classify the work of my friend Brian Teare, for example, with that of the women neo-Romantics I've mentioned.) Older poets come to mind, Allen Grossman chief among them, but not those of my own generation or younger. Because of that I've come to prefer those male poets who are very far from cool—whose vulnerability is made transparent by their self-aggrandizement—a mode I associate with the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Ted Berrigan. But it's hard to write that stuff without veering off into camp, which is another defense, another version of "the cool." Gabe Gudding comes very close to what I have in mind. So does Dan Bouchard, and my other great poetry friend, Richard Greenfield.

This is all very personal: I've never been cool, and now that I'm a father I feel warmer than ever, repelled by even the mildly ironic carapaces of the professoriate I'm now a part of. And the temptation of being accepted as "one of the cool kids"—a running buddy of the Flarfists or post-Language poets or any clique you'd care to name—has lost much of its hold over my imagination. Which is not to say I reject the possibilities of the group or wish to retreat to some naive atomized model of the lone poet. Most of the poets I've mentioned have been part of some group or other at one time in their careers—we all need comrades. It's more that I want to take up the other strands of relationship in my life and have those networks be of at least as much importance in my work as other poets and writers. The point of writing for me, always, is to put an end to isolation.

That also means ending the isolation of the body. I want to get closer to the physical in my writing, both in terms of sound and image, and in terms of content. The body in poetry seems either to lyricize into the ether or else present the sick plummet into matter and mortality. There has to be another way simply to breathe and move and touch in poetry. Maybe I should try rhyming again.

In between, for now.

The Race

In the latest New York Times article on the election, this paragraph appears:

“Senator Obama has more money than God, the most favorable political climate imaginable — a three-week Wall Street meltdown and financial crisis — and with all that, the most margin he can get is four points?” said Bill McInturff, one of Mr. McCain’s pollsters. “That does speak to the questions there are about lack of experience, his candidacy, and other things that make people say, ‘Gosh, is he really ready?’ ”

This is, I believe, a fundamental error on the McCain campaign's part. I think Obama passed the experience threshold after the first debate, if he hadn't done so already. The reason that he doesn't have a double-digit lead—though some polls give him close to one—has nothing to do with McInturff's argument. It's because of his name and because he's black.

I think that this means that the viciously negative campaign the McCain campaign says it's going to run in the next month is a waste of their dwindling resources and time, because nothing they say about Obama's supposed associations with radicals or his lack of experience or his "dangerous" willingness to use diplomacy is going to be scarier to the American people than the scary stuff that's already on the surface—stuff they are apparently willing to overlook to the tune of a 5.9% advantage to Obama according to the Real Clear Politics average of the current national polls. That doesn't mean we don't live in a racist country, only that our fear of the unknown is now less great than our fear of a known quantity: the bankrupt (in every sense!) Republican leadership of the past decade.

Obama's rope-a-dope strategy seems to be paying off big right now. I can only hope—in spite of the lack of evidence, in spite of his apparent "pragmatism"—that he has a similarly cool strategy for installing and pursuing a genuinely progressive agenda as President. We may, however, have substituted progress on the level of identity politics for the kind of progress that would really move large numbers of people at home and abroad toward justice and equality.

Birthday Baby Blogging

My birthday, not hers. I've gotten two mealtime snapshots to sustain me through a long workday:

Yay, food!

The biggest eyes.

***

We spent the week in Modern Poetry reading excerpts from The Cantos. The students were surprisingly game for it all. I think it helps that I confess my own ambivalence every time, so that they neither feel they must celebrate his genius nor denounce his nastiness but can instead actually respond to what's there. Next week: Gertrude Stein.

Tomorrow Lake Forest's Homecoming Weekend begins. I'll be taking part in an Alumni College event in which alumni get to feel like they're students once again. My chair, Rick Mallette, and I will discuss Frost's "Design." A spooky old chestnut of a poem. He's going to do an old-fashioned close reading, and I'm going to try and get all ecocritical about it.

And next week I come out as a poet to the rest of the faculty: we have a lunchtime series here where people present on their work or research to other faculty members. After some deliberation as to whether to talk about scholarship or my own poetry, I chose the latter. This is the squib I came up with to publicize the event:

Severance Songs: The Odyssey at Home

A reading from and talk about Joshua’s recently completed manuscript of poems, Severance Songs. Begun in the wake of September 11 and continued through the Iraq War, these poems ask whether it’s possible to live a right life in a wrong world. Or to put things in terms of the book’s enabling counter-myth: what if Odysseus had never gone to Troy? How do you find Ithaca if you’ve never left it? How do we take responsibility for a world we never made? And if we do not, who will? War, pastoral, humor, and love move in these poems toward his tentative conclusion: in severance there is yet a bond.

I do hope I can find a home for this book someday soon; I believe it has some of my best work in it, and it's come to seem like the most complete gesture that I've made poetically in the past decade.

Homeward bound now for birthday cake (if I'm lucky) and Palin's making a complete ass of herself in the VP debate (if we're all lucky).

Life? Or Blogging?

There's probably no more tiresome sort of blog post than the apology for not blogging, but that's what circumstances have reduced me to. These days, I find teaching and family life absorb nearly all of my energy, and what little is left over goes either toward other projects (writing reviews, talks I'm giving at Lake Forest in the coming weeks) or leisure reading (last week's spare moments were consumed by a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days that I found in a box on the street—anticipatory schadenfreude on my part). Current literary events, like the sad and sudden passing of David Foster Wallace, are passing me by. I'm not even reading blogs much anymore, a new trend as disturbing as it might be healthy.

If I did have time to blog, I'd blog about the Modern Poetry course I'm teaching, which has been a very exciting adventure. I have some very bright students in that class (including Brother Tom, who's auditing) who have never before encountered the likes of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or William Carlos Williams (the story so far). One beneficial effect for me has been to reread these writers as a clever undergraduate might—I find myself concerned with what these poets might mean, whereas normally when I read poetry I just permit myself to be ravished by surface effects and sociohistoric echoes. So I have to construct a narrative for each poet's work to guide the class, while letting the range and scope of it suggest to the students the necessary provisionality of such a narrative.

I'd also probably blog—it's a mercy I do not—about the presidential campaign. Despite his being by any world measure a center-right candidate, despite the likelihood of his turning into neoliberalism with a (multicultural) human face, I badly want Obama to win, and to win big. I have a daughter—have her while she is mine—and that puts me a lot closer to Polonius and his desire to keep the ship of state afloat than it does to Hamlet's revolution. If McCain and Palin get in—satyrs to Obama's Hyperion?—I will fear not for the decline of the American empire (that would be just fine, I long to live in a "normal country"), but its convulsive self-destruction. Which is to say, my little family will likely be stumping for Obama in Kenosha, Wis., this weekend. And I'll be checking the latest polls every spare second between now and November 4, hoping for current financial crisis-driven trends to continue to boost the guy who does indeed offer hope, however slender a reed that might be.

Going back underground, for a time.

Endoskeleton

I emerge from start-of-semester-induced silence blinking into the bloglight. I've got an enviable Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedule this semester, with Wednesday devoted to grading and committees, giving me a four-day weekend to spend with wife and daughter and do my own work (and, okay, a bunch of grading). But my abbreviated workweek is extraordinarily intense, and that combined with the vagaries of a seven-month-old's sleep schedule has left me with little or no extra energy that isn't being consumed by class preparation, futzing with my Olson article, reshuffling manuscripts, and fretting about the election.

Saddening news of the passing of Reginald Shepherd yesterday. We never met, but I had a stimulating and occasionally contentious online relationship with him for years. His apparent esteem for my work and opinions did a lot to help me feel that I had something valuable to contribute to the discourse surrounding American poetry, for which I'll always be grateful. He unfailingly addressed me as "Joshua" no matter how often I signed my e-mails "Josh," and I came to welcome the grace notes of his formality. I'll miss hearing what I imagined his voice sounded like: a bass-baritone with a rare glinting laugh attached.

Over at Exoskeleton, in between posting about his own election anxieties, Johannes Göransson has been taking issue with some of my blogpinions. I seem to be something of a bête noir of his, for manifesting insufficient political sensitivities. Now I read his blog with some regularity, but I still want to say: Johannes, by all means pick bones with me, but link to the posts you argue with, eh? Otherwise I may not find out you've been criticizing me until weeks after the fact.

