Trouble with Fiction

Here's my trouble with fiction: the labor, or rather the mechanics, required to interest most readers bores me silly. It's boring to read and twice as boring to write. Here is a character, here is a situation and setting for that character, here is that character's desire, here is another character who can gratify that desire but has contrary desires of her own. Wind up the monkeys and watch them dance. Beautiful or accurate prose is an accessory, a garnish; if the author's done his job correctly we'll hurry by all that stuff so we can get to What Happens Next.

I'm never bored when I write a poem: my interest is continually pricked onward by the endless possibilities of syntax and juxtaposition, of wordplay on the levels of sound, image, and connotation. I am often bored when I read poems, but when that doesn't happen I follow the turns of the language with delight, rarely hurrying on in search of the general gestalt—I don't have to, it accumulates slyly, rapidly, by indirection, so that the best poems gradually colonize my consciousness with something we might call worldness, or atmosphere, or mood (the German Stimmüng best approximates what I mean). It will do rapidly and effortlessly what fiction typically labors for many pages to achieve: that sensation of transport that is for me the degree zero of aesthetic experience.

I'm always trying to return to Middle Earth: not Tolkien's much-imitated and abused fantasy world (though that is the archetype) but that sensation of a world suspended between ours and that of pure imagination: a contested space, dialogic, allegorical but with no master key, in narrative but not necessarily of narrative. If I write my way into this space, I must not be bored. But I risk boring the reader in a hurry, and most readers are in a hurry. If I want to achieve what I think it's just possible to achieve, I will do so by inserting fragments of reality into the work, fragments with the energy, the gravity or the magnetism, to pull readers through the text, though not promising to deposit them in reality (or Truth) as conventional narratives do. To repeat the old saying: the journey is the destination. The trick is in making this as true for the reader as it is for the writer.

A Word about Watchmen

It didn't suck, though I wonder what the larger audience, the one not composed of GenX geeks for whom the comic served as a kind of serial Bible as it came out one mind-blowing, paranoia-steeping issue at a time back in the Eighties, could possibly have made of it. As spectacle, it exceeds The Dark Knight, and it's not without a certain visual poetry, particularly in the scenes focusing on Dr. Manhattan, who is gifted with a surprisingly light, properly bemused voice by Billy Crudup. The acting is a mixed bag: Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes gleefully sadistic hay in his turn as the Comedian, while Patrick Wilson is an appropriately melancholy Nite Owl (his hair is perfect). Malin Akerman, best known to me before now for being topless in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, looks the part but her line readings are wince-inducingly bad. As the trailer voiceover man would say, Jackie Earle Haley IS Rohrshach, compelling in his "squidgy" mask and even more compelling out of it. Most disappointing is Matthew Goode as Ozymandias: he gets the character's closeted self-superiority but has nothing of the necessary gravitas. He's a lightweight in more senses than one: it's hard to believe that the Comedian, even in his sixties, wouldn't have been able to throw this Ozymandias out the window instead of vice-versa.

These are quibbles. More disturbing, or perhaps just a sign of the times, is the negation or subtraction of the fundamental humanism of the comic. It's been misinterpreted as the book that cleared the path for "dark" superheroes, alongside the Moore-penned Batman: The Killing Joke and everything Frank Miller's ever done. But what Moore is really about in Watchmen is discovering the human faces behind the masks: as the first Nite Owl writes, ""Yes, we were crazy, we were kinky, we were Nazis, all those things that people say. We were also doing something because we believed in it. We were attempting, through our personal efforts, to make our country a safer and better place to live in. Individually, working on our separate patches of turf, we did too much good in our respective communities to be written off as a mere aberration, whether social or sexual or psychological." Moore takes the heroic impulse as seriously as the pathology, and none of his characters, even the very worst of them, lacks a fundamental humanity. That includes the minor characters, the non-masks: Bernard the newspaper vendor and Bernie the comic-reading freeloader; the compromised psychiatrist Malcolm Long and his wife; and the Nixon of the comic is more than the mad bomber of the movie but shows flickers of introspection and regret.

The subordination of these characters to the masked heroes is an obvious, probably necessary gesture given the task of compressing twelve issues into three hours, but it's a serious loss, made more serious by the director's moronic sadism, his need to upstage the already grim violence of the comic (but it's real, that violence—the people involved suffer, there's nothing cathartic about it). What on earth was he thinking by turning Dan and Laurie's battle with the street gang into a battle to the death? He takes a scene with a wryly humorous undertone—as shown in the final panel of the battle in which the sweat-drenched heroes are shown as it were post-coitally—and turns it into a pointless bloodbath that permanently damages our sense of the fundamental decency of those characters. There are many other moments in which the violence gratuitously goes beyond the comic, giving us a cheap little thrill that empties out the queasiness the original book induced by showing us superheroes attempting murder and rape. The cynicism of this is expressed most succinctly in the transformation of a scene in which Rohrshach outwits one of the thugs who've come to kill him in his prison cell. In the original comic, Rohrshach taunts poor Lawrence into reaching through the bars of his prison cell, Lawrence shouting, "We've got a hundred guys out here that want to kill you. What have you got?" Deftly breaking the guy's thumbs while tying his hands together, Rohrshach replies, "Your hands. My perspective." It's a dryly funny moment that emphasizes what's so terrifying about Rohrshach: not his physicality (he's a little guy) but his black-and-white view of the world. In the film, though, Rohrshach's line is "Your hands. My pleasure." That gives the whole game away. Snyder has traded the comic's negativity for nihilism, and it's too bad.

My dream for a filmed Watchmen always revolved around a mini-series or even a full-fledged series, something that could take the time to find a cinematic means of replicating the multiple perspectives for which comics are ideal. The comic packs almost every panel with multiple storylines, switching between background and foreground, each issue interpolated with texts: an essay on birding by Dan Dreiberg, a corporate report on Ozymandias' toy line, a Playboy-style interview with Veidt in Antarctica. It's a very writerly book, which makes it ever more obvious why Moore has taken his name off the filmed adaptations of his work. I liked V for Vendetta, and I liked this, if only for the set pieces and images that it brought to larger-than-life: Dr. Manhattan's glass palace on Mars, the Comedian leaping down into a rioting mob from the Owlship, Rohrshach's pitch-perfect battle with police. It's a great comic-book movie, but it's a lousy comic.

Teaching Poetry, Tossing the Coin

Heads

Most of my poetry students come to my classes with the goal of self-expression. They come to poetry with their ideas of themselves already formed, complete and entire. They seek to render, boldly or shyly, entirely “as is,” their ideal selves with sentences broken into lines. I do my level best to cut against this late-Romantic expressivist grain with a little old-fashioned constructivsm. I give them exercises and constraints, some Oulipo-inspired (S+7, abecedarian poems, lipograms, etc.) and some homegrown. One of my favorite tricks, usually at the beginning of the semester, is to ask them to write the worst poem they possibly can. The results are hilarious and raise student consciousness about the dangers posed by cliched images, overfamiliar or archaic diction, and clunky end-rhymes. To a greater or lesser degree this opens their ears and their eyes, and they start to think about poetry differently. All along, I’m working cheerfully to undermine the assumptions that they brought to the class, to fight a covert war against poetry as self-expression. It’s not that I’m against it per se, or that I’m on a moral crusade against the small-bore narcissism of Facebook and YouTube—I’m all for narcissism if it leads to interesting work. But I believe that poets, especially young poets, whether they realize it or not, write not to express the self but to discover it: to open the Russian doll of themselves, to give birth to multiplicities, to contain multitudes. Derrida wrote that there was nothing outside the text, infuriating just about everybody; but for me it’s an article of faith, at least as a poetry teacher, that the self is text, part of the larger weave of language, and a poet must find the seamy side of his or her particular embroidered corner and work it.

