otherwise

2010-04-29T00:58:00.000-05:00

In order for there to be some chance of catching up on my April reading posts, I’m limiting each to a maximum of ten sentences. Here, then are ten sentences on

David Larsen, The Thorn (Faux Press, 2005)

Where the utterly absurd and ironic, especially as they relate to our contemporary political milieu, generally produce poetry that places its author and its reader at a safe distance from danger, damage, risk, and involvement (as in, generally, Flarf), David Larsen uses them as motivating energies to set off chain reactions of thoughts and feelings whose earnestness is bound up with their self-sabotage, itself in turn a far cry from the safety of the earnest political poetry of liberal acknowledgement of one’s own complicity.

When Larsen begins “Portrait of Gerard Malanga” with “Osama Bin Laden is the most beautiful / man I have ever seen,” later claims that “he is in daily communication with angels,” and in-between asks, “BUT SHALL I TELL YOU / WHAT BEFELL THE PANCAKE VENDOR, / ON HIS FINAL VISIT TO OSAMA’S / MOUNTAIN PRECINCT?,” it certainly doesn’t seem as if we’re to take him seriously.

The whole poem, however, never seems to slide entirely into kitsch—I think I’m being asked to feel what these thoughts would be like to genuinely think—and it seems pretty serious when it throws off a series of other poems, ranging from the promised account of the pancake vendor’s execution (itself linked to a frightening story about the vendor’s wife’s encounter with Bin Laden’s followers) to genuinely informative meditations on religion and to the presence in other (less directly related) poems of parodic prayer language, considerations of masculinity, devotion and idolatry, and mourning.

The book forms a loosening and tightening serial set in which such systems of relationships activate each other retroactively, so that the poem before “Portrait” (its title scratched out) appears in a different light by virtue of the cultural associations of its proper name:

with nothing to lose
can be able to want to
will over the dam
a feeling to let spatter and
turn no wheel.
He throws the shells of the nuts he eats.
Alawi, turn a friend of mine.
How did you wind up

Through such resonances the wide stylistic variety of the book, which initially makes it seem like a series of pleasurably all-over-the-place independent works, comes to seem like a wild, unstoppable energy carrying important material in all kinds of directions.

This energy is expressed in the handwriting in which many of the poems are presented, in the use of obscenities, and in the surprising swerves between lines in a great number of the works, like “My Star is Rye:”

Plants and I
look back on it.
We’re fucking choking it, and
I’m poured all over the lawn in broths,
steaming. My star is rye
and forearms at the edge
of dampness, straining
in the math scores of
the state in which I am visiting.
Eighth graders, and Krishna in his bower
also did well on the test, and that is when
I decided to become a
Toronto Blue Jays fan

Among the book’s themes are friendship and death, and they state the argument of the book’s mode in an amazing way in a handwritten poem consisting of a numbered list of items like:

1.THE GLORY OF GOD
2.HIS WRATH
3.TOO MUCH SPERM
4.NOT ENOUGH SPERM
5.IMAGINATION
6.NARROWNESS OR SMALLNESS
[…]
13.DEMONS
13. DEVILS

IT TAKES A LOT
TO KILL A YOUNG PERSON

FOR ANN SIMON (1968-2003)

The ridiculousness of the listed items, it seems to me, embodies an intensity that is as appropriate as any, maybe more appropriate than anything more emotionally intuitive, to commemorate and protest against the loss of a beloved human being.

This intensity reaches its apex in the amazing “Wild Speech” (the fulcrum of Dana Ward’s Typing Wild Speech, the subject of my previous post), which activates nearly all the tendencies of the book and amplifies them to a degree that takes my breath away.

The Thorn should be absolutely required reading for anyone interested in poetry that engages with our contemporary worlds of pop culture, religion, politics, humor, education, interpersonal relationships, and the irony that plunges into an acknowledgment of the messes we’re in while all too rarely exhausting its many strengths in an attempt to live through and in spite of them.

2010-04-26T22:19:00.001-05:00

Dana Ward, Typing Wild Speech (2010)

I lent my copy of this powerful little chapbook to a friend last week, so I’m unable to quote it directly, or mention the publisher—but I had to skip forward in my alphabetical reading binge, as I couldn’t wait longer than a few days to read this book after I got it.

Ward performed in Madison a few weeks back, in the Deceptively Wall-Shaped Poetry Reading, along with John Coletti and Jess Mynes. The reading blew my mind, took my breath away, made me tear up, laugh and think hard. I’d been reading Coletti and Mynes and loving their stuff, but hadn’t yet been able to get my hands on much of Ward’s work. It’s a real revelation in its kind of honest persona-based directness, its talkiness—what is it that works so well in this writing? (Tapping tab key gently with middle finger while thinking—softly enough that it doesn’t get depressed, or even glum—pardon me, I just rode sixty miles on the bike and my mind is erratic). Ah, ok—what Ward read at the Mercury Lounge, and the writing in this book, is often—usually—centered around the speaking “I,” but—and—I get no sense at all that what’s being talked about is supposed to be important simply because it belongs to that “I;” instead, it’s more that only what’s important about the experience of that persona will be discussed, or that anything that comes into the poem will be pulled into the gravitational field of something urgent. That’s a special kind of integrity, which probably wouldn’t be enough to make great writing if it were not also characterized by surprising turns of thought, really sneaky ways of ending us up somewhere without it being clear how we got there—or the occasional screeching swerve into some other trajectory—less a letting-thought-go-where-it-will than a driving while just barely touching the wheel.

Typing Wild Speech is a prose work with a few embedded poems, a “New Narrative”-influenced piece of—I assume—autobiography. In the process of being thrown back into trying to deal with the past suicide of an old close friend (by the resemblance to the friend of the actor playing Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in a film about Curtis’s last days), the narrator (Ward) also tries to break a deadlock in his writing, and part of this attempt is a repeated typing-out of David Larsen’s poem “Wild Speech.” The poem, as it appears in Larsen’s excellent book The Thorn (which I read immediately upon finishing Ward’s text), is handwritten—so Ward is typing a handwritten poem about speech in trying to interrupt his own mental chatter. Though Ward claims that the attempt failed to get him anywhere, the overlaying of these forms works in the finished text as an model for the layering of levels of thought throughout the work.

Ward is skeptical about his own project, suspicious that he’s using the death of a friend as material or impetus for writing; that the concepts he comes up with along the way are insufficiently thought through but sound seductive and effective enough that he’ll end up employing them for a long time; that his notion of what it means to be a poet might be damaging his relationship with his lover Sarah—all important considerations that fall into the general complex of questions about how writing relates to everyday life, to the social and political world, to the larger culture. The self is always doubled by something else—Dana’s recollections of Geoff (already doubled by Curtis) are doubled by a story about the a rich man’s daughter who becomes obsessed with Kurt Cobain’s death. Dana’s perspective is doubled by Sarah’s and called into question by it. A daydream about the perfect crime is doubled by a short love poem that repeats it but takes its narrative in a completely different direction. The entire work is doubled by Larsen’s poem.

Hell. This is one of those books whose excellence is very hard to explain. I give up here, and close by highly recommending that you read Ward’s important work. It’s challenging in ways I didn’t expect, and still don’t, even as those ways recur in me.

2010-04-21T23:51:00.001-05:00

I’ve been getting behind on my April book reports, but nearly keeping up with the reading.

New publication-happenings!

An essay in the Ron Silliman feature of the new Jacket (which also includes, among other things, a big Bob Perelman feature. Just thinking about Bob Perelman makes me happy).
A review of Roberto Harrison’s work in the new Aufgabe
Poems in the first issue of We Are So Happy to Know Something, which came in the mail today and is an absolutely gorgeous little hardcover, stab-bound construction, full of what seems so far to be some pretty amazing writing.
Poems in the most recent Pinstripe Fedora. Some really weird ones.
All the best to all of you! More little essays to come soon.

2010-04-20T23:49:00.000-05:00

Myung Mi Kim, The Bounty (Chax, 2000)

I read this one a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for Kim’s reading at UW, having read bits and pieces of her books for awhile. It’s perhaps the most difficult of the texts that have found their way into my April marathon, and a discussion of it really needs more time (and more rereading) than I’ve been able to give to it this month. I’ll note some observations on her work in general, as I’ve found it so far, both in relation to The Bounty and to her recent Penury (the focus of her reading here, which was followed by an intriguing and friendly discussion).

Kim’s poetry is engaged with history—a train of wagons clambered upon by more and more poets these days, and one that I feel is well worth pursuing, with many directions open to investigation—and that includes the history of the present as well. In fact, much of Kim’s material from the present can often feel like the past, because it deals directly with issues of labor and gender in places and cultural contexts (Korea, Africa, the “third world” in general) that hardly get a mention in the news, are hardly a part of our everyday thinking. When we do encounter them, it’s in the context of something like a photo in the Times—an image so surrounded by the communicative, technological and informational contexts we’re used to that it’s all-but-drowned-out by our habitual perspectives. Kim somehow bypasses those conduits, and that makes it seem less “now” in a way that’s valuable in a culture in which “now” means “the latest thing” and precludes the experience of the genuine presence of things as they are.

Part of this is acheived through her use of the fragment. Many (in Penury, even most) of the lines seem clearly to be parts of sentences from source materials. These fragments don’t work in two of the most common modes for historical poetry. They’re not compressed citations of a Poundian or Olsonian sort, and they also—and this is a subtle and great aspect of Kim’s poetry that I didn’t fully get until I heard her read it—don’t come off as silenced, as buried or barely uttered. There’s a lot of space, a lot of silence, in and on Kim’s pages, but it doesn’t seem like a silence enforced by oppression. Though this poetry targets injustice, its silences are less a symbolic protest than they are a utopian space.

In the post-reading discussion, Kim made a lovely contrast between mourning as a state and as an activity (if I’m remembering this right). She wants mourning to be a way of moving forward with what’s passed, and thinks of her silences, mournful and otherwise, as productive sites of activity—so that a set of fragments becomes a constellation in which something about the sources that never spoke before can come to light their encounters with one another. Their fragmentariness makes their borders permeable to one another. It heightens aspects other than informational content (such as sound and figuration) in any given individual fragment. At the same time, the content of those fragments reappears in the gradual accumulation that takes place over the course of a long work—the content recurs on a larger scale, and in a different light, or in a way that’s quite transformed, as new meaning. It’s that accumulative aspect that’s impossible to convey in excerpts, so I’ll just re-cite the crucial notions here and end with a couple of almost randomly selected pages from the “Anna O Addendum” sequence of The Bounty.

--Silence is a spaciousness productive of new relationships between fragments, rather than representative of a silencing.
--Fragments no longer function as fragments, instead gaining connotative and semantic richness, becoming in their nature something other than their documentary origins
--The cumulative effect of constellations of these parts brings content back into the foreground in a new way, and it’s a content that’s dependent upon the original specifics of the fragments, though not reducible to them.

Tombs of women ornamented

Who wants me dead

Referred to as water in a tube

Given X, Y sisters in slings of ars

Enter foyer breathe alike

Cauterized condition of agreement

Just so pose of pumpkin gourd

Surplus tomatoes screen of oaks

So long as economy sailed with men

[page break]

Scrupulous remnant

Snapped for chewing

Reticent dowel laurel plague

Contaminate feed and see

Disdain fabric worn through

Torch fact defer

[page break]

Rank swan either rye ripe

Threading treading threw up the word: skylark

Scent and scene audible tooth and tongue

A vowel is that which a consonant brought to touch

Noses of corralled animals part species a flame

Perfidy method divisive

Point a composite significant sound

2010-04-16T14:38:00.001-05:00

Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996)

This is an incredibly disorienting book, so different from Jarnot’s later work but definitely containing some of its seeds. I have experienced a long and uncomfortable process of coming to adore her writing (especially the relatively recent Night Scenes), and finding this at the root of it makes me want to reread the rest in its light.

Some Other Kind of Mission has the feel of cutup work, and I suspect that something like that is involved in the generation of its material. Many of its pages are scanned or photocopied images of typed, handwritten, drawn-upon, collaged sheets with most of the words crossed out, and many of the remaining phrases can be found in the conventionally printed text. The book as a whole seems like a travelogue, with the “I” and a few recurring names driving, drinking, sleeping. There are many farm animals, sometimes in trucks (Jarnot’s familiar chickens), sometimes as surreal roadkill (“miles of strips of pig” recurs frequently). There are explosions, which sometimes seem like car bombs, sometimes like war, at least once a gas station exploding. Time seems to pass—they seem to have been on the road a long time—but this is all dim, shadowy, seen through a mesh of irregularly reiterated and varied sentences and fragments whose juxtapositions make up what is more an eerie sense of narrative than a narrative proper.

That’s the main prose text. The title pages usually include a short poem in verse, a bit closer to Jarnot’s later style, but without the dominant tone of playfulness I associate with much of the latter. There’s one very strange reiterative verse section in conventional type (“Emperor Wu”), and there’s a final section of “Marginalia,” with little reiteration of parts, that switches between Paris & Helen / Greek stuff and relatively straightforward, almost diaristic sentences. Here it’s as if the two main underlying strands of the whole work are being separated out and laid bare—the Trojan war and a complicated set of contemporary interpersonal relationships—but I don’t get the sense that this explains what preceded it. Instead it seems like a ground is being established that itself turns out to be ghostly; when there are a few repetitions or Steinian disorientations of language, it feels like a powerful drug coming on—in a minute we’ll be back in that strange variation on the production of reality that this book enacts.

In response, here’s a piece based partly on a travelogue text I’ve been keeping around for thirteen years. I’m glad to finally use it:

we swamp through film floor to return, carpentering even stranger, the mindless degree
in quick little of a low case floor all night into and through history and OK, the obvious intention
just waking observer. derrick in our object the witnessed doesn’t write silk and the match for others
saying setting slowly, scarred forever with mining after selling ourselves with pad ton ends
can ethical ham survival is not nuclear dust vanishing in a snare, then still read and bright fact
the row did the load, the mindless degree armed code enforces: do not flock V.
a loaded shown a red even stronger cause to ice, the cop trained terrain only from tulsa to texas
we felt its wife, the inexplicable violence to reach light, to caucasian well, paying our little whales
no of real, a beautiful dry, work to when allow, consequence of abstract architecture
just as we wear illusory rooms pulled over wants. pay in swine, flukes have no deal/solutions
I need quote to war, hair and satchel, notice of endless horseshit a fellow got to eat in
its six of, then peaches of, or off were off, we felt trained in flickering phosphor dots
and the, thinking the blanket question playing in bracket songs. share our survival
alien energies staffing energy waste if he and die everywhere, share our survival
floor that trailer, we drank it up the mountains, lost the freedom to fail the emotional residue
in the still it was getting liked a liked anger liked the fact all shapes of the stone
usually composed of maps, even stronger illusory rooms trying to sale. the ill county
the lumen still white and frank et al. evolving instantly into meme cancer
black and steam to swallow the silence of the silent, behind us both are presence
the PLO of budget boxes, files of holders slowly co-lessening, what a wonderful contract
watched assignment come up the witnessed to traits trace, then went to an ant
that is a cross of dealers that space must thus get chairs to fail close to note toilet
says they just bill it high down the Willow Santa, then may come out to the traced trace
and build him another wheat shaft, incredible vegetarian fluid bubble like to horror
just like gophers known as deal eagles will claim the paperless traveller
see blanket question. gift of a windblock we spent throughout turkey
traffic was waking up in order to present a robbery in the city needed with beef
but in the period we stared at the blue gibbons, code-enforcers share our survival
some diets garbage comes out like stained glass jewels, two traits to the traced trick scares

this happens despite the clear language
of the Low-Laid-Lawful Let Act of 1913:
“may not be in feared with or deny
the o\o\Open-the-Sewer Act

settled
to cancel
to be gentle
in everything
outside the law
fear put
half both speech
all-out boasts
this should get
into hard
centralized shit
keep steel home
shells crossing saints
passed the largest increase
biggest cross in the
centralized saint
to be gentle
when only eight
a.m. keeps you there
to fail, share
our survival

you don’t have to tell me that
or anything really

allow levine your hard to two cross over the empty space fact everywhere must he must
allow the fine of your heart to cross over the empty space that everywhere must be owners
allow the vying ability or hard to two-cross over the GE space fact everywhere must be over his
all of the vying to your heart to cross over the empty space event everywhere must be dealers
allow the fine above, your heart to cross, over the key space, that everywhere must be awards

fights to read itself in the dust

2010-04-15T14:34:00.000-05:00

p. inman, at. least. (Krupskaya, 1999)

This is an absolutely gorgeous book. It’s composed of seven pieces, and in five of them each word is followed by a period and a space. Capital letters only occur at the beginning of proper names. In combination with varying line and stanza length and differing degrees of sentence-like behavior, inman’s form produces a breathtaking range of ways to structure sense. Here are some bits of a few exemplary sections from the longest work, “n.b.:”

[…]
only. of. action. is. state. power.

empiricism. by. all. the. typewriter.
hobbles. (less. of. contentment.

property. relations. in. talk.

oin. wr.
write. pr.

ones. in.
terms. of.

statist.
outsides.

could. fl.
attenings.
extric. ls.
grievances.

prone.
bug. bites.
sterno.
coastal.
length.

[…]

how.much.eyesight.was.there.in.that.the.longer.she.spoke.

__________________________________________________________

prisonyard.
to. snowed.
film. clip.

skin. color.
as. minutes.

laced.
from.
mice.

say. the. sparing. of. a. theoretical.
moment. the. far. egg. of. another. market.
slump. placed. beside. a. book. whitecap.
[…]

--and this, from ten pages earlier:

looked. after.
a. lysine. of.
such. ink. crook.
only. the. farther.
he. moves. into.
him. striped. sweat.
[…]

Separation by periods gets amplified or softened by line length. Shorter lines tend to emphasize the independence of each word, so that even when conventional syntax is potentially present my tendency is to read for sonic qualities—whereas I look for sentences in the longer lines. In one-word lines there’s a finality to each word, whereas, over the course of extended reading, the emphatic pauses in longer lines form a stammering rhythm. It’s like physical gesture broken into its component micro-gestures, small muscular adjustments and shifts in balance—or like seeing a film frame by frame—except that the stops affect the individual moments (for instance, the intonation curves I hear in my head are very different from those I’d hear in a normal version of the sentence, and pronunciation is affected as well; I always hear “the” with a long “e” and “a” as “ay,” rather than “ah” or “uh”).

All this has its effects on content as well (often the content deals with the history and theory of communism, and sometimes with the work of other writers). A sentence fragment like “the. principal. objective. of. action.” seems less suspended or floating than it would without the periods, whose regularity of visual and sonic intonation weaves everything into a shared fabric made up of universal separation. If this is parataxis (it is driving me wild), it’s an unusual variety in which the distance between juxtaposed parts is doubled—one kind of distance varies with the degree and kind of content, while another is relentlessly regular.

“milton. babbitt. (50. words. each.),” in tribute to the great serialist composer, works through five permutations of ways of structuring its number (ten five-word lines, two columns of 25 single-word lines each, etc.). “Mel;nick’s” adds an extra space after each period in a series of four-line stanzas drawing from (I believe) David Melnick’s book pcoet. In “i.e.” (late in the book), commas replace the periods, and its alarming how much of a difference this makes. Perhaps the most gorgeous piece in the book is the three-page “lieu/instead,” written in two columns with highly variable margins, without regular punctuation. Every small cluster of words here is incredibly charged—it’s something like Robert Grenier at his best extended through Larry Eigner channeling Clark Coolidge, plus elegy.

I’ve always been a bit of a punctuation fetishist, constantly replacing colons with dashes, adding and removing commas, and so on, finding the ways these marks structure meaning. inman gets an amazing amount out of just a couple of punctuation devices here, but though the sense is one of exhaustiveness I finished the book with a wonderful sense of opened possibility. It doesn’t hurt that the writing itself is so graceful, so tuned to minute particulars, to music and to ethics at the same time.

What follows is a mere warmup, playing around in response. Another project to explore less imitatively and with greater seriousness.

*

dots. connect?
stars. lead.
(led.) LED. can’t.
dispense?

consequence. co.
-incidence. the. bus. went.
too. fast. for. soldiers.
fired. from. the. check.
point. eight. civilians.
period.

antleroid.
suspended.
redwing.
blckbrdsonfg. stoned. instantaneous.
late. making. time. marking.
intent. most.
beautiful. spot. that. “always.
already.” smells. like. sewage.
tie. as. floating. bug. frog.
-song. consequents. two.
herons. winches. margin. dent.
mind. as. as.

as. ass.

find. things.

oiled. tark. ob.
viousness. e. volved.
—to—await—new—problem—
carpentering? even? stranger?
illusory? rooms? rods? and?
slabs? memory? turns? to?
rust? nuclear? dust? vanishing?
in? snap? of? snare?

consequence?

constellation.

prosopopoeia. I?
am. a?
blueprint. for? adeptation. chair?

depth. was? a. victim. of. its?
distaste. for? chance? its. source?

every. inch.
becomes.
wilt?

stars, words,
constellation, scarred,
for, ever, by, mining,
equipment, itself, covered, in,
symbols, seeing, a, description
as, if we, wandered in, a.
prairie. until. dark.

when, stars.
come, out.

body. compass. gone.

hay.

wire.

2010-04-11T11:37:00.001-05:00

Horace, Odes, book I (Chicago, 1960, trans. Joseph P. Clancy)

Horace, what’s up? I don’t feel like trying to say something original about Horace. I’ll read the other books. It’s hard to take the “hail Caesar” bits, and I feel strange about the coloquial stuff, its often-mean tone, contrasted with—or, jeez, that’s moralistic, it’s “bound up with”—the hot life in its engagement. A model of social poetry worth investigating. It really starts to get good around #14 or 17 or so. Here are a couple of dashed-off half-assed bits written under the Horatian influence. I’d like to make a day’s or week’s project of responding to Horace’s poems with more care and effort.

John, Dana, Jess, Lewis, Lisa, Karl
Michael, Kevin, Bridget, John, Jordan
Rebecca, Hai-Dang, Steve, Connie
Matt, Seth, Ron, Rick, Mark, Mavis

Amy, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, Elizabeth
Beth, Astrid, Deena, Carolyn, Gretel
Karin, Jeremy, Kjerstin, Clay, Roberto
and you, voice is not speech, can we

carve a path between the name, I
recognize, and am that path, and
the tunnel of sound that opens me,
you, budding onto time, by which

I mean world, and am back in words
again, as if I ever left, on that path,
the voice, the underground tubes, shooting
down and welling, so long as it

does not dominate, let us be the voice
of voice’s polyphony, all over a choir
and that choir in counterpoint to what
doesn’t even sound, a lark of earth

*

Chant the praise of what’s not so hard, my love,
in you, chant the praises of what tones sing when you shake
a limber string, tuned enough
to set the other lyre alight.

Toes, sink in the mud of streams of barely-lived distances,
the cool tones that distinguish the middle ground,
the green ground hardest to see,
harder than the far dark mound of sky,

where hands, cold of the panhandling temple
with a name, an island to you, strain to birth
the quiver of passion held common
on common ground nobody gave.

May war with its tears and fearful famine and plague
be lifted from our people and from our enemies,
may we wish well on all
because that’s easier and doesn’t hurt.

2010-04-08T11:36:00.002-05:00

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)

War with its lights out eschews imagination. All our buds lost their heads in the flower of their youth.

So we got this apartment on Jockey Street. They used to race houses there.

Those are two stanza/paragraphs from “The Deep,” the first of the many brief prose poems that make up Gizzi’s book, which is one of the most fun things I’ve read in a long time, and is marvelously strange. This little excerpt gives some good examples of the ways Gizzi works: the sewing together of anomalous parts in the first sentence; the punning on “buds” that turns a cliché into a literal statement, which in turn doesn’t quite work, the sentence never stabilizing and that instability of metaphor pointing back to the first sentence’s different instability, that connection amplifying the sense of “our buds” having been killed in the war—where have all the flowers gone?; the “mishearing” of “race horses” as “race houses,” connecting that phrase with the preceding sentence in a doubled way with a surreal image (or is it a metaphor for real estate competition, for the turning of houses into apartments, of ownership into rental?).

I find this utterly brilliant and hilarious, and every moment in the book is as singular, complex, weird and pleasurable. I should make a list of poets, on which Gizzi would be included, who seem extraordinarily free, unfettered, able to simply write what there is to be written, without being held back by preconceptions of what their writing should be. At least it seems that way from the outside.

This was marginally written under Gizzi’s influence—though not much so—and while listening to Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” op. 109, 102, & 117:

The Esques have no jism heads, two songs and irregular sock type novitiate

What will think a flow’r perfectly carnival

A sotto crystal approach bounces a puncture into king’s ice

If you’re very having fun, give ed a humor changing into skunk
Dress, a little riverboatin’ ball

Not the resolution I’m used to breaking took me by surprise balls storm

Cheap ultra backed up in the mine, hung on the Shelley hoke

Saming noise

Plugs in—click—armada-shaped confectionesque
Sentescence hots him whence

Pocket procession, nobler calendar sticking to itself and story

Album leaf over and under water twins its tricks

A purpling corona holds three-step sky

Hove a grappling arena to shore

2010-04-07T11:36:00.001-05:00

Joel Felix, Regional Noir (Bronze Skull, 2007)

Regional Noir makes me curious about Felix’s writing. I feel like this brief chapbook is part of a larger project, or should be.

It’s in four sections:
(a) about three pages of verse, beginning with the line “Is found locally,” and continuing through a series of fragments and near-complete thoughts whose connecting idea seems to be the way in which local context is constructed—this explored in various senses (excerpted from various places in the section):

the lake communicated a fifth wall

as town repeats this pattern
of pedestal replacement

the one hundred twenty year present
of extremely local ecologies

If you think I’m the subject
then I will act suspiciously

and so forth: a situation defined by the length of a romance, the specific objects “found in a photo of the desk,” a desert place, a storefront and its parking lot...

(b) a prose journal of a train trip from Chicago to Detroit (apparently Felix’s home town), especially including reflections on the appearance and economic/industrial/ecological character of the Great Lakes shore between those cities. It also contains this:

If you reduce the scope of the text so finely that any suggestion of an outside world would be arbitrary and anomalous detail, then the outside of writing would be rendered a consequence of writing. But the world is not a consequence of this writing. The is that coincides with writing is a feedback of the system, no less than Orson Wells (sic), or Orion.