Most recently, Johannes expressed irritation with the "tribes" model that Scott McCloud adapted for talking about comics, and which I've found useful for thinking about poetry—my own most of all. He objects, if I read him aright, to what he sees as my belief that political poetry (i.e., iconoclasm) is less artistic than the other kinds (such as formalism). For Johannes, all poetry, indeed I'd say all artistic production, is political, a point that any longtime reader of this blog knows I agree with. But he seems to think that when I describe a certain kind of political poetry as "angry" or "feces-throwing" that I'm denigrating its artistic value. Far from it! He seems entirely to have missed my genuine sense of envy when confronted by the work of poets and writers whose self-identification, if offered McCloud's model, would certainly fall heavily on the Iconoclast/Animist side of the street—the real shit-stirrers, people like Kent Johnson and caconrad and some of the Flarfists and some of the "gurlesque" writers (and Johannes himself). Hurling feces is entirely appropriate behavior from an artist who feels him or herself to be in a cage, and the art of attracting spectators in that situation, who risk being themselves beshitted but are nonetheless drawn to that implicating spectacle, is a very fine art indeed.

As I'd want to make use of it, the four tribes model is in no way prescriptive, but descriptive, and of less use in categorizing art than in assisting in an artist's own fuller self-perception and positioning. It's a means of situating oneself in the field, and of assessing one's own inclinations and fears. It's true that, unlike Silliman's quietude/post-avant bifurcation, it's not a historicizing model, which may be a weakness. But I'd argue that a model that can be used historically (to talk about what Iconoclasm might have meant to the second-gen New York School poets, for example) is more useful than a model that purports to do all the critical work for you, so that nothing remains to you but sorting the poets you encounter into this category or that.

Finally, the question was raised as to whether I read comics. Yes I do, but much less than I used to, because they're so darned expensive and because comic book store owners, in my experience, are paranoid about people lingering over their wares, insisting that you buy something if you spend more than a couple of minutes with any one title. This forces me into the arms of Barnes & Noble, where you can sit and read for hours, but the selection is much more limited. It's true I've mostly read Anglo-American comics, and my favorites aren't particularly outré—Harvey Pekar, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, more recently Alison Bechdel. But I do enjoy the work of Jason (I got a big kick out of his book The Left Bank Gang, which reimagines the American expatriate writers of the 1920s—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, etc.—as both comic book artists and criminals), I watched a lot of anime in college, and I also used to read Heavy Metal which introduced me to French artists like Moebius. So I been around.

When Four Tribes Go to War

Ron has linked to a blog entry by Damien G. Walter on Scott McCloud's theory of the four tribes of artists in his book Making Comics. Longtime readers may recall my excitement about McCloud's classifications in this post that I wrote two years ago. I only call attention to it now because of the spiffy graphic, which I may print out and give to my creative writing students late in the semester, after they've had a chance to build up a small body of work and some confidence, just to promote discussion.

My own natural orientation tends toward Formalist/Classicist, the two "headiest" tribes, but I often look with longing at the greener grass of the Animists and Iconoclasts, grubbing and hooting and blazing with passion and hurling their own feces at the looky-loos. Flarf has attracted so much attention, I think, for being a counterintuitive blending of the Formalist and Iconoclast positions, whereas most of the Language and post-Language writers tend to be either strongly Formalist or strongly Iconoclast without much mixing (Michael Palmer versus Bruce Andrews, say, or Lyn Hejinian versus Alice Notley). The good old School of Quietude writers form an occasionally fractious alliance between Classicists and Animists; for a long time they had many people persuaded that their dyad was the only game in town. One could go on mapping poets and movements this way, but as a cognitive model it's probably most useful for obtaining a better self-understanding.

For a writer like me, uneasily perched between "emerging" and "mid-career," McCloud's tribes help me explain a little better to myself my own dissatisfactions with my writing, and will maybe even serve as fingerposts pointing toward new goals, new processes.

Reintroduction to Creative Writing

If you Google "creative writing" you come up with images like the one above, which serves if anything to remind me how resistant the act of writing is to visualization. A flip through the latest Poets & Writers reveals various attempts to overcome this difficulty in the selling of journals, books, and MFA programs. Images of young people in presumably intense discussion, famous or semi-famous faces, romantic landscapes and cityscapes, and abstract designs: you see all this, but the default image still seems to be the image implicit of some older mode of literary production: 1930s manual typewriters (I've never seen a Selectric in an ad, I don't think), fountain pens and inkbottles, or even just the graphic background of a yellow legal pad. You will never see a laptop so fetishized, at least not until we're all writing in the air like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

The image of the writer is on my mind as I put the finishing touches on my third syllabus for the fall semester, which gets started this week, Introduction to Creative Writing. Last year I was preoccupied with the question of creative writing as self-expression, given that young college students are rather more concerned with self-construction. Estrangement therefore guided my thinking about how to teach the course and what texts they should read: I wanted to destabilize the "naturalness" of prose narrative and rhymed verse.

This time around, without losing sight of the need to keep my students just a little off-balance, I'm taking a more pragmatic approach which might appear to be a retreat from Thoreau's "Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?" Partly this is because I've discovered my students don't have, for better or worse, as many allegiances as I'd expected to normative modes. I've come to accept the necessity of teaching them how to make a chair you can actually sit in before you start experimenting with the number of legs. And I've adopted a textbook with an eminently pragmatic approach to literary carpentry, Heather Sellers' The Practice of Creative Writing. What I like most about Sellers' book is the vocabulary and framework she provides for addressing creative writing—a vocabulary particularly valuable for being applicable to any mode of writing, or arguably any artistic practice at all. Rather than grouping into units on poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, etcetera, like most such textbooks, the Sellers book is organized around six principles or strategies that every beginning writer would be wise to become conscious of:

- Energy is what keeps readers turning the page. Subject matter is a big part of this: choosing a subject you know a great deal about, or are intensely curious about, will bring more energy to the writing. Leaps and gaps—what you leave out—are critical, as are word choice (concrete nouns, strong verbs) and pacing.
- Images refer not just to the visual element but to what you might call the "experientiality" of a text: its capacity for making the reader feel that he or she is there in the world of the story or poem. For Sellers the image is fundamentally opposed to "ideas" and intellection. I have some reservations about this, but really this section boils down to "show don't tell," and for beginning writers I'm on board with that.
- Tension is something many young writers neglect—I can't tell you how many stories I've read featuring a single protagonist alone with his or her thoughts and feelings, as opposed to being in actual conflict with other people. One thing I really like about the tension chapter is the strategy of "layering": images that contrast with the action, triangular relationships, and action that contrast and conflicts with dialogue (she calls this "facade," and it's another extremely useful tool for younger writers, who tend to write dialogues in which the characters say exactly what they mean, exactly unlike real human beings).
- Pattern has two divergent meanings for Sellers: pattern by ear (that is, the musical tools of verse: rhyme, meter, rhythm, consonance, etc.) and pattern by eye, which refers both to visual images created within a text (objects that form a significant pattern, characters' gestures) and visual arrangements on the page (this refers mostly to white space but is also an opening for talking about page-as-field).
- Insight—this is a category I'm really glad to devote some time to. This addresses the "So what?" question raised by any piece of writing on a deeper level than tension or energy; it refers to what we might call the truth content of any piece of writing. For Sellers, the means of achieving insight with writing are accuracy, particularly about human behavior; generosity toward one's characters and one's reader; asking questions with your writing rather than providing answers. She's careful to point out that these can be small questions as well as questions about death and the meaning of life (though one certainly shouldn't shun those).
- Structure: Elements. Sellers does another smart thing by dividing "structure" into two sections. The "Elements" section deals with the components of a piece, the moving parts of a narrative or a poem. She offers the categories of "bits," "beats," and "scenes" for thinking about prose, while for poems she focuses on words and lines. Commonsense stuff, maybe, but worth spending a chapter on.
- Structure: Forms. For poems she offers an expected handful of traditional forms: the pantoum, ghazal, sestina, and villanelle (why not the sonnet?). For narratives she breaks things into linear and non-linear structures: the former includes the classical dramatic structure we all learned in high school (rising action, climax, falling action), the journey, and the journey's inverse, the visitation (reminding of someone's axiom that there are only two plots: a young person leaves town, a stranger rides into town). I'm glad she offered some nonlinear structures to think about as well: the list, the alphabet (shades of Walter Abish!), and the braid (three or more interlocking strands of narrative).