Tails

All semester, she’d endured the incomprehension of her classmates, while I gently and sometimes less gently tried to nudge her obvious talent toward something I could grasp, something I could recognize. She sank into stony silence while continuing to write baffling little poems, often with the grammar or syntax mangled to a degree that maddens because you can’t be sure if it’s deliberate or a mistake. The images spoke of something subterranean and grand, something having to do with sex, death, alcoholism, and a mother half helpless, half horrifying. They weren’t good poems but they were strong poems. I pointed out her mistakes, tried to encourage her, eventually just tried to avoid discouraging her. At semester’s end, in the artist’s statement I have each student append to his or her portfolio, she complained about the class. She’d felt humiliated by the experience of having her classmates read her poems, time and again, without ever getting them. They kept asking her, as I asked her, for clarity, though we meant different things by this. They wanted to know what the poem was about; I wanted the poem’s components, its lines and word choices, to ring more resonantly. She wrote a cry from the heart: “I don’t want to write from a place of clarity. I want to write from a more private, unseen place.” And reading this, after the class is over, no longer really her teacher, I want to applaud it even as I lament my inability to have seen that private place—not that I would intrude upon it, but that I could have felt its presence more palpably and encouraged its growth and slow revelation. She’s building a self, maybe several selves, maybe her mother’s self in new relation with her own. She’s doing it in language and she believes in the self. She’s a romantic, she’s a visionary, she’s clumsy as all hell. And I can’t, don’t, teach that. I gave her some tools, I got out of her way, but I didn’t get clear, and she didn’t. I hope she will. I hope she won’t.

Say It Don't Spray It: Another Note on Bolaño

Nearing the end finally of 2666, which is bound to leave a lasting and deep impression upon me. One insight I've gleaned about the challenge the novel poses I've obtained from Adam Kirsch's review in Slate of the book: his first sentence ("According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly") goes some distance toward expressing what I and others have tried to say about Bolaño's seemingly un- or antiliterary qualities. But a more profoundly practical insight comes from an Amazon review by one Stephen Balbach—here's the key paragraph:

Bolano successfully breaks one of the basic rules of fiction writing - rather than showing what happens, he tells what happens, like a journalist. Thus he is able to say as much in one paragraph that others take in a chapter. Bolano says as much in 900 pages that might normally take 2500. He does not use line breaks and quotes for dialog (except in book 5), so there are often long blocks of text with no white space - it's a 900 page novel of high word count, but smooth reading. Ironically I never felt I was wasting my time, as if every detail mattered, even though I guess none of it did, all of it did.

This explains to me better than anything else I've read what I find so fascinating and attractive about Bolaño's style. As a teacher of creative writing, I'm constantly admonishing students to show-don't-tell—that most axiomatic article-of-faith in the field of creative writing, heir to Ezra Pound's "Go in fear of abstractions" and as such an exception to the rule of our generally anti-modernist literature: it's the one little fragment of modernism universally adopted and passed on, like a virus. And to be sure, it's damn good advice, easier to offer than to accept, and students prove time and again that telling about or describing characters, thoughts, and themes rather than showing through action is the quickest path to dead-eyed and amateurish prose.

I don't regret repeating show-don't-tell to students that need to hear it, but I am beginning to regret my own internalization of that rule, and to recognize that much of what I find most valuable in writing is in fact in violation of the rule. This is part of a larger or longer pattern of education and Bildung that I've perceived in myself as a writer, which in the past I've expressed as a kind of pyramidal view of Pound's trio, melopoeia (sound), phanopoeia (image), and logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words"). That is, it's a pyramid I've climbed as I've become more confident and experienced as a poet. When I was very young, I was fascinated above all by the sound of words, by the way they shift and deform in your mouth through repetition. Then in the first poems I wrote to find readers I was preoccupied primarily with the creation of striking images, and this impulse carried me some ways into graduate school. Finally—it took discovering the Language poets for me to conceptualize this—I became most interested in logopoeia, in the complex and subtle interactions between the connotative and denotative levels of language, a level of linguistic action maybe best described by Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. That's territory at a considerable remove from show-don't-tell, which it required a certain amount of conceptual machinery and experience for me to distance myself from in my poems.

At the same time, I've wanted to try narrative, and that's where show-don't-tell has stymied me, because fiction that tells is lifeless, or so I believed, while fiction that shows bores the pants off of me. What's the distinction between lifelessness and boredom? Well, the former is a corpse, interesting only for its history as something alive: the experience that you try to transform and render in prose like a coroner's report of an autopsy. There's at least a certain honesty to that, but I find most "good" fiction to be bankrupted by its slavish adherence to show-don't-tell: I can't read mainstream short stories or novels without being acutely conscious of the machinery of manipulation that gets vividly realized character X across the pages to ambiguously revealed goal Z—Y being the more-or-less beautiful, more-or-less serviceable and vehicular sentences and paragraphs that even most literary writers hope to disappear (disappear is here a transitive verb, as it is in South America) in favor of what John Gardner, archdeacon of realist fiction, called the "vivid continuous dream."

Bolaño breaks the stalemate. He tells, and yet his prose—no, that's not quite accurate, his narrative—is full of life and interest and urgency, forcing attention to details (which is what I go to poetry for, that slippery savoring recoil from individual words, clauses, lines) through intense compression (thus Balbach's intimation that the novel is "really" 2500 pages long). How does he achieve this? I think quite simply from his adaptation of the hoariest of narrative engines, going all the way back to Oedipus Rex: the mystery. Because each of his fictions ultimately has the obsessive drive of the detective seeking to unravel a crime—a crime that, in the best hard-boiled tradition, is always also an existential or even ontological crime, and not just a murder, though it's murder too, murder most foul and unbearable in its endless iterations, as the deliberate flatness of the prose describing the murders of women in "The Part about the Crimes" makes plain. The novel takes us deeper and deeper into multiple mysteries mysteriously aligned—the parallel hauntings of the literary critics, the mad Mexican professor, the black reporter whose nom de plume is Oscar Fate, the savage naif novelist Benno von Arcimboldi whose story I'm currently unraveling, sure to leave a morass of threads in my hands at the end without anything resembling a resolution, and yet bound to satisfy through its truth content, the respect Bolaño holds for mystery, a mystery that he throws everything he's got at (and he's got a lot) and which still resists him, and us, and that's its truth, though it takes us close into its heart, and wraps us and holds us there, and will not be forgotten.

If I write narrative prose, then, I must write it like poetry, so that the details matter. But neither can I tie those details together—compress them—in a way that falsifies them. The third, most difficult thing is to coalesce them with an urgency that gets fully transmitted to the reader—otherwise I'm doomed, as so many are doomed, to produce writing that only a handful of other logophiles will be willing to parse. Not the worst fate if that's the price of integrity; but Bolaño shows—I hope he shows—another path.

Pastiche of Greatness

I don't hear a lot of live music—I'm lucky to make it to the movies once a month or so with a 13-month-old—but on Friday night Emily and I were in the kitchen and heard Tony Sarabia on the radio talking about Juana Molina in such glowing terms that, in a thoroughly uncharacteristic moment of mutual spontaneity, we got online and ordered some tickets for her show on Sunday night at the Morse Theater and then lo and behold were able at the last minute to get friends to babysit so we could actually see the show.