(c) a brief verse meditation on the sentence as a way of linking a human life with the world, the sentence as a finite place in which one can lose one’s way

(d) a prose section largely about the visit to Detroit and its recent history, but beginning with an account of writing as “the inexhaustible need to replicate” the things of the world, to produce something that both is them and “claims a life over” them. The section ends with the imagining of “a little pillow-cover ghost like the kind my mother made for Halloween” suspended in the darkness of an empty lot.

The relationships between these ideas just barely get played out in the course of this text, and that leaves a good deal to think about, but maybe too much, and therefore not enough. Which makes me feel it as a beginning of something. Which is an advantage, in a way, for a text. For a complex thought forming. It’s humble in relation to its own ideas, doesn’t want to own them except in their further exploration.

A made ghost: a replica of the trace of a past, its made-ness a life denied real ghosts. Its own humble status preserving its particularity, resisting total absorption into metaphor. Joel Felix as a detective, under a streetlight in the empty lots of Detroit, searching out the proper relation of the sentence to the specificity of local context, a context that, in its brokenness, has become soaked with collective and personal memory. A project I’d like to see continued.

does a train track

and what

mushrooming

where now big lonesome houses make a class ladder squash an elm wood
which is an advantage for development, aka the ugly pictures on “for sale” signs
my neighbor is the one I brush in accidental murmur in line at the store
not the association of rules on lines and lawns
growing a replacement

opening sentences opening sentences

writing is a balloon full of the world’s air
when it pops there’s a displacement of the sky
for a short time
then

sky rushes in

2010-04-06T14:28:00.000-05:00

kari edwards, obedience (factory school, 2005)

From the moment I opened this book I knew it would be a crucial work, and I’ve saved it for a few years, glancing in every now and then, until my attention seemed oriented toward it in the right way. This is, for me, a good time to read it, having drifted away from emphatic engagement, in my own poetry, with political and philosophical questions (not that they’ve been absent), having in the last year written more in response to a sense of physiological energy, bodily intuition, more in arenas of the force of language and of its more nonsemantic characteristics, beginning lately to miss the centrality of that engagement, those questions.

I don’t think I’m going to try to excerpt from obedience here—not that there aren’t plenty of great lines, great thoughts. I’ll just note some things I admire about the work.

obedience engages with philosophy, with substantial thought about the metaphysics of space and time, the ontological constitution of things, thoughts, bodies and identities, in a way that reminds me of how necessary this kind of thought really is in engaging with the politics of everyday social existence, with the language that defines and limits us, that determines the range and possible meaning of terms like environment, sexuality, need, spirit, conversation. So much, for instance, depends on a concept of causality, which links things in chains of effects, and reflection on the being and becoming of things in the intersections of space and time involves critical reflection on the concept of cause. In this sense, the book is a meditation.

The meditation is emphatically oriented toward a utopianism, always pushing pure possibility into the foreground. I mean to contrast “pure possibility” with the “possibly actual,” where the latter indicates the range of what can be conceived as coming into being, given our current nexus of fundamental concepts. “Pure possibility” is the source of unlimited calling-into-question, of possibility not tied to what is, and questions are of the utmost importance for edwards’ work. Hir philosophical thinking means to reconceive fundamental frameworks, in order to present, through the poem, specific indications of the workings of a desirable world. obedience, unlike some recent work with whose engagement and commitment to emphatic thinking I am sympathetic, never falls into the trap in which the reiterated gesture of mere negation produces a consistent dark tone, a tone that can seem louder than the thought that produces it, sacrificing the creative thrust of negative utopianism for the sake of a feel of aestheticized protest.

I’m sorry that this is so vague. It will take more time than I have right now to figure out for myself how this works in edwards’ book, let alone to convey it to someone else.

How it works certainly has something to do with all the particulars in the poem. It’s not all time and space. There are rocks, rooms, knives, body parts, mosquitoes, leaves, viaducts, colors, emotions. These are generally non-archetypal (meaning that they don’t stand as citations of some larger argument), and remain both independent of and linked to the philosophical material. Sometimes they become near-metaphors, and this kind of operation, in which something kind of pushes something else in a particular direction of meaning, rather than being subsumed in the work of representing it, is worth further investigation.

edwards’ formalism is worth remarking. Zie often works with the page as a unit, or with a particular set of margins, or length of line, or reiterative character that structures a section, but these are rarely foregrounded. Sections don’t have rigid identities (which parallels edwards’ concern with destabilizing gender and other identities). Their boundaries are somewhat porous while remaining definitely present. Sections feature kinds of writing that are different, but not drastically so. I’d call it a gentle formalism, though not a soft one—there’s a good deal of structural meaning (meaning generated by formal movements and juxtapositions), but content is usually structuring the form as well. The movement of the boundless sentence, for instance, gets tied into the conceptual concerns of the poem.

This is my muddiest post yet this April. I’ll just say that this is a unique, provocative, moving book with which I’ll need to spend more time, and will quit this writing while I’m not ahead. An improvisation follows.

return to scale
where concept comes in
constellation
the incomparable
in a snail
of relation
not the impermeability
of a body
strange to have
enough to cry
out
one
doesn’t have a body
one has an honesty
that kills
one has a body
its skin an organ
part of an organ
completed in contact
fenceless mapping
unmapping
in porosity
to resist
the turning of thought
a question
into answers
inc.

systems shit
disinfected things
negation is not
to innoculate
that’s abstract
I try to stare
into blinding shadows
sockets blaze
skull predicts
its artifact
dying in
to scale
heart divides
runnels all over
racing ice
not “I will
be gone”
but the going
in staying
as web
of skin skull
and dirt water
mushroom
you
burning after
image
that shows up
as a window
everywhere I look
through it the clouds
of names
in the unnamed
world we will
with every No

exactly this scale

the one died into
each breath out

the window

before this there’s time

2010-04-05T14:24:00.001-05:00

Beverly Dahlen, A Reading 11-17 (potes and poets, 1989)

Having just written tomorrow’s post on kari edwards, I’m really beginning to feel a sense of futility with regard to these little reviews. I can’t, for instance, hope to adequately convey here what it’s like to read Beverly Dahlen’s work. With that in mind, I’ll try to keep it short.

I can’t think of anything that A Reading resembles. It’s a lifelong project that views writing, reading and thinking as continuous with each other, overlapping and often just facets of the same activity—and “reading” overlaps with living, since there’s as much reading of the world here as there is reading of texts. This description could, I guess, be applied to Lyn Hejinian’s work since Happily, but the two approaches to poetry don’t read in the same way at all. Each, though, conveys a thrilling sense of unfetteredness, of real freedom in composition, that is very rare.

This comes through in one way with regard to form. Dahlen moves with regular ease between prose paragraphs and verse lines whose lengths vary as the work and thought require; there’s little concern with “poetry” in terms of measure, polysemic linebreaks and so forth, at least not in any usual ways. There are plenty of poetic “markers”: the absence of initial capitals, the occasional recurrence of a Stein-like syntax, repetitions, puns. It’s just that “poetry” doesn’t seem to be the central concern. I find this intensely valuable.

The sections have different degrees and areas of focus—Dahlen often seems to deal with a collection of topics in a given section. Number 11 deals with memory, moving quickly from the personal to the archaeological (“finding a relic, this fingernail survived but the source is gone”), and then to reflections on the human transition from prehistory and myth into history (“the great leap forward, the idea of progress, that we might enter history at last”).

A little later, this leads to a beautiful page:

our course through the mountains, under a glaze.
the sun had come full circle. we might step out
of these clothes but we were moved towards a future.

there what we held in common against the end.

there is a common world which does not yet exist.
all our lives from the caves forward is a labor towards it.
I held her in some moment towards it.
there are those whom I have held towards it. in moments, that
time towards it. that moment in history in which we break and
fall away towards it.

wherever we come to claim it
it is a falling away, out of this bristling.
standing away towards it, this is not mine
I have not made it. there is that in which we are joined
and not one among us may claim it. there is that in which
we are joined towards it, it calls back to us from some future
“the substance of things hoped for”
calling backwards towards us.

our own,
Freud’s prayer to Eros
now come you among the powers
in whom the way, however obscurely
might lead, come some path and pathmaker
come in which we might fall away from ourselves
towards that common day
come as such a one
as ever
in this life
not my own
but ours from the beginning.

(7)

These concerns branch out over the remaining seventeen pages of the section, which work with “we,” origins (births), the structure and function of stories, the unconscious, and the relation between parts and wholes, each always anchored in something highly specific (lots of jokes, flowers, seaside observations, accounts of conversation).

Other sections have quite different relations to their material: #12 is undeclarative, #13 frequently quotes idiomatic speech, the vast #16 spends a good deal of time on the Bronte family, #17 begins with a collection of words that are then deployed throughout the body of the poem, almost like a theme and variations movement. The last metaphor seems appropriate; reading Dahlen’s book reminds me of listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas in order. Both artists have a highly developed sense of what “material” can mean: the tonal or grammatical system, larger formal structures (like the sonata), the historical aspect of such material, the texts of predecessors, the activity of composition itself. A given work selects meanings for that term, approaches them from particular distances, brings them to reflect on each other in ways specific to that work, and explores the results with virtuosic skill and freedom.

I won’t presume to do an “imitation” of a life-work like A Reading. Instead, here’s a rough draft of a new section of a piece I’ve been working on. Its goal is more or less to organize notes on non-poetic readings, to bring them into thematic conjunctions with each other and with everyday materials. Once this April binge is over, an in-depth reading of Dahlen’s work, which I’ve read in bits and pieces for a long time, is in order, and will, I’m sure, influence the progress of this project. Since a lot of my thinking is done via editing, the thoughts here are still pretty messy:

Opening silences opening silences. Pure possibility, the noise of it,
the richness, the bounty. It challenges the mouth, suspended above peaks
the deductive-nomological fanatic economist loves. So close today to the
uselessness of poetry, nothing is more striking than these strata, their
sinuosities so like the calcinated scree an ocean away—the same strange
ramifications we find in cake. The eye assures us affliction. The ethical sockets anonymously tremble. And the same can be said of the blue mirror. Turning
a corner, the picture framed in a doorway takes an attitude, not a position,
toward the world. We express our politic, our melos, in legato, in being bound to life together, as in boundaries, the leaps in bounds, as abounds. Hearing
is touch. There are languages lacking. Contingency is what is happening
to the birch leaves: unique and incandescent, entirely normal and repeatable. Rhyme pretends. Credit it to theft, tempo rubato, time stolen from the objective for a lonely thought, to hear many voices at once and remember them. Debit it in Muzak form, banking on a chain of analog copies, desire bound to false image—-take the gamble and drill in Ecuador, 1970, too late, the hundred-year-solution covers it, flatbeds execute boiling systems Keynes saw whose limbs we fetishize. Yet our grace in time: everything comes in return, not in exchange. We’ve already been out, but “out” was nowhere. One has the feeling that it began earlier, before the silence, as if one stepped onto a train to find it already moving fast. It’s always one, thinking, and thought is always all. Seeing well can’t cause a clear shape of the crucial wound read off and back. Stippled, the memory stalls, plays around the edges bind drive to particular. Oslo off-tempo. To become history is to change keys.

2010-04-04T22:55:00.001-05:00

John Coletti, mum halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010)

I feel close to John Coletti’s poems, not so much in terms of their content but in their way of moving. I’ve written a good deal in a mode that feels almost identical in its structuring of reading-time, its way of getting from one line to another and in the kinds of mild sabotage that the syntax performs on itself along the way. I’m really looking forward to hearing him in the Deceptively Wall-Shaped Reading here in Madison this Friday.

79 Pieces

Earshell stillness

all her friends were there

sucking on toes

French dalmatians

flicker by bedside

thick water sunlight curb

crushed re-crushed rock

The lines generally seem independent, beginning with the connotative and consonant strength of the opening line, not quite an image, and with its floating syntactic non-connection with the next line. That “floating” sense sets up an expectation that the third line will also not follow syntactically from the second, so that—when it does—its independence amplifies the character of both lines. The second line seems almost quoted, the third truncated (missing information; one wouldn’t say “sucking on toes;” one might say “sucking on each others’ toes,” or even just “sucking toes”). The capital “F” at the beginning of the next line again doubles the sense of which way the connections are going; is it the opening of a new sentence or not? The bedside seems to continue the scene, while “flicker” jumps the big gap to the penultimate line by connecting with “sunlight.” “Sunlight,” because of the implied grammatical parallelism between “thick water” and “sunlight curb,” ends up feeling like a partly adjectivized noun—though it’s resistant to that (a resistance that conceptually parallels the unlikelihood of “thick water”). That grammatical ambiguity is taken up in the first “crushed” of the final line. If we read the lines as syntactically flowing into one another, then we get the sentence “Thick water sunlight curb crushed re-crushed rock,” in which case that first “crushed” is a past-tense verb. If we view the line as syntactically independent, that “crushed” reads as an adjective. Either way, the rock has now been crushed at least three times. The ambiguity (which I find mighty funny) dramatizes the situation of the whole poem; every line (rock) gets “crushed” more than once, standing on its own and always leading into the next line. It’s that downward motion that makes “crushed” seem so appropriate. In almost every poem in this book, the movement is very powerfully stepped, from one line to the next, always to some degree independent and always retroactively pulled onward. The result is that, by the end of a poem, we’ve ended up in a surprising place, and can look back on how we got there—but we can never get from the second stage to the end directly. Perhaps a better metaphor is one of linked chains of lines.

To continue comparing and contrasting my April readings: George Albon’s work depends on linkages between parts that may be very distant from one another; the sense is of a constellation of parts. Steve Benson’s book is forward-moving, but in “real time.” Or without the quotes. The separation/connection dynamic is very different. All three of these poets deal with dailiness, though. That may not be apparent from this selection of Coletti’s, but throughout much of the book there are names of friends, addresses to pop culture figures, drinks drunk, days in the park, trees and weather observed. The shared formal movement of the poems allows them to accumulate in a way that suggests a world common to them. The person whose world it is remains blurry, glimpsed only in relation to these movements, objects, actions, names, and impressions. Perhaps that’s why I’m least attracted to the poems (most of these are in the second section, previously published in the chapbook Same Enemy Rainbow) with the most “attitude,” the hippest ones—they solidify a voice in the poems, and it’s precisely the “attitude,” which in “real life” is already less individual than part of the culture’s social games, that makes it a voice (something similar might be said about nearly all instances of “voice”). Even those, however, at least tend to be funny—and the rest (many of them very tender with regard to the people in or near them) convey a continuously disorienting sense of reality that I like a great deal, a way of experiencing the world that’s twisted up with a way of constructing it, both dizzying. I also suspect, from what I take to be the improvisational rhythms of a well-tuned ear in these poems, that Coletti is a musician.

Here’s another:

The Warlock

Thinned paper roses
burnt on top
mushrooms actually
on a sea walk for ice
hungry ospreys
dive hold then splash
search for wallets in high tide
moose horns line up
sucked in headlights
chill with the hill stubble
as gnomes pull back
their brittle nets

I can’t, especially having emphasized their similarity, convey the variety among these poems—the beauty of the last handful in the book are, on their own, enough to make it worth buying, and I’ll certainly be reading this one more than once.

My “imitation” follows. This one is actually less close than some stuff I was writing a while back, and certainly doesn’t measure up.

Square in

which a warp

roasted seams

see what

happens taps

the frame glow

off shingle

why does talk go

wrong language

becomes metaphor

for yeasty gunk

none of that is technically

reading about clouds

2010-04-03T13:30:00.002-05:00

Since I'll probably get a little behind with my "C" and "D" reading in the next couple of days, I thought I'd post an alternate "C" for the moment: a little musing on Joseph Ceravolo from a couple of months back. Since writing it, I've been reading JC more extensively, and he's become one of my favorite poets.

*

I’ve just been reading the selections of Ceravolo’s work in the anthology From the Other Side of the Century (the most valued book I own). Here’s the first of ten sections that make up “Ho Ho Ho Caribou:”

Leaped at the caribou.
My son looked at the caribou.
The kangaroo leaped on the
fruit tree. I am a white
man and my children
are hungry
which is like paradise.
The doll is sleeping.
It lay down to creep into
the plate.
It was clean and flying.

I find this powerfully disorienting; it gives me the “where the hell am I?” feeling, one of the main things I want out of reading poetry. How does it do that?

Here and in the rest of the poem (and most of Ceravolo’s work in this anthology--I haven’t read much elsewhere), there’s the impression that language isn’t working smoothly and naturally. Normal language use has been impeded, and it takes effort to construct grammatical and syntactic units; the words are heavy, not easy to move around. What impedes the process is the sense the language wants to convey, in general a “sense of reality” intensely felt, more real than “natural” language. Not an impedance felt as difficulty or loss. The reality experienced: the intensities of language itself in its coming-to-being, each time that there is something to be said. The feeling of the words coming to mean things as that happens.

The first line comes out of nowhere in a startling fashion. The subject is replaced by the high energy of the verb--and when the verb’s object turns out to be “caribou,” we assume that this is a predatory situation. The grammatical parallelism of the second line carries that energy through so that “leaped” echoes unsettlingly in “looked,” son and predator brought into a conjunction that could be read in various ways.

The echo of “caribou” in “kangaroo,” of course, doubles their grouping as “exotic” animals to be looked at by the “white man” and his children. That sonic echo, combined with the slight wrongness of “on” in the third sentence, builds the sense of language being manipulated as if it had never been heard before--how can we combine these words, these parts of speech? Language here is palpable and strange, almost incantatory, as if the poem is a spell or an alchemical experiment. There’s the sense that it’s more a matter of how the words feel and what they do than of what they mean. “The kangaroo leaped on the fruit tree” has the ring of a fable or folk tale to me; I can hear it being told in that incantatory mode. That sense is heightened by the next sentence, which seems to place the “white man” in contrast to the sort of aboriginal environment in which he’d assume these animals to be found.

“The doll is sleeping” seems like another instance of tentatively working with the strange materials of language, feeling out the possibilities of the predicate. “Is like paradise.” “Is sleeping.” This magical awkardness heightened by the tense change and the two verbs, so unlike either “leaped” or “looked,” in the penultimate sentence. That sentence also giving a “back story” to the doll, explaining how it ended up asleep. Then “it was clean and flying,” as if building on its predecessor, but in contradiction to it (“flying” vs. “asleep”), so that this final sentence becomes another instance of linguistic exploration--here of adjectives, the first denoting a property and the second a state of action very different, again, from “leaping” and “looking.”

Amplifying all this: the breaking of the poem in two by “are hungry” (the only line that neither begins nor ends a sentence, and the first proper adjective), its dissonance with “paradise” that sets off the second half, in which disturbances, I think, are greater than in the first half. The contrast of “doll” with both animals and children, and the little system those nouns make. The connection of “plate” with “hungry.”

2010-04-03T10:56:00.003-05:00

Steve Benson, Roaring Spring (Zasterle Press, 1998)

Steve Benson is becoming one of the most important writers for me. I’ve read his work in bits, here and there, for over a decade, but it’s only in the last year that it’s seemed so crucial, singular, unlike anything else (and barely even like itself). For Benson, writing is a practice of vulnerability, of finding all kinds of ways to throw himself off-balance, to see what happens when there’s a real risk of falling. This practice is ethical as much as, or more than, aesthetic, a self-questioning whose relentlessness doesn’t make it any less gentle in its peculiar ways.

What makes me, as a writer, feel like I need to really study Steve Benson’s work is that he seems utterly unconcerned—no, that’s not right—he seems to aim at being unconcerned with writing a good poem (or making a good performance, since so much of his work is in his own unique varieties of partly-improvised speech). This is not to say that the poems are bad—they certainly are not—but the ways in which they’re good have, usually, little to do with criteria for aesthetic success operative in the discourses of traditional or avant-garde writing. What Benson does is to set up situations, and anything might get caught up in those situations. It’s hard not to be vague here, especially since I’m still very much in the process of discovering his work, so I’ll save the general comments for another writing.

Roaring Spring is written in very brief sections divided from one another by dates (usually just the number of the day, say “27”), beginning on 2/11/96 and ending on 3/17/97. Most days have an entry. Most of the utterances are syntactically incomplete, with almost no capital letters or periods. As with much of his work, Benson uses a very simple form in wonderful ways. The stanzas can seem like independent, compressed poems, varying from the observational to the highly abstract. On the other hand, the end of one stanza might be continued syntactically by the beginning of the next. The numbers that separate the stanzas from one another (with no additional carriage returns) make just enough of a division (and not too much of one) to allow for every possible degree of distinctness or connection. This sounds awfully simple, and it is—but it’s one of the big risks of the writing: that its dailiness, its unrestricted nature with regard to content and kinds of writing, will become a mess in this structure that does little structuring, that does the little it does in such a blunt way. The bluntness has beautiful results. The method solves a great problem, by giving very short poems the opportunity to stand on their own without requiring that each poem be “strong” or self-contained enough to do so.

Where George Albon (see yesterday’s post), in “Empire Life,” incorporates dailiness through a careful, disciplined formal sculpting of impressions into motivically linked arrangements of stanzas (each a quite crafted poem in itself), Benson’s method is more a somewhat meditative allowing-in of whatever might come along—in tension, here, with the constraint of the very short poem.

I don’t have a general argument to pursue. I’ll end with a few randomly chosen sequences, and follow them up with my daily “imitation,” to which I’ll add a stanza a day for at least the month of April.

28
dried grass and
the uneven ends of
different meanings
from the wetlands
29
belief systems
hollering into an
imaginary forest
suspend crashes
30
hurried downhill
cantilevered stress
confound variables
man overboard
31
I want to read
wind fear love stone
one way I
adventure
space geology

7
you have to leave
early cancellations
8
or they may be
thrown aloft
9
turned inward
stuttering
safecracker
10
cloud envelope
opens juices
explode all over
a crazy quilt
I wonder what
I did with that

5
fresh air or intrigue
the path includes
6
being here and away
always and right now
7
anyway, my swollen
eye or eyelid
sketching last night
8
a tear rolling
across the disheveled
9
frame of inference
10
picked up where I left off
a cool blue light
11
behind the socks
the scenes unfold
and take turns
raising and lowering

______________________________________

4/2/10
long message
all the tunes spring
rain
first off on
3
a photo show
with no
new york
4
beers in length
shadows in log
tune
garden
5
a trick
was planted
for a bad start
6
you can't see
that pain
you can see
the room
and envy
7
I'm here
in the rain
not at a schmoozefest

2010-04-02T00:31:00.004-05:00

George Albon, Empire Life (Littoral Books, 1998) Two long works: EMPIRE LIFE is composed of 88 sections, each a set of four couplets of short lines. There's a lot of "space" or "silence" in them--though the language isn't fragmentary, the syntax is nearly always a clause or two short of the complete sentence. Enough is said (often with small words, in precise observation or thought--sort of Zukofskian or Oppenoid) to give a vivid impression, but never enough to form a whole. The un-jarring incompleteness allows strands of language to merge into each other, recombining to give, by accretion, a concrete sense of a world that we only ever see in glimpses, or that is always coming into being as parts of it negotiate with each other. The work is composed motivically. The motifs include image-figures (a window, knot, penis, weather, sleep) and--more strikingly--instances of punctuation, degrees of incompleteness, functions of the linebreak--Albon is a masterful orchestrator of these. Compare the function and weight of the dash in these two sections:

The ego no
longer

blocks action.
Music

would be
there in the

dark too, a fluency--

I can't hear
thru the rain.

So, let it
be curtain--

tho there is
a voice, electric-

ally echoing out-
side, in situation.

--or the ampersands and parentheses here, structured perfectly by caesurae:

A body leaves
in two weeks

& image &
memory (memory)

will start a
breath into

the maintain-
ing calendars.

--or, just to give examples of contrasting syntax, these two:

The opening of
the chro-

matic world,
step taking

each un-
foreknown, the

turn, color,
direction, sign.

Visible origin
of the stimu-

lant--slaves
at long tables.

Hung that
story-part on

their wall, the
many walls.

"Home" is a big motif, the place of sleep and also the feeling of words and poems as homes, and then homelessness in various forms, mostly quite literal. The space that emerges is definitely structured by property and its lack. "One is me, the/one [...]"--here "(any)one" becomes a singularity, and that first-person, throughout the poem, is not dissolving, but being opened up to the world in which it lives--its property/selfhood turning out to be entwined with the world it shares with others. Strange tenuous sense of social space. COSMOPHAGY is in a kind of prose, a series of paragraph-like units of unbroken phrasal continuities (run-ons), like:

a kind of pre-planned operative music swelling in the tracks where the feet land an arrhythmic hand outside the screen patting-hitting the TV dots coagulated-encamped on the lower-left-hand-side

I may not have been as attuned to the great variety and--again--motivic building between paragraphs, had I not previously experienced them in the sparer context of "Empire Life," but they're certainly here. The degree to which a paragraph seems more like a series of unpunctuated sentences or more like a set of overlapping syntaxes or something more tangled or (occasionally) one straightforward sentence varies widely. Punctuation ends up playing an interesting role here as well; the first instance of it is the question mark (interesting that it's more difficult to imply question marks than to imply periods). After that, any instance of that mark is felt as an active transformation of a piece of language into a question. "Cosmophagy" also builds a space by accretion. This space seems like a foreign country, probably Middle-Eastern, probably under military occupation--though the coherence of that environment is unstable--during a number of paragraph sequences there seem to be operations with tanks, while in another the trial and exile of a pig seems to lead somehow to members of a tribe being devoured by a strange monster from beneath the ground--but the emphasis should be on SEEMS. Again, everything is indicated with just enough concreteness to indicate it, and motifs are recombined to form a fluid world. "Seeming" might be a main object of investigation here--it often seems like we're getting images and stories, rather than direct (if filtered) observations. There are passages in the past tense that, strangely, seem more present to me (as if they constitute a report on what just happened). Fairly late in the poem, after some motivic use of quotation marks, there's a thrillingly blunt couple of pages based on the recurrence of the same (punctuated!) syntactic form with the same structural bump or glitch in it--for instance:

The path described as "treacherous" was in fact merely futuristic. It had all the regularly appointed features but also different ones, whose function it was their rod and staff, a painted curtain finally opening onto a backdrop of deep blue sky, to discern.