In general I find the materials Sellers has to offer on prose are more interesting and useful than those to do with poetry, a feeling confirmed by the mini-anthology that the books effectively contains. The prose pieces include an excerpt from Amy Fusselman's terrific The Pharmacist's Mate (an example of braided narrative and an early McSweeney's production), stalwart stylists like Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, and Michael Cunningham, and some expected but nonetheless welcome contributions from the likes of Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore. The poems, on the other hand, are almost invariably either anecdotal or precious, reflecting Sellers' simplistic division of all poems into narrative or lyric categories (though she does make space for the prose poem). This would bother me more if I weren't confident in my ability to present the students with broader poetic options. It's prose I need a little more help with, and in any case the six strategies Sellers provides are perfectly viable for describing the workings of a poem by Lisa Jarnot or Ron Silliman, say.

Sellers stresses the difference between images and "thought" to a degree that makes me just a little uneasy. She's absolutely write to point out that student writers tend to put a layer of insulation between their readers and their texts; instead, "Your images shouldn't be about describing, they shouldn't be about anything at all; they should be the thing." Well, William Carlos Williams could hardly disagree with her. But on the same page she claims, "Creative writers don't want their readers to think. We want them to see and feel." This is a false dichotomy. I can understand why Sellers puts so much stress on sensory detail and experience, because students are likely to be uncomfortable with putting their own sensual experience on the line in their writing. But I, for one, want my readers to think—it's really just a question of priority, in that I want the thinking to happen after, or maybe just at right angles, to the sensual presence of the language. Maybe Sellers just trusts that this kind of thing will take care of itself: first the elements of craft, then cognition or Geist may follow.

Sellers has another idea or first principle for beginning writers that seems useful but questionable: a stress on audience, which takes us back to the self-expression problem. In the first chapter, she distinguishes between writing for yourself and writing for others, and puts "creative writing" firmly in the second category. This is an expedient means of transmitting what we might call a "professional" attitude to students: their first and last concern is the effect they want to have on readers. It's an effective message in contradiction of a younger writer's more solipsistic tendencies, accompanied as it is by the message that the writer should never be having more fun than her reader. But it is a push toward professionalization, and the way the book is composed leaves little room for the possibility of different notions of audience, or the audience one's writing is intended to create. Maybe this is an unnecessary layer of sophistication for an introductory class, but I worry that as a strategy this passes writing too quickly out of the question of, if not self, of different sorts of community for readers and writers other than those determined by the insatiable market for sensation (tension, imagery, and all the rest).

Quibbles, really, given the usefulness of Sellers' six strategies, which provide a simple theoretical armature that I wish had been available to me when I was a creative writing student, told that certain lines didn't "work" or that I hadn't "earned" a particular image. They also provide a useful simulacrum of objective standards by which writing can be judged, which goes some way toward addressing the always vexing question of how to grade a piece of creative writing. More on that perhaps another time.

Man on Wire

I don't get to the movies much these ways (see below for the reason why) but last night I saw this haunting documentary. The director, James Marsh, said he conceived of his film about Phillipe Petit's insane and triumphant endeavor to walk a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 as a heist picture, and that's exactly how it plays (the tagline is "1974. 1350 feet up. The artistic crime of the century"). But as if that weren't pleasure enough—suspenseful in spite of knowing how it turns out—it's also a film about an artist at work, and about collaboration. Petit's obssession, and his ability to bring others into his obsession, make this one of the finest films I've seen about artmaking, comparable in its way to my all-time favorite The Five Obstructions. The obstacles in this case are not those posed by a diabolical apprentice but are simply, staggeringly logistical. Yet in both films the artist in question has to cross the black territory of the unconscious without dwelling there in order to achieve works of lacerating perfection.

The lyricism of the images of Petit on his wire take on an additional elegiac resonance given the further destiny of those towers—an event referred to not at all by the film. Marsh knows that he doesn't have to mention it, and the peculiar interpolation of History with Petit's defiant assertion of art-for-art's sake (he derides, in a friendly way, those Americans who kept asking him "Why?" afterward) for me raises anew the necessity of art's autonomy from life. But Petit's autonomy is achieved almost literally on the razor's edge of life—it's astounding he didn't fall to his death—and this perhaps reminds us that one shouldn't speak too glibly of the imagination as that which resists the pressure of reality (to use Stevens' language—I'm reading him again in preparation for my modern poetry class). Petit staked his body on "le coup" as he and his team called it, and if poets don't do the same in kind, if not in degree, their work might succeed didactically or be politically engagé without having the real savor of what is simultaneously escape from reality and the penetration of it. "Strike behind the mask"—Petit is a good-natured Ahab who neither kills the whale nor tames it—he rides, he surfs, he flies, at one point on one knee, paying homage to the spirit that's within him.

The dark and utter contrast between "the artistic crime of the century" and what Karl Stockhausen infamously termed "the greatest work of art ever" requires no further comment, except perhaps to say that when you wield a razor instead of walking its edge you pass from revelation to obscenity. Perhaps there's a dialectic here, but it's one I haven't the stomach for.

Late Summer Cuteness

More substantive and less cute blogging to follow in the not too distant future.

Forward to the Nineteenth Century

For the past couple of weeks I've been ruminating the various aspects of my pastoral project—the Olson paper, ideas for an anthology, plans for a book—trying to decide, in effect, where to plant my Archimedean fulcrum. On the one hand I've been reading a lot of poetry and criticism, particularly Olson and Oppen, and thinking about how their paths of innovation lead toward the postmodern pastoral. On the other hand I've been sunk deep in theory, most especially that of Fredric Jameson, and constructing what might be meant by a postmodern pastoral. My habits of mind lead me to get more excited about writing big-picture theory than I do about the more painstaking and empirical task of criticism. But whichever end of the fulcrum I emphasize, I'm going to need both if my dissertation ideas will be reborn as something fresh, relevant, and urgent.

But goodbye to all that, because August is here and I need to get my syllabi in shape. Today it's not the Modern Poetry course that preoccupies me but the hoary old survey class, Nineteenth-Century American Literature. This is a repeat course, unlike Modern Poetry, but I'm not satisfied with how things went last semester so I'm making some changes. The most basic change is switching anthologies from the Norton to the Heath—the latter puts more emphasis on presenting the spectrum of nineteenth-century cultural writing than the Norton, which is a canon-making machine. The representation of non-white-male authors in the Heath is much higher than the Norton, and their notes suggest a more overtly politicized approach to the material (that is to say, they don't pretend there's a politically neutral stance from which to regard these texts). At the same time, all the classics that I want to teach are still included, and often in superior versions: the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," "Bartleby" and other major works by Melville (no Moby-Dick, but the excerpts provided in the Norton seemed to confuse my students more than enlighten them), a cluster of Hawthorne stories plus the entirety of The Scarlet Letter, plenty of Emerson, Frederick Douglass' Narrative and "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", a useful chunk of Cooper's The Pioneers, stories by Washington Irving, etc.

Last year I broke the course up into five units: Lighting Out for the Territory (we read all of Huck Finn), The Original Sin of Slavery, What Was Transcendentalism?, American Gothic (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville), and Containing Multitudes (Whitman and Dickinson). I will use units again this year, but I want them to be more cumulative this time, so that each text we read will have clear roots and antecedents in what went before, to give my students a stronger sense of literature as conversation and contest. And I'm letting go of Huck Finn (and also of Walden, another long book we read in its entirety) for the sake of greater breadth: I want to start earlier in the century and end later. Finally, I want to regionalize/spatialize this great unwieldy "American" beast—so after some initial questioning of the "American," I want to devote each unit to a different region of the emerging nation and its distinctive literatures. But I won't necessarily think of "regions" in the conventional way. So:

- Becoming American: This section will focus on the earliest moments in the American experience as they were being recapitulated, celebrated, and criticized by nineteenth-century authors. Texts will include some propagandistic poems by Lydia Sigourney, Washington Irving's scathing satire on the white campaign against Indians from A History of New York, "Rip Van Winkle," Emerson's "The American Scholar," three chapters from Cooper's The Pioneers, excerpts from Catharine Maria Sedgwick's novel Hope Leslie. The urge to separate from Europe, and the urge to at once destroy and assimilate American "wildness," will be counterposed.

- New England Transcendentalists: This unit will focus largely on the theory and nonfiction associated with New England in the first half of the century. We'll read Emerson's "Nature" and "The Poet," Margaret Fuller's "American Literature," Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government," "Walking," and some excerpts from Walden.