Molina is astonishing. A former sit-com star from Argentina, she's been making intricately layered music as a solo artist for many years—Sarabia says for the first time she's touring with a band, though it consists of just two other people. She reminds me a bit of Theresa Andersson, whom you can see in this video doing a one-woman band routine a bit like Molina's, making use of digital looping to layer one sound atop another. Molina, though, makes much heavier usage of synthesizers, as well as natural and ambient sounds (her album Son, integrates birdsong and a fireworks show into the music); she used to be quite folky, but the music now has a harder and to me more interesting edge. Her new album, Un Dia, creates a vivid soundscape in which the lyricism of her voice struggles to harmonize with sounds I associate with the hyperintensity of the global urban mediascape. I hear elements that remind me of Laurie Anderson circa Big Science, Björk's more experimental pieces, and riffs from the darker side of Radiohead's moon.

Semi-legible photo of Juana Molina and her band at the Morse Theater on Sunday, February 22, 2009.

Hearing her live was a sublime experience like I've rarely had a music show: the reason I rarely go to concerts is that I'm more of an earbuds kind of guy, and part of me has never understood the value of paying a lot of money to watch a bunch of people do not terribly visually interesting things on a stage while playing a rougher version of what they did in the studio. But Molina, ably backed by a slyly charismatic bass player and a drummer with a sunny vibe, was mesmerizing as she constructed the intricate loops of her songs. Again and again, she created a sound that was the whole foreground— the melody—only to succeed it with a new melody that harmonized with the old sound, now in the background, so that as each song went further and deeper it was like wandering in Baudelaire's forest of correspondences. It was an absolute triumph of pastiche, the form that excites me the most in music. And it makes me think about pastiche's role in poetry, as well.

Pastiche is practically a self-criticizing concept in the wake of Jameson's attack on it: a "blank parody" that produces sensation out of juxtaposing unlike discourses while detaching that act of collage from the political and historical energies that would give it meaning. This is the nutshell critique of post-Language poetry: that poets in their wake have adopted the disjunctive techniques of their predecessors while walking away from the ethical commitments that drove the LangPos to develop those techniques in the first place. The pop music equivalent is sampling, and if I were more knowledgeable about it I could probably draw distinctions between those artists who intend some kind of witty commentary by their appropriation of a riff originally belonging to Motown or acid rock or what have you and those who simply want a quick meaningless hit of the familiar to make their song more marketable. The big musical equivalent to the poetry example is probably the long history of the appropriation of African-American musical tropes by white artists; sampling just speeds up a process that began long before Elvis opened his first can of Brylcreem.

Molina seems a bit different. That may partly depend on my ignorance: I don't know anything about Latin American pop, and she may very well be appropriating and riffing on musical discourses that I just don't know about. But I don't think so: I believe instead that her juxtaposition of patently synthetic sounds with the music of the lyric subject (the voice, the acoustic guitar), and of course her crossbreeding of these (harmonizing with herself, rendering her own voice mechanical) turns a constructivist collage technique toward expressive ends that include the personal without being confined to it. That is, as with much postmodern poetry and music, I get the news of our/my condition from her music: I am transported to where I'm already standing, the half-virtual half-real circumstance of a citizen of the digital age, clapping his hands in the overloud dark.

How weird to come out of this ecstasy into the debased discourse that can produce something like David Orr's piece on poetic greatness in the most recent Sunday New York Times. Parts of it are valuable, like his indictment of "greatness" as a tone, "grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical," a willed nationalistic somberness that reminds me of nothing so much as Yorick's suspicion of "gravity" ("a mysterious carriage of the body invented to cover the defects of the mind") in Tristram Shandy. But even as he attacks this notion of greatness he still longs for greatness as such, weirdly oblivious, among other things, to the masculinist presumptions behind such canon-making gestures (his discussion of Elizabeth Bishop is egregiously untheorized in this respect). It has something to do with his desire for more rigorous criticism: if we keep our eye on the greatness ball there will be less mediocrity, less log-rolling. But I'm not sure we can so easily separate "greatness" as a category from the pompous discourse that Orr tries to criticize but ends up entirely wrapped in, like a second-rate Superman's cape.

I recognize a little of myself in Orr's point about our veneration of non-American writers, whose greater political risks confer automatic laurels—isn't part of my fascination with Robert Bolaño based on his apparent greatness, even though the whole drive of his work deliberately dead-ends in the lethal cul-de-sac of literary greatness? But that's another post. Mostly I find Orr's focus on poets as vessels of "greatness" bizarre and unuseful. The music of Juana Molina remind me that what matters to me in art is an individual's multi-voicedness: heteroglossia without all the plot and other encumbrances of the novel being dragged along behind it. And this gets to another thing I love about Molina: she's a comedian, and there's humor, wit, and goofiness behind and beside the sublimity, which I probably would not have apprehended without seeing her live. She doesn't melodramatize herself and her music, but the music isn't "small"—it contains multitudes. That's what I'd like my poetry to be like: something supple and with real reach, and power without taking itself too seriously—without playing the game of self-canonization.

The Stentor Speaks

Worth reading: an article in the Lake Forest College student paper about Christian Bök's performance last week:

Noise, sound, or poetry? LFC reacts - Arts and Leisure

Report from the Festival, Part 2

Happy birthday, Charles. Happy birthday, Abe.

Jessica Savitz reading.

Tuesday evening

Jessica Savitz's reading at 8 PM in Meyer Auditorium is not only her Lake Forest College debut, but her debut period—she's never read her work in public before. It's a remarkably assured debut, in which the poems from her manuscript Hunting Is Painting ebb and flow together in a kind of continuous dream language, while images—family photos, the photos of a family friend who served in Vietnam, the work of a photographer named Roxane Hopper, and paintings by Allison Hawkins—flash by on the screen behind her:



What I love about Jessica's poetry is how purely beautiful it is, while at the same time there are hints and peeps of the grotesque and violent shimmering between the lines, especially in the poems that deal directly with animals and the animalistic. I also like what the images do in the text, particularly the photographs, which are never simply illustrative but instead reframe the sometimes elliptical poems on the tense axis of personal history. I confess that when the manuscript arrived last year, I was put off by the largely amateur quality of the photos, but I've since been won over—I like the roughness, the collage-quality, they bring to the poems. A cautionary tale against letting some corrupt idea of "professionalism" prejudge my experience of poetry.

Wednesday

A morning of administrative tasks followed by an afternoon and evening of increasing poetic intensity. Three of the four Gnoets arrive on campus about an hour before showtime—they are Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, and John Tipton (absent was Jon Trowbridge, the Google engineer who actually wrote the Gnoetry software). Really lovely guys I'd recommend to any campus looking to shake some cages in the nicest possible way. After some technical difficulties they are able to demonstrate the Gnoetry machine in action. What is Gnoetry? Well, you can read about it at some length here, but the quick and dirty version is that the software uses an algorithim to analyze one or more texts (generally public domain stuff readily available on the web, ranging from the novels of Charles Dickens and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe to scripture and Eliza Poor Donner Houghton's firsthand account of the fate of the Donnner Party). It can then transform elements from those texts (and you can select what percentage of your poem that you want to draw from each source text) and create a formal poem: haiku, renga, blank verse, and other forms in which syllable-counting is involved.

The results can be eerily high in aesthetic quality: a poem extracted from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" is appropriately haunted and blood-splashed as it worked through phrases like "The scarlet horror" and the oddly terrifying ending phrase, "But the bolts." The audience of mostly students is mostly scandalized by the apparent vandalism to human ingenuity offered by machine-assisted poetry, but they show signs of being intrigued as well—one of my poetry students writes afterwards that while she felt that in some way Gnoetry was destructive to poetry, she also appreciated its democratic dimension—offering a potential path for non-poets to create poems. I wish the Gnoetry software was online, but there are apparently considerable technical difficulties; I imagine they'll manage it someday.

Three of the guys of Gnoetry—Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, and John Tipton—demonstrating the end of poetry as we know it.

A slightly less blurry shot of Gnoetry in action.