This is followed by another "run-on" paragraph, and then:

The goal described as "impossible" was merely ill-chosen. It had all the predictably accumulating earmarks but also different ones, whose relevance it was their crown and duty, a red carpet finally leading into a chamber of tall wooden chairs, to establish.

The incursion of this structure into the ongoing development of the main formal drift of the poem utterly transforms the form of the whole, in a way that appeals to my own sense of composition--it's musical, in the sense of the structures of later European art music. The piece also appeals to me in that--in a way I'd like to achieve--it seems quite concretely a political poem, but rarely seems so at any given moment (in other words, it never seems like a sociopolitical issue is just being cited, by--say--putting the phrase "the war" into the poem). Its address to political circumstances does have to do with its content, but the content only comes to life in the context of the whole work of formal movements from one state to another. My "imitations" for the day follow.
_________________________________________

slate heart, of
wind house

former chatter
seduces and se

-cludes
in

pun thorn
squares of light

*

-plendent tithe
the effort of rehearsal

effects of A
the weather, chin

turned a horn
that interrupts

the social
mayonnaise

*

green
buds, not

what you’re thinking
what I’m saying

two-four
measure of excellence

burdock outpost in bank
reform’s evanescence

*

wind trying to organize
parking effect—a void

in a mind
-full of hot mouths,

connected and concerned
cornered and

—at fixed rates—
selling the farm by now

*

what are they trying to pull the clothes lie down by me separated from the norm only by a thin scratch the pane means “keep out” to the air a romantic tinge to double barrels in semi-automatic weather pull quotes pushed around to make the numbers swell

shadow bit in two by brick a long weight unacceptable as currency the present staves it’s simple jobs the rent guy takes longest to complete we’re well past this double-charmed second now the lilac and now the other emerge

*

grows (saw) just past
iterate, hasn’t invent

-ed a double dance
and a spider eddy

long as sustains permit:
whisper, release remains

states and crumples (are)
its own form (frame)

That last one was written while listening to Anton Webern’s “Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, op.7.” Webern shows up as “a favorite” in Albon’s book, and he’s one of mine as well.

Take the National Poetry Month Challenge!

2010-04-01T15:41:00.001-05:00

For all that National Poetry Month is, yes, a kind of hokey thing

I enjoy using it as an excuse to read and write a lot

So I will read a book of poetry every day

(Almost always one I’ve never read before)

Going through the alphabet letter by letter

(I’m going to start with a book by George Albon

and can only imagine finishing with Zukofsky)

And writing a little review/report/reflection

As well as a poem responding in some way to the poet in question

Posting all this—probably the day after each session—

On this rarely-used blog

Join me! Read a book a day. Write in response. Or just do the former.

Start a blog to keep track of it, or post to a blog you already have

Or send me your list

Because I’m curious

You’ll notice that there are more days in April

Than the alphabet has letters

Which makes it easy to take more than one day

For a given book

If needed

And that additional days (at least for me)

Will be gained by the absence of Q and X

(In my collection)

(Last year I finished all but two of the books

One of them having been quite thick

And managed to keep up with the posts

Until about halfway through the alphabet

After which I kept writing them

But decided to sleep more

And so never got them online

Whatever

It’s fun)

all the best,

Andy

Reading this Sunday

2009-07-23T14:36:00.000-05:00

This Sunday, at 2 p.m., Jennifer Karmin and Andy Gricevich will give a poetry reading at Avol's Bookstore. It will be a blast.

Jennifer Karmin is the author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice (Flim Forum Press, forthcoming 2009). She curates the Red Rover Series and is a founding member of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented nationally at festivals, artist-run spaces, and on city streets. Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet in Residence for the Chicago Public Schools. Recent poems are published in the journals Cannot Exist, MoonLit, Otoliths, and anthologized in Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Not A Muse (Haven Books), and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books).

Andy Gricevich is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. He's a poet, actor, theater director and musician whose work occasionally finds the time to get itself published here and there. He spent much of the last four years melding political theater and experimental music with the Nonsense Company, and performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins. Andy edits Cannot Exist, a print poetry magazine put lovingly together in his living room in Madison, Wisconsin. He very rarely, and with extensive discomfort, blogs at ndgwriting.blogspot.com.

http://www.avolsbooks.com

2009-05-01T22:50:00.002-05:00

I got way behind on the posts here while preparing for my April 25th reading in the Red Rover series (Chicago--more on it later). I have, however, kept the read-a-book/write-a-poem -a-day project up to the extent that I read 23 books in April, finishing all but 3--and wrote well over 26 poems, some of them, I think, pretty decent. I'll be trying to post the poems and blurbs (backdated) on the books here over the next week or so, but for now, here's the list of N-Z:

Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
Ovid, Metamorphoses (didn't quite finish)
Bob Perelman, 7 Works
[no Q]
Kit Robinson, Covers
Ron Silliman, VOG
Rodrigo Toscano, Collapsible Poetics Theater (didn't quite finish)
[no U]
Cesar Vallejo, Spain, Take this Cup from Me
Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Flat With No Key
[no X]
William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds
Louis Zukofsky, 80 Flowers

All in all, a fine trip through a bunch of mostly great stuff I hadn't read before.

2009-04-22T10:28:00.001-05:00

Red Rover Series
{readings that play with reading}

Experiment #28:
It's Voyeuristic

SATURDAY, APRIL 25th
7pm

Featuring:
Carrie Olivia Adams & Andy Gricevich

NEW LOCATION
at the Orientation Center
2129 N. Rockwell -- Chicago, IL
corner of Milwaukee/Rockwell
left side of the Congress Theater building
http://orientationcenter.wordpress.com
suggested donation $4

CARRIE OLIVIA ADAMS lives and works in Chicago, where she also serves as poetry editor for Black Ocean and Hunger Mountain. Her poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as Backwards City Review, Cranky, DIAGRAM, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, and Verse. She is the author of Intervening Absence, published by Ahsahta Press and the chapbook, “A Useless Window.”

ANDY GRICEVICH is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. He's a poet, actor, theater director and musician whose work occasionally finds the time to get itself published here and there. He spent much of the last four years melding political theater and experimental music with the Nonsense Company, and performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins. Andy edits Cannot Exist, a print poetry magazine put lovingly together in his living room in Madison, Wisconsin. He very rarely, and with extensive discomfort, blogs at ndgwriting.blogspot.com.

Red Rover Series is curated by Lisa Janssen and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

UPCOMING
May 9th - Lisa Fishman & Aurora Tabar

Email ideas for reading experiments
to us at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com

The schedule for upcoming events is listed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

2009-04-18T23:25:00.000-05:00

things keep turning
into other things
such as lots

in which you
can turn on
a dime (barring

inflation) I'm
still wearing
my helmet

****

quoth the raven nearly nightly
"I'm a bird of some repute.
If you from my mouth won't take it
You will find it on your suit."

****

Today I tried to finish Ovid's Metamorphoses and failed. I've been reading it for a while. It's as good as it's supposed to be. The best poetry, I think, is in the descriptions (the place where a thing occurred). Weird stories.

2009-04-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

If you are some kind of wind--and you probably are--some kind of partnership is forming with the jealous tendons, see the bulb filament its way out hat. I stopped it here because it could not. Every poem is an instance of memory, also of getting in the way. The yaks wanted their revenge on the world through linebreaks. I will give up all my bulges for you, but not the gnawing insect of my heart. Its bell rings always at horizons without register. A package awaits me under the empty sign, should I die a cushion or the persistent narrative manner of a polluted stream. Question.

*****

Today's reading: Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions. I still haven't read much Neruda, and this late book piques my curiosity. Something a bit like an alternate Whitman in the use of repeating form (each poem composed of four or five questions, each question almost always a couplet), though the alternative is extreme (the question as contrasted with Whitman's declarative mode). Each poet employs constancy to get a wider range of possible material in than might seem possible without the formal strategy--the poem would "break" (which has an interest of its own). Neruda's questions range from jokes to childlike playfulness to surrealist impossibility to existential and political crisis. Why do I so rarely hear anyone talk about his work in the circles to which I pay attention? That fact, as well, makes me curious.

2009-04-15T22:02:00.003-05:00

TWO MINUTE POEM

Some kind of artifact in a
suit walks in
around the wall where Hikmet
is held
shackles are a coconut
without amusement
without amount
for no particular reason
a raisin in the sun
explodes
songing weaves
abolish the heated sun

For today I almost finished the Mayer book. It's the first volume I haven't managed to complete this month, and I'll have to come back to it in what I expect to be a few "free days." Everyone who's read Mayer knows how good she is. My favorite pieces are the verse poems, many of them, especially toward the middle of the book. I like, in the prose works, the places where she, in the midst of immense catalogues of dailiness, hits on an extended historical or literary anecdote or description of a plant, etc.--the way those extended passages alter the rhythm of the work. Nearly everything about this writing is inspiring in the best sense: the palpability of the language, the stunningly prolific writing life, the devotion to it and the acceptance of poverty and uncertainty as part of that devotion. There's no better example.

2009-04-14T23:09:00.005-05:00

impatience

impatience impatience

i should learn
to recognize it
like a botanist

plants need attention
they have no eye

*

cows rub up against ogam inscriptions
erasing their dumb letters lowing

*

A poem should not bean
but me
Claudius
carving meself
of wood
a hole
to try
rye
in

I'm reading the Bernadette Mayer Reader, but didn't finish it today. April, fortunately, has more days than the alphabet has letters, so I can take an extra day once or twice to get through a book--especially when it's longish.

2009-04-13T22:23:00.003-05:00

where to house
that lone thought

little pieces of hail
--memory slips--

fall on
and on

an un
finished basket

like a big spider

neither will ever
be a bone

people I know are going
are a loss of stories

big wars
with dumb drones

cover over
the daily thirst

to live between
moments of thirst

and state

over the dead
who've stopped
wanting

Machaut, though
seems a guarantee

or a promise
without guarantee

as the thought is a promise,
the thought that

got lost.

2
Then there's the thing I said
instead of asking how you were
when I knew the answer was "bad,"
though it's not the answer you'd have given
had I asked. Accidentally
I pushed the button in my pocket
and Machaut burst into my ear
as if someone were calling from
an impossible distance, near and far,
in which the thought got lost.

Today's reading: Andrew Levy's Memories of My Father, another book whose excellence I'm not sure I can explain here. The book centers doubly around memories belonging to and memories about its main subject. When it's closest to literal description (especially of the hospital as the father is dying), the point of view seems to shift between that of the author and that of the father (tilting, for example, around the "gaze" and the father's complaint (?) that everyone is looking at him). The main thrust of the book, however, is the enactment, in poetic thought, of Levy's father's ethical nature, of the relation of memory to ethics, the taking in of ethical substance through memory and the process, through writing, of keeping memory active, preserving its verbal sense (remembering, an ongoing reincorporation and renegotiation) against its freezing into a noun (a container for past images). This ethical memory spreads to address economics and war, the resonances between the Depression and the war the father was in and today's circumstances. And, returning again and again, there's the question of why one writes, and what, and how. The doubt contained in this question is a positive doubt; Levy's book is, among other things, composed of answers.

(It's especially moving for me to read it as part of the sequence of books from the last few days, to connect and contrast its humanity with the kinds of humanity in and behind Iijima, Jeffers, and Koch, their different kinds of attention and their relations to the living and the dead, these embodied social presences. Something about love.)

2009-04-12T23:51:00.000-05:00

stick not,
little tots

(pint error)
(lobed stump)

races expel
or insert rats

plat maps
to a cinder

expensive friends
latrine orchestra

hornets scrape

___________________

THE REDNESS EXPERT

sometimes it's messy
sometimes it's May [Mary?]

there is a curved [carved?] dark lie
where prisons have been won
in the "heart"

scrap, or
chin rattler
expenses

eat your inner orchestra
return to cinder

we advocate renown
via experiences in date race

cud hat seen in finest places
(crass resin expert love)

secret rat pulses
hated since 1957

Today's reading: Kenneth Koch's The Pleasures of Peace. What an antithesis to Robinson Jeffers, especially in the concluding title poem. Koch's poetry will never be a model for me, but his glee in writing, his energy--well, everyone who's read him knows about it. He is an inspiration as a writer. I love the moments in the list poems (like "Faces") where he seems to realize he can write anything he wants, and then does it--he can refer to anything as having a face, and say anything he can think of about it. And why not have a poem like "The Pleasures of Peace," which itself exemplifies one brilliant set of facets of the humanism we would like to have? His writing, which I've not been strongly attracted to for some time, keeps taking me by surprise in how far from shallow it can really be.

2009-04-11T19:11:00.000-05:00

Moments hang,
linger

to return.
Each chair is a gift.

The sun
we'll turn
from

in passion

curves wood
to make the string
like speech

--which these
people pour

"that they may hear."

This is simply a bit of notation made while waiting for a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a great thing to hear live, on period instruments, with two small orchestras, two small choirs plus a small children's choir, organ, and harpsichords. The introductory lecturer claimed that the baroque bow, with the curvature of its wood away from the strings--the opposite of the modern bow--mimics the consonant-vowel sequence of speech (since it produces a strong initial articulation, immediately tapering into smoothness--as opposed to the modern bow's "all-vowel" character, which matches the irritating lack of diction in most operatic performance). The music was magnificent, especially the extraordinarily strange, sparse arias in the second half, which I'd never really dug into. I thought, of course, of Louis Zukofsky, though I didn't come home and start writing "A."

Today's reading: Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems, the small, older edition published by Vintage. I've been meaning to read Jeffers for some time. I think he may be the most depressing poet I've ever read. Over and over there's the assertion that humankind is done for, and good riddance, the urge that we not speak about atrocity, but merely observe the idiocy of slaughter, starvation and willful ignorance as dispassionately as possible. Where many poets during and since the second World War have written that we can't speak about atrocity--that language can't encompass its magnitude--and many poets today say that we shouldn't because "it's bad for poetry," Jeffers urges us not to out of an ethical (though highly misanthropic) conviction. His most positive thought is the assertion that new culture can only arise from the burning and bloodbath of a decaying civilization. In contrast to the sarcasm and the ultimately bored, cynical jokesterism that usually accompany the antipolitical in the poetry world, Jeffers is dead serious, facing horror in poems that are often very good, nearly always gripping.

I wrote three "mirrors" in opposition to this stance, but they didn't turn out well, and so their implicit argument seemed to be "don't waste time writing against other writers who say we shouldn't, or can't, speak out." Maybe that's right, in some sense.

There's a powerful respect for nonhuman nature in Jeffers' work, but--in contrast to Iijima (see yesterday's post)--the gulf between the human and the nonhuman is vast, and the idea of crossing it is both dismissed and condemned. The radical indifference of hawks, stones and especially the ocean to our humanity is essential, for Jeffers, to what's powerful in it. It's a radical nonhumanity that I find philosophically attractive, except that I also see it as liberating, instead of connected to nihilistic misanthropy. I can certainly see what Jack Spicer saw in Jeffers. This is a poet whose work should, I think, be read by anyone who feels a crisis in relation to the question of political poetry--he presents problems to be dealt with. A worthy adversary.

2009-04-10T18:51:00.000-05:00

1
you never even hear about ford anymorelock
fjord
dam (a bird just fell
lock
ford
ford
afford
afford
can't afford
can't afford to eat
little light speckled the wall
the bay
leaves in the light
logic without body
can handle this
two dollars
a day
would make it moot
moat
afloat
float
not drown

in the absurdity of starvation,
which no-one can acknowledge.

Starvation isn't hunger.
Not required.
Unrequited.
A diamond
Day
Has emerged around the nests
And sticks
To the bricks
Blinds hang
High

Somewhere there are birds
Looked to for longing
When length is a dash
then another dash, the punct

uation
of unshelter

2
A small bunny goes by in a red car
collaring any attention like a flag
then sinking in the waves

It made us laugh:
a day of invisible stars
jammed into series
by the girl whose sweaters,
flying around the room to dry,
were unemployed as she

In that uselessness
lies
turn true

or something like true
would be
were there no lies.

lies are grains cast
by tons into the sea.

3
their
boats
I
read
of
fires
dumb
flame,
name

them.

That's another improvisation, certainly in need of revision, or discarding. The point, I remind you, is to write a poem a day, and to post it in spite of embarrassment.

Today's reading: Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson. It's good political poetry. Remarkable what she does, starting with the scared rabbit and the fox, wolf, bird of prey, leading from that into war scenarios and then on into strange and complex territory. The book takes animality seriously, never demoting the rabbit/predator situation to the status of metaphor for war. Each not only illuminates, but interpenetrates the other. It's about the body, with its guts, gaze, attention, response. It's not protest poetry; its compassion is in giving each thing it examines its due, trying to see clearly what it is. (This is all pretty vague--I'm in a hurry today). Iijima's use of the page is magnificent: lots of sculpted space, the density of text varied with thoughtful composition, and here and there light grey words in a much larger font floating near or behind the main text, variations on certain of its moments or beginnings of thought that would move in a different direction. It's very precise: neither the open fields of "vispo" nor the page scoring of Charles Olson or Susan Howe (where we seem to get fragments of something lost), but the movement of attention coming repeatedly into being--and an ethics of attentiveness that comes along with it.

2009-04-09T21:50:00.003-05:00

AGAINST SPECIAL MOMENTS

Why I wake Mary O early
I will never know

I do not--for enrichment--own
the slightest view, nor its

window

*

fulfillment capital

surplus enrichment

*

(two poems that each need a second section)

1
Lobed, mellow
agreement.

Three shots
"rang

out." Blue
corps.

Add the
"e"

of the
air.

2
"More to be revealed"
said the white block
in the dark pool

You have to watch
reruns

for that.
The organizational

functions.
Loss on the vertigo-

danced horizon
of calm.

*

addenda

says the chimera

_______

laced
..........tide

_______

show your stock
a good time

bond, age, cow
(tick) talk

_______

feed us this crow
.
we don't know stones

***********

Today's reading: Carla Harryman's Open Box (improvisations). It's a great book. The form is highly liberating, and suggests valuable possibilities for writing to me. Each page consists of two four-line stanzas, with plenty of white space around them. The pairs most often seem like independent poems, but often the last line carries over syntactically into the first line of the next page, and themes recur at various points, so the book ends up reading like a very loose set of serial poems of varying lengths--or one book-length work. The way it can function formally in multiple ways thrills me--particularly the way this allows multiple simultaneous scales to work, often in friction with each other. The details (individual lines and stanzas) are generally stunning. The poems above, aside from being improvisations, have little to do with Harryman's book.

2009-04-08T22:21:00.000-05:00

unmanned drones

pretending to be unmanned drones

*

I sing the body acoustic.
In this field, where becoming's pushed to such a speed
that we are robbed of the experience, the observation,
the sensation of change, and can only note that it has passed,

I write: POEM FOR--
--not a blank to be filled, but a direction of dedication, the possible
and the actual on equal terms.

The pretense here: I have not written such a poem.

For each stone from an old, old wall
meant not to mark territory, to make as permanent
as can withstand coldly the laughter at such pretense
the division within and between possible communities,

meant in quiet, forward-looking and defiant stead
to bank up the root place of the olive grove,

for each such stone--no longer in, but from--
and for the power to imagine, in each,
the memory of one now torn tree

--for each such stone a poem.

A lousy poem. Really notes toward a possible poem, for Palestine, or elsewhere. I am reading John Berger's Hold Everything Dear the best book of essays I've come across in some time. Dark, condensed responses to atrocity in the last nine years. Great writing, owing a good deal to Benjamin or the Adorno of Minima Moralia, or maybe not "owing"--it doesn't seem imitative, just unflinching and rich in similar ways.

Today's reading: Barbara Guest's The Blue Stairs. Guest's sense of form was phenomenal. I'm particularly struck by the title poem, and by the two in the middle entitled "The Return of the Muses" and "A Reason." There's a great variety here. As with many of the real "masters," I get the sense, in trying to figure out what it might have been like to write a given poem, that she "just did it," followed her compositional sense without question, but with an ongoing critical observation. It's not that there's any "ease" to the writing, or that it's particularly easy or difficult) to read--in fact, it's often upsetting, or thrilling in a kind of scary way--but that the poems seem so unapologetically what they are. Much to be learned from more reading of Guest.

2009-04-07T22:03:00.000-05:00

The melon hides
the head
in wood. So what

is just
a faded
Should.

The new hot
pan in town
bordered by

holes. What did
the bleeding get
out. what did

you think, drink
at stars, a flagging
hoarse and guided

stab.

Today's reading: Norman Fischer's Charlotte's Way, in the beautiful edition from Tinfish Press (one long fold-out sheet, put together so well that I didn't see the seams until I was looking for them). I've found it hard to get incredibly excited about Fischer's work, but the straightforward, observant humility of this long poem makes me certain I'll come back to it for a second try. Its way of mapping daily experience and thought is an interesting contrast to Larry Eigner's.

I also read around a little in Benjamin Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes. I feel a strong kinship with Friedlander. His way of disrupting the poem, to fracture the smoothness in short lyrics, to introduce swift turns that send the energy of the poem off in unexpected directions, is something a lot of poets could learn from. I think he's at his best when he's not trying too hard to be "wrong"--I don't have any problem with obscenity, fecal matter, and so on, but it's less striking in his work than the other forms of disruptiveness there.

In

2009-04-06T22:04:00.002-05:00

in

...here

....................n't

*

in

wood

does

...............nt
...................................................t
.....................................................read

*

in
....where we
....stayed
..................................................NO DREAM
t......................................................................?
........................................it
stead

............................................niggling
stand
............................................length

*

nope, loop

soucience

soup

*

....................................property

sky

................at rest

........................................blue
........................................is its
........................................remainder
.................................rent

*

innit
................................you <------->it

................stant
............................mix
........................................t

*

........................surrounds

three songs
crow pass
es hawk
in air
or wall
nut not
bud ed
........yet

*

duce

(in de

patch

blotch

*

or of

*

in chinese
no spell
spill it
....o.u.t.

............................................to

*

form to
......give ............................sub
................................ord.....in.....ate

*

to the time not taken (took):

there is this false sense of own

-----------------------------------------

Today's reading: Larry Eigner's Readiness / Enough / Depends / Upon. Eigner is best taken in large doses, entire books of whatever length. What seem to be notations of the arrangements of objects, the drift of phenomena into constellations over a span of time (the poems often seem to be written in a very short time--or, more often, over two days, which is fascinating for such brief works), turns out to work on the border between that sort of descriptive notation and a notation of constellations of pieces of language. External phenomena and the language that refers to them begin in strict analogy, then drift apart to varying degrees. And the subject matter drifts and shifts in surprising ways, so that we go from frequent descriptions of weather, trees, streets, sights and sounds to jokes, meditations, responses to other writing, even one pretty dark poem of historical atrocity. I wrote today's poem while about halfway through the book, after which I found, at the beginning of a longer Eigner poem dated 10.26-7.93:

...............................o n e o r t w o
in............................t h i n g s c a n b e
(to)....................................s p e c u l a t e d
an
empty
sky
surrounding
so
many

2009-04-05T23:59:00.000-05:00

The sexual skeleton is cloyingly at wait
on the divan of darkly vandalized love.

A tarpaulin seen from two irreconcilable angles
can only have died in its sleep, too much on sale.

Kept printing out JAZZ MONKEY from the white ticker
tape machine erasing moss from a midget, page 15, raw cheat
pump deft
geisha chic
crop gran
it ick
lops side
sicle donor
hot butt
on invest
I equate it with great deeds
to put walnuts on the skin
of one's victims. She bangs an
egg against the bill of sale,
the boards that have replaced
Citizen Three with panel flips.

I'm trying to read a book of poems each day. Many, but not all, are short. Today's is Beverly Dahlen's A Reading: Spicer and 18 Sonnets. Many of my daily poems will be in some sense "imitations" of the day's reading. I don't see how I could imitate Dahlen without taking decades to do so. This one is closer to Bruce Andrews, I think.

2009-04-04T23:58:00.000-05:00

The melon hides
the head in
wood. So What

is just
a faded
Should.

The new hot
thing in towns
wrecked by

holes. A pleasure what
the blood got out. What

did you think, drink at stars,
a flagging house, a hoarse and
guided starve, a stab. A vine,

o vine, you most
certainly are not.

Today's reading: Robert Creeley's Words.

2009-04-03T23:59:00.000-05:00

Are you ready to become the man
you came here to be? Why do I present
this ironic facade, instead of asking
a genuine question? What is the question?
Why is it marked thus? What's the history
of that mark?

Is that a lotus behind my head? How far
from the last question to the last one? Am I
just happy to see me? Why do these questions
keep spiraling off, instead of delving deeper?
Why do I want deeper delving? Are the sexual
possibilities lost on me? Is that a real question?
What was the question? What was the gap?

What is performance? Does it involve that
tight feeling in the throat? That lonely olive
on the shelf? The presence of anything? Huh?
What? Paint? Tea? Stop now?

This poem, which fails somewhat miserably, owes its inspiration to today's reading: Steve Benson's Open Clothes. Benson's improvisations, all of which seem to involve the setting up of situations of vulnerability, uncertainty, probable embarassment and a great deal of brilliant surprise, are a recent inspiration to me. I've been meaning to really delve into his work for years, and this most recent book has me hooked. It'd be an interesting job to compare Benson's long sequences of questions with the questions that make up Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris."

2009-04-02T19:08:00.003-05:00

THIS SPACE

Leaves
........................................sharpen
.......................................................the mode.
Takes.

Nude, formed, found, near-
..........................................Edgelessly?

"If you want the lens, buy the eye!"

who becomes the swell in cloud mass

(after "The Dark" in Rae Armantrout's The Invention of Hunger, which I'd not read as a book before today. This poem, like the other two I don't remember having seen collected elsewhere, is particularly chilling and strange).

Also in today's reading: Bruce Andrews' Executive Summary (I'm reading "A's" today, starting the alphabet). It collects early works that make me remember why I like the guy's writing so much. The language is packed, hilarious, full of crackly context-readiness (as in "moss from a midget").

ok, a poem a day for the month of april

2009-04-01T20:27:00.002-05:00

after Duncan

come back
as if
made up

I is
not mine

but makes
what is

by delimit:
walls shadow

and that's how we know
where we are

I'm a box
of bones,

their shapes
imitations

of the way
words always squirm
inside words

so that they don't
mean what they mean. they blanket the
squirming things.