- Slavery and the South: In addition to Douglass's Narrative and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we'll read some of the abolitionist rhetoric addressed directly to Southerners (particularly Angelina Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South) and two Southern apologists, Caroline Lee Hentz and George Fitzhugh (the latter is particularly interesting for his quasi-Marxist argument—saying in effect that the feudal institution of slavery is kinder than capitalist wage-slavery). We'll also read some Civil War literature: bits of Mary Chesnut's Civil War and some of Melville's Battle Pieces and Whitman's Drum-Taps (kind of a back-door into Whitman).

- American Interiors: Two parts to this unit. One focuses on women's writing and the ways in which they subtly or overtly revise the more usual narratives about American values and expansion. So that means pieces from Fanny Fern, excerpts from Caroline Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow? (my mostly midwestern students will no doubt be amused by her depictions of a wild and untamed Michigan)), and Dickinson's poems. But the other part will focus on the rise of "psychological" literature: Poe stories and poems, some Hawthorne stories, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

- Containing Multitudes: I'm keeping this title for Whitman, but I also want this unit to address the rise of industrial-urban America after the Civil War. There's a useful section or "cluster" in the anthology titled "Literacy, Literature, and Democracy in Postbellum American" that addresses the question of which Americans get to speak and shape America. I'd also like to include Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills," Melville's "Bartleby" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and finish up with Henry Adams's famous chapter on "The Virgin and the Dynamo."

This is a lot to cram into fifteen weeks, and I'm sure the actual syllabus will be more selective than this list indicates. I'm also not sure if the thematized units shouldn't be taken more loosely, because there are texts I'm interested in teaching that are hard to categorize in this fashion (where do I put Daisy Miller, for example?). I need to strike a balance between a larger narrative about American self-fashioning and the perverse individual will of each text to be itself alone.

When I've worked this all up it will be time to address the last class I'm teaching this fall, which I've also taught before: Introduction to Creative Writing. This time I'm using a textbook I've found that's not bad, principally because of the critical vocabulary it offers to young writers. But that's another post.

O Superwoman

This bit from a Village Voice interview with one of my favorite artists caught my eye:

I’m not messianic about this. I don’t need to bring my message to the world. I’m a classic case of talking, you know, to the people who agree with me in a lot of ways. And it’s also because I’m a snob, you know. I don’t think art’s a very good way to convince people. This material came into my work not because I was trying to deliver a message, but because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It just became about that. I’m not a missionary. I’m not trying to convert anyone to see things a certain way, at all. I’m really not. Why do I use political content? Because it’s the crossover with journalism, and with anyone who tells a story.

The sentence I've italicized there is really what I believe distinguishes artmaking from rhetoric, and I think one of the most difficult tasks for an artist is trusting the—I don't know, veracity?—of whatever it is you can't get out of your mind. And when I encounter a book of poems these days, I find I'm looking for evidence of that kind of commitment—the commitment of a ghost to its haunted house. So often I read poems or collections of poems whose reason for being seems merely whimsical or merely rhetorical. Whereas what turns my head is committed to the generally unenviable task of articulating something that other people don't necessarily want to hear—hell, that you don't want to hear.

I find it interesting, though, that in spite of Laurie Anderson's self-deprecating frankness, she still represents her work as that of being the kind of storytelling that's meant to call attention to story-making: in other words, there is still a critical task in hand, even if she knows she's preaching to the converted. Here's the rest of what she had to say in response to the interviewer's question about audiences:

You know, when we were invading . . . or saber-rattling last November about invading Iran, Bush’s story was ‘Here’s an evil dictator with weapons of mass destruction.’ Jaw-dropping, you know. Like, we’d all heard that story before. We saw where that went. But, you know, there was still some people who went, ‘Oh, okay.’ Instead of going, ‘What are you telling that story again for?’ So it didn’t matter than it wasn’t a true story. It mattered that it was a good story, with the evil guy and hidden treasure and all the things that people want. It’s not a complicated one, but it’s got a good cast of characters. So it’s a fantastic time to be doing this kind of work because everybody’s got their story about where we are, where we’re going. ‘We’re going to be at war for 100 years.’ You have to say, you know, ‘Why is he telling that story? Why is he smiling when he’s saying that?’ But I don’t think there’s a lot of that real kind of analysis going on, so that also is what Homeland’s about, you know, stories and how you tell them.

What I like about this is how on the one hand Anderson's standing up for the artist's right—her imperative—to follow what compels her, no matter how strange or redundant that thing might be... and on the other hand, her work performs a task of analysis that is at least potentially socially useful (if only in the sense that it's useful to her and makes it possible for her to go on telling these stories, which clearly some few of us need to hear). That said, other remarks she makes in the interview suggest that for Anderson, the socially useful is beside the point:

- ...part of my downfall in a way is I kind of like the world as it is. I don’t really feel like, ‘Wow, I have to change it.’ I don’t. It’s kind of always fascinating.

- I really do think that we’re here to have a really good time, shallow as that may sound.

At the same time, she's an acute observer: "You know, we voted in an anti-war government in ’04, but they didn’t stop the war because, you know, basically the government doesn’t run the war." But these observations are a part of her storytelling in a way that doesn't, or isn't meant to, motivate or rabble-rouse. At most, you hear that sort of thing and you recognize the truth of it. And what you do with that recognition is up to you.

I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson, probably the first contemporary artist I was ever made aware of, thanks to my friend Rachel who I knew when I was in fifteen and who was in love with her. She gave a tremendous performance as part of Ithaca's Light in Winter festival that we saw a couple of years ago. I hope to catch her in Chicago sometime—I understand she's from here.

Shaping Up

With some trepidation, I've decided to ditch Whitman and Dickinson from my modern poetry course and to focus on the twentieth century instead. The texts I've ordered for the class are:

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind
Gertrude Stein, Selections
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
John Ashbery, Selected Poems
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook

I've decided to trust that my students will have at least some familiarity with Whitman and Dickinson (this trust based in part on the fact that at least a couple of students signed up for the fall studied those poets in my Nineteenth-Century American Lit class last year (which I'm also teaching again this fall). Which is not to say I can't start the course off with a little sampler handout, just so they can begin to appreciate and start noticing some of the most elemental modern tactics: whether a poem has short lines and a basically vertical movement on the page, or long lines and a horizontal movement; musical effects in the absence of rhyme; leaving-it-out versus putting-it-in; etc.

Strategy versus tactics: I read with interest the comments of Nada Gordon and others on my original post about the course's composition. I definitely think I've constructed the course less as a theory of influences and more with a pedagogical framework in mind: as Kasey says in his comment, my theory is that "the majority of contemporary practice which might appear strange or challenging to the uninitiated reader has been anticipated in one way or another by the particular methodological and presentational choices made by the [poets] in question." In other words, I'm thinking primarily as a reader, seeking to provide a map (there's navigation again) for less experienced readers. I would never presume to create some kind of schema that looked like (Pound + Stevens)/Stein = Ashbery; I know that influence is a much stranger and more unpredictable beast than that. I doubt I'm even aware of every one of my own poetic influences: any such list is potentially of infinite length, given the fact that other poets are far from the only influence on a poet's writing. (Annette Funicello, anyone?)

I haven't tried to free myself or my students from the canon, because of the shaping force it's had, for better or worse, on my own ideas about poetry. I can conceive a course in reading poetry that ignored all canonical figures and poems and instead focused entirely on the contemporary, and maybe I'll try that next time. But I fear this would only deepen, or rather fill in further, the shallow sense of literary history that most undergraduates have. Which raises an interesting question: how can you teach the history of an art form without resorting to canons (or counter-canons through a feminist approach, a Marxist approach, etc.)? Maybe one of my cleverer readers could enlighten me.

Eliot, Williams, Pound, and Stein remain the core quartet, the poets whom I believe have done the most in terms of innovating and creating the field of modern poetry. Then I decided I couldn't leave out Stevens, if only because he's been the greatest single influence on my own work and I might as well cop to that. After those five we move into the postwar period and a sampler of poets of varying canonicity who all, I believe, adopt tactics the core five would recognize—collage, found texts, parataxis, imagism, association, page-as-field—but with wildly different strategic goals. Ginsberg is someone my students have probably read, but Howl is such an epochal poem and I doubt they've read it very closely. O'Hara's mannerisms are maybe over-influential, but what really interests me about him is how, to use a Heideggerianism, he dwells poetically in New York and New York-ly (queerly, visually, cacophonously) in poetry. Brooks is a very different urban poet and a Chicago poet too; I'm interested in how she uses narrative to reconcile aesthetic and political purposes. Ashbery is Ashbery. Mullen combines playfulness and serious critical intent to a high degree, and students love her. And Gudding's book is almost certainly too long a book to end a semester with, but it was one of the most moving reading experiences I had last year, and I think he'll give my writing students permission to write about dimensions of experience they may not have realized are possible to bring into poetry. Plus one of the other elements I want to weave into the course is the function of long poems versus short poems: to finish with a long poem that calls itself a "notebook" and consists of innumerable fragments should leave us with interesting questions.