After the Gnoets do their thing and a bite to eat at the dining hall, it's time for the main event: Christian Bök and the Lake Forest College Student Sound Cabaret. The Cabaret consists of eight Lake Forest students (Zachary Engel, Alexandra Fisher, Roland Davin, Max Glassburg, Will Stafford, Carl LaMark, Emily Capettini, and Nicole Nodi) who've been working with Christian for the last several days on a performance of Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate," but they precede this with an "uncreative writing" demonstration: each has chosen a non-literary text to perform for one minute's duration. The results are pretty hilarious as the students perform a hysterical prologue to what I assume is an anti-abortion video; a caption from an art history textbook; the text from the back of somebody's State Farm insurance card; instructions on how to create methamphetamine "for informational purposes only"; and other bits of anti-literature.


The LFC Student Sound Cabaret's "uncreative writing" findings. Stay tuned for what I call Max Glassburg's "State Trooper State Farm" routine at the very end (around 5:36).

I'm even more impressed by the performance of "Ursonate": after fewer than three days of rehearsal they've produced a tightly woven and integrated performance of complete nonsense that manages to be lyrical, funny, and dramatic by turns:


The LFC Student Sound Cabaret performing an excerpt from Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate."

After the Cabaret sits down, Christian steps up to the microphone and does his thing. Photos and video can't capture the electric effect his performance has on an audience: this is the only poetry reading I can remember in which each poem is followed by spontaneous applause. He reads some of the dirtiest bits of Eunoia, sings an alien hymn that he wrote for Earth: Final Conflict, and performs anagrams and dadaist ditties. But what will stay with me the longest is the aria he performed from a Canadian avant-garde opera, The Princess of the Stars, written by R. Murray Schafer.


Christian Bök performs the Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy from R. Murray Schafer's opera The Princess of the Stars.

The opera is apparently staged on the shores of a Canadian lake at 4 in the morning. The audience sits on shore, while the performers are in large canoes on the water. Christian played the villain, the Three-Horned Enemy, a dragon-like monster that abducts the eponymous princess, which apparently takes the form of a gigantic (10-foot) puppet that Christian has to manipulate from his canoe while "singing." The Enemy's aria consists of a series of earsplitting shrieks, growls, and moans that rip through the audience like lightning-tipped spears; one young woman next to me flinches at every new torrent of sound. Sublime.

Part of the score for the Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy.
After the performance there's a reception with more guacamole than anyone can eat, and a remnant band of students plus myself, Christian, and creative writing instructor and playwright Lucas Krueger retire to Boomer's in the student center for a beer. Christian goes into more detail about his experience performing in the opera and fields the students' questions—pitched midway between incredulity and awe—with aplomb. A family man, I leave them to their 10:30 PM confab and drive home.

Report from the Festival

Man in motion: Christian Bök leads Lake Forest students into the thickets of Schwitters' "Ursonate."

Sunday evening

I pick up Christian from the airport and take him to the college. We discuss Canadian politics, the rise of Michael Ignatieff, and the general absence of charismatic personages in both the political and poetry worlds in Canada at the moment. We pick up Stephanie Strickland at Glen Rowan House on the campus and go for dinner to Casa de Isaac in Highwood—a great little Mexican place owned by Orthodox Jews, so the place is closed on Shabbat. I am chagrined to realize the place has no liquor license, but we still enjoy our food. Stop off for a drink at the rather stuffy Southgate Cafe in Lake Forest, where Christian dazzles us with the complexity of his drink order, though it seems to amount to a dry martini with a slice of cucumber instead of an olive or twist of lemon.

Tucked into a corner of the bar I mostly bear witness to an animated debate between Stephanie and Christian about the role that myth might play in reconfiguring our culture's ability to understand reality (with a special emphasis on ecology) in terms that aren't stranded by the personal, the experiential, our very grammar's tendency to reduce our understanding of the world to the action of individual agents upon individual objects. Christian rejects myth as something dangerous that's already been tried; Stephanie is more pragmatic and thinks we need to hook into existing structures of feeling (my phrase, or rather Raymond Williams' phrase, not hers). Their disagreement seems to center on whether myth can be non-religious or not: Stephanie seems to say it can, Christian seems to say it can't. I lean in Stephanie's direction, but am unhappy with her example of Buddhism as a philosophical framework that gets us away from subject-object (or I-It, I suppose to adapt Martin Buber) thinking. If we really want to be pragmatic about getting people to imagine the mess we're in, and the sheer complexity of the systems that obtain, we're going to have to work with material more or less indigenous to North American culture. But maybe I'm being too narrow.

One drink's all I have time for, as a family man, but we nevertheless manage to close the place down at 9 PM. Lake Forest nightlife ain't much. I drop them off at the guest house and drive home.

Monday

Christian is met for breakfast by four student volunteers, one of whom wrote me afterward to report that Bök blew his mind. Well, that's why he's here. Then he goes off to visit music professor Don Meyer's senior seminar with apparently similar results. I spend the morning dealing with administrative details, then meet up with Stephanie for lunch at our surprisingly good dining hall (I think "surprisingly good" ought to be part of its name. I had stir fry). Afterward we do an a/v check in the auditorium where Stephanie and and our Plonsker writer-in-residence Jessica Savitz will each do their things on Tuesday: Jessica's incorporating some striking photos and images into her reading, while Stephanie of course is a full-fledged multimedia poet (evidence here).

More administration, then I walk over to Glen Rowan to pick up Christian to take him to the first meeting of the Sound Cabaret Workshop he's leading as Artist-in-Residence. I stick around to see how it goes; the workshop turns out to be a lively rehearsal of an excerpt from Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate," to be performed chorus-style by the students in the workshop. They take surprisingly and immediately well to shouting things like Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu and rakete bee bee? rakete bee zee. (I think here of Khlebnikov's definition of Zaum as "words in no known language that nonetheless have something to say.") If language is a virus, nonsense may be one of its most infective forms. They'll perform their piece before a hopefully large audience on Wednesday evening.

After the workshop we meet Stephanie and Jessica for dinner in the dining hall (pesto chicken pizza with bacon on top, just because) along with English/Theater prof Richard Pettengill, who's having the indefagitable Christian to visit his evening class afterward. Jessica and I opt to attend the Lake Forest College Writing Club's reading, which is alas poorly attended, but the readers get off some good things. I'm pleased to see that the univocalic constraint I gave my poetry students has infected some club members who are not in the class, and marvel as always at how restricting yourself to one vowel invariably produces lively, surprising, pleasure-inducing poems.

Home in time to see the latest Bachelor deny one of four identical females a rose.

Tuesday

Meet up with Stephanie and Christian to take them to my morning poetry writing class, in which they each give short presentations and take questions. Christian has ten simple rules for writing better poems, which I'll print here:

1. Use only concrete, physical nouns.
2. Choose the most specific possible nouns: "convertible" or "Mercedes," not "car."
3. Verbs must be active. Avoid "to be" like it was Ebola.
4. Make the subject of the verb do something that subject doesn't normally do. Not "the chainsaw cuts" or even "the chainsaw shreds" (a student-suggested improvement) but "the chainsaw stencils the silence" (Al Purdy).
5. No adjectives!
6. But if you must use an adjective, it should not normally apply to the noun it modifies.
7. No adverbs!
8. But if you must use an adverb, it should modify its verb in a surprising or incongruous way.
9. Never compare anything to anything else (i.e., death to similes—no "like" or "as"). Juxtapose directly.
10. The things you juxtapose should be wildly unlike each other. Not "The moon, a face" but cummings' "the moon rattles like a piece of angry candy." Yes, that breaks the simile rule.