I remember--enfold--at freeze--bent grass
in wind. I own it, but don't
own I. That is

the first persimmon. O mensch. O my.

Cannot Exist no.4

2009-02-27T19:45:00.002-06:00

I haven't even mentioned here that Cannot Exist no.4 is out.

SEGUE put on a great launch reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC a month ago.
Lots of people, lots of energy, many compliments on the magazine that made its editor proud.

2009-02-27T19:42:00.002-06:00

A reading experiment: assume that every part of a text is thoroughly referential. In the case of, say, a text by Stein, what name can we give to the experience to which such a text refers?

2008-12-31T15:11:00.002-06:00

I'm thinking this New Year's Eve Day of a lot of people, especially those friends with whom I regularly fail to correspond. And people I don't know at all, especially the people of Palestine, suffering from decades of slower and faster murder, and now a declared war for which the turning of the year will make little difference.

I wish you all the best, and hope for the transformation of the old Chinese curse--that we live in interesting times--into a blessing.

Lists

2008-12-25T11:27:00.003-06:00

Just for fun, I've been trying to list the books I read this year (counting only those I've finished, or come so close to finishing that it might as well count). Comparing it to 2007's year-end list, it seems kind of paltry. A number of factors are to blame, not the least of which has been my editing of Cannot Exist, which has taken up a great deal of reading time. It's been a great year for poetry publications, though; the stack of various writers' Collecteds is a great thing to have around. 2009 will be a serious reading year.

Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree
Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews
Hart Crane, White Buildings and The Bridge
Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers and Art is War
Bob Perelman, Primer* and To the Reader*
Barrett Watten, Opera--Works*
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (finally, after a decade of rereading half of it)
Ron Silliman, The Alphabet (letters A-O, most of them rereads) and Ketjak*
Cesar Vallejo, Trilce (in Clayton Eshleman's heartbreakingly wonderful translation)
Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries
Robin Blaser, Charms, Image Nations 5-14, Streams I, Syntax, and Pell Mell (all in The Holy Forest)
Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches
Lyn Hejinian, Saga/Circus
William Faulkner, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, Sanctuary, and, Absalom, Absalom!
Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde and Epigrammititis
Kevin Killian, Action Kylie and Wow Wow Wow Wow
Michael Slosek, A Sequence for Cinematic History
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears and The Object Stares Back
Rod Smith, Deed
Benjamin Friedlander, A Knot is Not a Tangle
Laura Moxley, Often Capital
Lisa Jarnot, Night Scenes and The Iliad Book XXII
The Grand Piano, vols. 4-7 (collective autobiography)
Chimed in Freddie (unattributed chapbook)
Robert Gluck, Reader
Graham Foust, Necessary Stranger
Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract
Eula Biss, The Balloonists
Alan Davies, Book 6
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination
Charles Olson, The Distances*
Chuck Stebelton, Flags and Banners
Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics

[note: * indicates "not for the first time"]

Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance"

2008-11-29T21:19:00.006-06:00

Philosophy can be seen as the history of struggles over the definitions of certain words: not just "knowledge," "being," "value," "right," but more crucially "think," "I," "thing," "eye," and just as crucially "with," "in," "as," "from." And "music," "human," "some." Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance" (the second of two long pieces in her new book, Saga/Circus) adds the rarely-considered emotions and passions, regret, pathos, cowardice, enthusiasm, forgetfulness, understanding, shock, love. This addition isn't her major philosophical innovation. That comes with the ways in which she sets every idea, feeling, variety of situatedness into motion. Everything is deployed, and what a concept is can no longer be a question of definition, but must instead be seen in the way it moves, happens, acts, its form of concretion in situated time. There's no general description of its motion; it's always what it is as a particular event, an event being a context thought of not as a "place" but as the whole structure of an occurrence (we are at sea, on a groundless ground).

I haven't mentioned that "The Distance" is the name of a ship, and that the poem takes place as an ocean voyage, without stated purpose or any end in sight.

We are passing through cascades of animation
And even that which is 'merely imaginary'
And that which is overlooked
Soak us.
(138)

on the other hand,

We are surrounded by immobilized projections.
(139)

There is the water, and there are icebergs and islands, frozen water and land at which it laps.

The emotions and concepts, so evanescent in themselves that they can barely be spoken of, let alone examined via direct observation, are deployed in "The Distance" via methods that are truer than definition and more radical than metaphor. Feelings and inclinations are bluntly personified, so that Pathos and Regret as animals simply do things, behaving in ways that aren't any less complex than real-life behavior, and therefore not reducible to allegories for the emotions that gave them names. Emotions are externalized through characters (Madoud, Feliz, Miroire, etc.) who don't embody them, but rather pass through them from varying directions. Or concepts are depolyed in propositions, but those propositions run into figures (the horizon, the wake, the dip and swell of the water beneath the boat, the sunrise, auditory and visual illusions) which take over the definitional aspect of the propositions and replace it (so that the push-forward and pull-back of a particular aquatic turbulence becomes the essential description of ambivalence--and not as a metaphor in the usual sense: ambivalence is, for the moment, nothing but that dynamic, and the water is still the water, not merely an object of comparison).

All these deployments and attempts at definition happen in and as context, and so they're transient and provisional. Once, however, a provisional statement has been made, it will always have been made--so that the essence of a concept or emotion is found in the aggregate of its provisional manifestations, in the dialectic between provisionality and always-having-been.

This is the kind of thinking that even the most far-out philosophical writing can't quite enact (Deleuze, writing brilliantly about thought in terms of speed and dynamics, coining slippery terms that are only defined by their contextualization throughout a text, still falls on the side of the propositional, and so his concepts always risk freezing into thingliness)--but art can.

Life can't be studied
As if it were the nonlife of something
Lived by someone studying.
(141)

The sentences are beautiful.

...I pass the camera
To others so as to emancipate the point of view. Trade is relevant
Everywhere. We can't escape economy, economies.
As far as we can see the world
Is unsparing of things to see, reality
Is profligate, ubiquitous, vivid, prolix, it's all too much, vista
Without terrain, the "too much," the "neither given nor giveable"
World we can neither approach nor leave. We live
Then through. Then having lived, we will always have
Lived. The only immortality is absence.
(118)

Where the colors driven by the wind
Apply, history returns, and so can I, having told myself these things
And keeping them in readiness to tell again.
(120)

...I remember
Patches of my own adolescence as I catch glimpses
Of patches of turbulence the wind is picking up, tearing
At the surface of the sea
But in those days my imagination drew thick forests
Into which I would dash
Into a secret future
Between trees, walking the forest floor on the outer edges of my feet--
Silent, invisible, in an infinite process of disappearing.
(112-113)

Pursuing a vibration that we take for a grebe
(131)

I want to understand
What I have seen and understand
That nothing I have seen explains what I have seen.
(131)

I can tell you
Everything we know about rats but I can't tell you what rats know
About themselves.
(135)

The thinking here works in distances and at limits. Thoughts, words, things and unthingly phenomena call out to one another across them, need one another.

...The northern waters are black as ink,
The southern waters are pale in contrast--but the contrast itself is nowhere
To be found.
(146)

I know these words.
My thoughts are dead without them.
(126)

...I feel all that I feel but there's nothing
There, nothing
Could be there: an emotion is held
In an absence together only
With the strength of an interior--anterior--presence.
But happily the world has poles
And they draw things out
Just as night draws
Bats from barns...
(144)

The bats are encountered, though (in the next lines), at dawn. While most of Hejinian's recent work has been "night work," full of sleep and dreams, this is a day poem, full of waking, sunrise, the coming into visibility of things.

...There is nothing here
But exposure. Every wave, even as it curls over the light, produces exposure,
Every thought is crossed by its own frame of illimitable
Transient foam...
...The sun
Is always prejudiced in favor of appearances--change, eventfulness
And destination.
(142)

A journey with a beginning and no end. Saga flowing into the beginning of history. Exposure of prison, war. Music, the interdependence of what it does and doesn't say, bringing the latter to light.

I'm again struck by the positivity of Hejinian's thought as a writer, her light courage to do and think, to help inquisitive enthusiasm carry itself out. It makes possible a 37-section take on the "life is a journey" figure that gives that figure more life than it may have ever had.

So much of her recent work is concerned with the border, distance, limit as productive, as the source of possibility--of splits and rifts as the production of more individuals, and thus more relationships, crossings, contexts. In "The Distance" there's always the split between past and future, thought and word, feeling and object, body and soul, visible and invisible. The voyage is in and across these distances, giving life to what waits on either side.

2008-11-05T13:57:00.003-06:00

The sense that this moment is unquestionably historic, and that, even more crucially, it's a chance to make it have been historic in a more profound and wide-ranging way.

On the south side of Madison, driving people to the polls: "Riiide to vote in style! We gotta juggler and a luxurious van! Free riiiides to the polls!" up and down the streets, kids chasing the car shouting "Obama! Obama!," Clay teaching three-ball techniques to the folks in the back seat, thumbs up and cheers from people in yards in the poorest part of town.

Back to the office after the polls closed, just in time to hear that Ohio had been called for Obama, thinking of my "Sing Out the Vote" cohorts.

The speech, like the campaign, made me want to be sincere, optimistic, tireless. The temporal and geographic expansiveness of it, the sense that it's not over for the human race, the plea for intelligence, its undeniable presence, had me in tears. The thought of everyone I know for whom the civil rights movement was the defining event of their lives, all the speeds and forms of social change, the thought that there were almost no bad reasons to feel bowled over by this.

I don't need to point out the reasons for caution, skepticism, not letting him get away with things, the need for the degree and intensity of involvement he asks for. My sustaining reason for optimism is the suspicion (based partly on my sister's reports of Obama while she was working for the Illinois Democratic Sentate) that he's actually prepared to listen, if we have something to say.

What in the hell is wrong with people in California? GLBT rights is an issue we're definitely going to have to press during the presidency of a thoughtful and articulate man who can still parrot the inane sentence "I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman," as if belief meant anything. (Admittedly, he tentatively opposed Prop 8).

Right now, though, I can't help feeling thrilled, even in exhaustion, at the prospect of a shift from eight years of a national political culture based on fear as the ultimate motivation to one in which desire and possibility are at least claimed as guiding ideals. To see photos from around the world of people's joy makes me think, again and again, that I want to love this country.

2008-11-01T09:28:00.002-05:00

I've got poems in the new Turntable and Blue Light.

*

Farewell to Studs Terkel.

*

Get out the vote!

*

Cannot Exist no.4 seeks cover art--and submissions are still open for poetry until November 7th.

2008-10-27T22:16:00.003-05:00

I just got back from performing with a large and amazing gang of musicians on the Sing Out the Vote Ohio tour, organized in only a few weeks by Holly Near, with help from many women and a couple of men working on voter registration, Obama campaigning, and other urgent projects. What an incredible experience. For one thing, Holly is amazing--an inspiring performer, organizer and person who in almost any concert or conversation is likely to say something I want to write down and think about for a long time. For another thing, the sense of being part of a group of artists who are contributing collectively to social change is satisfying and educational in ways I hadn't even expected. As Holly points out, this kind of music (really a lot of kinds--the variety was huge) isn't a retro thing, a '60s thing. It's a set of ongoing variations on interlocking traditions that are much older than that, and will go on for a long time, represented here by a diverse group of people (none of them trying to hog a spotlight, all energetically doing whatever needed to be done and consulting with one another to improve the performances) that would never have appeared together on stage before the labor movement, civil rights, feminism, gay liberation and the consciousness of links across age and class boundaries.

And the apparent success of the project is impressive. The concerts and street singing re-energized organizers and volunteers. They brought their friends and got them to sign up. One big lesson for me: we sang on the green at Ohio State University in Columbus, by a table where organizers were attempting to recruit Get Out the Vote volunteers and convince students to hop on the vans (running every half-hour) taking people to vote early. As often happens on college campuses, it seemed like no-one was paying any attention, that we were probably wasting our energy. After singing in a handful of classes, we ran into one of the organizers from the table, who told us that, while we were performing, she got ten times as many volunteers as she's usually able to get in a day. I'm going to remind myself of that experience often, whenever I feel like the art I'm involved in is being flung out into a void. The work we do as artists (singers, actors, poets, painters, dancers, composers) plays crucial roles in imagining and moving towards the kinds of societies we want to live in, and the effects we can't see might not even be something we have to hope future generations will experience--they might be immediate and only temporarily invisible.

The work continues after the election, and I think there's reason for optimism. If Obama's elected (and, holy shit, I hope he is) things are, at worst, going to get a lot more interesting.

*

Links:

Photos from the Columbus concert
YouTube videos of anthemic election songs

2008-09-18T10:47:00.003-05:00

Cannot Exist no.3 is out. It's really good, such a variety of intensities that I find it difficult to read.

*

The Nonsense Company will soon be part of a very unusual production of King Lear. Five groups, five desserts.

*

"Pardon me while my intraproprioceptive wife has a breakdown."

*

What I'm reading (listed to work off a bit of caffeine energy before rehearsal):

Kevin Davies, The Golden Age of Paraphenalia
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Cannot Exist no.3
submissions for no.4
Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest
Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries
Cesar Vallejo, The Collected Poems
Eduardo Galleano, Genesis
Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Ron Silliman, The Alphabet (Rick's copy arrived today, and I expect mine tomorrow, but can't wait. Whoo-ee!)

... and about fifty other things. There are the books I read at least every other day.
Lists are fun.

*

The kind of access that comes with the internet makes me so very aware of mortality.

a few further post-RNC reflections, facts, fragments

2008-09-06T12:20:00.003-05:00

Sarah Palin is dangerous. This strategy has worked before: take an ignorant, inexperienced, smug and nasty psychopath and run them for office on the platform of ordinariness. She's Bush, with more rhetorical skill.

The left should have a massive series of theater workshops.

a securitization of major
preemptive raids of alleged

Dakota occupation of Coldwater Spring site near Minnehaha Park expected to end peacefully today... to reclaim the site for their tribe... but federal officials disrupted the plan from the start, granting a permit for the occupation, even though protesters hadn't requested one.

(Compare to the march-blocking strategy on Thursday)

In full riot gear, jokingly
refer to themselves as "turtles"

More arrests (818) than
at any convention except
NYCs in 2004 (1781)
(Chicago's '68 DNC had 589)
19 felony charges, 30 journalists

Cmdr Steve Frazer, head
of one mobile division, called
the parade route's end "Ground
Zero," called thrown shit
and piss "bio attacks"

mobile force field units
officers moving about "subtly"
"in soccer-mom minivans"

former Mpls police chief:
St. Paul could've handled security
with a few hundred extras. Instead,
an orgy of overtime
subsidized by the federal government
via the National Security Act

(much of this from the Star-Tribune, whose reporting has become worse, writing as if the police were constantly reigning in crowds of people bent on chaos and destruction, whereas they generally were blocking the progress of peaceful marches moving down clearly defined routes. These people weren't "keeping the situation under control"--we were.

The paper, however, is still emphasizing the gap between the language of counter-terrorism and the reality of the protests--a degree of nuance lacking in the "nonpartisan" CityPages, the Minneapolis paper that, like many free weeklies, features a broadly cynical tone, attempting to sound hip in the apparent absence of any work to actually find out what's going on. The latest issue describes the anarchist march on the 1st as "a cross between a disco and Hamas," and the writer doesn't seem to have taken the ten minutes required to find out that that march left an hour earlier than the official parade because the anarchists decided well beforehand to separate, spatially or temporally, their actions from those officially permitted.

But I'm getting away from the main point: the detached, "with-it" cool of the weeklies, uninvolved and uninvested, is worse than the police repression of the protesters. This is the attitude that renders anything it touches (which include the whole surface field of culture) unimportant, an object of easy mockery, a series of empty appearances for the entertainment of all. That's it--for the free weeklies, everything is "entertainment," presented by people who relish their power to dismiss. The invulnerability of such an attitude combines with a lack of real inquiry to produce a form of "news" much more conducive to totalitarian culture than any of the more obviously ideologically invested forms of journalism.)

The most important issues--they're not "issues"--are still poverty and imperialism, the techniques (they're not just "techniques") used to maintain them and their destruction of the basis for any acceptable form of human social existence.

2008-09-05T15:20:00.003-05:00

YESTERDAY:

We go to the student walkout and march. Mostly high-schoolers, enthusiastic and charming. It's still early in the day, cool and misty. Ska with very bad lyrics, to be reperformed tonight at the high-profile, basically pointless Nader rally. Songs that say "We say." Careerism in leftist culture. When syntax runs into corners, the voice of the collective of non-individuals speaks in readily available phrases. Then he remembers counter-recruitment, of vital importance. Pronounces "Clean Water" as "Clean War Act." "The more out of tune, the better," claims Shannon from Riot Folk. "The Christian icon is not stars and stripes, but a slaughtered lamb." Joe Hill as odd but good soundtrack for transgender Make-In. This ragtag bunch is the group that should be listened to by older activists and moralizing liberals. This song is about accepting your own criminality. "If the fetus you save turns out to be gay, will you still fight for its rights?" A handful of actual Republican delegates for peace (who then say stupid things about immigration). "This is what a jumble of thoughts & observations looks like!" Ensure safety by having everyone repeat, "I have an announcement. Cheney, Big Oil Bob, and General Betrayus are goint to try to escape arrest by boarding a boat at the Harriet Island Yacht Club. We're going to camp out here on the hay for about half an hour, then march down to the park to surprise them. While we're here, we'll eat some kick-ass food provided by Seeds of Peace--but we're going to stay out of the middle of the street, because the police... uh, there's no diplomatic way I can say this... you know." The last part, repeated en masse, is particularly funny, and the whole idea has a theatrical sense far superior to that I associate with the usual things we're asked to repeat as groups. Rick and I walk down to the island a half-hour before the students get there. The three arrestees, well-made big puppet heads on smaller bodies, are there, with little to do, so while Tao Rodriguez-Seeger sings "Guantanamera" Dick Cheney holds a mic and gently boogies, as if performing the song in a hotel lounge. It's hilarious; all movement songs should include some such odd juxtaposition. Then the puppets are placed on trial.

We find the bigger march stalled on a bridge just a block from the Capitol, flanked on two sides by battalions of riot cops on horses, bikes, trucks, standing with batons, bulldozers behind them. Apparently the well-advertised 4 p.m. march was only given a permit that lasted until 5--an idiotic idea, the police only asking for trouble. It's obvious to me that the best way to keep the situation "under control" would've been to let the march proceed to the Xcel Center without harrassment. Instead, the cops pepper-sprayed the crowd at the Captiol before the permit was even up, ordering them to disperse. They've already been on this bridge to downtown for at least an hour by the time we arrive, folks on bikes endlessly circling in the middle of an intersection, a moving wall between the cops on its east side and the many hundreds of people still on the bridge to the north. We run into Roy Zimmerman as we walk up, and the three of us explore and join the crowd for a while. A nice example of solidarity: a woman on the bridge has to pee, so friends form a dense circle with their backs to her on the grassy median. As the three of us start to leave for the evening's performance at the Bedlam, the cops rush the crowd, trying to get them off the bridge, routing them back toward the Capitol. Instead, the crowd suddenly turns on the Captiol lawn and rushes to the next street over, trying to get across that bridge. The cops block them off again. This could go on for a long time (and, I find out later, does, with another 200 or so arrests).

The performance goes well, the Myshkins and Roy with the WYXY News Team followed by another performance of Wallace Shawn's The Fever, even better than Tuesday's, leaving me thoroughly exhausted. But there's more to do. We swap songs with David Rovics and Jim Page for a couple of hours. I've never met Jim before; he's a great performer and songwriter, a lovely person onstage and off. As with Bryan's performance of Shawn's play, Jim starts off very softly, only gradually arriving at a moment of normal audibility, charged with intense attention, everything that happens in it opened up. He gives a great intro to a song about the 1999 WTO protests, in which he says "People tend to feel morally superior to those young folks who break windows and such. What did those windows ever do to them? Well, I've lived in Seattle for 27 years, and I know what was there before those windows were: low-income housing. When that housing was knocked down for Planet Hollywood and Nike Town, people who'd lived there for ten years had nowhere to go, and had to turn to government aid. Now, the first symptoms of being forced out of a place you've lived for ten years are migraines and dental problems. Those are the first symptoms. A lot of people die within five or six years. So I don't think those windows are innocent." He made a similar point about the Caterpillar tractors used to knock down houses in Palestine. They're not built for road construction; the company knows exactly what they're for. I'd like to write a poem of objects, seen as resonating not only with their history, but with the histories they're intended to create.

Today is Ryan's birthday, so we're going out on the town before our penultimate 10 p.m. performance as the Nonsense Company.

2008-09-03T12:59:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, more reports of raids by the cops, arrests for blocking streets and rushing police officers, but also for simply moving too slowly. Someone apparently threw a rock through the window of a bus full of Republican delegates from Connecticut. Not sure how I feel about that. The papers here, so far, have been pretty good about maintaining the distinctions between the anarchist "elements" and the protesters engaging in permitted activities. The anarchists themselves are trying to promote this distinction--basically, everyone's doing a better job of it than the police.

The "March for Our Lives" took place yesterday, organized by the Poor People's Coalition for Economic Human Rights. The rally, like Monday's, boasted a wide ethnic diversity and age range, reflecting the sense that poverty is THE most important issue--that economic injustice is the umbrella under which the most social problems can be gathered. There was some troubling rhetorical conflict between the organizers and the anarchists: at one point in the rally, a bunch of people suddenly ran off to (I think) block one of the intersections next to the park. The main organizer urged everyone to stay focused on the stage--which I decided to do; I felt like the event, with its focused topic, deserved a concentration that would promote its theatrical presence. At the same time, the organizer's continued chiding rubbed me the wrong way. She accused the anarchist rush of being "a deliberately orchestrated distraction" from the attempt by poor people to make their voices heard. This seems like paranoia to me. There can be a debate over tactics, but the anarchists aren't obligated to stand there and listen to the speakers, and they've also decided not to criticize the techniques of pacifists. As often happens, the anger and condescension directed at anarchists made the organizers look bad. On the other hand, the point of another speaker--that the working class in the Twin Cities already sees violence and property destruction on a daily basis, and that a multiracial, pacifist action would be more of a shock to the police who assume a tendency toward violence on the part of people of color--made a lot of sense. It threw the techniques of the anarchists into the light of a question, rather than a moral condemnation. It's a question that seems entirely appropriate for anarchism: is a given action responding in the right way to the immediate specificity of a context?

****

It seems like, earlier in the day, the astonishing mob of police in riot gear have usually been pretty calm. It's as the afternoon goes on that they start splitting peaceful marches arbitrarily into smaller sections, detaining large groups of people for hours on single city blocks, raiding various spaces. Last night there were three attempted police actions at the Bedlam Theatre, where I'm performing every night--the first a response to an anonymous call asserting that the Bedlam was selling "more than beer and wine." Fortunately, the folks there run a very tight ship, ID'ing people rigorously, etc., so the officer who showed up was shown around the building to her satisfaction. When told that the theater was hosting evenings of political art in response to the RNC, she said "I'll try to come back for that. I'd be protesting if I didn't have this job." Later in the evening, a fleet of bicycle cops showed up, and an hour later seven or eight squad cars; neither found anything illegal going on, so they left. The sort of luck not found by the people at the RNC Welcoming Committee Convergence Center, who had their dangerous pamphlets and unspecified "weapons" confiscated.

****

At the Bedlam last night (after music by the Prince Myshkins David Rovics and Jim Page, and mock news by the WYXY News Team), Bryan Bevell gave a magnificent performance of Wallace Shawn's monologue The Fever. Bryan's acting was subdued, quiet, even with the gradually increasing noise from the bar outside the theater, and this mode of performance got the audience into a state of intense concentration. It's a fantastic piece, done here with admirable vulnerability. He'll do it again on Thursday. Tonight, more of the Myshkins with guests, WYXY, and the Nonsense Company performing "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving / Conversation Storm."

http://www.bedlamtheatre.org

all-too-hurriedly-typed,

Andy

more from the twin cities

2008-09-02T01:19:00.005-05:00

YESTERDAY:

We joined the silent march of Vets for Peace and an anti-torture group, in which we dressed as Guantanamo prisoners, in orange jumpsuits and hoods. Participating in a march with an actual dramatic idea behind it was pretty satisfying (though I still felt grouchy about the left's inadequate ability to perform--we could have been absolutely silent, and maintained militaristically straight rows and columns).

At the end, I saw the back of a t-shirt that gave me yet another reading of the opening sentence of Ron Silliman's Tjanting: "Not THIS!", it read, under a picture of a football player, down on one knee with a ball and one finger pointing triumphantly into the air. The front turned out to be a photo of two collaborating baseball players, with the caption "We need more of this..." and the logo for the Revolutionary Communist Party--all of which, the socialist politics and the privileging of baseball, made the connection with Ron seem even stronger.

(Reiko points out the important mistake in my reading of the shirt's front in the comments box. Check it out.)

TODAY:

The big march on the RNC. Already hotter today than under a hood yesterday. Undocumented immigrant among the first casualties of the Iraq war. Emma's Revolution turns out to be performing at the opening rally, and we get to chat with them awhile. "Whoever it is in power, and whoever you are, they've got a plan for you." Toothed blasts rip through the sound system; they clearly don't know which channel is which. A huge number of Ethiopians demonstrating. This constant motion of many of us, restless inquisitive citizenry, mobile polis. Riot police surround, at various unpermitted intersections, the anarchists who've set off well before the official march, who dance their asses off, ebullient music pouring clear from rolling speakers, not "doing their thing" but revelling in their mutual presence and possibility, a height of joy and thoughtful, thorough organization for which they hardly ever get credit (how I've missed them during the Bush administration, in which they seemed almost invisible). They dance again in a fenced-in alley near the energy center, in front of a troupe of pro-war protesters; the encounter is non-confrontational and hilarious, the cops (I think) afraid to advance into this block with their gas masks and rifles, not wanting to appear over-reactive in the face of such committed, energetic, subversive yet non-threatening activity.

