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100 book challenge: part two: poetry
Still toying with the idea of trying to figure out which books I would keep, if I were to limit myself to 100. Last week I figured out 25 works of fiction I'd want to keep; here are some selections from the Poetry shelf. Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout My Life, by Lyn Hejinian Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr The Tunnel: Selected Poems, by Russel Edson How to Write, by Gertrude Stein Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, edited by Jerome Rothenberg Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy, by Leslie Scalapino A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, by Tom Phillips Human Wishes, by Robert Hass A Book of Luminous Things, by Czeslaw Milosz Darkness Moves, by Henri Michaux Howl, by Allen Ginsburg The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens That's fifteen—added to the twenty-five fiction titles brings us to forty. Sixty more to go. Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary
Monday, June 30, 2008
fractal economies, by derek beaulieu
A quick litmus test for whether or not you should read derek beaulieu's fractal economies would be to look at the image below: "sinus headache" This is one poem from the book. If you can accept this as a poem, you might enjoy this book. If you can see it as an exciting poem, one that expands the field of what a poem can be and expands the toolkit of ways poetry can represent, then you might love this book. I did. "sinus headache," above, is taken from "surface," a long sequence of Letraset experiments that comprises most of the first half of the book. The second half is made up of two other sequences, "depression" and "blister," in which beaulieu investigates other visual means of poetry-making: photocopier and scanner experiments, relief experiments (rubbings), found poems, diagrams, etc. These other sequences are slightly less interesting than "surface," although this might be a matter of personal taste—part of what I enjoyed about the dry transfer experiments, for instance, is their compositional intricacy, a quality that doesn't naturally inhere in, say, a photocopier experiment. Ultimately, I'd argue for the importance of these other sequences as well, for they contribute to the book's larger effect: broadening the field of possible techniques for contemporary visual poetry. (There are, by my count, four poems in the book that don't even use letterforms.) As an extra bonus for the truly hard-core: the book closes with a theoretical essay by beaulieu, "an afterward after words: notes towards a concrete poetic." I'm still digesting the ideas in this essay, and may write more on it later. Labels: book_commentary, poetics, poetry_commentary, visual_poetry, xerography
Thursday, June 28, 2007
poets on war
Yesterday I posted a list... today I'm posting a list. Maybe we can make this a thing. Today's list is books on "US military expansionism" written in the past five years and recommended by the great Juliana Spahr at her blog, Swoonrocket. I've read only two on this list, K. Silem Mohammed's Deer Head Nation and Lisa Jarnot's Black Dog Songs, both are a lot of fun, which is a little bit odd to say about books on US military expansionism, but which is, in fact, true. Alice Notley, Alma, or The Dead Women Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew up America Barrett Watten, Bad History Carole Mirakove, Mediated or Occupied Eliot Weinberg, “What I Heard about Iraq” Fanny Howe, On the Ground Judith Goldman, Deathstar/Rico-chet Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge Rob Fitterman & Dirk Rowntree, War, a Musical Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, editors, War & Peace 2: Poetry and Essays Jena Osman, Essays in Astericks K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation Kent Johnson, Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz Kim Rosenfeld, Trama Kristin Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs Meg Hammell, Death Notices Drew Gardener, Petroleum Hat Linh Dinh, Borderless Bodies Spahr—who wrote one of the best books I read last year— was here in Chicago on Friday, giving a talk at UIC, where I teach. In point of fact she was giving her talk in Room 2028 on a floor where my office is 2026. Despite this I missed the entire talk (I was teaching) and managed to slip in just in time to see the very tail end of the Q+A session. I did at least get to say "thanks for coming." But it still sucked. Labels: bibliographies, lists, poetics, poetry_commentary, war
Monday, March 05, 2007
"ruptures of diverse sorts" : some scavengings on collage Gregory Ulmer: "[C]ollage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century." David Antin: "[F]or better or for worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset" Groupe Mu: "[To collage is] [t]o lift a certain number of elements from works, objects, preexisting messages, and to integrate them in a new creation in order to produce an original totality manifesting ruptures of diverse sorts." Ulmer again: "[C]ollage is the transfer of materials from one context to another, and 'montage' is the dissemination of these borrowings through the new setting [?]" Charles Bernstein: "[Montage is] the use of contrasting images toward the goal of one unifying theme" and collage is "the use of different textual elements without recourse to an overall unifying idea." [Questionable.] All quotes scavenged from Pierre Joris' "Collage and Post-Collage," in his essay collection A Nomad Poetics. And for anyone who wants to do further investigation along this axis, Joris also provides a whole list of "limit-breaking" artists who he sees as inspired or influenced by collage techniques, including: Oh, and PS: one of my own collage poems, "Gjallarhornet," has just been published in the new issue (#15) of Brendan Lorber's "annual compendium of horrible mistakes," Lungfull!. Labels: collage, poetics, poetry_commentary