These are very fine rules, I think, though there must always be exceptions. It will be interesting to hear from those students who resist this constructivist approach to poetry. Stephanie followed up with her own list, this time the eleven rules or principles of electronic literature, or elit. They're part of an essay of hers on the subject that's about to appear over at the Poetry Foundation, so just keep checking there for it. I can remember a couple of them: the first is elegant in its simplicity: "If you can print it out, it's not elit." She got everyone thinking, I believe, about how writing is and must change in a digital age. In a sense, the books we read are digital imitations of books: electronically typeset rather than letter-pressed, a reproduction of the product of older technology. The illusion of the "page" produced by a word processor such as Word similarly demonstrates how chained we continue to be to a past era of information. Stephanie's point about this is not that books should or will disappear, but rather that we have yet to develop an electronic literature that fits its medium; her point of comparison is the early days of TV, in which all the programs resembled filmed plays. It took decades for television to evolve forms of storytelling that make maximum use of its particular resources while minimizing or eliminating remnants of the theatrical (though it seems, with the advent of wide-screen television, to have moved much closer to cinema in recent years).

Stephanie Strickland takes questions after her presentation of hypermedia poems on Tuesday afternoon.
After the class and a quick lunch, in which we are joined by by my colleague Davis Schneiderman, it's time for Stephanie's noon performance/demonstration. Attendance is solid and my feeling is that the audience was impressed and interested in the digital poems she shared with us: Vniverse, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, slippingglimpse, and Errand upon Which We Came (all viewable at her website, though some of the pieces, like Vniverse, can only be viewed on a PC). Most fascinating to me was her explanation of how slippingglimpse uses the movements of water—images captured from the Maine coast—to synchronize the movements of words and phrases from the poem. As she puts it, the water "reads" the poems in this way, creating a dialogue between human and nonhuman languages; there's also a dialogue or dialectic in the ways in which the stylized configuration of the phrases and their overlappings and movement can lead one to read the image and watch the text. Stephanie and Christian are both skeptical, I think, of my notion of postmodern pastoral (which I talked to them a bit about), and of "nature poetry" in general; but I think I could make some interesting hay with slippingglimpse's staging of what Strickland calls "coreading."

After that Stephanie, Christian, and I meet with my advanced writing seminar—a small group of seniors, most of whom are more interested in prose than poetry. That doesn't stop us from having a fascinating conversation about changes in publishing, the tension between commerce and art, and the different levels of "alienation" (a student's word) that different sorts of texts conjure (the implicit continuum begins with J.K. Rowling and ends, I suppose, with Schwitters). And then Stephanie goes off to write and Christian, whose energy continues to humble, goes off to his workshop and I am here in my office writing this.

Tonight Jessica's reading; tomorrow, Gnoetry, the Sound Cabaret, and Christian himself. The Festival is, I think, well-launched.

The Lake Forest College Poetrypalooza

Image of Hotchkiss Hall on the Lake Forest College campus, where most of the events listed below will take place.

Poetrypalooza! That's my secret alternative name for the Fifth Annual Lake Forest Literary Festival, scheduled next week as an extremely rich appetizer for the AWP conference taking place in downtown Chicago that weekend. We have a heckuva line-up of great poetry scheduled, with an special emphasis on performance, hypermedia, and poetry off the page. Click the link or read on for an annotated schedule of events.

Monday, February 9

7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Reading by the members of the Lake Forest College Writing Club.
Come hear what our students have been up to, creative writing-wise.

Tuesday, February 10

Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Reading/performance by computer artist and poet Stephanie Strickland.
This should represent an extraordinary collision of hypermedia and the numinous (her latest book, The Red Virgin, is about the French feminist poet and philosopher Simone Weil).

8:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Reading by Jessica Savitz, our first Madeleine P. Plonsker Writer in Residence
Jessica's manuscript of poems, Hunting Is Painting, won the first prize ever to be awarded, and it's an auspicious debute: a strange and marvelous exploration of the boundaries between animality and art. It will be published by Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books.

Wednesday, February 11

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Gnoetry, a Chicago-based collective that explores collaborations between poets and computer programmers, demonstrates their work.
Should be very entertaining as the Gnoets take cues from the audience to create a computer-assisted poem right then and there.

7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
The Lake Forest College Student Sound Cabaret performs, followed by a reading by Artist-in-Residence Christian Bök in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel.
The keynote event of the festival and a must-see (or rather, must-hear).

Thursday, February 12

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Panel discussion by Festival participants.

7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Three younger poets—Brian Teare, Karen Leona Anderson, and Richard Greenfield—will read from their work in Meyer Auditorium.
These three poets are all under 40 and have all written extraordinary first books:

- Brian Teare’s The Room Where I Was Born won the Triangle Award for Gay Poetry and his new book, Sight Map is due out this month from University of California Press.
- Karen Leona Anderson’s forthcoming first book, Punish Honey, mixes lyricism with scientific investigation.
- Richard Greenfield’s A Carnage in the Love-trees was named a Top Ten University Press Book by BookSense in 2003. His highly anticipated second book, Tracer, is forthcoming from Omnidawn.

All festival events are free and open to the public and take place on the Middle Campus of Lake Forest College in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall. (The exception is the Wednesday night performance by the Sound Cabaret and Christian Bök, which will take place in the Chapel.) The festival has been made possible by the support of the Lake Forest College Department of English, the Dean of the Faculty, the Artist-in-Residence Committee, the Center for Chicago Programs, and the American Studies Program.

Hoping to see you there! And if not, perhaps I'll see you at or around AWP the following weekend.

Sadie is one year old and in a sense, so am I

Every day Sadie is perfect. But every day she is a little more herself than she was the day before. Futurity is part of her perfection: language, verticality. We call this growing up.

A sentence I want to write: The better we think we know ourselves, the less we know of what we're capable of. This sentence may not be true; I need to invent a character to say it.

From the Wikipedia entry for Wallace Stevens: "The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself." So listeners are like children.

I am pretty much already whom I'm going to be. My futurity's at least half exhausted. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. But I can't actually know this. At any moment I might make the journey to hell, purgatory, or heaven, and not necessarily in that order.

Pointing at what she wants: something on the table, something on the ceiling, something out the window. Whining when she doesn't get it, inarticulate, disjointed.

The seeing hand. "Let me see that" means give. The talking hand (not "talk to the hand"). Crying, both hands outstretched.

A child should not mean, but be.

Her aunt gave her a wooden box with red cylinders, blue cubes, and green pyramids, and a removable lid with circle, square, and triangular openings. The idea is to put the round peg in the round hole. Sadie just takes the lid off and tosses it aside, then drops the shapes into the box, like Alexander cutting the knot.

Emily visited a Montessori school: the toddlers working quietly and diligently at their play stations, or rather playing diligently at their work stations. Then they all gathered at a table for a snack. My friend Alex says the firm boundaries established there make the child freer within themselves, later in life. It's what I tell my students about the lipograms and homophonic translations I ask them to do, though I don't say "child within."

Embarrassing how often, when trying to teach a difficult concept such as Bakhtin's authoritative speech, I resort to the example of The Matrix. "The Matrix is all around you. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes." Too bad about the sequels.

Her fierceness and will, a rage boiling up from within. But language, so far, stands apart from that will. Instead it's syllabic joy: in "hat" (anything she puts on her head), in "apple" (rarely in reference to the fruit), in "duck" (not necessarily a bird that quacks). But: "up" is shifting from phoneme to morpheme, from plaything to entreaty and command.

Tonight we're meeting friends to celebrate a year of parenthood, without the object of that parenthood (we're getting a babysitter). A year in a strange country where the lights have changed. A year in which I seem to have become more porous, more easily seized by emotion. Can't think of a child's suffering now, even a fictional child, without suffering myself—is this profound or sentimental?