The main march is gigantic--every time it seems we've come to its end (moving backwards along the route toward the car, which we'll take to our tech rehearsal at the Bedlam Theatre) another dense three blocks' worth of people comes into view. Billionairesses in elaborate, buxom costume sing "Oh, show us the way/to the next little war..." Later in the day, of course, the reports start to come in of a dumpster set aflame and pushed into a cop car, of people arrested for moving too slowly down the street, of the main march split into sections, hundreds of people delayed for half an hour at a time, some still not permitted to leave a city block hours later.

At the end of a night at the Bedlam Theatre that includes us (as the Prince Myshkins and the Nonsense Company), Roy Zimmerman, David Rovics, and the WYXY News Show, the punk/folk band Blackbird Raum plays and utterly blows my mind. They're all fine musicians, well-rehearsed--but it's the washboard player who floors me most thoroughly, outdoing the accordion, banjo, washtub bass, musical saw and mandolin, playing ridiculous fills, constantly varying rhythms at blinding tempi. All this unamplified, saturated with friendship between the band members. A young woman with a sprig of fern in her hair dances with another woman, and their closeness is the perfect beautiful compliment, until I forget about them completely in the thrill of the songs. They kept me energetic, as exhausted as I am from marching, tech-ing, organizing... but now, sleep, with no reason to get up before 11.

2008-08-31T01:03:00.002-05:00

I'm in the Twin Cities, for a series of performances (see the previous post) occasioned by the RNC. The city is quiet for the moment, though I'm on the Minneapolis side of the river. You can hear the cicadas, but not the cops bursting into the RNC Welcoming Committee Convergence space late at night to confiscate dangerous pamphlets, laptops, cameras, and activist bodies. Which already happened a few days ago--but since the space has since re-opened, I'd be surprised if more raids weren't in the works.

Tomorrow will be hot, especially in a black hood and orange jumpsuit, in which we'll march with the War Resister's League in a demonstration against torture and extraordinary rendition.

This is my first real "political blog moment": is anyone else utterly dumbfounded that the media is reporting McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate as "confusing?" Is there anyone who's been following things to whom the opportunism of this act (the attempt to give the guy "diversity credibility" and to appeal to the--small, I hope--group of female Clinton supporters who are so bitter about Obama that they'd actually vote for a sexist maniac) is anything but utterly transparent and comprehensible? In a performance tonight, my friend Courtney McClean told us how tired she was of being angry about war, hatred, etc. I realized that I'm actually not angry about those things--my feelings about them are strong and very different from anger--and that what raises my ire is the knee-jerk circulation of phraseology through public discourse--the way people just accept phrases, sentences, descriptions, frames as they're thrown at them--and so, even when that language is treated from ideologically opposed points of view, the terms are already more powerful than anything their speakers might actually want to say.

Announcements

2008-08-31T01:02:00.000-05:00

Three things, the preparation for which has been eating up every spare minute of my time:

September 1-6
RADICAL NEIGHBORLY CONVIVIALITY:
A week of performance and community building in response to the other RNC
Curated by Bedlam Theatre and the Nonsense Company
featuring The Nonsense Company, the Prince Myshkins, Roy Zimmerman, Bedlam Theatre, Bryan Bevell (performing Wallace Shawn's "The Fever"), David Rovics and more.
Bedlam Theatre, 1501 S. 6th St., Minneapolis (West Bank)
http://www.bedlamtheatre.org
http://www.nonsensecompany.com

(The Nonsense Company will also do two additonal performances on Friday and Saturday)

September 25-28, 8 p.m.
KING LEAR
Puppet Uprising's 2nd Annual Secret Shakespearean Dessert Theater

Five groups from around the country each take an act of Shakespeare's play, each in a different space and with a different dessert item served. The Nonsense Company's treatment of Act III is going to be pretty strange, and I imagine that we're not the only group of whom that can be said.

http://puppetuprising.org/upcoming.html

(Next Week)
CANNOT EXIST no.3
edited by Andy Gricevich
featuring Alex Burford, Mark Cunningham, Carrie Etter, Lawrence Giffin, William Gillespie, Kevin Killian, Mark Lamoureux, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Sheila E. Murphy, Andy Nicholson and Dirk Stratton.
http://cannotexist.blogspot.com

2008-08-14T13:04:00.003-05:00

I got my copy of Active Boundaries, Michael Palmer's book of selected essays and talks, in the mail yesterday. Looks like it's going to be a good read. And that I'll probably feel the urge to go back and reread everything he's written.

Here are a few quotations from his talk, "Counter-Poetics and Current Practice:"

"In a poem you can be perfectly in a logic where a thing is both A and not-A [...]. This is not simply frivolity--it's the announcement of another area of knowing. [...] This is a poem that is not simply there to reinscribe something already experienced, but is actually a mode of experience in and of itself. [...] What are the interrelations? It's always a question. Who are we in relation? Who am I? Am I doing the speaking? Are you doing the listening? [...] A refusal, also of the reader as a passive consumer. Speaking to a passive audience is much more a HItlerian form of discourse where the passivity of the audience is assumed, where they are not involved in an active exchange of meaning. [...] the poem only occurs, is only there, in the event of the poem, which is in its engagement with the reader. Except in some platonic sense, the poem is not present when the book is closed. What I mean is that the poem is an even, temporally and historically conditioned. And so I am interested in acts of composition that emphasize this without becoming simply buckets into which anyone can drop whatever they want. The poem is not simply an aleatory event." (245-47)

Ok, so this is all stuff I've thought about for some time--but Palmer says it with great elegance. "Another area of knowing." The poem as event and the whole way of thinking that moves in terms of events (as distinguished from, and enveloping in dialectical fashion, the "object/process" dichotomy). The distinction between a work's context always being part of its events--the determinateness of any given context--and the very different notion of the work as "meaning whatever you want it to mean."

In the course of discussing Jack Spicer, Palmer poses a critique of the Wright/Bly "Deep Image" school, claiming that those poets simply appropriated a kind of image, with a particular feel, from its original Spanish/Moorish cultures, and then dropped examples of it into their poems from the outside, assuming that they'd just serve as expressive devices there, without internal motivation.

"There's enough reference [in Spicer's "lemon" letter to Lorca] obliquely to that misappropriation that I suspect he had it in mind. So much of Spicer, and other poets, is directed against anything that could be taken as a constructive or creative device around which you could build a poetics. And in this respect one can see a Spicer as having a relationship of critical negativity to the culture as a whole, I suppose, but also to the models of poetic making that became so standard." (251)

"There is a certain arbitrairiness outside a given language system, so that the possibility of reference and signification rests on an agreement we make in community, and once community begins to disintegrate that agreement begins to break down." (253)

Again, not really a new idea--but somehow, in this context, it struck me in a big way. If the possibility of reference, of using language to talk about things, is a communal matter, then the question of how much of our language is being given to us, for instance, by corporations (including the news and the federal government in its current state, but also the language of advertising, the language text-messaging and various kinds of internet discourse allow for and encourage by virtue of their form), becomes really crucial. If a great deal of our language, from its most instrumental to its most fanciful uses, is being given to us not by our daily forms of practice, but by language networks in which we're enmeshed, but which are outside any of our fields of choice, then reference is truly in trouble. It's a real danger: that one will only be understood if one employs the terms that no speaker chooses, but simply inherits. Given that danger, what is poetry to do? There are, of course, a number of proposals floating around. Palmer sees poetry as a taking-back of the meanings of things by enacting the processes of making sense, rather than allowing them to be taken for granted. Dale Smith calls for poetry that helps enact new platforms of communication. Some Flarf treats imposed discourse ironically by appropriating and recycling it, trying for an implicit critique. Barrett Watten asserts that no-one can understand anyone else, and that poetry needs to place itself directly in that situation. Though each of these proposals raises its own concrete questions and has its own specific shortcomings, their generally problematic nature, the difficulty of making a convincing proposal at all, is one sign of just how serious a problem this is.

"In Jabes' case, if you do not allow for silence--silence being the place where you reply to the question, where you reply to the other--[...] then you are appropriating the discourse and entering, then, yourself, into an authoritarian mode. [...] He constructs exactly out of what is considered the nondiscursive, the spaces between things, the junctures, the breaks and fragments." (255)

I have to finally get around to Jabes one of these days. The drastic cover price of his books has slowed my approach so far.

[Here he's been talking about Latin American poets]:
"It's interesting to relate this to the problem of political poetry in the United States, which tends to become doctrinal or an occasion for self-display. You take, let's say, the poets' Nicaragua shuttle and go down for ten days,then you return and become a hero of the Revolution. For those who are interested, to come to the deeper responsibility of the political is every bit as demanding and difficult as coming to the deeper responsibility of the emotional. It's instructive to go to the poets for whom the political is not a 'topic'." (257)

It's that last sentence I want to highlight here. I'll be thinking about that for a while. I'll point out again, as extra food for that thought, Palmer's claim that "deep image" didn't work because it was taken from its place in a long-developing cultural context. So the thought of the political as "not a 'topic,'" as an assumed aspect of one's culture, can't, for a North American poet, just mean lifting ways of writing from Peru or Chile.

"[...] I was drawn to [Robert Creeley's] sense of staying away from one aspect of revision, which is the normative sense of revising to conform to certain expectations. And so, I turned to de Kooning, who in an interview talked about returning and returning to the first moment of the canvas, and the layering process, the process of accretion and the process of emergence. In other words, you return into the act of the thing until the thing is complete." (263)

There's plenty more there.

the fragmentation of subjectivity...

2008-08-14T12:55:00.002-05:00

...doesn't amount to much if the many voices that say "I" are more or less identical.

They may also be identical in sharing an unreflected-upon, inarticulate comfort with their own contradictoriness--a fragmentation that precedes anything that might happen in the poem.

*

One major problem: "self" or "subject" gets identified with "voice," and a multiplication or fragmentation of subjectivity becomes a matter of multiple voices.

I'd think this problem would have gone away by now, since more interesting solutions were already around by the late nineteenth century.

2008-07-25T23:15:00.003-05:00

You can now download my reading with Carrie Etter from Tuesday's "Series A" in Chicago by clicking here. Some dirty words blanked out for radio.

reading in Chicago tomorrow

2008-07-21T13:54:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, July 22nd

All the way from London: Carrie Etter

All the way from Madison: Andy Gricevich

Reading poems in Chicago
at
Series A

Watten's Grand Piano

2008-07-18T11:20:00.013-05:00

I've revised my discomfort with Barrett Watten's stance as represented in the collectively-written memoir/essay The Grand Piano. I'd seen the attempt to present a unified front for Language Writing, in the form of a story about a singular avant-garde movement appearing dramatically on the scene, as exactly the wrong move, at a time when so many writers of my age (plus or minus a decade or so) use "LangPo" as a broad stylistic term, without historical specificity, in a generalized way that misses the then-and-still-staggering breadth and variety among and within the writing of its practitioners, absorbing their work into a sound-bite series of descriptions paraphrased from two or three essays written in the early 1980s.

In the light of his contributions to GP 5 & 6, as well as his recent note on the "1970s" conference in Orono, I've come to see Watten's critical project as an effort to retain a place for radical art (and its extensions into the larger culture through poetics, literary history and criticism) at the institutional table--to keep it from being displaced entirely by official criticism, which, even at its best, is almost always far behind art, both chronologically and philosophically. As regards "Language Poetry," this is a place that's barely been gained--a tenuousness that shows in the easy reduction to formulas mentioned above.

In GP 6, Watten revisits his first book of criticism, Total Syntax (a book I've found endlessly fascinating and influential, and which absolutely deserves a reprint). He focuses on that book's distinction between "technique" and "method." "Technique" is everything about how the work is constructed, while "method" is technique's extension in the form of engagements with the world outside the work, whether through its manner of reception, the forms of its presentation, or the range of materials about which it has something to say. Technique is "the beginning of a series that provisionally arrives with the work" (p. 76), while method is what comes "after," beyond its making.

At the end of his section of #6, Watten cites Progress and Total Syntax as the "sites" he's left, places to be returned to. That the latter is included puts the "split" in his career in a new light for me. Before the split (which might be marked by Bad History), there's a concentration on the production of new work, corresponding to "technique--" the period in which he was writing poetry. After it, there's the period characterized by The Constructivist Moment (his second critical collection), as well as most of the writing on his blog. This phase addresses, in one way, the matter of method. (The use of these terms in this way cheapens them a bit, since Watten's been concerned with both all along. I'll return to them in their richer and more provocative implications in the next post).

The picture that emerges now for me is of a poet and critic whose commited and unapologetic thinking has pushed into often counterintuitive areas in which the result can't be entirely predicted. The fact that I find The Constructivist Moment less compelling, less radical than Total Syntax has as much to do with the fact that the more recent work is addressed to an institutional context in which I'm not currently involved (or particularly interested) as it has to do with the quality of that work. It's an attempt to make frames for the reception of poetry that depend on something more vital than the mere economics of publication and distribution, to expand it into the extra-poetic. I remain skeptical of most academic discourse and worried about ways in which this effort might backfire, producing a strong but undesirable reception for the art in whose name it's made--but that institutional address is a job that needs to be done in some way, and I'm glad that he's doing it.

And he does qualify the "we," in a substantial footnote, claiming that it's to be used as a "shifter" rather than a "rigid designator"--that each writer undertook different investigations in his or her own way, around some shared concerns and a number of different ones, and that these individual works were encouraged by the group dynamic. That's a distinction from the "unified front" picture, and sounds pretty damn good to me.

*

I've also just reread Watten's first two collections, Opera/Works and Decay, the former for the second time and the latter for the umpteenth. I'm still blown away by their singularity, their strangeness that hasn't faded a bit, their breadth and humor and unique form of rigor. In a recent post-reading conversation somebody claimed that Language Poetry is about "the process of the experiment" to the exclusion of the poem. When I disagreed, he said something like "nobody remembers specific lines from a Charles Bernstein poem, or a Barrett Watten poem." I realized just how wrong that is; sentences from Silliman's Tjanting, language from Bernstein's Controlling Interests, lines from Armantrout's and Perelman's work, and most definitely from Watten's Decay, Complete Thought, Conduit and others have stuck with me for a long time, still signalling what's possible.

The aggressive energy with which so many writers compulsively argue that this writing is a thing of the past, an "experiment" that long ago ran its course, indicates all on its own just how far the work is from having been absorbed.

2008-06-24T19:45:00.002-05:00

While on tour in California a couple of months back, I read Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, certainly one of the best novels (if it's a novel) published in my lifetime, and the best investigation I've seen of the questions and contradictions that thoughtful North Americans (and, in particular, politically concerned artists) tend to run into in the 21st century.

Spahr's novel is intelligent, moving, crucial, tentative in all the best ways while remaining emphatic in its ethical commitment. It's the story of the change in her writing that led to her wartime poetry collection, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Told almost entirely in the third person plural, it's the story of a three-person relationship that moves to Hawaii in the late '90s. There "they" meet with a series of contradictions and absent places: their roles as low-grade pawns in the post-grad employment machine, which is at the same time a vast system reproducing cultural imperialism in a colonized place; the ecology, alien to them but also invasive as regards the island; the lack of social support for the kind of sexual relationship they've undertaken; the foregrounding of the impossibility of ranking issues of class, race, gender, and aesthetic commitments. It's the story of their subsequent move to another colonized set of islands (New York), and the effects of 9/11 and the beginning of the "War on Terror" on every aspect of their lives. Most of all, it's a story about discovering vulnerabilities, at first imposed upon the "they" of the book, and finally sought after in the consciousness that only the opening of themselves to all these contradictions, difficulties and dangers can make possible a life and a writing that could, in the midst of social, cultural, economic and political crisis, point toward more desirable forms of human existence.

I'm thankful for this courageous cultivation of vulnerability, this openness to one's possible and even inevitable wrongness that nonetheless refuses resignation, choosing instead to see ethical contradiction and error as the mask shown by possible alternatives in a historical period that blocks their real appearance.

Invasive Species

2008-06-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

like duplexes

Uninflectedness and Irony

2008-06-12T12:30:00.007-05:00

Two ubiquitous modes in contemporary art (both often present): uninflectedness and irony.

Uninflectedness:
All surfaces are smooth and even. There's no real disruption; any dissonance is absorbed into the total effect. No abrupt shifts.

Irony:
The message is "I'm not really (doing) this," though the cue that lets us in on this message might be so slight as to be absent (the artist merely seems to have assumed, "no-one could possibly think I mean this").

In neither case is there an invitation to risk or care, a self-exceeding involvement with the materials of the work and the world as seen from the work. Each mode negates the traditional relations of the artwork to subjectivity, rejecting the investments of the artist and the viewer. Uninflectedness does this by simply refusing any stance toward anything--a "hands-off" approach--while irony violently destroys such investments by inhabiting positions it characterizes as false in the very act of inhabiting them.

These are rejections of an approach to art that depends on a unified subject as the locus of meaning, and in many cases they particularly work as avoidances of the most common forms of sincerity, with the sentimentality or self-aggrandizement sincerity can involve. In this sense uninflectedness and irony could be progressive, if only they didn't so often seem to be mere negations of what they oppose. If sincerity in its most commodified forms is offensive because it actually turns out to be poisonous to care, a real, comprehensive critique of it would involve the discovery of ways to invite care that stem from entirely different foundations, that show (rather than--as with bad sincerity--tell or insist on) what's lost in the decay of the communication of commitment into an aesthetic ideology of emotional habit.

*

Note:
I've been thinking about the problems of irony for a long time. The notion of "uninflectedness" came to mind while I was trying to answer the question: "Why does so much contemporary pop music, though obviously skilled and intelligent, leave me so cold?" I was particularly trying to figure out what bothered me about the music of Sufjan Stevens, which I've just started listening to and like quite a lot. Stevens has an incredibly even vocal delivery, all within a very restricted dynamic range, and his lyrics are poetically interesting, and generally describable as "almost actually being about something." The arrangements are texturally and melodically thoughtful. I want more dynamic shifts, more harmonic dissonance. The recording (of Come on, feel the Illinoise!), like most pristine contemporary digital recordings, is very compressed, so the dynamic range not only of the performance style but of the music in its entirety is squashed down to a highly listenable smoothness. The technology that makes it possible to produce these scintillating arrangements encourages--and all but demands--an uninflected music (it's a lot harder to go from soft to loud singing in a close-miked digital recording than in a rougher analog situation). These are songs that could be breathtaking, but instead they're just very good.

Admittedly, Stevens takes this vocal uninflectedness and uses it in productive ways. The melodies he and his backing vocalists sing end up being treated like more string and horn parts, breaking syllables where the melody, rather than the language, dictates, and this makes the singing a fully integrated "instrumental section" in his polyphonic arrangements. In this respect he's an exception among recent songwriters I've heard, for whom uninflectedness merely sounds like a form of expression (perhaps one characteristic of a generation raised on ADD drugs).

Irony is all over contemporary songwriting, especially in the adoption of musical genres that were initially performed sincerely, but are now viewed as kitsch.

In recent poetry, "Conceptual Writing" might be characterized by uninflectedness, in its utterly impersonal approach to the texts it appropriates and processes (at least in the descriptions of CW given by Kenneth Goldsmith). Flarf, on the other hand (at least in its "classic," "cloyingly awful" period), tends toward the ironic. Both tendencies can make something out of what's primarily a merely negative tendency (the way Language writing has generated new constructive principles out of its initial negations of subjective expressivity, narrative, etc.), and both always run the risk of becoming willing constructions of the technologies that make them possible.

Aesthetic innovation via the negation of other modes involves the discovery of new problems. The work is one of engaging with those as problems, rather than just sitting in the glow of the new until what's new in art turns out to look just like what was already around outside it.

Cannot Exist no.2 is out...

2008-06-06T21:12:00.001-05:00

...and chock full of good writing, as well as some stuff by me. Click the title of the post to get it.

2008-05-25T00:57:00.003-05:00

Goodbye, Utah, and thanks, with love.

2008-05-22T01:01:00.003-05:00

A bit ago, I had poems published in Bob Heman's magazine of very short poems, CLWN WR. The earlier issues Bob sent me contain some truly magnificent stuff (as does the one I'm in). Not easy to get, but well worth your while if you can find it.

I've also got new stuff in the latest Moria, which is easy to find. It's a fine, fine online magazine.

2008-05-22T00:49:00.002-05:00

If the first line begins with a lowercase letter, it gives the title (assuming there is a title) the opportunity to link up with the first line, which can be extremely interesting (if not exactly a rarity in the writing I read & write) when there are possibilities for multiple syntaxes, so that the title & opening line can be equally read as independent or conjoined.

Tips of branches of the maple in the front yard, which a few weeks ago pointed into the air three feet above my head, are now so weighted with great green leaves and pods (these someday to whirl and spin in their fall) that they end below my waist.

And junebugs are here, banging against the door, though it isn't June.

I have recently read:

Bob Perelman, Primer and To the Reader (both for the second or third time)
Juliana Spahr, The Transformation
Benjamin Friedlander, A Knot is Not a Tangle
Graham Foust, Necessary Stranger
William Faulkner, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion
Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree

all of which I adored--or found therein much to take the breath away.

2008-04-17T12:18:00.003-05:00

Lyn Hejinian gave an absolutely breathtaking reading at Woodland Pattern last Sunday.

I can't think of any other writing that's this generous, profuse, positive in the best sense. That very particular positivity, which bowls me over as a devotee of the negative, is something I hope to examine in a future post--but for now I'll just mention the free and light affirmation of thinking that rests on strata of critical awareness, an innocence that has earned its place by insisting on openness (and not on innocence, naivete) throughout Hejinian's writing career.

Generous, profuse: this close attention to such a wealth of particulars (I find it elsewhere only in Ron Silliman's writing and, in a different way, in Rae Armantrout's; in all cases arriving somewhere Proust only could have dreamt of): anything that comes into the day (animals, plants, talk, weather, objects of all kinds) and the ways a day takes shape; dreams; stories already told and newly invented; the language of other writers (poets, correspondents, novelists, philosophers, memoirists); instances of what would be "pure language" if anything in this writing were "pure;" jokes; philosophical propositions... anything may come in, and does.

And a profusion of styles and durations of abiding in one area of subject matter or another: the reading's large selection from The Book of a Thousand Eyes included a sequence of odd "faerie tales," tiny instances of speech, an extended description of the attitudes of mothers and children in a Blockbuster Video, a series of wildly varied tangents that ended in a catalog of facts about Malta, lyric poems and a portrait of a war zone.

And not just generous in the kinds of things the writing includes, but in what it gets those things to do. The Hejinianian (what a fine adjective to coin) poem can (at different times, and often at the same time) seem like a catalog of things, or of events (which, in this writing, are generally particular connections between things--or things and thoughts--making contexts for each other, producing a singular temporal form with its own shape and extension)--in which case one gets the sense of all this world laid out spatially. And/or the sense of a path through the world (the path of one's living), in which all these things and thoughts are encountered, their time and the time of one's experience intersecting and producing one another. All this has to do with what the language is about. There's also the status of all these particulars as specifically linguistic particulars; they are encountered in thought (by the poet and by readers/listeners) as words, phrases, lines, stanzas and sentences, and the shifting variety of the language is equally a part of the work. (Not-so-)finally, there's the relation of all this to a special set of particulars: the philosophical propositions that have been increasingly frequent in Hejinian's writing since Happily. These especially tend toward statements about the nature of temporal experience and phenomenological observations about appearance and event.

At the reception, I asked Hejinian about the status of this philosophical language in relation to everything else in the work: does it have a special status? If there's a general statement about temporality, are the descriptive particulars examples of that, objects to illustrate it or be illuminated by it? Is a proposition rather just another particular, a thought that comes into the poem with the other thoughts and observations? She told me that these propositions are in fact things she stands behind, but that they shouldn't be considered "pearls of wisdom." The function of the concrete particulars with relation to them is to show those committed philosophical positions as fundamentally context-dependent, their truth a matter of what there is and what happens (my paraphrase). To render the propositions less stable, less certain.

This is an area in which Hejinian's writing is particularly important to me: like no other poet, she's philosophizing in her work, not just quoting philosophy, referring to it or playing with it (I do, I should point out, like those latter approaches as well--and Hejinian is playful with philosophy). When I was finishing my BA in philosophy in San Diego, I repeatedly came to the conclusion that philosophy, in any form it's taken so far, can't really handle particulars--even in its most literary, empiricist or phenomenologically descriptive modes it subsumes them under general concepts and makes them illustrations of the latter. Some writers come closer than others (Adorno in Minima Moralia), and a number can provide revolutionary ways of thinking that, while they end up moored in generality within the work of a given writer, can be astonishingly illuminating and valuable in daily experience (Heidegger). It really does take the kind of paratactic approach native to art (for instance, to poetry, or to hybrid forms that poetry will accept and philosophy, even at its furthest margins, will not) to juxtapose the general and the particular in a mutually conditioning way, to let each have its independence as well as its dance with the other--and to embody, enact a way (shape, behavior, style, speed, rhythm) of thinking or a general concept, which in good philosophy is already a more important task than the direct statement or description of that way of thinking or concept. The last decade of Hejinian's writing is breaking absolutely new ground in this regard, opening up a whole new field of possibilities for poetry.

From work to work a philosophical focus tends to be foregrounded, in intimate relation to a particular linguistic issue. In Happily the adverb first comes into full prominence: the adverb says how something is going, and this "howness" of a "going" becomes the primary structure of experience. "Along comes something--launched in context." Things are always on their way, in transition, with a particular set of ways and speeds of moving--and, in fact, "things" and "states" are redefined as events, less "essential" than the becoming of which they are coagulations or glittering configurations. And these transitions aren't just in linear time (linear time is in question in this writing), but also between perspectives--of the things themselves, which include us and the poet. As Hejinian writes (somewhere in The Language of Inquiry) about the way she thinks of the lines in her poems, any place is the center; from any starting point the mutual contextualizations of things immediately will have already begun to crystallize into events, which vanish into others. This all ties back into the title of the work, the investigation of the connection between "happily" and "happens" and "happenstance," the question "is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?," ideas about time taking on particular shapes: stories make moments seem like additions to, rather than subtractions from, one's life; a move into context ("the chance that time takes") is a move outside ourselves, or into the outside we're included in, into the possibility of encounters ("The matter is here//Can we share its kind of existence?") in which temporal experience is primarily a relation to a future characterized by offering, the constant opening of beginnings. This leads to ethical investigations: to launch oneself in context is to affirm what there is, but the primacy of the future makes this into a commitment to attend to what's possible.* These joyous affirmations are risks. The fullest openness would also be the greatest vulnerability, because in that way of being there would be so many things that so crucially matter.