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
future of the book I finished reading the Nichol / McCaffery collaboration Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine about a month ago, but I'm still picking it up and pulling good quotes out of it. For instance, there's this 1831 gem by Alphonse de Lamartine: he's writing on journalism, but the quote seems even more trenchant when taken as an early prediction (and critique?) of the emergence of the "blogosphere": "Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press—the whole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech—multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet—mankind will write their books day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will be spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth—it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plentitude. It will not have time to ripen—to accumulate in a book; the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a news paper." To be fair, it seems like Lamartine was slightly off the mark—books still get written, after all—although Nichol and McCaffery couple the Lamartine quote from Lyotard, which seems to even more precisely (if cynically) predict the status of the book in the current state of the mediascape: "[I]n the next century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time. What will be called a book will be a printed object whose 'message' (its information content) and name and title will first have been broadcast by the media, a film, a newspaper interview, a television program, and a cassette recording. It will be an object from whose sale the publisher (who will also have produced the film, the interview, the program, etc.) will obtain a certain profit margin, because people will think that they must 'have' it (and therefore buy it) so as not to be taken for idiots or to break (my goodness) the social bond! The book will be distributed at a premium, yielding a financial profit for the publisher and a symbolic one for the reader." Less dire takes can maybe be found at if:book, the blog of the Insititute for the Future of the Book, although it's worth noting that the top post as I write this is a post about war documentaries, gamer theory, machinima, and Sony TV commercials: quite interesting, but not a book in sight. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing
Friday, May 05, 2006
macrosyntax I just recently finished reading Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, which collects the writings of the Toronto Research Group, a group founded by the great experimental poets bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. Although most of the "research reports" collected in this book date back to the Seventies, there have been few people in the intervening three decades who have rivaled Nichol and McCaffery's committment to interrogating the form of the book, the form of the poem, the form of the word, etc. Part of their project hinges on developing more ways of thinking about syntax. If syntax is defined as "sentence construction or its rules," then it follows that rules governing units smaller than the sentence could be thought of as a microsyntax. Once this idea is established, it follows that, just as poets can choose to formally investigate / play with / reject the "rules" of syntax at the sentence level, they can similarly investigate / play with / reject the rules of microsyntax. McCaffery and Nichol also identify a macrosyntax governing "elements and combinations that occur in a context greater than the sentence." Particularly inspired, to my mind, is this description of the largest possible macrosyntactic unit: "As a macrosyntactic unit all literature is seen as one huge, spherical sentence, continuously expanding, whose grammar and arrangement is continuously permutated and modified... This macrosyntax is the given context of reading: it is the huge block of unread letter sequences that make up textuality." More: "Obviously, from the point of view of readership, the paths through the macrosyntax (which is itself constantly growing and changing) are infinite. The sequence of things read can be as significant as the actual things read. Any path creates valid reader experiences. The notion of any absolute reading is ridiculous. Intertextual travels that cover Husserl, Reader's Digest, Robert Filliou and Maurice Sendak ae as valid as those covering Max Brand, Stan Lee, Jacques Lacan, T.S. Eliot and Robert Crumb. The writer can never know the entire macrosyntactic context from which her readers draw. The only certainty is that they will all be different." From this, McCaffery and Nichol conclude that "[b]oth reading and writing are activities of foregrounding from a ground of potentiality, and the history of a person's reading can be seen to constitute that person's own writing through the macrosyntax." Of course, if that is true, it raises the question of "why write at all when one could just be reading?" but that's really a question for another day. bPNichol died in 1988, but McCaffery is still around, most recently spotted writing about "parapoetics" for the North American Center for Interdiscipliary Poetics. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing
Monday, April 17, 2006
poetry beat : chris glomski and vincent katz A Danny's Reading Series event Wednesday, Jan 25 at Danny's Tavern Chris began with a set of poems from his newly-published book, Transparencies Lifted From Noon Of "Vela (the Amaneuensis)," he remarks that it began as an attempt to write 'a poem within a poem' but that he instead 'switched around the framing device and made it sort of a mystery.' The 'poem within a poem' is now represented as verses 'left behind in [a] Selectric on the desk' by the mysterious 'Vela,' recently disappeared 'Vela''s poem is pretty sensual stuff, with lines referencing 'fragrant ham and melon' and 'wriggling perfumes,' but then the poem is interrupted as 'something electric tore out the text and sucked it into the weather.' I like the way that the melodrama (ghost story? noir?) here fixes Vela's more lyric passages into something more narrative, but still cryptic. Chris follows this with 'Currency Exchange,' one of my favorite poems of his. It's essentially a long inventory, short lines that are mostly nouns or noun clauses: "Exclamations. The price of life. Peas and carrots." There are some verbs thrown in, too, from time to time: "Sun shines. Cobras spit." Somehow the addition of the verbs makes the piece feel more "filmic"-- more a montage of short clips of non-narrative action than a montage of still shots of objects. To further mix things up, there are things in there that aren't objects or actions but abstractions: "Illusions of speed and dexterity. Step 2 and Step 3." and some bits of dialogue (with no identified speaker): "How long will you have that look on your face?" Some phrases seem chosen for their rhythmic qualities ("duct tape", for instance, follows "bake sale"), but this doesn't happen often enough to become a pattern. In fact, one of the things I like about this poem is that it's kind of a pattern-disruptor: every time you think you can articulate the formal principle undergirding the inventory, a new item comes in to disrupt that principle. This gives the poem a distinct life and energy. The poem is funny, too, with lines like "Attention-seeking noise originates in cat" He reads a few prose poems (also funny) from a sequence about 'brushes with fame,' including being visited at school by local weatherman / cult figure Harry Volkman, and a set of triolets inspired, apparently, by having made his students write triolets He closes out with a piece based on Joe Brainard's I Remember, which he said he attempted to re-write in a "surrealist mode" before deciding it was "stupid." Instead he's given it an abecedarian scheme, wherein each stanza focuses on a different letter of the alphabet. This poem is entertaining, but to my mind it suffers from sounding too much like a standard abecedarian primer. Language tends towards clunkiness when you fit, say, "aardvarks" and "abacus" into the same line, and it's hard to transcend that awkwardness (although it can be done: see, for example, Christian Bok's Eunoia, which reads pretty smoothly while being driven by an extremely rigorous alphabetical constraint) There were a couple of funny lines, and the poem worked well enough as a good-natured homage to Brainard, but was a trifle compared to most of the other work Chris read. Vincent Katz began with a set of poems written in Brazil that were pretty narrative, driven by a stable lyrical subject, which frankly didn't do that much for me. I'm not all that interested in white-male observations on Brazilian street musicians and transitory female beauty to begin with, although I'll occasionally overlook that, but not for lines like "In a couple of years, his girl will look weathered ... Her breasts will be sad." I did like the first poem in this series, "Some Kinds of Love." Composed mostly of exclamations ("I can take no more! Tie me to a tree!"), Katz delivered this poem with real aplomb. Katz has spent a lot of time translating the writings of Sextus Propertius, a Latin poet from around 50 BC, and these poems were possibly the high point of his reading. Katz describes Propertius as 'decadent and immoral,' and if you've ever whiled away an afternoon reading translated Pompeiian graffiti you know that hearing bawdy old-schoolers is often entertaining. And Katz delivers lines like "fortune granted that I always have affairs ... never will I be blind to the babes" with obvious relish. But afterwards it's back to poems like "Pearl," from Understanding Objects, which is, again, a straightforward narrative (about a man named Jimmy who bought the young Vincent Katz some Janis Joplin albums as well as the Kinks' Arthur). This one ends with some bald-faced sentimentality: "Now, at 2 am, it rains. The kind of rain Jimmy would have noticed." I hate to say it, but that kind of thing (along with the later assertion, in a different poem, that James Merrill "composed his poems as seer for an age") is exactly the kind of thing that turns me markedly off. [Cross-posted to Kerri Sonnenberg's Chicago Poetry group-blog] Labels: poetry_commentary
Friday, January 27, 2006