A year of learning to trust touch. I was recently asked, How do you hold a baby? First of all you support the head. Then you yield to the hand that seems to support you—a stark, impersonal strength that parents know. That drops you when it's done with you and leaves you breathless in front of the TV.

Standing at a nearly imperceptible distance from writing. As Sadie stands a hairsbreadth from speaking.

One strange and wonderful year down the rabbit hole, everyone seeming to fall at the same rate, but Sadie's already clutching that bottle, that cake. EAT ME. DRINK ME. Telescoping somewhere else, beyond us.

Now in the not-yet.

A Poem by Allen Grossman

Pretty well expresses my feelings about Israel right now. From his new book, Descartes' Loneliness:

City of David

Jerusalem is a grave of poets. Name
two who are buried there:
the poet Dennis Silk is buried there.
He lived with a dressmaker's dummy,
in a cave, on the Hill of Evil
Counsel due south of Zion Mount.
She bore him children
after her kind.—In any case, whatever
she gave birth to did not live.
Famous Amichai, also a poet,
is buried there. From his apartment on
the eastern slope you can see
a gate of the City, called David's Gate.
In '48, on a beach at Tel Aviv,
the poet Amichai held a dying soldier
in his arms. The soldier whispered—:
"Shelley." And then he died.
Poets built Jerusalem. Therefore,
poets have a duty to destroy
Jerusalem. If I forget thee,
the world will be better off.
The tree a cat can get up into,
a cat can get down from by itself.

Once Again, It's Time to Apply for a Plonsker

A what? Read this, all you prose writers under forty, and get cracking.

Poem for the Inaugural Poem

Since public speech is dead, they say, since poetry is only
a private, even perverse affair nowadays, since in spite of this you and you alone
will rise to the occasion, let me rise to the occasion of you!
In Frost’s wake, after Maya Angelou’s multicultural mellifluities and Miller Williams’ stalwart
soporifics, it shall be you—brainchild
of Elizabeth Alexander, as worthy a poet as any, plucked from obscurity
to be returned to obscurity, Friend of Barack, who was himself so plucked
and now bestrides the puny stage available and makes it larger by his largeness
and gives voice to those whose voices are already a bit too loud (I’m looking at you, Rick Warren,
and the Pope too, why not, the unlovely dumbass, he says homosexuality poses as great a threat to the planet
as global warming) and who speaks himself so reasonably in his plucked, scuffed baritone,
enameled mellow speech like Johnny Hartman's in the studio dark
answering Coltrane’s horn as he, Barack Obama, answers Martin’s
and maybe Malcolm’s, well we can dream we all saw that New Yorker cover
and exchanged terrorist fist bumps and fantasized a bit
about his First Lady, who let’s face it is totally packing and totally hot—
and while this poem is rolling, now, inexorably toward the real poem
let us also pay tribute to Malia and Sasha and to the whole damn handsome family
who in a single moving day will renovate so much that is now just trash and spangles—
mission accomplished, Barack, getting elected was enough
and while banks and Detroit go under and the still-President’s dodging shoes
why do I yet wish to linger in the path of the electric door
letting it shut and shut again on my foot until it gets painful
to think of you, inaugural poem, unfurling on January 20th,
getting lots of things wrong or just unmemorably and inevitably disappointing
and stalling like an opening act that’s in over its head
but stalling’s what I want so I hope you’re really long
I hope you go on for hours and days, I hope the crowd will be well provided
with hot dogs and tents and porta potties while you spiel and spiel and spiel
like an elegy for a newborn like a Jimmy Stewart filibuster
that you’ll resemble, inaugural poem, growing hoarse and sweaty and exhausted
as the crowd begins to rumble wanting history to begin
but I’m prepared to wait I’m prepared to wait it out
for who could bear it if poetry were to really be reborn
untimely now as rhetoric like the losers told him they’re just words
words we could lift to our shoulders and carry triumphant as soldiers
to the Black White House we’re all secretly hoping you’ll give us
and preach it sing out testify amen brothers sisters speak in tongues
give us back our public ecstasy give us back the beside ourselves
give us back to nobler thoughts and gives us back to waking reason
give us the snake to handle it’s alright now we’re experienced
for history is a temptation after these nightmare years
these satanic treadmill years blackened with the smoke of bodies
flag-covered coffins and factories, flagged detention centers and lapels,
flagged schools and postoffices—simply to buy a stamp was to feel shame—
and now you’re here, inaugural poem, I and everyone can scarcely believe it—
let us down gently as you’re meant to, deliver an awkward common speech
salted with unmemorable metaphors but maybe a single metrical line
that will give us back the gift outright that lies soiled from neglect
some trace memory of untrustworthy eloquence for a moment we can trust
will open wide the door to what no one scarcely imagined
shouldn’t you shut up and just say what everyone is thinking
over and over till the taste of it is swelling in every mouth
President, our
President, black
President, our black President—
so call him to preside
over what’s best and worst in us, masses yearning to breathe free,
masses yearning to be masses, many-purposed but a living ear
to hear you fall at last to silence. And let our President speak.

************

The lineation here's a mess—Whitman could never have used Blogger—but beyond my meager technical abilities to correct. I read this poem at the MLA off-site reading (maskless). It was going to appear in a chapbook of poems for the inauguration that will be published by DePaul University, but they objected to the line about the Pope and I decided to leave it in, so that means leaving the poem out of the anthology. My first time being censored, that I can recall, and a fitting moment of ambivalence.

Gaza

It should go without saying that I'm horrified and disgusted by Israel's assault on the helpless civilians of Gaza. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So, in case it matters to someone, even one person, I'll say it here.

Unlike most of my extended family, I was not raised with any special feeling for Israel—partly a byproduct of my liberal parents' distance from Judaism as a religion (I grew up attending a Unitarian fellowship, making us "Jewnitarians"). My sense of Jewishness was firmly diasporic, and—for better or worse—largely informed by the experience of the Holocaust, which my maternal grandparents had both improbably survived (as had my mother, born in 1942 and hidden by relatives in the Budapest ghetto till war's end). The stories I absorbed from her, from my grandfather, and the gruesome books that my mother collected on the subject, formed the kernel of my notion of Jews as victims of power. Jews as wielders of power were difficult to envision, but if I did envision them, I imagined that they would be called to a higher standard of ethical conduct both by the Torah itself and by the historical experience of near-extinction at the hands of oppressors. It's stomach-wrenching to see that experience being used, instead, to justify the oppression of others through routinized racism, the creation of new ghettos, and plain old-fashioned banditry.

Again and again I hear the argument: you'd do the same if rockets were being fired at you. Obama, who like every other American politician panders to, if not Israel itself than to the debased American discourse about Israel, said it himself. It's profoundly disappointing to see the people I must claim as my own, whom if they are to mean anything as a Jewish people must hold themselves to the highest standards of justice and equality, justifying their actions with an argument that amounts to "anyone would do the same in our place." It's a meaningless argument that makes the special cultural heritage and historic burden of Jewishness just as meaningless.

My tribalism, such as it is, is primarily invested in communities of choice: poets, intellectuals, D&D fanatics. But I would make myself part of another tribe, however small and splintered: secular Jews with a nevertheless religious feeling for the meaning of a chosen people—chosen not to prevail over enemies, or to take land based on Biblical claims, but rather chosen to be choosers of the more difficult, less expedient, most just path, whatever the situation. I am therefore not a Zionist, though I'm not an anti-Zionist either—a Diasporist, who rather thinks that Philip Roth got it right in his amazing metafiction Operation Shylock: A Confession. That's the Jewishness I'm committed to: suffering questions, and not punishing those who question us. The Jewishness of Marx and Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg; the Jewishness of Kafka and Benjamin; the Jewishness of Rosenzweig and Roth and Leonard Bernstein.