Obviously I've left out many, many poets who are important to American poetry and to me personally: Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, H.D., all the Objectivists, Charles Olson, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, etc., etc. We only have fifteen weeks. But if I get to teach this course on a recurring basis, I'll mix up the reading list, and I might even specialize in a given school or movement to further test my theory about teaching transferable reading strategies. It would be amazing to teach a "modern poetry" class that focused exclusively on the Objectivists, for example: Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Niedecker, Reznikoff, Rakosi. A course in the generations of the New York School would also be a no-brainer, or a course in Language poetry. I hope this time around to learn a great deal from my students: what they already know or think they know, what their expectations for poetry might be, who or what they see in their mind's eye when they hear the word "poet." We shall see.

Poetry as Navigation

In some ways what preoccupies me most in poetry is navigation: the poem as cognitive map; the poem as an imaginative attempt at orientation, in and through language. Jameson’s Postmodernism appeals to me most of all for its notion of cognitive mappig and what it suggests for postmodern poetry as a series of attempts to navigate and make palpable the capitalist world-system that is rarely if ever visible to the naked eye. In this respect for me poetry is no different from criticism and theory, as discourses which illuminate invisible connections both vertically (the modernist "depth model" of what’s beneath the surface: Freud and the unconscious. Marx and the mode of production, Darwin and natural selection) and horizontally (the postmodernist network of metonyms: Derrida’s chain of signifiers, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, Lyotard’s implosion of master narratives).

What draws me to the great modernist long poems—The Waste Land, The Cantos, Trilogy, Paterson, “A”, ARK—is their epic-scale attempt by an individual to situate him or herself in relation to a culture or cultures dynamically conceived. Even their most conservative attempts to arrest that dynamism—to save a tradition from decay, dissolution, or outright destruction (Pound, Eliot, H.D.), or to preserve a place, a family, or their own imaginations (Williams, Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson) from the pressures of capital—manage to include that dynamic through the fundamental modernist technique of collage, so that each poem is, in Stevens’ terms, a pitched battle between "reality" and imagination. A battle which can never be won; yet merely to locate the enemy’s ground and engage him is a tremendous victory of perception, given the pressure we all are under to submit to the most expedient narrative frames for our lives—frames that omit reality and imagination in almost equal measure.

I'm drawn to pastoral as one of the oldest literary modes of mapping, which is simultaneously a troubling of the territory: where does nature end and culture begin? And as I immerse myself more deeply in ecocriticism I recognize its attempts to think space, place, and history in a fresh way. Struck by the mutual hostility and incomprehension of mainstream ecocritics and postmodernists, and by the similarity of their projects: deep ecology, which seems to be the most influential ecocritical impulse (versus the shallowness of "environmentalism" as just another attempt to manage nature), takes a post- or anti-humanist stance that Foucault might recognize in its decentering of the human subject. The difference is that Foucault, et al, would say that there is only discourse (il n'y a pas hors de texte) and the power relations that generate and situate subjects, whereas the deep ecologists privilege the nonhuman and in their more enthusiastic moments claim the nonhuman as a kind of ur-discourse (mystical, scientific, or both) through which we can access reality directly. I'm too far gone in postmodernism to go there: I think all our claims about nature are saturated in ideology, even and especially when they're made in scientific language. The virtue of pastoral is the transparency of its relation to ideology, and a properly postmodern pastoral will deconstruct its own claims about nature while its powerful affect remains intact.

I say that navigation is what I go to poetry for—Pound’s periplum, Olson’s 'istorin—but it’s more atavistic than that. Reading in Lawrence Buell’s Writiing for an Endangered World an observation of Leslie Marmon Silko’s that "particularity of environmental detail may actually betoken lack of connectedness," I immediately think of my own childhood and my sense of being trapped in a world I never made. The social relations that others seemed to swim in like fish in water were at once visible and opaque: I saw clearly the power struggles that governed relationships, but my vision seemingly disqualified me from joining the struggle in a meaningful way. I suspect this experience is typical of many intellectuals, or at least it’s typical of nerds as they’re described in a useful taxonomy I read recently. I wrote and later read poetry (that’s the usual order, no?) because it promised to reintegrate what I saw and what I felt: as a cognitive mode that involves the body (by ear, he sd) it creates danceable maps of experience. Later on I became more interested in collective modes of experience, in more layered and detailed maps (whereas the lyrical-confessional mode of poetry that I was originally attracted to was more concerned with points than lines: for such poetry YOU ARE is more important than YOU ARE HERE), and I was also not coincidentally discovering the great theoretical maps of psychological and social and historical being (I’m a latecomer to the biological via my new interest in ecopoetics). For a long while the more abstract something was—the more of a God’s eye view it promised of the territory—the more seductive I found it. Only recently has this tendency been counterbalanced back toward a concern with more local and particular details, and in my rewrite of Severance Songs I'm trying to rediscover the unabandonable "I." Because creating a map, however variegated and gorgeous, may be less important now than the act of tracking and orienteering, of living off the unstable postmodern "land" without accepting it as the only possible reality. (I find I am incorrigibly diasporic in my thinking, a sojourner, most un-at-home when at home. But maybe this feeling has been intensified by moving twice in two years.) Another way of saying that I want to preserve something of the modernist preoccupation with history—the absolute present of the postmodern nullifies the very notion of a future that doesn’t look like the present, but more so.

Signs of Life

Which has basically been topsy-turvy since early May. In that time, I've gone to Europe, spent a few weeks hanging out in Ithaca, changed apartments here in Evanston, spent a week in Arizona with the in-laws, and now slowly unpacking, reading Plonsker applications, and ruminating over how best to spend the precious few weeks remaining before classes start again. Of course as I ruminate, the time goes by! I have a number of projects on the fire but they're all in early, creative stages—this is a great place to be except when I start worrying about summer's end and what I might tangibly have to show for them.

Severance Songs has gone through a full revision and I'm waiting for a little feedback from friends before I send it on its rounds again. I've got a big stack of books on the subject of ecocriticism and I'm slowly looking through them with an eye toward launching my pastoral book from the ashes of my dissertation. I'm working on my syllabi, most intently right now on a modern poetry course: after some dithering I've decided to emphasize teaching the students to fish rather than filling their creels for them. That means less of a survey and more of an intensive study of a handful of the greats, followed by their seizing the initiative and writing about a poet of their choosing. "Modern poetry" is a vast acreage and if I had world enough and time I'd make the mix of poets more international, but for the first time I teach a course like this I think it's wiser to stay closer to my own areas of expertise, which means American modernism. So we'll start out with Whitman and Dickinson, ancestors of us all, then read healthy chunks of Williams, Eliot, Pound, and Stein. After that I'd like to shift the emphasis to the contemporary, and to get a little more diverse vis-a-vis race, politics, and gender. My pedagogical theory here is, familiarize yourself with the strategies of these six poets and there's no poem whose tactics you won't be able to figure out.

Still and all, what I'd really rather be doing is continue to read George Oppen, whose complete published oeuvre is now at my fingertips, having picked up a probably mispriced copy of the Selected Letters for a song online. I'm not uncritical of Oppen's ascetism, his underdeveloped feminism (at times in the Daybooks he sounds just like D.H. Lawrence), or his ontological one-mindedness (what he refers to in the letters as his "metaphysical vertigo"). But I find him to be an excellent, sober, keen-sighted and dry-witted companion on what I can only describe as a search for the roots of my own poetic impulses—a quest for renewal, to see clearly what it is I'm about, as I shake free of the chatter and clutter of a childless life when there was more time, or so it seems now, to dawdle in cul-de-sacs or to give basically uninteresting work second and third chances. Besides, I love reading letters (alas for the dead art! there's only blogs now), especially letters like these in which the poet himself is in pursuit of fundamentals and there's only small leaven of gossip and publishing chit-chat to wade through.

All this, plus Sadie, plus my lingering wish to get a good D&D game or something like it going again. When I haven't even seen a movie in ages. (Except for WALL-E, in Arizona while my aunt was babysitting—excellent.)