poetry beat : e. tracy grinnell + craig watson It's been a while since I've done a write-up of a poetry reading—I think the last one was the write-up of Dana Ward's reading back in May of last year? That date would line up with around the time when I moved into my new apartment (the "Blood Dorm"), which put me further from a subway stop and made it harder to get to Myopic Poetry Series or Discrete Series events. But I've been missing them, and I'm going to try to get back into the habit of once again attending them regularly. So, this past Friday, at the Spare Room, we had E. Tracy Grinnell and Craig Watson. Of the two, I made better notes on Grinnell, so I apologize for the slightly lopsided write-up here. Grinnell began by reading a segments from her chapbook On the Frame (available as a free PDF from Jerrold Shiroma's Duration Press) and a work-in-progress called 'Wolf.' Grinnell has spoken often on the influence of music on her poetic practice—in this interview she cites "Erik Satie, ... Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Beethoven’s sonatas, Messaien, [and] Cage" as influences—and this attention to "musicality" showed through in "Wolf." At one particular point the poem distilled itself down to a fine-grained particulate which struck me as a poetic analogue to the minimalist patterning of a musician like Morton Feldman... short words repeated in various rhythmic configurations... careful attention given to the duration and texture of the silences between them... She followed this up with a piece which will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of Aufgabe, featuring writers responding to a lecture on Cage by Norman O. Brown. Her piece (the title eluded me) was a traditional [?] Cagean mesostic, with "raw materials" derived from Finnegans Wake (a text of central importance to both Cage and Brown) and the middle row "key text" being the (again musical) terms fugare and fugere (to pursue and to flee). She closed out with a series of poems from Some Clear Souvenir, many of which again had a "musical" attention to rhythm, particularly the staccato "Clip One," built around a one-word-per-line constraint. Grinnell was followed by Craig Watson, who struck me as a good example of someone whose poetic practice can be simultaneously avant-garde and political. His poems felt very palpably like "protest poems" or "poems of resistance" while at the same time not exactly being "about," say, a particular issue that's in the news. The work is chock-full of phrases like "repression / entertainment / repression," which isn't exactly oblique in terms of political content. I don't mean to imply that it's heavy-handed: Watson has a light touch as a reader, and he's often quite funny as well—that "repression / entertainment / repression" sequence is delivered as comic, and his acerbicness throughout the reading was coupled with equal parts wit. With the emphasis on unexpected juxtapositions, avant and "post-avant" poetry has a built-in ability to deliver laughs, exploited by only a few poets I can think of (Bernstein, Ashbery). It was nice to see Watson play up this approach ("Go with God / and take your stuff") which counteracted (or complimented) the darkness inherent in writing poems about empire—his "Steppe Work" is a cycle about Genghis Khan—or the "last twelve months of human existence," as in his "Last Man Standing" cycle. The next Discrete reading is Elizabeth Block + Jordan Stempleman, December 9th. Labels: poetry_commentary
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
other perspectives A little sniffing around yesterday revealed that Josh Corey and Jack Kimball have also weighed in thoughtfully on the New Yorker Ashbery profile. All of us are bothered by it, but all of us center our critiques on different paragraphs. Somewhere else, jack-of-all-trades Seth Tisue has posted some photos of the Two Million Tongues Festival, including two of Number None [one, two]. Labels: number_none, poetry_commentary
Thursday, November 10, 2005
aesthetics & allegiances In 1990, John Ashbery gave a set of lectures at Harvard on six poets who he claims as influences, all lesser-known: John Clare, Thomas Love Beddoes, Raymound Roussel, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright, and David Schubert. These lectures have recently been gathered together and published as a nice-looking volume, Other Traditions. In this post, Ron Silliman sums up the central question of Other Traditions as "how do we know if some writing is great if it is also, at the same time, unintelligible? And what do we mean if we say that unintelligible writing is great?" These strike me as very "Ashbery" sort of questions, by which I mean: I'm not surprised to hear that Ashbery's contemplating these questions, because they're the same questions I contemplate when I'm reading his poems. The New Yorker recently ran a profile on Ashbery (PDF supplied by Josh W.), which writes eloquently about the experience of coming up against these sorts of questions: "Resisting the impulse to make sense, allowing sentences to accumulate into an abstract collage of meaning rather than a story or an argument, requires effort. But that collage—a poem that cannot be paraphrased or explained or 'unpacked'—is what Ashbery is after ... This is one of the reasons it's a pity that he has a reputation for being a difficult poet: a reader who likes difficult poetry will tend to concentrate fiercely and bring to bear all his [sic] most sophisticated analytical equipment in order to wrestle an explicable meaning out of a poem; and while he may well be able to come up with one, it is unlikely to be the sort of meaning that Ashbery was after." It's slightly disappointing (although not unexpected) that once having taken what I think of as the fundamental