My identity aside, powerlessly, imperatively, I say simply: stop. Stop the war. Stop making widows. Stop making orphans. Stop making fresh hatred. Stop today. Stop now.

Stop.

Lillian Ruth Rasof Corey, 1922 - 2009

Pictured at left, a couple of weeks ago, with her friend Helene in the background and Sadie Gray in front.

Goodbye, Grandma. You taught us all a lot about love.

Poets in San Francisco

First, some images, in more or less reverse chronological order:

Fog rolling in.

Michael Palmer reading Ernest Jones's "Songs of the Low" and other poems from the new Volume III of the Poems for the Millenium anthology, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, and devoted to "Romantic and Postromantic Poetry."

Leslie Scalapino reading STC's "Kubla Khan" at the same event.

Carmen Gimenez-Smith and Richard Greenfield at dinner after the reading.

Obligatory shot of the Golden Gate Bridge

Brian Teare, right, and his partner Robert.

Angular view of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, downtown.

The Transamerica Pyramid and the Zoetrope building.

Me in a tree at Muir Woods.

My sister Vanessa and her neighbor's dog Einstein.

Shadows of Vanessa and me at Land's End.

This trip was just about everything I'd hoped for: five days devoted to poetry in one of the most beautiful cities on earth. I did nothing whatever MLA related, though I did participate in the off-site reading at the Yerba Buena center on Sunday night (there's a story to be told about the poem I read but I'll save that for another post). But I went to all my favorite bookstores (the ones that still exist, that is; but I didn't make it to the East Bay to mourn for Cody's in any case) and bought a pile of things I have no time to read, and I hung out with my favorite people, and perhaps most significantly did a manuscript workshop on Saturday night with Richard Greenfield and Brian Teare and Catherine Meng (we also went over Cat's remarkable new manuscript, bits of which have appeared here and there, most recently in Fence: it's a book partly inspired by Lost and the questions of collective subjectivity and narrativity that that show's capable of raising in its finer moments). In the workshop, I was persuaded of a couple of things:

- The Odysseyan superstructure that I'd constructed this past summer as a means of freshening and re-opening the poems was actually a cumbersome distraction from the poems, which don't need its help.

- The title, Severance Songs, has to go. Brian doesn't like "severance" because he doesn't think the poems are about that; Richard doesn't like the unreconstructed romanticism of "songs." Cat doesn't mind the title, but she does agree the book needs a new frame, and Homer isn't the guy to provide it.

- The individual poems may or may not need titles so their density doesn't overwhelm the reader, a real risk in a whole book of formally similar poems. (More formal variation or ventilation of some of the poems may also be required.)

The problem of the new title really stumped me all day Sunday as I wandered about the city. I've used the old one for so long, and published many or even most of the poems with reference to it, including the chapbook-sized chunk that appeared in Conjunctions in 2004. The title has, at least in my own mind, taken on some of the attributes of a brand, which I'm leery of discarding. On the other hand, it's obvious that the poems need a new frame, a new handle, which will provide unobstructed (or unobstructive) access to them. At the same time, I need to honor the poems as they were written and the original impulses behind them, not thrash about in search of a "high concept" that will erase the slowness of their accumulation.

Because they were written day by day, more or less in response to events in my life while living in Ithaca, I considered using a term like journal, diary, notebook, or daybook in the new title. But this would suggest a casualness that the poems, in their post-Stevensian density, simply don't reflect. Then I thought of using the word "sonnets," since the sonnet form is the most unifying principle of the book. None of the poems use end rhyme in any systematic way, but they're all about fourteen lines long and play with the argumentative structure of the sonnet; more significantly, the pursuit of an impossible ideal is the most consistent theme in the poems as a whole. But to use sonnets in the title would imply a sequentiality and completeness that's as false as the retrofitted Odysseyan superstructre. This is a serial poem, if it's anything, with the open-endedness and anti-narrativity that implies.

Browsing in Green Apple Books with Brian the next day, I mused to Brian that maybe I should simply name the book after the place in which I wrote it. Ithaca is out, obviously, and Ithaca, New York is specific in the wrong way. What about Southern Tier, I asked him. Then he reminded me that the Fingerlakes Region, and western New York in general, has another, more remarkable name that it acquired in the mid-nineteenth century: the burned-over district.

This immediately appealed to me. First of all, it plays with the idea of the poem as field or territory, and the ventilation of the poems is my attempt to deterritorialize the "little room" of the sonnet. Then of course there's the term's actual reference to the region I lived as a place so prone to spiritual uplift and transformation on a massive scale (in the Second Great Awakening) that it was spoken of as a place in which all the spiritual timber had already been used up. The Oneida colony, Joseph Smith and his golden tablets, the Shakers, and other such Transcendentalists avant la lettre all made their most significant spiritual discoveries in western New York. Finally, while on the one hand the term suggests devastation—a spiritual commons turned stale, flat and unprofitable from overuse—it also suggests renewal, as in slash-and-burn agriculture. All this seems to apply to what the poems actually are and do, in a way that the Odysseus model simply doesn't.

So, that's the new title of my revised manuscript: Burned-over District. I think that turns the corner and takes the poems into a new epoch, which is a movement I really need. Not just so that the book itself might see the light of day, but so I can begin to close the door on this project and start seeing what new things arise. I'm grateful, above all, for my poetry companions Richard, Brian, and Cat, part of my Montana cohort and, as I said that night, invaluable "continuity girls": the people who have known you and your work long enough to remind you of who and what you're really about. I've been struggling with my own love of beautiful language—a kind of Oedipal struggle with Stevens, who's the poet that first enabled my own writing at a tender age, and who's in my DNA now for better and for worse. My comrades gave me permission, and the book permission, simply to be myself. There's no greater gift.

Gudding, Bolaño, and the Limits of Literature

Last week I had the pleasure of having Gabe Gudding up to Lake Forest to talk to my Modern Poetry students and give a reading. I'd recommend him to any teacher and any class anywhere. One of my students marveled afterward about how unpretentious he is. Both in conversation and in the reading he was a quiet, yet commanding presence, the best imaginable soft advocate for his own work. At least three of my students wrote or are writing pieces inspired by him and Rhode Island Notebook in the wake of his visit, and it's some of the best writing they've done all semester.

But I come not to praise Gabe but to bury him, or rather to contemplate his own flirtation with the limits of poetry. We were all struck by his admission in the class that he often doesn't like or feels embarrassed by his old work—something most writers can surely relate to—but during the Q&A after the reading he went further and told us that he doesn't read much poetry any more and doesn't really like or trust it. "I want poetry to be useful," he said, and said he was moving away from beautiful language and metaphors (things he clearly loves and which come naturally to him as the leaves to a tree) toward simply presenting the things he finds in the world—an Objectivist-inluenced stance. The example of the new style that he presented was an section from his horological essay, "Praise to the Swiss Federation," a portion of which was excerpted in Harper's. I took this piece for a poem in the spirit of Christopher Smart, but Gabe calls it an essay, and as such evidence of his move away from poetry and, it would perhaps not be too much to say, an expression of his unease with the literary as such.


Given my obsession with Roberto Bolañno, it was natural for me to connect Gabe's unease with the central quality of Bolaño's greatness, as asserted by the clever boys at n plus one, following up their own Benjamin Kunkel's review of The Savage Detectives that first appeared in the London Review of Books. There Kunkel wrote, "Here is a writer, then, who writes as if literature were all that mattered, and at the same time writes in a distinctly unliterary way." The collectively authored n plus one piece goes further, comparing Bolaño or at least his similarly sudden canonization to W.G. Sebald (have they been reading my blog?) and saying of both authors, "neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can't be a really important novelist anymore unless you can't really write novels" (italics original).