This is getting abstract, and would require another post to be brought back to coherence.

In A Border Comedy a focus is on story, narrative, forward motion and images, and the language that goes along with those. In The Fatalist a view of time from the point of view of "what will have happened" structures a way of writing that employs sentences, but takes the phrase as its basic unit, linking phrases with varying degrees of semantic continuity or cognitive distance from one another. Each sentence becomes a path defined by the way it's going in terms of how what has already happened will look in retrospect from the place toward which it seems, right now, to be headed. The ethical questions get more pronounced.

These investigations of temporal experience, with their shifting focus from work to work, are more or less consistent throughout Hejinian's last bunch of books--which makes me feel that her answer to my question is (not wrong, but) incomplete (not that I'd expect a complete answer at a reception). Though her many statements are certainly always "in context," and they successfully avoid the sense "oh, this is what this is all about," the commitment to them is strong and ongoing. The motivation behind my question is the further question, "how do you do it?." When I start trying to answer this for myself, I tend to get caught up in notes on the philosophical standpoint of the work (especially since the topics about which Hejinian is thinking are so often those with which I've been obsessed for some time--we do seem to be into the same philosophers, for example), and to temporarily forget about the experiential character of actually reading it, and this misses the answer to the question entirely. What's necessary is probably a patient description of what happens when I read the work, and a more detailed analysis of the linguistic particulars in it. In any case, this writing is generous even in the problems it offers me, the thrilling interest of its difficulties and the prospect of infinite reasons to read it again and again.

2008-04-16T14:06:00.002-05:00

Putting the new Cannot Exist together is very pleasing. There's such good poetry out there, and I feel fortunate to have been sent so much for my little magazine. Spring has arrived in all its splendor in Madison, though, and it's hard to stay indoors to do layout.

So I won't.

2008-04-14T15:41:00.003-05:00

For National Poetry Month, I've been going to work at the library in my one suit and brown bow tie, distributing a pretty wide range of poems from a box at the circ desk. The distribution of people's likes and dislikes is interesting: people find Frank O'Hara depressing (it's one of the funny early poems), prefer Rae Armantrout to William Blake, seem to really enjoy Bob Perelman's "Trees" (from his early book Primer, which is pretty odd) and Fanny Howe, while not expressing much interest in Auden. Everyone, of course, likes Dickinson, Silverstein, Lewis Carroll, and many kids just want to read whatever they get out loud--I got to hear a nine-year-old (I'd guess) boy recite Hart Crane's "Passage" the other day. I'm pretty pleased that so many people get excited about the idea, having been ready for rejection when I started this little project.

Today an elderly woman pulled "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" from the box, looked at it, and asked me, "Are you Robert Duncan?" I simply didn't know what to say.

2008-04-14T09:45:00.001-05:00

"Do you want to walk in the woods?"

"Does a bear shit in them?"

2008-04-12T12:49:00.006-05:00

The fine poet and editor Lars Palm has been so kind as to publish some recent things of mine on his new blog-journal,
Dromedaries. His last journal, Luzmag, is still up, and chock full of good stuff.

reading in Madison

2008-04-04T10:49:00.001-05:00

Andy Gricevich and Rick Burkhardt will read unusual,
often political, sometimes humorous poems this Sunday
at Avol's Bookstore in Madison, partly in celebration
of Cannot Exist magazine. Hope you can make it!

Sunday, April 6th, 2 p.m.
Avol's Bookstore
315 W. Gorham St. (@ State)
Free

Andy Gricevich and Rick Burkhardt

Andy Gricevich edits CANNOT EXIST, a poetry magazine
and small press in Madison. His poems and essays have
been published in numerous print and online journals,
most recently in "Pinstripe Fedora," "Dromedaries" and
"EAOGH." He occasionally posts ruminations on his
blog, "Otherwise," performs regularly with the Prince
Myshkins and the Nonsense Company, and is
uncomfortably writing this in the third person.
http://cannotexist.blogspot.com
http://ndgwriting.blogspot.com

from RETURN POLICY

Give up, my dear
this rack of heat
holding the bubble of your room.

No poet wants to know
what you kind of
feel embarrassed about.

Their concern
is with the bee
that pushed through

where the screen meets the window,
with sweet maple and cops
sweeping up for the holiday…

drowning the clatter of coins
shaken in a paper cup this
weighted season. Leave

the shrug of resignation
to the experts,

Operation Voltage
the lineup
and the gale

Rick Burkhardt is an award-winning composer, playwright, poet,
and songwriter whose music and text pieces have been
performed throughout the US and in Europe, Canada, Mexico,
Australia, and New Zealand by a wide variety of theater and music
ensembles. His poetry has been published in Mirage (A Periodical), admit2,
and Cannot Exist.
http://rickburkhardt.com
http://nonsensecompany.com

Once again the news told us
it had shocked the world. But it was

a new millenium: the paperboy shuffled
his briefcase to the office, squinting nervously away

from potential customers.

Keeping a promise.
"Making good on" it.

A photograph holding a photograph that says
"Have you seen me?"

Laura Sims: a close reading

2008-03-28T00:08:00.004-05:00

My friend Amy, having read the first issue of Cannot Exist, the magazine I'm editing, said of Laura Sims' poems in that issue that she "didn't know what to do with them" (she said it in a perfectly friendly way). I realized that, while all of Sims' work in the magazine appeals to me strongly in an intuitive way, I wasn't able to articulate exactly what I liked about them, aside from a few generalities. After thinking about it for a while, I came up with the following close reading of one of the poems. It's part of a sequence called "Murder is for murderers," and appears on page 24 of the magazine:

*

Let time tie a millstone & pass

Through exits the children

Draw water

You fathom

What sticks in the five

Small emergency doors could be

More

*

There’s a setting: I imagine an old mill by a stream or river, kids “drawing water.” I imagine this as an archetypal scene, the sort of place where strange things are discovered—a simultaneously idyllic and creepy potential here (think Stephen King’s “The Body,” aka Stand By Me—in which I, having grown up wandering old railroad tracks, creeks and collapsing buildings in woods and overgrown lots, always felt the idyllic side as strongly as, if not more than, the creepy).

But I didn’t start with this; I started with counting.
The first line in the poem’s fourth stanza contains five one-syllable words (like five sticks). It’s also, if you count the title as also a line (which I think is justified here, for various reasons), the fifth line. The next line also contains five words, but “emergency” is four syllables. The word itself is a disruption or crisis in the sonic and rhythmic patterning, a metric emergency. This effect is strengthened by the stress patterns in the stanza. The pattern in the first stanza is something like:

What sticks in the five

(You could stress “what” as well, but I think sticks would still come off as a bit more heavily emphasized). There’s a lilting stressed-unstressed rhythm to the line. The next line, however, comes off as having every syllable stressed: a bit more on the second syllable of “emergency” than on the rest of the word, but not much. The stresses vary, so that the line’s rhythm comes off as something like:

dah—dit-dit-dit-dit —dah dih dih

with that “emergency” in its insistent, alarm-like rhythm, framed by those slightly longer sounds, as if it’s a call in Morse code or an alarm, and followed by those two softer beats, as if the alarm is failing, fading off into a silence to be inhabited by the final “More.” When I let the syntax flow from “five” into the next line, then “small” feels more rhythmically connected to “emergency” than “doors” does—which would make “small emergency” into a (five-syllable) unit. So we have multiple, irreconcilable patterns on top of each other here, and instability that the word “emergency” embodies.

Going back to the title: visually, there are five one-syllable words, if you don’t count the ampersand as a word; audibly, there are five strong beats:

Let time tie a millstone & pass

It’s a similar pattern to that in the “emergency” line—but it’s not yet a crisis here.
There are seven units in the line, counting the ampersand, and seven units in the poem, counting the title (interesting that each has one element of which I feel the need to say, “if you count this”).
The sound in the title is interesting; it moves from short, clipped consonants into liquid and hissing sounds:

l→t(m)t t→m-lll-st(n)→sss

Note the way the “l” attaches first, as a short sound, to the reiterating “t,” and then later as an opening to the emerging “s.” It’s as if the “s” passes through the “exits” (note “s” and “t” sounds in that word) of the “t”s, with the “l”s as the sound of the “t”s’ opening. Looking back at my scheme for the rhythmic pattern of the “emergency” line, I find those four punctual “t”s. Then there are the “s”s and “t” of “sticks,” which lay yet another sonic pattern onto that fourth stanza:

What sticks in the five/ Small emergency doors […] More

Again, a move from the short and clipped into the hissing and liquid, the "s" first associated with "t" and then with "l" and "r" as they take over.

I can hear this kind of sonic web throughout the poem. It connects “sticks” and “exit,” and strengthens the semantic connection between “children,” “small” and “more” (one of “more”s many connotations being that of growth), as well as linking “more” with “draw water.” Once I start to make more obvious connections, subtler (even tenuous) examples start to pop out: “fathom” connotes depth, which connects connotatively to “more”, and this connection is reinforced by the soft sounds in “fathom” and “more.”

Then there’s the syntactic multiplicity of the poem. Because of its lack of punctuation and the grammatical ambiguity of a few key words, it’s possible to read it as a number of potential, overlapping sentences:

Let time tie a millstone and pass through exits. (or, “…through exits the children,” as in “pass the children through exits”)

Through exits the children draw water. You fathom what [those] sticks in the five small emergency doors could be.

Through exits the children draw water you fathom. What sticks in the five small emergency doors could be more? [where “sticks” is a noun].

…and so on.

All these connections, multiplicities, ambiguities, make the poem into a meaning-system. From these overlapping webs I go back to interpretation on the level of semantic contents. Here are some disordered reflections:

The wheel is often a metaphor for time. The title asks that time tie that wheel and inhabit its other metaphor, passing like water. The mill is the location of two different ways of conceiving time—one in which it’s stuck, circular, and one in which it flows.

A stick is used to draw with (to mark on a surface), or to “fathom” (to test the depth), or perhaps to clear debris from an underwater grating.

“Draw” is double.

“Fathom” is double: it also means “to understand.”

Who is “you?” With “more,” it’s the most ambiguous word in the poem—but “more,” as we’ll see, is ambiguous because it’s overdetermined, while “you” is ambiguous because it comes out of nowhere—it’s outside the scene, or outside the poem. Depending on the meaning of “fathom,” “you” is either searching in the water, trying to bring up what might be down there, or else “you” is the one who knows what’s going on here—which is kind of creepy as well: the observer, hiding in the bushes? The witness, or the one responsible for the drowning? If “you” is a murderer, and “what sticks” a corpse (see below), then “could be more” is really scary.

The idea of something being stuck in an emergency door is already scary. Something tried desperately to get out, and failed. If the emergency doors are exits where water comes out, then this poem might be about discovering something that drowned, at least in part. This, to me, gives “tie a millstone” a creepy connotation—as if the stone were tied to an ankle, before dumping the body in the water.

“More:” an excess, both in terms of its definition and as a self-referential moment. More of what? More water? “More-ness” in general? More children? The word is portentous, connoting something unknown and undiscovered; it also connotes plenitude and possibility; it indicates an outside; finally, it’s a word of longing.

What if the words themselves are the “emergency doors,” and what tried to get through was meaning? This is supported by the self-referential count I started off with. Then “could be more” can be read in at least two ways:

1) “there isn’t as much as I wish there were”
2) “there might be even more,” or “we might be about to let more of that through”

Meaning as water, words as “emergency doors,” kids by the water, drawing it (in both senses of “drawing”). Meaning as a turbulent realm in which humans can’t survive, trying to exit into the world through words, getting stuck in (fixed in place by) the words. The children at the place this process happens, the place where the as-yet-undetermined excess of possibility (of childhood—the “idyllic” side) is gushing through, at the same time getting jammed up in those socialized words through which it tries with such insistent (t t t t) force to come into the world.

The poem is haunted: “what sticks” leaves ghosts: the “more” of meaning (which is not just a lost, dead thing, but is also the open field of possibility being closed off). Haunted by “you” (which might mean you, the reader, outside all this). Everything in it buzzes with the haunting of what’s missing, what’s outside the poem: these ghosts, as well as the social world with its archetypal scenes and fixed meanings… and also, in that world, the other poems (like the one on the next page of the magazine, which gathers resonances from this one that I’ve just begun to perceive). Haunted by past and future, by places time gets stuck, divided into three tenses. The poem stages these murders, these gettings-stuck, these closings-off, but by its carefully structured ambiguities holds everything open.

new poems

2008-03-28T00:02:00.003-05:00

I'm pretty proud of the batch of poems just published in the new, and long-awaited (after a series of technical nightmares those poor guys seem to have gone through) Pinstripe Fedora. Click on the title of this post to see 'em.

on tour

2008-03-01T13:35:00.006-06:00

The Nonsense Company is touring the east, now in the early phase of the New York FRIGID Festival.
We've already had a couple of nice reviews here and here.

announcing CANNOT EXIST no.1

2008-02-01T17:15:00.001-06:00

Announcing the first issue of CANNOT EXIST
a quarterly magazine of poetry
edited by Andy Gricevich

to appear
February 1st, 2008

with 50 pages of staggeringly good writing by

Rick Burkhardt
Arielle Guy
Rob Halpern
Roberto Harrison
Lisa Jarnot
Kent Johnson
Laura Sims
Rodrigo Toscano

$4.00; $15 for a four-issue subscription.

Saddle-stapled with hand-stamped card covers,
with outside cover featuring mind-bending artwork by Benjamin Grosser.

Submissions are open for the second issue!

Visit the website for ordering information and submissions guidelines.

The Duke corresponds with Wildebord Snell, first formulator of the rules of refraction

2007-12-28T22:36:00.000-06:00

Dear Snell,

It is one of the great tragedies of thought, as played out on every scale, that significant qualitative changes only tend to occur when a quantitative limit is reached. There are objectively too many poems, or no more oil, or trees, or too many are hungry, or the body can take no more brandy and carcinogens and so the whole life must change. I think that a slab of marble is only like a heap of stones, which I smash into dust with the power of my thought. The resultant powder, however, brings on the sneeze of indifference. Not my indifference, but that of the world. It doesn’t care how small things get, though it responds to everything—nothing is empty, sterile, undeveloped or without perception. No matter how the light breaks up against the side of the house, changing into a panoply of colors that might, after all, be entirely specific to this region, or even to this singular and unrepeatable day, on which I have done nearly nothing, logged on and off, admired the snow softly piling up on the branches, cursed it with the next breath as if dividing time into such distinct moments would get me on to the next thing, despaired and smoked and coughed and cleaned the tub and reflected upon the past, trying to find the precise moments of change under the glacial sheets of long-since retroactively narrated periods or phases, none of this ever attains the scale at which things meet and cohere into an existence, mine or the world’s. That light breaks down into my speech, and in turn into a sheaf of mucous layered in the lung, and from there into a rattle cut into particulate clicks separated by—and including—a dimensionless void into which any excess can pour forever.

Imagine that there were two stones, for example the diamond of the Grand Duke and that of the Great Mogul. How should these ever meet beyond the borders of the similarities that join them in a sentence? (An easier question: how can we specify the relations by juxtaposition that have, thus far, been our only alternative if we wish to express the world as it may be prior to the arrangements of grammar? Scream?) They are divided not only by actualities, but by the seething plenitude of activity. Today I heard on the radio the sentence:

At the hospital where she died, some smashed glass and wailed

and the pulse of this was neatly eradicated by the swift proliferation across varied networks and stations of the same vocabulary. In order to capture this I wrote:

imitating the intonation in which
Benazir Bhutto has expired
the distinct rhythms of two reports in which
Benazir Bhutto has expired
hum of the cone
at the pitch of one
man’s voice repeating
Benazir Bhutto has expired

how in the fuck am I supposed to know why
Benazir Bhutto has expired
when the radio hammers away at this
until it shatters into its metaphors

a breath and lung
a past and hope
a policy and excuse
an offer not to be repeated

not to be repeated

This smashed glass is the double diamond.
Inside us, more machines.
We go downstairs until we jump
—and something cracks. Through the fracture,
we can see bodies, one oozing mass
against the crystalline firmament
of the way things touch each other from far away.

Until this crack in our own bones widens, there’s only the infinite descent that we can share only in terms of our knowledge that we can’t share it, even with ourselves. The emptiness of a second reading; the resuscitation of swallows which make their winter quarters in reeds and which are discovered with no semblance of life; experiments with people killed by cold, drowned or strangled, and who are then brought back to life… all these things confirm my opinion that such states differ only in degree. If you ask me in particular what I say about the sun, my answer will vary from ray to ray. In order to avoid your accusations of inconsistency or downright deception, I will withhold any answer.

I am worried. Since there is no life, we’re stuck choosing between resignation and something we can’t possibly imagine. How to stumble so that we fall upon it?

Why not sing with utmost grace
your goddamn ugly song? A lapse
nearly always feels good. The snow,
once a signal of something ineffable,
now just sits piled on the trees.

One died clowning, repeating
From station to station,
spreads. That was an example
of condensation. I lean against the window
and get wet and a cold. Something in Pakistan is happening.

You try,
which breaks.

Blood boils at the prospect of stopping, please
Leaves matted for discovery. Undernourished in the trap of this. That made
a likeable corpse unrotting in the backwards snow. She thrums her vulva
like a missed tone on the screen. He chafes his hearts as if it mattered
to the night. You like that in the present tense, but
remembering it is ow.

I have imagined for far too long
that you have pretended for far too long
to an enmity.

Give it up,
Dive.

regards,

The Nut

2007-12-07T16:11:00.000-06:00

When I read Jim Behrle's sometimes-amusing attacks on the poetry scene and the responses of others to those attacks, the thought I usually have is "thank goodness I don't live in New York."
It often seems like a place where even camaraderie is competitive. I find Behrle's aggression depressing, largely because it's an involvement-by-negation in scenes that I'd find depressing (mostly because they're scenes, because I'm horrible at mingling, schmoozing, etc.) and would want to stop thinking about as much as possible (while still trying to pay attention to the writing of many of the people in those scenes, which I'm curious about or find very exciting). Sometimes, though, Behrle says something that makes me sigh with relief:

Meanwhile, of course, poets ought to do whatever the fuck they wanna do. That people like Stan need to hide behind Tradition (Tzara! Tzara! He's my 2nd cousin!) and feel oppressed by forces that aren't oppressing them (Society will never accept my poems! They're too busy bombing Baghdad!) shows the limits of the people who allegedly know better not knowing any better. It seems to me you write the poems you write and don't write the poems you don't write.

(Behrle, 11/07)

It's really the first and last sentences that I care about (I know nothing about Stan Apps (the object of Behrle's attack), aside from having just scanned his blog, which looks like it might contain some interesting stuff). I think those sentences constitute some of the best pragmatic advice a writer can give hirself, along with statements like Jessica Smith's (not quoted literally) "make sure the work is good. If it is, someone will probably publish it. If they don't, publish it yourself and don't be embarrassed about that."

I do think that good writing only happens when the writer takes risks, or pushes the consequences of taking one of those risks--but what constitutes a "risk" is different for different writers, which is why there's a sense in which the "new" is as much a matter of something that happens in an individual work as one of novelty in comparison to what came before. I think you can tell when someone's pushing limits. This isn't to say that pushing limits guarantees good work. It all comes back to whether you think it's good. If you like it, do for it what you think it deserves. If you don't, change it, pitch it, or file it away in the folder marked "do not open 'til you've forgotten what's here."

This is mostly very unsophisticated advice to myself, an injunction to not waste time worrying about historical status (mine--haha--or others'), to worry about whether I've read enough Flarf or whether I comment on enough blogs or read enough Tate or Weiner or Badiou (I'm at least potentially interested in all of this), and instead to write what I'd like to read in the hopes that not-yet-conceived desires will arise from that.

from the circ desk

2007-12-06T19:11:00.000-06:00

It is irritating to be treated as if you know less than you do and have more power than you do.

I'm Not There

2007-12-03T15:04:00.000-06:00

The other night the fresh snow and still-drizzling (rattling) sleet prevented
us from driving to campus for this week's free Godard film, so we decided
to hike on over to the egregiously overpriced Sundance 608 Cinemas
(where they charge you an obligatory "convenience fee" of three dollars
so that you "can"--must--reserve a seat) to see Todd Haynes' I'm Not
There for a second time.

There is, I admit, the occasional dopey moment--but not many, and
they're more than counterbalanced for me by the things that are simply
fun for someone with my enthusiasms: the Rimbaud and Nietzsche
quotations, Fellini references, the fact that the Richard Gere sections are
basically film versions of the cover of Dylan's Basement Tapes. None of
this stuff, though, gets at the substance of the film's excellence, which is
there to be found whether you care about Dylan or not (some of this post
is the offshoot of a late-night conversation with my pal Rick, who sort of
likes some Dylan, but has always been pretty skeptical, and certainly
doesn't know or care much about his biography and "legend").

First, there's the level of craftsmanship of nearly every shot; in any
scene there's a great deal to be discovered simply by looking around the
screen. The subtle and the spectacular are both present. In the Gere
sequence alone (which I'll concentrate on a bit here, since it's the one
nobody seems to like much, while I think it's astonishing), there's:

--the shot in which Billy, gazing at the Missouri hills (shot in gorgeous
color), has a fast series of short Vietnam war flashbacks--except they're
flashbacks to the war as televised, which we've seen exclusively in the
Heath Ledger sequences. This is an instance of a fascinating narrative
trajectory: as the various "Dylans" diverge increasingly from each other
(Billy, the last presented, being the least literal Dylan), there are more
and more instances of shared memories between them, shots that could
belong to two or more of their stories. When, a few seconds later, we
return to the image of the hills, it's shot on video.

--the brief shot in which Homer has helped Billy escape from jail at dawn.
We see a shot of Homer waving goodbye from beside the tracks as Billy
pulls away on a boxcar. The sun is rising on the side of the train opposite
Homer, and we see him illuminated, just for a moment, by the new sunlight
shining between the train cars. A metaphor for film, perhaps, and (as Rick
notes) for the quick emergence and disappearance of characters in Dylan's
songs, but also simply the kind of gorgeous camera work that almost
nobody bothers with, or has the eye for, these days (or maybe ever).

--the composition of the sequence that leads up to the funeral: the camera
wanders as strange humans and animals emerge from behind buildings; we
see the buildings of the town of Riddle, brief references tothe world of The
Basement Tapes, shots of the road leading out of town... this disorienting
sequence hides the slow gathering of all its elements toward the bandstand
where the scene is to take place, subtly gathering direction until we suddenly
realize we're there, with the whole town in attendance.

There's plenty of "artier" editing, just as accomplished, throughout the film:
the jump cuts of dishes being washed with the TV sound in the background
(producing channel switches because of the visual shifts); the difference, in
the Cate Blanchett sequences, between the crisp black and white of the main
story and the slightly grainier one used for some of the directly quoted
material (i.e., the reconstruction of the press conference near the beginning
of the famous London tour); etc.

More important to me are the possibilities the film offers for the expansion of
scale in art. How can artworks include as much of the world--or (and this is
different) open out onto as much of it--as possible? How to make it vulnerable
to the world's answering back to the work? I'm Not There gives me a lot to
think about in this regard.

Haynes sets up his multiple narratives so that they suggest perspectives on
one another. There are plenty of lines, referencing the larger social world,
that within a given narrative are casually dropped in and then left there,
but that can be seen retroactively as a lens through which to view another
of the stories. Some of these are gestures that ask us (or directly ask a
character) to look outside the purview of the people in the film and their
narrativized concerns,but we don't get that look directly in the story that
contains the gesture.

The largest formal instance of this mutual conditioning is the movement I
noted above: by the last third of the film, the "Dylans" have diverged from
one another in character, mode of presentation, and comparative distance
from the "real" biography to a great extent, seeming less and less like
portraits of the various "sides" of one person (some of the plot
trajectories contradict each other)--even as we see more shots that are
common to the experiences and memories of characters in different stories.
The switch to video in the shot of the Missouri hills is, of course, a
psychological representation of the resonance of the memory (of the televised
war) in the present. But it's also a memory of a past in which the outside
(the war) leaked in, in which the protagonist's neglect of the sociopolitical
exactly paralleled his neglect of his family and his friendships. Finally,
it's a leaking-in of the kind of film manipulations that characterize many
of the other narratives (and of the variation in film stock and technique
between sections that characterizes the movie as a whole), an invasion of
the spectacular, full-color naturalism of the Billy the Kid world (which was
untouched when it appeared in the literal kid-world of Marcus Carl Franklin's
"Woody").

Narratively, this particular constellation of examples sets up the incursion
(leak) of the interstate system into the town of Riddle, and the new
"invasion" of politics into Billy's life when he decides to speak up about
it. As part of an accumulation of various such moves, it has a more wide-
ranging formal effect: as the film progresses, the stories become porous
with regard to one another. That porosity, once it passes a certain
threshold,  renders them so full of holes that they open onto the outside
of the film. By the Gere/Billy section, I'm unable to view the movie
without reference to contexts outside it. The section is set in an ambiguous
time: explicitly Billy in hiding (thus late 19th century), but also Dylan
in hiding (between 1966 and, maybe, the present) and perhaps even
Rimbaud in Africa. The scene itself looks like the Old West, but the
interstate highway system is being constructed, and its planners show up
in old cars that were new in the 1970s. The anachronisms throw me outside
the narrative so that, when Billy is jailed for speaking out against the
plan that will destroy the town, I can't help but think, "oh, criminalization
of speech and arbitrary imprisonment in the face of profit-driven destruction.
That sounds kinda familiar."

The fact that Billy is the least identifiable as Dylan (both in terms of
his story and as someone who, unlike the real Dylan, sticks his neck out
at risk of his life), and that his section is the one that closes the film,
opens the whole work out far beyond the "bio-pic" form, and is the strongest
argument against viewing it in terms of the accuracy or sufficiency of its 
treatment of its subject. In terms of its content, I'm Not There is as much
a film about the question "what is/could/should be the relation of art to
politics?" as it is about Bob Dylan. This question is posed repeatedly, and
Haynes certainly doesn't seem to take Dylan's various responses to it as
successful answers. The film instead enacts the question, and does so in
an environment in which the idea of political art is snidely dismissed in
many mainstream and avant-garde art worlds. I'm grateful to Haynes for
that.