Horn-Tooting

Chad Blair, a fellow University of Montana creative writing alum, has written a sensitive and appreciative review of Compos(t)ition Marble for the English Department's alumni newsletter. Click here then click "Spring/Summer 2008 • Volume 1, Issue 2" (it's a PDF, so you may want to right-click and save) to read it. The newsletter is worth perusing in full, as is the inaugural issue: it testifies to what a vital and interesting writing program Montana has had and continues to have. I'm proud to have gone there.

My favorite sentence from the review: "So this poem reads like the working out of an impossible math problem titled what is everything urban happening right now?" And it's truly humbling to hear this sentence of Allen Grossman's quoted in reference to what I was trying to do in that poem: "The highest form which poetic ambition, in my mind, can take is to join together oracular profundity with the whole, intact, harmonious, and socially-addressed countenance."

Happy Bloomsday

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Further Notes on Poetic Ecologies

16 May 2008
Friday

A poet's talk by Jack Collom kicks off the day. "I think nature is made of fruitful contradictions." The structure of trees, the structure of poems—"rivertrees." The poem flows in like a river, branches out like a tree. Xylem refers to the structural hardness of wood but it is also a conduit for liquid. Quotes Darwin: "The greatest amount of life can be supported by the greatest diversification of structure."

"It's okay to be partly mechanical. Otherwise you couldn't walk! Downplay 'meaning' a bit."

- "Nature is everthing and something."
- "It's the ocean culture floats in."
- "It's what's not built."
- "Oooooh!"
- "It's a rose and it's a photographed rose."
- "It's the desire to smash nature to bits."

A poem in its entirety:

Nature's too slow.
People get
bored.

"The shockingly vast gulf between time and moment."

In normal descriptive writing we tend to collage in labels. "But the things needn't be entities wearing badges." "We don't so much see things as recognize things." A definition for metaphor: "essence revealed by indirection." "Writing description is a process of circumventing data per se." "It takes imagination to see what's in front of you, to avoid using labels."

"Help to shift our reverence energy into activism." "Political poems [are] compassionate noise."

Wonderful word: spandrel. Refers to the space between two arches, but Collom uses it to describe the variances in a system.

Finishes with a long, sad, astonished poem, "Passage," about the destruction of the passenger pigeon. In the Q&A he makes an appealing distinction regarding Darwin: that he thinks diversity and mutation—the theory of expansion in Darwin—is more significant than natural selection. Mentions McKenzie Wark as originator of a phrase, "third nature." Says "second nature" originates with Cicero.

Franca Bellarsi, the conference organizer (a very sweet soul) asks if Collom's theory of language as second nature is a challenge to or rejection of deconstruction, poststructuralism, et al. Collom: there are lots of contradictory truths in nature, implying there's no necessary conflict between these positions. "Multiple truths concurrently operational." Pound's Chinese writing visual-onomatopoetic and arbitrary.

Where things are coming from is more important than what they point to.

Good stuff. Jack's a very appealing character: I didn't know his work before this but shall seek it out now.

Mid-morning panel on pastoral. My paper, "Tansy City: Charles Olson and the Prospects for Avant-Pastoral" is first. I won't say more about that now.

Adam Dickinson gives a paper on Erin Moure's "deterritorialized pastoral" in a newish book of hers: Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, which is a kind of translation from Pessoa/Caeiro. Combines Pessoa's pastoral landscape with the geographical facts of the city of Toronto's burial and entombment of its brooks and streams. This heuristic combination, Adam says, is a form of 'pataphysics, which suggests a critical-playful attitude toward the limits of scientific language in conventional ecopoetry.

Talks about ecopoetry's emphasis on referentiality and realism, and its concomitant neglect of postmodernism. "Realism"-->turn to science. Glen A. Love says in Practical Ecocriticism that scientific ecology can "reel us in when we've gone too far." But as Adam says, "If there's science that imagines itself as poetry, what can we then make of poetry that imagines itself to be science?"

Cites Christian Bok's take on 'pataphysics—that it makes weak arguments stronger through the deterritorialization of scientific procedures.

I'd say then that a binary between Romanticism and referential realism continues to obtain in our ecopoetic discourse. I'd argue that the weakness of the latter is in its turn from the imagination's capabilities of affect—that form of knowledge won't change our behavior, as scientific knowledge about the lethality of smoking has largely failed to persuade people to quit.

Moure's is a practice of ecstatic translation or "transelation." She adopted, in her words, "preposterous and excessive" constraints for her project.

Angela M. Leonard gives a paper on African-American gravesites and how visiting them complicates W.E.B. DuBois' notion of "double consciousness." The focus is on "mourners who return to environments." The "syndetic" reading of gravesites—"memory work" that extracts contradictory materials which must be accepted without being resolved.

DuBois: double consciousness creates "moral hesitancy" in both black and white Americans.

Jonathan Skinner is last with a presentation on constraints and procedures in pastoral poetry. He reminds us that the "ouvroir" of Oulipo refers colloquially to a sewing circle. The move from constraint toward procedure—"a restraint on the task of writing itself."

Authors/works mentioned included Alexander "Eck" Finlay's Mesostic Herbarium; Stephen Ratcliffe (whose constraints in Real include a) something he sees out the window; b) something that happened yesterday; something from Woolf's To the Lighthouse); Zukofsky's 80 Flowers as a "species saturation project".

Ecocriticism demands that you know what you're talking about.

"...constraint as a way of taming the unconscious." Ethical implications of Noulipo: "The constraint is a procedure for the distribution of agency."

17 May 2008
Saturday

Barely wake up in time for the last panel (2:30 PM!) on poetry and science after a night's carousing with Jonathan and Robin Purvis. Madhur Anand talks about Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity as literary analogies to ecological ambiguities. She uses Ashbery poems as demonstrations of the types.

The environment functions like a metaphor, or at least a zone of ambiguity, because it connects human activities to the nonhuman (and of course is also the scene of human-to-human interaction).

"Deterministic chaos" refers to persistent and consistent chaos and variation—chaos regularized. Random vs. chaotic dynamics—the latter can have an intrinsic stability. "Strange attractors." An increase in diversity creates more stability. "Stochastic resonance."

Empson's "vaguely imagined forces" that hold a poem together --> "emergent property" in biology refers to what holds a system together, i.e. the movement of flocks of birds that depend upon no single bird's decisions or agency. (Some nice video here of flocks of starlings.)

Poems and scientific models both get criticized for their ambiguities, but it's a necessary space for creativity.

What is poetic truth's relation to testability and the falsified?

Lucille Lang Day, a physician, on "Poetry, Ecology, and the Human Brain." Mentions an anthropologist named Roy Rappaport who theorizes that religion evolved as a means of organizing groups.

Music and singing may have preceded grammar and words—or rather a poetic grammar/syntax (rhyme, alliteration, etc.) came first. (Kristeva's semiotics?)

"The human brain is hardwired for poetry and religion, but not science."

Day claims that poetry could be a useful way for conveying scientific information and attitudes, since it's a more basic mode of communication. I have my doubts about this. Or rather, she's half right: poetry could sacralize scientific apprehensions that our senses cannot perceive. But poetry is not simple, or at least not all poetry. I'm too committed to the idea of poetry as a mode of cognition to accept its demotion to a mode of rhetoric—which seems to be what she's suggesting.

The most compelling example of a successful transfer or endowment of a natural space with sacred energy is the 9/11 memorial forest, in which the names of the dead have been tied to the branches of trees. What if every citizen gave his or her name to a tree or some other bit of biome?

The other problem with Day's argument is poetry's staggering unpopularity—it's a lousy vehicle for propaganda. Her argument that scientists themselves could make use of poetry seems more useful. But that instrumentalizes poetry, too—suggesting that it might foster intuition in scientists to make them more creative and efficient in finding solutions to our problems. I worry this line of thinking leaves everything in the hands of specialists and continues to disempower ordinary people.

Mari-Lou Rowley, a poet-physicist, presents a talk called "Ecopoetics as Enactivist Poetics."

Disturbing news: the very shape of cloud crystals is changing with the climate. Dehydration of the upper atmosphere accelerates warming, because water vapor mediates solar radiation.

Twenty percent of aerosols are generated by cooking meat.

Most of the poetry panels I've attended which demonstrate much in the way of theoretical vigor have been dominated by men. Here we have a panel full of scientists, and they're all women.

"Living smaller means not having less, but not wanting more." Enactivism: "The world is not what we observe, but what we do."

Bio-semiotics: the sign rather than the molecule becomes the basic unit with which life is described. "Aboutness," "contextual recognition."