We have overshot, then, the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized "theory" in the 1970s to arrive at a poetics of suspicion: only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question can now summon the aesthetic impact we associate with great literature. This may represent the most complete assimilation by authors of the skeptical stance that diffused itself in the last universally acknowledged great wave of postmodern fiction (Pynchon, Delillo, Coover) and poetry (Ashbery, Ashbery, Ashbery). Now it's not merely literary strategies that are picked apart and turned around through unreliable narrators, disordered chronologies, the blurring of fact and fiction, extreme parataxis, etc. It's the literary itself, the summoning and deployment of aesthetic effects, summarized in the phrase "beautiful language." It's like the avant-garde attack on art as an institution, but the spirit is less merry prankster than Beckettian: I can't go on writing, I'll go on writing. Which tone makes me wonder if this new anti-literary strategy isn't just modernism through the back door, since it's modernism's aura of mournful remembrance that most superficially distinguishes it from the products of postmodernism.

The only problem with this thesis is that it isn't really true. Sebald's work first shocked readers with its apparently artless photographs and endless paragraphs, but in recollection the work is nearly limpid, its melancholy polished to a high gleam. If Sebald's writing drew sighs of longing from its American readers, that had less to do with a sense of liberation from the literary than it provided a frisson of contact with a culture and history and tragedy that seemed far weightier and more substantial than ours during the decade of his American emergence. He seems less strange and more realistic in post-9/11 America, with his endless search for lost people, lost time, lost atmospheres. As for Bolaño, I suspect the artless, "lurid and flat" storytelling we accuse him of now will become not the surface to be broken by the diving reader in search of deeper, more duende-like qualities; instead, it will eventually be seen as the very thing that attracts us and which marks his writing as literary: that is, language hijacked on the road to representation by the very starkness and strangeness of the real that infiltrates and suffuses the work of Sebald and Bolaño alike. Or to put it another way, this is writing that doesn't pretend to understand the strangeness of life but lets it unfold, never shaped in any form save by storytellers who don't disguise both their interest in and their lack of control over the outcome. Sebald did this monologically; Bolaño's major innovation is his dialogism, as seen in the innumerable narrators of The Savage Detectives. None of them has a handle on the truth, but collectively they present us with the restless search for truth, for a truth that can account for the fate of the novel's antiheroes on every level: social, economic, juridical, literary, geographical. From what I've read of 2666 he pursues a similarly dark and heteroglossic investigation, one with far more chilling consequences in its irresolution.

Which takes me back to Gabe, whose Rhode Island Notebook already shows signs of the anti-literary, hyper-literary stance he now wants to take toward poetry. In its seemingly artless, scatological, essayistic progress, the book picks up and discards language both lyrical and mundane, sometimes sadistically so, reckoning experience through that simplest and most flexible of narratives: there and back again, anabasis-katabasis. So when Gabe talks about wanting to somehow move beyond poetry, yet in poetry, I want to send him one of those old Publishers Clearing House envelopes that says YOU MAY ALREADY BE A WINNER. And I wonder what his model may have to teach me in my own moment of revulsion (too strong: recoiling? re-collection?) against my own literary DNA, my own restless distrust of the beautiful language I seem so badly to need.

Flowers in My Hair

Caught in the feedback loop of silence. Wanting to write—there's no more futile emotion. You have to want to write something. And I am writing, here and there, but it never seems like the thing. But wanting it to be "the thing" is what defeats me.

There are two books I want to read between semesters: Robert Bolaño's 2666 and Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Bolaño draws me in much the same way W.G. Sebald did years ago, though he entirely lacks Sebald's lyricism (in spite of being a poet) and studied sense of guilt (except in the fictional sense, as in the sensational, abject guiltiness of Father Urrutia in By Night in Chile. As for Hyde, his book is a vade mecum that others have tried to push on me in the past, but I always avoided it, knowing little about the author and suspecting, because of the title and the way it's marketed, that it's basically a glorified self-help book. Just look at that little heart! But from what I've heard, it really is a masterpiece and a boon to the thinking of any poet who seeks escape from markets (especially the market in recognition that is the subject of Adam Kirsch's latest dismal screed in the same November issue of Poetry that gave me my first taste of the poetry of Robert Bolaño [typically, though he always thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, only his fiction has made it over into English]).

But I mention Kirsch because of his essay, with its anatomy of the scorn that has been heaped on the head of Keith Gessen, author of a novel that both chronicles the literary ambitions of young men and is the ourouborian document of Gessen's own ambition—much misplaced, it seems, in these unliterary times. Why didn't he just do a virtuosic job of lip-syncing something on YouTube? But then, why don't I? Because I have this faith in literature which is yet killing my ability to produce any. The desire to speak from the mountaintop—to go big—to take on one's era—shames and paralyzes. We must think small, instead, but cannily: to assume that our petty obsessions are the keys to something greater. Joyce's silence, exile, and cunning must meet with Emerson's core belief: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius." And that is how I recognized the genius of Bolaño, who writes frankly and astonishing about the pettiest of worlds—the world of poets—and ends up going very big indeed, stalking nothing less than the wounded utopian specter that haunts the Americas, manifesting in the present tense as farce (in the government and persona of a Hugo Chavez), as cynicism (it's hard not to feel hopeless at Obama's apparent transformation into Clinton III—but did he really promise us anything different?), or most starkly as murder (the countless unsolved murders of young women in Juarez that are the major subject and backdrop of 2666).

The very little I've seen of Hyde is a tonic for all this. I couldn't find The Gift in the Evanston Public Library, but I did glance at his introduction to the collection of Thoreau essays he edited, in which he talks about Thoreau (and I think Emerson) as a master of the prophetic voice: that which stands upon the hilltop above the valleys of venal life and proclaims—not the future, but truths which must be eventually be fresh again because they are eternal. Up to this point Hyde seemed a talented hagiographer. But then came this astonishing passage:

A Thoreauvian prophetic essay leads us on a redemptive journey... but there is a redemption of the valley as well, one that comes from abandoning all hope of getting it together. If you need to come apart, you do not need to listen to the prophetic voice. Stop trying to be a hero. There is a time to fall to pieces, to identify with the confusion of your life as it is, confined absolutely to the present November sunset and your present apartment. (Emphasis added.)

This is exactly what I needed to hear, exactly the cure for the itch of objectless ambition, or more simply the desire to "get it together": to seamlessly synthesize a life that, in its multiple spheres—writing, new fatherhood, marriage, teaching—resists all my efforts to be glued into a whole. If I can take Hyde's advice and be an upended Thoreau, who goes not into the woods but deeper into his own messy life, maybe I'll find my way back to the writing that matters to me, without letting everything else go any more to pieces than it already is.

As a step in this direction, which may superficially resemble the urge to get it together, I'm taking a holiday to San Francisco at the end of this month, roughly coinciding with MLA, though I have no plans to attend the conference itself. Instead, I'm going to meet up with the poet-friends who will be converging there, to talk poetry and read manuscripts and browse Green Apple and Moe's Books like in the old days, and reconnect with that hauntingly beautiful cityscape, and just be a poet for a few days, letting the ties that bind me unravel a little bit without worrying about reraveling them later—they'll do that themselves, god knows. My beautiful wife is willing to let me go for a little while, though it will be painful to miss even six days of little Sadie Gray's growth. (She's dabbling now in language: show her a picture of a dog or say "dog" to her and she makes a little "uff-uff" sound, almost reflexively, her bright and shining eyes as yet displaying nothing like consciousness, present-tense eyes like those of dogs themselves.)


And so I have no plans either to get this blog together. Let it hang out as it will, a post per month or per day or per year. Let it and the pace of expectations adapt to my life and not the other way around for a change.