In most art that tries to address the question I posed above
(how to enlarge the scale by inclusion or opening-out), the expansion requires
a gesture of expansion that has to persist for as long as the artist wants
things to be seen on that scale. In big Russian novels, this is analogous to
a pulling-back of the camera, showing us the larger society for a while before
returning us to the lives of the main characters. In Joyce's Ulysses, its the
intrusion of a strange discourse that marks a point in the story as a
manifestation of cultural or historic layers that prod through from below or,
floating above the story's world, confer a greater significance on its mundane
events. Pound, in his Cantos, takes a "hodgepodge" tack, and the expansion of
scale is achieved through a greater range of collaged sources, or (when a
section focuses more closely on one main subject, as in the Adams and
"China" cantos) a greater speed through the chronology of his materials
(Pound is the apex of "inclusion," of trying to "get it all in" in a mania
for order). Ron Silliman's long works, while trying to get it all in, give as
much weight to the "opening out onto it" possibility, and in fact enact that
opening in the process of reading: the foregrounding of the reader's
processes of synthesizing juxtaposed phenomena into coherent experience
dehabituates everyday perception, so that I, at least, take a residual effect
away from the work, letting a lot more in, noting a greater variety of
particulars and connections. The gesture of expansion here is the endless
profusion of sentences (early on, in accordance with number systems),
tied in with the modeling of a depersonalized consciousness represented as
language.

I love all these examples. What I'm saying here is simply that they all
need  gestures of expansion that stick around, and that this has its
limits. Put very formalistically, what I'm Not There offers, with its own
limits, is a mode in which a tenuous whole opens onto the world as an effect
of the way the individual, coherent continuities that make it up change each
other's scale of reference by making gestures that function as "expansion
gestures" primarily outside the continuities in which they occur--when seen
from the perspectives of other continuities. A small event in one stream has
an enlarging effect in another.

I don't see the film as an end-point, but as a gorgeous presentation of a
series of tools. I want to make political art that works with the effects of
micro-level juxtaposition while also employing larger blocks, continuities
whose own juxtaposition is fruitful due to their proliferating "leaks." I'm
Not There, while certainly not Haynes' most explicitly socially critical film
or his most obviously formally radical, gives me things to think about in this
regard that I haven't seen anywhere else. And it's a beautifully constructed,
moving, scary, sneakily disorienting work of art that also happens to contain
some of my favorite songs.

more terrible titles from the library collection

2007-12-01T15:20:00.000-06:00

the children's book series:

God Must Love... Shapes!
God Must Love... Colors!
God Must Love... Opposites!

Were this the middle ages, philosophers would formulate astounding proofs of, and based upon, these assertions.

2007-11-29T02:46:00.000-06:00

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."

--G.W. Bush, Townsend, Tennessee, Feb. 21, 2001

This is one of the 'best' embarrassing presidential quotes I've heard from this guy. It's the perfect enactment of the way his public persona works in the context of his political achievements. There's the obvious and ironic idiocy of it; he's thought of as a bumbler, a bad speaker. A slightly subtler level is the tautological nature of its reasoning--just as, in his politics, acts are self-justifying in a way that would make a hardcore existentialist shudder. Finally (and still not so subtle), there's the reduction of the value of literacy to the ability to pass a test--just as the Bush administration's agenda is to whittle everything meant for the public good down to what will directly serve the profits of employers and owners.

*

The detachment I can achieve in relation to that quote went out the window when I heard Naomi Wolf on "Democracy Now!" today. I usually don't get scared per se, but this does the trick.

*

In a perfect illustration of the power of fear, I responded first by thinking about what to do about fascism, then by buying things: Wolf's book and the bp Nichol reader. Then, tonight, I saw I'm Not There, the new Todd Haynes movie about Dylan.

It's absolutely stunning, confirming again that Haynes is the best filmmaker in the U.S., and one of the couple best in the world. I need to see it again before writing extensively about it. Cinematically nearly perfect, incredible acting, moving and strange, and characterized by a tone that's neither naive nor self-referential, that's somewhere between or outside of a number of other dichotomies of narrative cinema. Quotation without scare quotes. It's probably--in a strange way--the best film about U.S. culture I've ever seen.

2007-11-28T02:29:00.001-06:00

Happy Birthday (now yesterday) to Helmut Lachenmann, at 72 still writing the most breathtaking, otherworldly music I've ever heard.

some of the dumbest book titles I've recently noted at work (the library)

2007-11-28T00:39:00.002-06:00

Anthony Trollope is up there for the "classics:"

He Knew He Was Right
Can You Forgive Her?
Phineas Finn: the Irish Member
The Eustace Diamonds
Dr. Wortle's School

then there's Nora Roberts, a.k.a J.D. Robb:

Immortality in Death
Rapture in Death
Holiday in Death
Seduction in Death
Portrait in Death
Imitation in Death
Divided in Death

...you get the point.

Then there are the romance novels of Sandra Hill:

The Very Virile Viking
The Reluctant Viking
Truly, Madly Viking (I'm serious)
The Blue Viking
My Fair Viking
Here Comes Santa Claus

and lastly:

Kathy Reichs' Death du Jour
and my very favorite,
Deja Dead

Indeed.

2007-11-23T01:56:00.000-06:00

I was sad to hear, the other day, about the death (a suicide) of the poet Landis Everson, whose writing I began to love a couple of years ago, when Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy published some of his new poems (the first in decades) in Mirage#4/Period(ical).

Here I want to thank them for that, to thank Kevin and Lewis Ellingham for their varied efforts in bringing Everson's work to attention again (I had heard his name in lists of writers around Jack Spicer in the 1950s, and found out more through Killian & Ellingham's Spicer biography, Poet, Be Like God), and to thank Ben Mazer for starting the whole thing off by featuring Everson's early work in the third issue of Fulcrum and encouraging the writing of his last years.

2007-11-20T02:42:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend, 25,000 people gathered in Columbus, Georgia to call for the closure of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning.

I didn't go this year, but should have.

Learn about it here. This movement is part a history that charges the present and ruptures the membrane of the future, that possibility might flood the desert of the actual.

2007-11-18T16:20:00.000-06:00

"The possible contradictions of the war photograph now become apparent... the most extreme examples... show moments of agony in order to extort the maximum concern. Such moments... are discontinuous with all other moments. They exist by themselves. But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy... the issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised. The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody."

--John Berger*

"In [Goya's The Third of May, 1808], the soldiers faces are hidden from view[...] Godard chooses to take the camera inside the painting here, shooting the soldiers "face on" in a slow tracking shot along the barrels of their guns, while a voice-over states 'You do nothing to change yourselves'. This intrusion into the painting's "life" is not just a simple aesthetic trick[...] "Take concentration camps, for instance. The only real film to be made about them -- which has never been made because it would be intolerable -- would be if a camp were filmed from the point of view of the torturers and their daily routine . . . The really horrible thing about such scenes would not be their horror but their very ordinary everydayness." (Godard on Godard, 198) [...] instead of letting the viewer empathise with the holocaust victims in the face of anonymous oppression, he would give faces to these oppressors, which is exactly what he does with the Goya sequence in Passion. Godard gives an analysis of a similar "painting" to that of Goya's in Six Fois deux, this time of a photograph depicting Nazis in the foreground (shot from behind) torturing someone in the background (shot so the viewer can see his face). A voice-over says: "They always photograph the ones who are doing the torturing from the back and their victims face on." Again, this seems to be the preferred relationship of "objective" photographs between oppressor and oppressed, so the viewer can empathise with the victim. By breaking the plane of Goya's work, Godard challenges this commodified, archetypal aspect of mise-en-scene."

--Glen Norton**

* from About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Quoted in Tina Darragh's "Numb to Dumb," in Crayon no.4. Milwaukee, 2004

** from Godard's Passion

2007-11-17T21:47:00.000-06:00

A couple of bits from my sequence Return Policy are in the new EAOGH, and in fine company.

favorite tidbits from The Grand Piano, part 4

2007-11-15T16:46:00.000-06:00

Carla Harryman:

The structure of memory is formed between what's been purged and held in. Why not make a formal writing experiment of what I never said? (17)

[The account of reading Genet as a liberation from Eliotic modernism on pp.18-19]

...the sex that delivers one to the surprise sensation of self-coherence through the smell of somebody else. (24)

Tom Mandel:

[on Robert Duncan, during the conflicted Watten/Duncan talk on Zukofsky in 1978]:

He didn't like Barry's attempt to "materialize Zukofsky, both textually and politically" [...] He shone, but his brilliance was frightening. His evangelical bearing--Christian and Spiritualist--scared me. Zukofsky was a Jew and a materialist [...] Only now, writing this account, do I realize what undid me: the Christian authoritarian use of the Jew. (60)

I wonder what one wins in these poetry wars? Daily life with acolytes? If that's utopia, give me la derive. (61)

Barrett Watten:

[...] we wanted a big canvas, of time and space, so unlike the twenty-five minute limit of poetry readings now. (64)

There is no difference between myself and what I do, all day every day, except that I myself am suspended in that difference: this is not me. (70)

The silence of everyday life is that it passes without memory, without recording. If only we could write that silence, we would return to everyday life. (81)

Rae Armantrout:

I identified with that kid even as he distracted me and messed up my handwriting (so that I crossed my "k"s). So the noise becomes the signal. (87)

Ted Pearson:

Everyday life requires an exercise of faith: that daily practice, each next word, will attend what is, as it is, and lead to what might be otherwise. (89)

Ron Silliman:

The second stage [of the Talks] was much more organized than the first. For one thing, everybody had talked about the first thing that came to mind already. (134)

Steve Benson:

[...] in Language writing, "self" became [...] all sorts of things, and next to nothing, but always something else. It didn't vanish, it just wasn't willing to be taken for granted anymore [...] (138-139)

--Are you saying you transcended your potential tendencies toward narcissistic self-preoccupation by--
--No, they were incorporated into it [...] The narcissism kept getting recycled by the social [...] Isn't political action predicated on identifying its practice with getting something one finds or believes one needs? (140)

(and plenty of other passages that aren't excerptable)

on The Grand Piano, part 4

2007-11-14T19:33:00.001-06:00

I find each installment of The Grand Piano more intriguing than the last.

As the project goes on, the standpoints of the participants seem increasingly to diverge (I'm not certain whether this is happening in the writing itself or as a cumulative effect of reading). There's a friction , I think, between this divergence and Barrett Watten's ongoing attempt to cement the legend of Language Poetry. In much of his writing (here and in The Constructivist Moment), Watten is concerned to solidly establish the 'we' of these writers in a history of singular avant-garde cultural formations--to present the 'Language School' (of which he's, I think, the only member to employ that phrase, comfortably and without scare quotes), with all its variety, as a unified moment and rupture, a negative expression of discursive formations in a particular nexus of sociopolitical situations. Watten wants this writing ensconced in literary history, and for that he needs a myth.*

It's this myth that most often comes under attack when people complain about Language poetry (rather than the writing itself, which most critics seem not to have read very thoroughly): the presentation of an avant-garde collective, a unified front without precedent, claiming for itself a permanently oppositional status that these critics claim has become institutionalized, gaining power in terms of social status while losing power as a radical critique. This is already a caricature of Watten's presentation; while there is a drive toward a particular kind of institutionalization (of the 'school's' cultural significance, more than of the writers and their paid positions or blogging status), he most definitely sees LP as historical, and has insisted on the relation of the work to specific contexts.** If LP needed a defense against these dismissals, though, I find the fractured picture painted by this memoir to be a more compelling one than any instance of a more thoroughly theorized coherence.

Watten's approach has its varied antipodes and alternatives in The Grand Piano. Ron Silliman tends toward a more modest mode of historiography, crisp and straightforward (his entry here concentrates on the "talks" series, often unjustly overshadowed, in discourse about LangPo's theoretical production, by The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, perhaps because the printed records of the former are simply harder to find). Rae Armantrout's contributions are condensed, wry, direct and full of uncertainty. "I guess," "I hope so," and "I don't know"appear frequently, and (as in her poems) there's a discomfort with easy categories and answers. Here her recent bout with cancer and the relation to mortality that comes with that (which, incidentally, her most recent poems treat with a humor that astounds me) are juxtaposed with a nostalgia for an infinite, open time to place 'everyday life' (this volume's central concept) at a distance. Steve Benson's mode is an increasingly incisive self-questioning. Lyn Hejinian continues the philosophical investigations that have always characterized her work (though in a new and more explicit way since Happily), here meditating on the nature of memory in relation to the everyday and placing reminiscences about Tuumba Press beside events in the newspaper from 1977 to 1979. Kit Robinson (an exemplary poet with regard to the relation of writing to the everyday) here looks at poetry and jobs; as with the majority of his entries and his poetry, this one is characterized by a 'keeping-on-one's toes' sort of restlessness, an attention that wanders while remaining attentive. Carla Harryman's contributions are unsummarizable. They're regularly the most wide-ranging and self-sufficient of the bunch and, regardless of their position in the order of a given volume, seem to elicit the most response, from outside readers as well as from the other participants. They deserve their own blog post.***

Bob Perelman is certainly the most direct and skeptical questioner of the 'myth' (and has been so increasingly for at least a decade now), and of his own status in relation to it, both as participant and as critic. In book 4, Perelman introduces 'utopia' into the conversation, with its unstable relation to the concept of everyday life ("utopias aim at a clarified, just version of what everyday life could be; and in bad times, everyday life can seem like a utopian prospect" (GP4, p.116)). In this history, is utopia being treated as something that's already happened? Language poetry as entrenched, protected, "an unimpeachably recognizable object of study" (p.119)? Perelman's account of the panel "Language Writing and the Body" reproduces, in a displaced way, the same variety of investments in accounting for this writing that one finds in The Grand Piano, contrasting Steve Benson's self-critical performance, Leslie Scalapino's implied critique of narratives like GP, Maria Damon's feminist analysis of women's avant-garde writing (including Harryman's contributions to the collective autobiography, which contain the lion's share of its explicit instances of feminism), and Bruce Andrews' apparently 'LangPo-canonical' presentation. Perelman contrasts this event, in which he finds an uncomfortable 'MLA-like' character, with the Talks, which he found much more open, unstable, in process, utopian. He then recounts a conversation with Andrews at the after-party about whether there is, or has been, any 'Language writing' per se, and the answer is highly ambiguous. In conclusion, he asks who holds the "two-edged sword" that carves "the trench that founds Utopia... King Utopus or His Majesty the Ego"[?] (p.126).

It's less the opposition of this skepticism and uncertainty to Watten's heroism that makes up The Grand Piano's picture of a collective than it is the kaleidoscopic differences among all its contributors' work. As the project progresses, the 'collective' known as 'West Coast Language Poetry' loses, not its reality, but its subsumption of its individual members under a single umbrella (or piano).*****
The collective is coming to seem like something that happened (happens? happens here again? in any case, an in-motion occurrence rather than an organic entity) between its participants, in the crossing of the various shifting lines of friendships, collaborations, events, writings, responses, individual relations to separate social contexts overlapping and diverging. The collective subsists (subsisted? in any case, rather than 'exists,' 'existed') in the proposal of it, the calling it into question, the interest in it as an event and the lack of that interest as central, in singular/exemplary works and in ongoing processes--in the shifting relations between all these. Instead of a force, a wedge, a school, a set of rules--something being done, a real epiphenomenon of actual things being done and imagined.

-------------------------------------------------------

Two notes unattached to particular moments in this post:

--As this divergence occurs, Watten's own contributions become more specific, more essays in their own right; though they've had this characteristic all along, the deliquescent "we" dominates his tone to a lesser extent in GP 4, even though it does end with "we were just about to make a big noise" (p.85). Here he makes brilliant statements on the relation of writing to the everyday, on negativity and art, in relation to a series of presentations he gave in December 1979, culminating in the premiere of 1-10, one of those exemplary moments in contemporary poetry.

--I'd guess I'm more attracted to this dispersed picture of a writing community than to Watten's partly because I discovered Language Writing with a group of friends in Urbana back in 1995 or so (none of us had any idea who these people were, and the writing didn't tell us that either), in the context of a less lasting but just as multiple nexus of collaborations, enthusiasms and interrelationships, in which some of us (including myself) were given to bold theoretical pronouncements, others not, and in which all of us had different kinds and degrees of investment. The fact that this poetry took us by surprise, seemed so strange and estranging, seemed to come out of nowhere, that it didn't seem to form a unity at all, has become progressively more valuable to me as I encounter more and more people who came to the same writing in universities, presented with a small bit of the theory first, had it packaged for them--people who were given the arguments for the writing before they had a chance to encounter the writing itself.

*I want to point out that "myth" doesn't equal "lie," and that my preference for the presentation that emerges from this collective memoir doesn't equal a wholesale dismissal of Watten's project in this regard.

**There's also, in many of these criticisms, the always-disturbing hatred of what's passed, the reviling of the old, the "over" (which is not only cold but inaccurate, since some of these writers are, I'd argue, producing their finest work now).

***I haven't said anything here about the other two participants, Tom Mandel and Ted Pearson. It's only for reasons of space, but it's unfortunately typical; they're writers who have received less attention than the others in general.

****Either one will protect you from the rain; the piano is bigger, less mobile, and more canonically musical (the umbrella would require the invention of new techniques, and probably a contact microphone). Furniture and the Sitting vs. the Portable Object and the Walk?

2007-11-12T00:15:00.001-06:00

Here's one more recent one--a possible book cover.

2007-11-12T00:06:00.000-06:00

Those are some pieces from up to nine years back (click on 'em for bigger versions). I've been trying to pick this stuff up again. Here's hoping.

2007-11-11T17:14:00.000-06:00

As far as I'm concerned, the most cogent issue in the debate between Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young (on the one hand) and Jennifer Ashton (a debate discussed quite a bit recently in the poetry blogworld) is one that isn't explicitly part of either of their Chicago Review essays. It's a question placed at the meeting point of the issues of representation/privilege and anti-essentialism, and might be phrased:

"Can one be a materialist and anti-essentialist feminist?"

I want to give a positive answer to this question.

The anti-essentialist Ashton claims that anthologies of experimental writing by women reproduce the sex/gender categories whose radical critique is often a crucial part of the poetics and politics of the editors and writers whose work those anthologies represent:

When women's "innovative" poetry anthologies moved from an anti-discriminatory agenda to an aesthetic one [...] the continued insistence on the importance of the poems as women's poems transformed the contingent relation between the sex of the authors and the forms of their poems into a necessary one.

Chicago Review 53:2/3, p.117

A materialist response might be:
The facts show that women are still discriminated against and defined by their sex; therefore, the publication of a women-only anthology simply is still an anti-discriminatory act. Furthermore, the women-only listserv (another target of Ashton's critique) is a response to a situation in which, in public online forums, women still have to face social circumstances that can be intolerable; therefore, a listserv like this is needed so that conversations that might be aggressively disrupted, mocked, or simply drowned out otherwise can happen at all.

I'd say that Spahr and Young are materialists (the point of view that material conditions are the basis of other conditions). Since they're explicitly not particularly concerned with the question of essentialism, their essay and Ashton's response don't speak directly to one another. That's why I wanted to offer my own attempt at a response that's both materialist and anti-essentialist:

The argument is pretty simple. It assumes agreement with the connected claims:
1) The anti-essentialist project is not yet complete.
2) Being biologically female is still a powerfully (and negatively) defining cultural category.

Given (2), a biologically female writer will be seen/read as female whether she likes it or not (unless she works pseudo- or anonymously) . Assume an editor who considered all ideas about essential femininity to be inherently problematic and undesirable, an editor who wanted to put together an anthology of experimental writing that called essentialism into question. How might the anthology enact an instance of such questioning? I'd argue that a women-only anthology could be one perfectly valid response to the problem.

In any collection of entities of extraordinary variety, the individual entities are going to be grouped according to the most accessible cognitive categories available for grouping entities. It's only when attention is paid explicitly to a collection of entities "of the same kind" that one begins to note the differences between them, perhaps even coming to the conclusion that they don't belong in the same category at all, or that some of them seem to belong to multiple categories, thus calling the categories themselves into question.

Given (2), an anthology that contains a few women, or 50% women, will be read in terms of its proportional representation of two sexes ("twelve men and six women"), whereas an anthology of writing by women will, once one gets beyond its most superficial characteristic, sidestep that question, potentially offering instead the opportunity to see a wide variety within the category "women," and perhaps to ask "why do these varied relations to one's sex all fall into the same category?" If it's an anthology of "innovative writing by women," the common care for innovation might throw into even higher relief the unchosen, sex-based category.

This is actually all in Ashton's argument itself; she asks why "women" and "innovative" should go together in the absence of an asserted necessary connection between them. My argument is that they go together for contingent, materialist reasons: given the state of things at the present time, one way to exemplify the thought that would be appropriate to (and represent a movement towards) a more desirable state of things is to pragmatically frame a literary act in accordance with the present state, precisely in order to show its inconsistencies, its shakiness as a frame.

a hastily written excursus on "I Once Met"

2007-11-04T13:44:00.001-06:00

I once met Kent Johnson's I Once Met. It was last night, shortly after I met its author. I found it to be (as I've said) both tender and funny. Why, though, do I also find it interesting?

1) There's a naturalness to it (which predominated in the reading), the sense of "here are some little stories from my life." Then there's the artifice of it (impossible to ignore in reading the full text): not only the question of the truth of any given anecdote (ultimately not a very interesting question to try to answer--though its presence as a question is, I think, interesting), but also the repeating formal structure, borrowed from Joe Brainard's I Remember, the various impossible or highly unlikely events, and the goofy diction of some of Johnson's sentences (his use of the poetic "O," for instance). These are like casual little Verfremdungseffekts, reminding the reader of the literary status of the text--though the naturalness persists. The work never settles on one side or the other.

2) I don't think I've seen an explicit consideration of "the meeting" as unit of experience before.

Why is it important "to have met?" So many people, myself included, talk about it.

There are, of course, the status-granting aspects: I can tell people, for instance, that I've met Wallace Shawn, and they will be impressed (I found him to be friendly, excited that I'd been involved in performances of some of his more obscure plays, amusing, a bit awkward, and very like Wallace Shawn). In any case, it feels good to me to have met someone "famous" and thus "inaccessible."

Within an art scene, of course, meeting a more-or-less established artist can be seen as a way to "make connections," advance one's own career.

Then there's the notion that an artist whose work you know seems like a kindred spirit, or just nice person to talk to, and that the experience of meeting them might be mutually pleasurable (this is all kind of obvious and boring, isn't it?).

(At times, I've attempted to meet more established poets based on this kind of motivation. Sometimes it works, and we talk about our mutual interest in some other poet, or composer, or sociopolitical problem or movement. I know it's working if the person I'm meeting doesn't immediately ask me what my last name is. When they do, it seems like the situation is being placed back in the "status" category, which I'm probably trying to avoid--as if they're asking, "should I know your name?". This is all very slippery, since they might be asking out of a genuine interest in discovering new writing, and not out of an assumption that what's happening is an instance of "scene-politics.")

(I once met Lyn Hejinian. She had given a reading at UC San Diego; she read "Happily" and parts of A Border Comedy. I told her how much I appreciated the way she was able, in this recent work, to fuse philosophy and poetry without producing a haphazard philosophy or a poetry with philosophical "icing." She asked, "are you in Michael [Davidson]'s class?" I answered that I wasn't a student at all, just a poet and enthusiastic reader, and she said "Oh, great! A real person!")

Then there's the meeting with the person you've seen around for a long time, or have even been in the room with frequently, but have never really begun to know. This is an interesting one.

Some of the most amazing people I've met are vast repositories of stories of the amazing people they've met (some famous in whatever sphere, some who almost no-one would have heard of). These people most often seem to come out of activist contexts (though some artistic ones as well); their meetings haven't been a matter of personal advancement, because their lives simply are their histories of relations with others, organized collectively around common projects.

The meetings in I Once Met seem variously to involve these motivations and more, and often many at once. At times the repeated formal marker "I once met" doesn't quite work. In one instance of this, Johnson writes that he "once met" David Bromige, shortly after hanging out with him in Sebastopol. This gives a slight shift to the meaning of the phrase; it could now mean something more like "I once met so-and-so for coffee." In one of the most moving sections of the book, Johnson says that he has not met one of his sons, a claim which a tiny bit of research shows to be literally untrue--unless, again, the meaning of the phrase has shifted: they have not yet come to know each other in the right way, never connected in the way Johnson wishes they had and hopes, someday, they will.

I'm trying, in too many words, to get to the observation that, by using the phrase "I once met" in a formally consistent way, Johnson opens to the reader's view this range of meanings a meeting can have between people, and in different social contexts. As in all of his best writing about the social worlds of poetry itself, he here avoids reducing the interactions taking place in those worlds to one underlying motivation or other. By choosing a more culturally loaded marker than, for instance, Joe Brainard's "I remember," Johnson points explicitly to a complex of behaviors that, in other works, he might satirize with a much sharper tooth. Here, however, the real uncertainty about what is going on "beneath the surface" of these meetings and the recounting of them (and their frequent fictionalizations) is held in suspension, delicately--and it's the attention to that fragile moment, in which the situation could turn out one way or another, or turn out to mean one thing or another, that gives the book its valuable humanness. The fact that the recurring phrase sometimes loses its meaning almost entirely can be read as an analogy for the superficial layer of these encounters--and thus a parodic critique--while, through the very fracturing of this superficiality, revealing the richer possibilities layered and mixed up underneath. In this sense, it's a call for patience, consideration, rethinking, care.

2007-11-04T02:15:00.000-06:00

I had a great time reading with Kent tonight in Milwaukee. He's a sweetheart, and a fine reader.

Kent read from I Once Met (anecdotal memoir-paragraphs on meeting/not meeting poets, scholars, his own children); it's a funny and tender book, as moving in the sections I suspect are made up as in the ones I think aren't.

We had goat curry beforehand with Roberto and Brenda; Roberto sure can cook, and it was lovely of him to set up the reading.