Part of our crisis at this moment stems from the ignorant devaluation of poetry and science—I feel both have become marginal discourses, in America at least.

Ambiguity can be used as a weapon—consider the politicians who say we can't act on global warming because "certainty" is unachievable.

The final plenary address is given by Andrew McMurray, introduced as a poststructuralist thinker about Thoreau and ecocriticism.

"The world is about once again to become a very large place."

Intuition, he says, gets more respect in the sciences than the humanities, which depend too much upon "pseudo-rigor" (theory built upon theorists). "Blinded by an excess of vision." Our inability to see the horror of the end of our living world.

"I intuit a connection between well-chosen words and a world worth living in." "You can't get there [the world] from here [poetry]." Yet we must.

Frederic Jameson's "Metacommentary": start from the need for interpretation. Why do we need to interpret in the first place? "The unnaturalness of the hermeneutic situation."

Montaigne: the process of thought (intuition) is more important than what we we think (tuition—that's Emerson).

Ideas are wedges that choose and discard. The realist wedge says some language is better accommodated to the world than others. This view predominates in ecocriticism.

Wedge #2: Some texts and poets offer us better examples of such language—the "green canon"—which ignores literature as a totality.

Dana Phillips: ecocriticism as realism becomes an umpire, judging what's "green" or not.

The ineluctable logic of realism: a flower is more mimetic of nature than any text.

The second wave of ecocriticism orients on place—"environmentality" wherever it can be found. McMurray wants to go further, to "ride madly off in all directions." "All literature is environmental literature." "The recovery of objects of no ethical concern" ought to be the goal of ecocriticism—its objects being "the signifiers of the nonhuman world."

Ecocriticism follows feminism, African-American criticism, etc. Each discourse must move from identification (of gendered thinking, racist thinking) to metatheory. So a book that doesn't mention race is still symptomatic. Quotes Marianne Moore: "Omissions are not accidents."

Political criticism as a model for ecocriticism: it begins with a basic assumption that there is a Real, yet these politics have the power of changing what is real.

The physical world—the "environmental actual"—precedes and includes Marx's horizon, history (that is, of the evolution of the means of production). Production is only the proximate cause of history. "Modes of production have themselves been reified," whether in terms of harnessing production (Communism) or releasing it (capitalism).

But how does the environmental actual get into the poem? A John Muirean view of the literary act: what we select ends up pulling everything else along with it.

The key strategic move comes in decentering man—the posthuman totality. Perhaps utopia is no longer the point? Lawrence Buell: embedment in spatio-temporality is more fundamental than ideology.

Calls for a "synoptic decoding of texts with the environmental actual as the horizon." Presents two preceding modes of synoptic interpretation for comparison: medieval Christian hermeneutics and Jamesonian Marxism. Clever correspondences between the four hierarchical levels of the former (from the basic literal to allegorical, moral, and finally anagogical readings) and of the latter (in which the author-function, social contradictions, class struggle, and History are the corresponding categories).

In "ecocritical holism" the four categories of interpretation are:
- authorial (thematics, style)
- discursive (words, metaphors)
- political (symbolic acts, ideologemes)
- environmental (functional constraints, epistemology, history)

Systems theory, he claims, is a broader and more "generous" governing theory than Marxism.

McMurray picks on Ashbery for working on the discursive level alone, while Frost and Stevens are celebrate for working every level. This hardly seems fair. I'm not sure he's fair to Jameson either. I think many contemporary poets are not simply producing allegories of social conditions, but are instead active investigators and interpreters in their own right, whose work can help us recognize and navigate the social totality. The next level then would be poetry that helps us navigate the environmental actual, of which the social is only a component.

"People and their systems establish themselves against something," and that "something" defines that system.

Prophecies either disaster and collapse or the total technologization of the earth: shows a slide of Coruscant from the Star Wars movies. Star Wars or The Road Warrior: these are our alternatives?

Notes on Poetic Ecologies

14 May 2008
Wednesday

Pierre Lambelin: the city is now more biologically diverse and alive than the countryside, which is like a "desert," subjected to intensive agriculture all the way from Brussels to Marseilles.

Susan Moore on Kristeva: poetic language destroys identity or "accompanies crises in social structures." Ecopoetics emphasizes a semiotic boundary moment between nature and culture. Poetry resists the symbolic/culture/nom du pere.

Kristeva, Tales of Love: "[T]he only infinite space where we might unfurl our love, that is, the infinity of the signifier. Love is something spoken, and it is only that: poets have always known it."

Harriet Tarlo gives an engaging talk on the ecology of found text as the equivalent of field work - poetry in the landscape. (See, by the way, the important ecopoetics feature that she curated for the most recent issue of HOW2.)

Tarlo's talk reminds me of my idea of ecolage: decaying text so as to bring out the life of the signifier, "opening the language." Talks of "the spirit of citation" (the poet's reluctance to attribute the texts she palimpsests) as connoting the author's love or hatred for the found text: a mode of affect. (She doesn't mention, but I think immediately of Jed Rasula's This Compost.) Homage vs. satire—confronting an oppressive textual world. Acknowledging the otherness of found text, putting its ownership into question.

Describes work of Janis Butler Holm—a poem called "Seminar" that writes through Emerson and Thoreau as "reverse collage," leaving out the nouns so verbs emphasizing insemination and penetration leap to our attention. Other poets mentioned: Tony Lopez, Rachel Blau du Plessis.

Rich Murphy on Blake: he fully describes his utopia, whereas the modernist only gestures at it. Modernists like Williams and Stein seek to erase connotation. Symbolism no longer possible in a capitalist society of continual change—tradition can't stop time, myth no longer appeals to shared, universal experience.

Cites Richard Rorty: we must redescribe our experience in new ways until the next generation is prepared to embrace contingency and change in language. "We are in an epoch of redescribing." Jorie Graham's "Prayer" as an attempt to redescribe religious symbols in Darwinian language; Charles Bernstein's "In Particular" seeks to leave symbols and symbol-making behind.

Murphy seems to be arguing that we're in a moment of postmodern dissolution of "local" symbolisms prior to some new global culture better adapted to this era of change. But isn't that just capitalism tout court? Or the appeal to science: do scientific/ecological discourses still have more prestige/status/non-symbolic meaning than literary discourse at a time when scientific literacy is rapidly declining?

Creating an enclave separate from commodification ("pastoral") or self-conscious play with one's embedment in commodification. This is the gap of difference—and similarity!—thatI've perceived between post-Baudelairean and pastoral poetics. But there's no reason the Arcadian enclave can't be draw as a site for just such self-conscious play (Baudelaire in Arcadia!). Arcadia is the name we give to the autonomous or disinterested space in which we separate from commodification, but it's always a compromised and provisional space.

15 May
Thursday

Tired today, a layer of plastic over everything. The poet Judith McCombs is talking about her own work. "Stories are what you do when you're not very good at theory." I find my mind wandering, so that the following meditations depend only tangentially on what she says:

I HATE NATURE WRITING. Yes, I love Thoreau and Aldo Leopold; I like Gary Snyder well enough. But the sentimental piety of so much nature writing—the third-rate uncritical romanticism—makes my skin crawl. Give my a little dyspepsia along with the swooning at least, like Edward Abbey (tossing beer cans into Lake Mead). I get impatient too with description, which is what so much of nature writing seems to amount to.

What I do like: Westerns; the social text of "nature"; lucid images woven into more discursive or palimpsestic texts; the dialectic of economy-ecology; deconstructing myths of individualism; nature as that which underwrites and undermines our mode of production; urban pastoral.

Suspicious of Romanticism (but we need the eggs). Ancient suspicion, even fear, of large-scale structures of feeling: nationalism, Zionism, religious fervor. Because no doubt of my own susceptibility to such things.

McCombs: "There's a wilderness behind me, I know! I paid to get out here. It's chock full of dirt."

"we swim among stones"—is she aware of Olson here? Glacial stones, enspirited—enhumaned?—by their mark of otherness, their unhumanness. Whereas in "The Kingfishers," "I hunt among stones" refers to thoroughly human stones—ruins of culture. I prefer that mode, admire it more, because it's less mystical/mystifying. I don't trust an author to single-handedly, priestlike, invest "stone" with mythic significance—to fetishize it for what always feels like one's own spiritual aggrandizement. I also respect the geologist who turns "stone" into glacial specifics of granite and shale—but this too quickly comes to seem arid and boring—"description" again.

I do seem to need and want a spiritual investment in nature—an animism—for it to become interesting. But I'm suspicious of the black box of fetishization that tends to accompany such maneuvers. Solution: break open the box, expose the deus inside the machina. Can an ecopoet show as much self-consciousness about her landscapes as the post-Baudelairean shows about her cityscape? Back once again to constructivst pastoral. (Will I ever get my terms straight?)

Olson interests me because he's interested in myth-construction, not myth reconstruction (separating him from Pound, or Duncan). The agon of the dialectic of enlightenment—the push pull between myth and disenchantment—is right there on the surface of his work.

Of course at some point you stop the weathervane and start writiing.

IMPOSSIBLE not to anthropomorphize nature. Even to describe water as "flowing" humanizes it, makes it more like us. Language is always human, even the most Latinate, "cool" language.

"If you want a story you need evil in the plot." Well, that's why narrative's such an undialectical mode.

Arcadia as staging ground for personae, play with masks, recombinations of desire. But what about the big fish? My intuition all along has been that pastoral provides the unstable pivot between myth and enlightenment, that imaginary balance in which the benefits of both can be enjoyed while either's domination is forestalled. Of course such a landscape may be, may even more easily be, Frank O'Hara's subway and record store, "at hand" to the grass.

10:30 AM: African-American (Re)readings of Nature

Evie Shockley on Ed Roberson and Anne Spencer—the latter apparently more famous for her spectacular garden than for her poetry, which "failed" to engage racial themes and so has aroused little critical interest. But Schockley argues that her garden constitutes a site in which to reconstruct a sense of self after withstanding the corroding effects of racism (Spencer very much an activist).

Similarly, Roberson has endured critical neglect because his nature-centered aesthetic and his conceptual, disjunctive poetics do not fit into existing models for African-American poetry. Roberson challenges the Wordsworthian Romantic/ecopoetics dichotomy, neither idealizing nature nor critiquing human impact on the environment. Instead studies diverse landscapes (Alaska, Pittsburgh) as ecosystems. Finding the negative in nature/wilderness and the urban is as important to him as celebrating their beneficient dimensions—Roberson's means of destabilizing nature/culture.

Yuya Kuchi is the next speaker—he happens to have translated Obama's book Dreams from My Father into Japanese. His talk revists Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and talks about black slaves as both a version of the machine (they "process" nature for their masters) and as victims of a highly rationalized slavery systems that itself constitutes a machine. "Black machinery in the white garden."

For many blacks, then, nature/the countryside has been associated with bondage and mechanization, whereas the city comes to be associated with freedom, economic opportunity, and the organics of authenticity. If you're "really black" you're from the inner city.

I ask Evie: Does poetry like Roberson's put the very concepts of "authenticity" and "blackness" into question, or does it simply redistribute these categories?

Evie: Roberson has been described as "post-black" (Obama again!). She sees him as "troubling" the category of blackness, particularly as it was constructed by the Black Arts movement in the 1970s (Roberson's moment of coming to consciousness as a poet).

Thinking now of Hillary Clinton's comment about "hard-working Americans, white Americans" and the implied disparagement of African-American voters as being somehow less valuable, less authentically American. But it ought to be the Republicans getting tripped up by this. Learned today about the Democratic candidate who won a special election to Congress in Mississippi in spite—because?—of Republican efforts to link him to Obama. Also worth noting: Europeans keep buttonholing me at this conference, asking me if I think Obama can win, as if my mere Americanness were enough to grant me oracle status. In a possible abuse of nonexistent agency, I tell them he can.

Noon Gary Snyder panel. Fredrick Brogger argues that Snyder's prose is riddled with culture-specific references that weaken it, whereas his poetry more closely adheres to a deep ecological decentering of the human. This is unconvincing: how is Snyder's poetry any less culturally specific or located than his prose? The "figurative reticence and restraint" that Brogger praises in the poems is something Snyder learned from studying Asian poetry, which of course was also for Pound a major source for a de-rhetorized American poetics. Brogger's is an Orientalist argument, it seems to me. Restraint and humility may be counter-cultural, but they're not a-cultural!

Robin Cheng-Hsing Tsai's paper is called "Gary Snyder and the Nature of Nature," and he gives a terrifically animated performance. A Lacanian reading: holds up a biscuit tin as a means of demonstrating what Lacan means by petit objet a. "For Snyder, the real cannot be divorced from the virtual." A line of Snyder's from Mountains and Rivers Without End: there can be no true hunger without a painting of hunger.

"Healing" vs. "saving"—Snyder rejects the Christian notion of salvation. Contending perhaps with Pound's claim that "when the mind hangs by a grass blade / an ant's forefoot will save you"?

Lacan's Real versus Snyder's.

Josh Weinstein, a sweet guy who I'll hang out with quite a bit, talks about Snyder's poetry as an "ecotone" between the human and nonhuman worlds.

(Arcadia ecotoned in the sense that its shepherds are cultivated verse-speakers embedded in nature. Song resolves or through jouissance relieves the human/non-human tension. But jouissance of course can never be fully contained or controlled! Et in Arcadia ego....)

I get very nervous when people try to extract the human or turn aside toward silence. "Nature communicates itself"? Heidegger again.

Afternoon panel on "urban ecologies" chaired by Jno. Skinner.

W. Mark Giles's talk: "Into the Wild / Into the Crosswalk." An ingenious reading of Kracauer's book vis-a-vis Roland Barthes' death-by-laundry truck on the streets of Paris. Inspired bv a comment posted on the ASLE listserv: if Christopher McCandless had forgotten his wallet and run into a crosswalk and gotten himself run over, Kracauer could have written a book called Into the Crosswalk but no one would have bought it.

Barthes: "There is nothing natural any more—everything is historic." Giles adviser remarked to him that if anyone other than an academic had said that he would have been immediately institutionalized.

Mark hates nature writing too: "I believe society is constructed and nature is not something numinous and other."

Traffic produces risk in urban environments but not the "escape from history" (William Cronon) that wilderness offers. Does Benjamin's flaneur escape from history the same way McCandless tried to? Both responses to alienation. The pastoral of jaywalking? Mark doesn't mention the possibility, but was Barthes perhaps cruising when he died?

Flanerie does seem in some ways to be a pastoral mode—but Olson doesn't fit this model the way O'Hara or Snyder even might. He's not an alienated man of the crowd, but a would-be founding citizen.

Christophe den tandt gives a talk on "urban vitalism." From a vitalist/Whitmanian "web of life" ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") to the necropolis "City of Dreadful Night" of Thomson. Proposes vitalism as "A mapping device for a world of diminishing resources vs. postructuralist/postmodernist theories of infinite expansion and diversifaction.

What's "natural" about the crowd? Its sublimity? But then we're confined to discussing aesthetic effects.

"the utopian pole of description"—Whitman overcomes disconnected, depressed, or alienated moments—"disintegrated yet part of the scheme."

Does the phrase "death in life" sum up the Gothic? I rather think it does. Paris Spleen: "Horrible life! Horrible city!"

Uncanny vitality of the not alive: of course that's just another incarnation of the uncanny life of the commodity. Its flip side: the paradise of shoppers. A pastoral reaction to this would restore the categories of seeming and being: what's alive seems alive, what seems unalive is that way.

Ma Huaqui is next; his paper and presentation were stolen. "I'll be presenting my paper in absentia—my paper is in absentia." He does a remarkable job.

City as organism but Singapore, as 25 x 40 km. island, is "100 percent urbanized," no open space anywhere.

Singaporean poet Alfian bin la'at's "Autobiography" describes the poet as lacking both a childhood and any contact with nature.

If there's no countryside in Singapore I'd think people would turn to the sea as open space—no?

The human body is the only natural element in the hyperurbanized space.

Jason Wiens is last with a paper on Lisa Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Wish I'd written this one. Robertson inverts Empson, he claims, by putting the simple into the complex. Robertson: "The Office for Soft Architecture came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in a substance called money."

Cites Timothy G. Gray's article, which I've also recently read, on urban pastoral (Snyder and O'Hara, role-playing).

"Under the pavement, pavement." Robertson's irony is difficult to track. Wiens: "An inverted dystopia is not necessarily a dystopia."

It's the urban space that's mutable in Robertson, that plays roles, not the people in that space. But he's reading her more affirmatively than I do. It's true her book ends with a hyperbolic scene of sexual gratification.

***

That was Thursday—my fullest day at the conference, which set my mind afire. I woke up at 3 AM and wrote down what I believe to be the seeds of my pastoral book—something that will bear at best a family resemblance to the dissertation. But I won't record it here.

More notes will follow.