Hung out with varied buddies old and new at Tony's, one of the comfier bars I've visited in recent memory. Finally met David Baptiste-Chirot in person.

I feel like being extremely kind and considerate to everyone
and I feel like reading lots and lots of poetry. For very many years.

I also feel that I have eaten too much delicious pizza, but that I've digested enough of it to go to sleep.

tomorrow's reading

2007-11-02T02:48:00.000-05:00

I'm excited to be reading with Kent Johnson tomorrow:

Enemy Rumor
November 3, 2007, 7 pm
@ Walker's Point Center for the Arts
911 W. National Ave., Milwaukee, WI

2007-10-25T21:24:00.000-05:00

Paul Chan's video films might be an excellent example of vulnerablist political art.

Three of them were shown at the Madison MCA this evening, and I'll write about two:

RE: THE_OPERATION (2002), a half-hour series of invented letters and emails from the Bush cabinet as they fight the "war on terror" on the ground in the Middle East, seems like a setup that could only result in sarcastic caricature (which could be perfectly good satire--"what if they really did have to serve in the armed forces"). Instead, the text Chan gives these politicos includes a more or less ordinary letter from George to Laura, a musing by Condi on masculine equations of war and sex, an anonymously delivered, predatory sexual message by Ashcroft, a press release regularly disrupted by static, a text by Blanchot on friendship. Some of it's funny, most is variously strange--and even the moments of "character assassination" lack any "nyah-nyah." I find the tone (or various tones) admirable and moving, as well as profoundly disorienting.

It's Baghdad In No Particular Order (2003) that particularly inclines me to give Chan the Vulnerablist's Stamp of Approval. A fifty-minute sequence of pieces of footage from Chan's 2002 trip to Baghdad with Voices in the Wilderness, this is "artless" art in the best sense; Chan's technique with the hand-held camera is, by his own admission, "not that good," and the cinematography has the look of any video shot by a highly thoughtful, sensitive and observant tourist--because it more or less is that, rather than an imitation of that style by someone trying to make their work look "authentic."

The juxtaposition of scenes is paratactical, as the title implies, though the composition is clearly thought-out. The voice-over (spoken not by Chan himself, but by a woman whose name I didn't manage to write down) is infrequent, usually just telling us the name of a person or type of music we're seeing. When the voice does wax philosophical, it does so without any need to produce an intellectual "ah-ha!" At one point, the voice says something like, "They only trust me enough to stare when I am blind... blindness is the prerequisite for clairvoyance--" a direct reflection on the situation of filming (in this case, a pair of fascinated, silent children toward whom Chen has turned the viewer screen on which they're displayed) and a less direct one on the intention to show the film to others. Both in the film and on his website, Chen is refreshingly unapologetic in his love of philosophy, it's always both interesting and relevant (in one Godardian moment Chan puts a quote from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into the mouth of a girl showing a drawing to the camera, and it works wonderfully). His program note frames BINPO as a Benjaminian project, which it manages to be, with less pretense than any other self-described Walterwerks I've encountered (Benjamin might be the philosopher who comes closest to Vulnerablism).

I don't think I've described the film very well. Perhaps a single moment will illustrate it better:

Throughout, the camera wobbles and swerves, and there are many close-ups that are too extreme for the lens to focus; subjects blur in and out. Toward the end of the film, the camera lingers, in a dim room, on a series of (I'm pretty sure) black-and-white snapshots of people who have died, the shot so close that, in general, they appear as face-shaped blobs with dark holes for eyes--almost skulls. This closeness, however, also means that any tiny movement of the camera has a huge effect, and so part of a face will become clear as the lens is tilted just a bit, or the entire photo becomes visible for a second. On occasion, this movement results in the haunting illusion of the eyes blinking--the shifting of focus in different directions on multiple areas of the picture is disorienting enough that the photo seems to have come to life.

Both of the latter two films, and this one in particular, meet the major Vulnerablist criteria (loose and tentative as they are): rough edges (not as a pose, but also treated as compositional material), room for humor and mournfulness as well as Brechtian alienation, directness and philosophical complexity, parataxis and naturalism, the inclusion of the composing subject without the protection either of accusing or excepting itself, careful reflexivity and a moment-by-moment openness to what happens.

No conclusion.

The "footnotes" (aka "Part II" of the film, an archive of texts, sound, paintings, and clips from the film) are online.

2007-10-17T02:22:00.001-05:00

This weekend in Chicago, the Nonsense Company performs as part of Opera Cabal's Delusions festival.

30 Years of Lou and Peter Berryman

2007-10-08T00:46:00.002-05:00

Last night Lou and Peter Berryman performed on the UW campus, celebrating 30 years of some of the most singular, mind-blowing songwriting in human history, as well as the release of their new record, The Universe: 14 Examples, and 30 years of folk music on Wisconsin Public Radio. The concert bounced back and forth between their earliest songs and their most recent, and between the think muscles, cry glands, and laugh cortex, binding them in synaesthesiac rapture.
How can I express how innovative, brilliantly constructed, and rewarding these songs are? I can't--not without at least the audible presence of the performers themselves, their odd, friendly, lovable personalities and vastly different, unique voices (a difference that imbues their polyphonic vocal interweavings with clarity). And not without Lou's meticulous music: melodies that can seem simple and straightforward until you try to sing them and begin to uncover their chromatic intricacy, their surprising twists and turns, the meaningful variation in degree of distance between pitches, the morphing, inversion and reversal of intervals that effectively answers the old question, "what if Schoenberg had written tonal folk music in the United States?"

But (to ask another of the old questions) is it folk? I can't answer that question without being able to play you the arrangements of Lou and Peter's songs. One recurrent problem in music (and perhaps especially in the nostalgic world of "folk as a genre") is the obsession with authenticity; if a songwriter is going to record a march or a tango, he or she generally does everything possible to give the song a "march sound" or "tango sound," bringing in extra musicians on the proper instruments for those genres, producing the record so that it sounds as much as possible like the most familiar marches or tangos. So the songwriter has simply added another set of lyrics to the same music we've heard before. The Berrymans are among the minority who know that the way to produce something new, an unheard-of folk music, is instead to bend the tools already at hand, to write for the accordion and guitar in forms they were never meant to inhabit. It makes every note count, makes it necessary to come up with fresh musical ideas, employs a genre as a skeleton or mask rather than a fashionable shirt ("playing a tango makes me look so good"). Part of the secret is in the instrumental melodies; Peter's 12-string rarely plays a full chord, instead interlocking with Lou's accordion to weave the fabric in the which the threads all stand out in their varied colors.

I can't express any of this, or even the wonderful consciousness that "funny" and "serious" are in no way opposites, that laughter and care go together and that this complexity is simple and direct because we live it (that it's only regarding art that there's a rigorous division made--another consequence of genre and of thinking of art as saying something about it's consumer, rather than to the people it encounters)--see, I can't express it without the songs. My sentences run off into obscurity. All I can venture here is a typology, a list of a few kinds of songs with reference to Peter's lyrics, and even that is misleading, since almost every song Peter writes is its own genre (actually, I've found that he writes in twos--there are a lot of songs that seem like pairs, often 15 or 20 years apart--but I can hardly think of any songwriter whose songs are that distinct from one another in their form and content).

1) The "pure language" song, like "The Similes," the first verse of which tells us that the Similes are flying by again in the sky, and the rest of which progresses symmetrically from single-word comparisons ("like flies/like hay") to elaborate compound images "like a bump on a log despite a notable night beside the beckoning beach without a suitable suit until the furniture guy arrives and everyone eats a pizza by the door beside the shore" and back to single words, the whole form imitating the expansion and contraction of a flock of birds, coming down to end on the unaccompanied "like ducks" (bird songs are a genre in their own right, and many make birds the icons of thoughts and words. For one that doesn't, see "Some Birds"). Or "The History of Language," in which a story of a seaside picnic ends with the arrival of a century-old woman who sits down and begins to tell her tale--which turns out to be the same tale we've just heard, but in versions of English that move farther and farther into the past as the song progresses. See also "Odd Man Out."

2) Close to this is the song that uses "pure" linguistic constraints to refer to the extra-linguistic, as in "Bird Bird Bird." See also, in another sense, "Artiste Interrupted."

(those clicking on the links will notice that my categories are already blurred)

3) The "conversation song." See "Talkin' at the Same Time" (verses 2&3, 5&6, 8&9 are simultaneous), "I Don't Believe You Like My Shirt," "Orange Cocoa Cake," countless others.

4) The Wisconsin song. See "The Limburger Ballad," "Forward Hey."

5) The political satire. See "Acme Forgetting Service," "Elderlyville."

6) There's a category I don't have a succinct name for: the song that deals with daily life, the normal stuff, seen as weird. There's often an appreciation for simple existence in these songs that I find incredibly moving--and it's a theme that I usually can't stand in other people's work; it often seems to promote a love of comfort that blocks out everything else, shuts down the mind, a position of (in folk music) middle-class liberal privilege. Peter's lyrics in this vein, on the other hand, show a mind as active and unpredictable as any, and implicitly argue for a life kept strange, and thus outside various statuses quo, always on its toes. I think this category and #1 might be my favorites. See "We Don't Do It," "When Did We Have Sauerkraut?," "Red Kimono."

This post is way too long. All I wanted to do was express my thanks to Peter and Lou for their work. I can't think of many examples of people who've created a genuinely new art form by making their chosen field so capacious, opening it up to such a wide range of experience. That sounds like a good definition of the achievement of full humanity, and I hold it dear. Here's to another 30 years!

2007-10-05T21:24:00.000-05:00

Some quotations from Robin Blaser's 1973 essay 'The Stadium of the Mirror' (in The Fire, UC Press 2006):

The Other is not an object, but acts chiasmatically (Merleau-Ponty's word). Not a stillness. Not a rest. Always the opposite and companion of any man's sudden form. This is the unrest given to thought. And to our invisibility. Perhaps this is also the life of Beauty whose companion is a terror or coldness. (28)

Under the arrangement of words (hypotaxis), the hierarchies come to a stasis. A standing still. [...] Ek--out of stasis. Ecstasy. [...] Through the arrangement of words (parataxis), there is a speech alongside my speech, which allows a double-speech. A placement. The Other is present and primary to our speaking. There is no public realm without such polarity of language. The operation of its duplicity is the poetic job. (32)

An actual directive of all serial poems is that the series is other than, not simply more than, its parts [...] the serial poem constantly circumscribes an absence that brings its presences to life. (33-34)

The ontological necessity of what we are speaking is our invisibility, the companion of our visibility. One may offer another only a world, not oneself. (34)

Stops. The thought of totals, the original totalitarianism, is a rooted dissimulation and turns the present into the past or into the already thought. (34)

All true language is thought and so reverses into experience. (36)

2007-09-22T22:46:00.000-05:00

Action Yes would seem to be a great online journal, given what I've had a chance to read so far. I've given a thorough skim to Joshua Corey's typically thoughtful essay on the possibilities of the Baroque for contemporary poetry (it deserves a more thorough reading, and will get it), and have scanned James Pate's intriguing writing on Wittgenstein versus "body philosophers" as influences on poets (I'll also read that one with full attention).

The one I've read through more thoroughly is Jasper Bernes' "On the Poverty of Internet Life: a Call for Poets," a great, relieving and sometimes frustrating critique of the depiction of the internet as a liberatory, democratizing non-space. Bernes runs very much against the grain here. Thank goodness. While I admit the unparalleled usefulness of the internet for many purposes, and certainly think it's done more good than bad for poetry, I'm thoroughly skeptical about the giddy postmodern glee so many express in relation to it.

I like Bernes' writing here. It's not just that I'm not particularly bothered by jargon and kind of attracted to polemics. What's compelling is the way Bernes deploys a lot of the same language often used to paint glowing pictures of the deterritorialized internet in order to make that picture look pretty ugly in a lot of ways. Here are a couple of bits that made me laugh:

In this, the funhouse mirror of the commodity, in which things appear to be more real than the social relations that produce them, in which commodities appear, in fact, to produce those relations—in this, the primary inversion of the commodity fetish that Marx described is itself inverted in the pseudo-emancipatory fetish of de-fetishization that is the user-generated internet. Opposed to relationships, here products and objects seem, in fact, the mere effluvia of an immense, acephalous process in which one futilely stakes out a section of the common and calls it “mine” or, more colloquially, “my shit.”

The point, then, is that to the extent that the internet fails to thrust me back onto my own lap, to the extent that it fails to render crystal clear the ugliness and smallness of the life I lead in all its terrible complicities, and to the extent that it fails to fail to escape these conditions, it is a vicious augmentation of the spectacular aerosolization of all that’s solid, a burp in the calculator.

Great stuff--and these excerpts don't give a sufficient indication of the ethical drive of much of the essay, its committed seriousness about U.S.-backed murder and colonialism. Bernes' discussions of IDF tactics as perfectly Deleuzian is terrifying. I love Deleuze, and this gives me chills.

*

It's when the discussion turns to poetry that I start to have some problems. Bernes claims that "American poetry is the cracked mirror of contemporary capitalism"--a familiar kind of statement about art as the reflection of society. It's been said a lot about the so-called 'so-called Language Poets"' (or SCSCLPs) who, the story goes, reflected in their early work the fragmented, postmodern, thoroughly commodified world they set out to critique. This story has always missed the constructivist side of the SCSCLPs' work--the astonishing variety of their literary production, the use of parataxis to produce new literary effects and new kinds of thinking in writing that, I'd claim, one certainly can't find "out there" in the sphere of consumer-capitalist consumption. The production of texts (like, I'd argue, Silliman's Tjanting) that, through their arrangement of materials, make an analogy for the everyday synthesis of experience that dehabitualizes that synthesis, bringing it into conscious view--an invaluable political effect for a piece of writing to have.

Perhaps the all-too-familiar critiques of SCSCLP lean all-too-heavily on the early theoretical writings, and not enough on the actual poetry. But that's an argument that, with its holes, belongs in another place.

*

Bernes' portrait of contemporary poetry as structured by the anxious Father, one "Son Realman," and by Oedipalized sons such as "Bomb Early," is all-too-familiar and none-too-true. The advantage of painting this portrait here is twofold: it makes explicit the situation that many poets (mostly poet-bloggers) enact without admitting it, and the situation itself is no less concretely effective among these poets for its unreality (just as the unreal value of money has very real effects). The problem with the portrait is that, while Realman may to some extent allow the power granted him to accrue, most of it is attributed by others (I've seen it happen over and over in Realman's comments box). Realman's authority as an arbiter of all things poetic is, in actuality, less weighty, worthy of fear, institutionally backed than the imaginary-symbolic figure the Bomb Earlies create in their attempted destruction of it. The anxiety lies not with the Realmans (who have little to gain or lose), but with the Earlies who go into conniptions every time the "school whose name cannot be spoken" is mentioned, each time an unapologetic pronouncement is made.

*

Thoughts on section 7.2:

1) Bernes' general proposal for intervention by poets via work that isn't poetry per se is a fine one ("an improvement of, or de-sterilization, or re-politicization of public language").
When one gets into the specifics of this, the problems become particularly difficult. By way of getting into a couple, I'd like to draw attention to a few distinct art-interventions in more or less recent times:

2) When I saw the film about the Yes-Men, I was struck by the differences in efficacy between their projects. On the one hand, there are the various presentations they've made at corporate conferences and universities (pretending to be representatives of corporations or consulting firms). These generally involve taking what sounds like an innovative business proposal and pushing beyond the bounds of what the attendees would accept as believable or ethically viable (either by proposing an utterly ridiculous product or a truly horrifying process, like piping processed feces from western McDonalds restaurants to "third world" restaurants, where they'll be made into new sandwiches). I'll also put their tour as fake Bush campaigners, in which they blatantly proposed massive environmental devastation to the residents of various small towns, in this category. In almost all these cases, the audience made no objections whatsoever; the proposals were often met with applause.

On the other hand, the project in which one of the Yes-Men posed as a DOW chemical representative and apologized, on international news television, for the Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal back in the '70's, promising massive remuneration and environmental cleanup, was highly effective. It forced the actual DOW people to tell the world that they did not apologize, took no responsibility for the spill, and would make no such promises--in other words, they had to appear on international news and admit that they were responsible and would do nothing about it.

3) When I was in Philadelphia for the protests around the 2000 Republican National Convention, I saw a Jenny Holzer project: sentences scrolling by on a board erected on a downtown street corner in front of a construction site. I'd seen and loved Holzer's work for years, but this context gave it an entirely new function. Her charged sentences about violence, ethics, money, value, sex, power, etc., some of which I'd seen in museum pieces and on a stone table at UCSD, took on entirely different meanings in a large city where people were having their homes and meeting spaces infiltrated by the police, having equipment destroyed, being arrested and beaten in jail, blocking routes to the convention center, confronting local and national political figures and screwing up everyone's downtown shopping experiences. Holzer's sentences seemed to address this context directly.

4) Hans Haacke, commissioned by a major museum in Germany, once undertook a project that involved making meticulous reproductions of the most famous works in the museum's collection, one copy for each previous owner of that painting. The caption for each copy detailed the owner's finances, social status, and how he or she acquired the work. These lists of dry facts revealed a lot about the owners, particularly the more recent ones: some acquired the paintings through associations with the Nazi party during their seizure of 'offending' works; some made the money required for the purchase through highly unethical business practices; some simply ripped off previous owners who couldn't afford not to make the deal.

5) As interventions, the first set of the Yes-Men's presentations failed (though they're hilarious, brilliant and troubling performances). Instead, they revealed a problem. I'd argue that the audiences for the Yes-Men have been able to accept their proposals largely because they fit formally with what's expected in the context of a conference or seminar. If they hadn't fit so well, the ruse would have been up, and the performers would have been driven from the stage--but the fit that allowed them to say whatever they wanted, as long as the form remained acceptable, prevented their content from having effects that were particularly distinct from those of the genuine presentations in such contexts.

If we're to alter or intervene in public language, we have (by definition) to do it in contexts in which that language appears. Given that, we need to find a way to build surprise into the work, perhaps by choosing media that will get attention by its public nature, but using, within those media, kinds of language that shouldn't be there. Kinds of language, not just amplified, distorted or mutated versions of the kind of language that 'belongs' in a given medium. At the same time, the degree of fit has to be engineered with regard to the specific medium. Media like caution tape (which Bernes proposes) might allow a certain degree of freedom with regard to this problem, since the set of kinds of language that belongs on caution tape is so small, and since people are used to seeing it but not absorbing it. The newspaper, on the other hand, is trickier; how to push past the point at which no-one will notice anything you've put in, without turning it into an obvious fake (like The Onion)? How to avoid either too close a fit or too great a mismatch?

6) Speaking of The Onion, there's the linked problem of irony. At this point, ironic methods ("Home Depot for President, for instance") are usually highly ineffective. Irony is so ubiquitous that everyone is used to it; it's the place where nearly everyone can feel at home. Almost no-one is made uncomfortable by South Park. Irony would capitalize (for example) on the president's bumbling, whereas the truth is that the bumbling image has been historically encouraged in order to take attention away from the hideous truth (as when the CIA, sued by patients whose lives had been ruined by the agency-funded electroshock/sensory deprivation research in Canadian hospitals in the '50s, portrayed that project as a clumsy, misguided and failed attempt to learn something about 'Communist brainwashing' of POWs, rather than as intentional and highly successful research into the torture techniques now employed in Iraq, Guantanamo, etc.). This is not to say that irony has no place--just that there has to be something besides irony at work. Otherwise, one simply thickens the skin of the reader at best (a sterilization of public language), or (at worst) contributes to the obfuscation of reality.

6) Holzer's kind of context-ready writing has more appeal for me. The problem might be that it's easily dismissable as art. Even in that Philadelphia context, I don't know if someone who wasn't interested in being affected by the work would have been.

7) The Haacke project, by contrast, places itself explicitly within the context of art, while linking art just as explicitly to the extra-aesthetic--and all this in a relatively public place, albeit one that only museum-goers would attend. It's an intervention within a smaller public sphere than that of Holzer's work or the Yes-Men's Bhopal apology.

8) All this points toward the notion (already there, more or less, in Bernes' essay), that the interventionist projects poets undertake need to be of a wide variety, in lots of different locations and media, taking place on different scales. Any general statement I've made here is bound to find exceptions in specific work, and there can be no all-encompassing prescription.

*

One of the tragic aspects of post-9/11 activism is the loss of the variety, creativity, and vibrancy
(not to mention, in some cases, success) that characterized the anti-globalization work of the late 1990s. Since 2001, we've seen a disappearance of that 'de-issuization,' the linking of many interests, concerns, strategies, and have instead been left with a pale shadow of the same old protest tactics, the speeches, signs and chants. In Philadelphia 2000, we had clowns, goatheaded bicyclists performing elaborate raps, puppets (those that weren't destroyed by the cops). In LA that year there were environmental activists in frog costumes, clown cops, poets, the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore). This wasn't just a colorful pageantry--it was a way of reaching out into a great variety of modes of public discourse, attitudes, interests. I miss it, and think we need it. Activism needs art, as it always has--but now more than ever. Bernes skewers the comforted flight of this kind of variety onto the 'net, and asks us to put it back into material society.

2007-09-22T22:16:00.001-05:00

Paid my fourth and (alas) final visit to the Jess exhibit at the Madison MCA today, and was stunned again by the intelligence of the composition, the humor, the precision of the technique, the referential complexity, the dizzying shifts and impossibilities of scale in the work. Not for some time have I had such experiences of profound estrangement; it reminds me of the first weird art that I remember seeing, as a kid wandering up the street to the art studios associated with Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, walking through the grounds of the former brickyard and train station, coming across unattributed abstract sculptures in the tall grass, entering the building (always open) and exploring the painting studios, in the presence of things utterly alien, fields of energy leaked through some rift from a hidden reality. Or the first times I saw De Chirico's paintings, also as a kid (still my favorite art associated with surrealism). That sense of vanished human time, a resonant silence.

*

Overheard before the Robin Blaser reading last weekend (with my unspoken comments in brackets):
"The thing about the Language poets [uh-oh]--and I'm sure I'm overgeneralizing [me too]--they've ended up in the same position as the New Critics, who were the enemy back in the '70s and '80s--taking up academic positions--they've become the canonical critics for the younger generation of poets [to some extent, yes, but there's a hell of a lot of resistance to that--and, in any case, the Language poets are so much better than the New Critics, and so much more fun!]"
[Also, they're poets.]

*

A curse of being a writer: it's hard to have an experience without thinking of it as material for poetry. One could spend an entire life working on two fronts: to let experience simply be experience, and to find a capacious enough poetics to encompass all of it.

*

Thinking about argumentation and critique:
If a statement is readily available, easily deployed, intuitively convincing due to its ubiquity, be as suspicious of it as possible. If you must use it, compose your language so that its former users don't speak through it so loudly that they drown you out.

*

On confidence:

A couple of years ago (just before I started sending stuff out for publication again), I finally convinced myself that I'm a good poet. This, however, does not at all mean that I think a given poem of mine is necessarily good--or that I have great confidence in the future production of good poems. On the contrary: the uncertainty only gets greater as I go on.

Robin Blaser at SF State

2007-09-21T01:21:00.000-05:00

At the tail end of the Nonsense Company's trip to San Francisco for our performances in the Fringe festival, I managed to get to Robin Blaser's reading at SF State. I came away stunned, and remain so.

The reading was framed by an introduction by Norma Cole and the presentation of a Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award by Robert Gluck; both of them gave moving speeches that, unfortunately, have been erased from my mind by the poems themselves, and the talk between them.

I don't go to a lot of readings (not many opportunities here in Madison), and when I think highly of a reader it's most often due to the clarity of their delivery, the way they make the poems as comprehensible as possible. Blaser goes way beyond this. He knows exactly how to use his rich, musical voice, sliding between plain speech and a kind of half-sung incantation that recalls the way Pound would have read if he'd been less obsessed with his cultural authority and had been able to vary the song from that repetitious, irritating two-or-three-pitch range you hear in recordings (say, of the "usura" Canto). Blaser's reading always serves the poem. I was transfixed in a way I've never been at a poetry reading (and I pride myself on attentiveness at performances).

He began by voicing his gratitude for the fact that both Jack Spicer's and Robert Duncan's collected writings are in the works (which excites the hell out of me as well, especially as regards Spicer), moving on to read his "Great Companions" poem for Duncan. He then read Spicer's letter to him from Admonitions, followed by a couple of sections from Fifteen False Propositions Against God and the "God is a big round white baseball" section of Book of Magazine Verse--and then read all three of them again, without comment, a little faster but with every pitch curve the same as the first time. Then we got to hear half an hour or so of Blaser's work from this century, some of it from the last year, all wonderful. Ten minutes in he asked, "am I reading too long?," and everyone (a lot of people), a bit shocked that this question was possible, answered, "oh, no."

I won't go into a detailed account of the rest of the reading, except to say that the long standing ovation was moving and heartfelt. Afterwards I briefly met the Itinerant Poetry Librarian, who had draped Blaser's table with a beautiful cloth she informed me had "been to eleven countries and absorbed a lot of poetry." I wanted to talk with her, and others, more, but my mingling abilities, never great, had already been drained by the Fringe experience, and the idea of chit-chat after that reading seemed utterly innocuous and embarrassing.

I bought the expanded Holy Forest and The Fire, Blaser's collected essays, against my better financial judgment but with no regret, sunk in the writing on the Muni train back to the Tenderloin, in bed in the morning as a nasty cold came on, in the car and the motel on the way back to Wisconsin, last night when I couldn't sleep after thirty hours on the road. This is such important writing; Charles Bernstein's comment in his afterword to the Holy Forest seems right on: this poetry seems to have more to do with the future of the art than with the past. So fresh, so varied, so unabsorbed by us, we writers in Blaser's wake. Such political and intellectual commitment, such music, such weaving of motifs, the incorporation of the lyric and the epic with the essay and the diary. A poetry of capaciousness that always looks for a way to let more in, like Pound, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan tried to open their work to the widest possible range of phenomena, like Silliman and Hejinian have done in much of their work... Blaser has an openness of his own, a freshness of thinking that sets him apart.

I can't do much more than rave at this point, still without a good night's sleep. I'll just say that Blaser looks extraordinarily good, not just for a man of 82 but in general, brimming with life that I can imagine taking him to 102. I hope so.

This is work one lives with.