step towards a progressive poetics—the recognition that "sense" or "meaning" is not the only valid end of a piece of writing—our New Yorker writer does not pause to consider the larger implications of this somewhat radical observation (as Ashbery does in his Other Traditions lectures) nor does she suggest that this observation may lead to an appreciation of other poets doing similar work (in short, an aesthetic). Instead she rapidly back-pedals to safe ground: "It's true that verbal abstraction can be jarring and, in a literal sense, repellent, darting about with zigzagging syntax or hurling projectile nouns [?], but Ashbery's poetry is neither. Its transitions may be confusing but they are rarely abrupt. Its syntax is usually conventional. Its meaning is elusive but only just, like a conversation overheard while half asleep; it is not incantation, not sheer sound, not nonsense, not scat. It has an abstract structure but the smell of a story. He seems not to be smashing up meaning but, rather, to be gently picking up old pieces of meaning that he has found lying about." While this passage may reassure the dubious reader enough to give Ashbery a try (a valid goal), it also seems to redraw some battle lines: the New Yorker may be broadening their circle of approval so that it firmly includes Ashbery (a white upper-class New Yorker), but they're in no way broadening it enough to include the rest of the poetic rabble, engaged, as they are, in all that unseemly smashing and hurling. Labels: poetry_commentary
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
writing opacity In a piece on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Guy Davenport describes the main movement of twentieth-century lit as being "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thought and language, to assuming ... that the world is opaque. This would seem to be the assumption of Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme, Ionesco." To this list, you could add most major American poets since probably Charles Olson. My short list would include poets like Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Leslie Scalapino, and Charles Bernstein: all writers who seem to me write in a way that acknowledges the inability of any written work to articulate the totality of the phenomenal world (to make it "transparent") and so accepts the reality that both author and reader exist in a state of near-total occlusion. Taking this reality as a given allows these authors to write in a way that plays off of it, that in effect depends upon it in order for their work to take on its particular set of qualities. Davenport again, on Olson's long poem "The Kingfishers" : "[The Kingfishers'] seeming inarticulateness is not a failure to articulate, but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision." This idea of "declining to articulate" the relationship between things is of increasing interest to me: one of the difficulties with what I've been calling the Novel of Adequacy is that it has to describe all the linkages that connect that suburban American teen to that woman in China in a way that both feels mimetically true and retains narrative interest. This is an enormous task, and one that leaves out far more important connections than it manages to illuminate. I feel like most of the poets I've discussed in this post would be more content to leave the woman and the teen in "free collision": to simply juxtapose the two of them, and jettison all the laborious claptrap-construction involved in drawing out the link narratively. A reader would grasp the point that the two figures are interrelated, even if he or she were unable to fully articulate the exact particulars of the relationship: in fact the work would partially be about the fact that for the vast majority of us, these networks of interrelationship are best characterized by our partial (or total) ignorance of them. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, poetry_commentary, writing
Thursday, October 20, 2005
I've spent a lot of this summer staking out The Cantos. The poem has proven to be relatively impermeable to forward assault, so I'm doing the kind of thing I don't normally do, namely, attempting to make the poem more intelligible by reading a bunch of contextual material, the writing about/around the poem.
This is more fun with Pound than it sometimes is with other poets, because The Cantos is a poem so Cinemascoped that it sometimes seems like almost everything ever written could be counted as part of "the context." The Odyssey? Check. Ovid's Metamorphoses? Check. The correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? Check. The Confucian Analects? Check.
I've been struggling through Pound's own (unorthodox?) translation of some of the Confucian writings, trying to see what he saw in them. The Analects in particular have been very difficult for me to appreciate: their repeated articulation of the actions and traits of the "superior man" makes them read, at times, like selections from the world's oldest self-help book.
Additionally, I struggle with the Confucian emphasis on tradition ("performing the rites") and the corresponding disdain for "twistiness" or deviance... this world-view is so congruent with contemporary U.S. conservativism that I have great difficulty feeling comfortable with it as a philosophy.
All the same, there's something in the Confucian works that I'm interested in, most notably the way the works approach pattern and change: the Analects can be seen, in part, as a way to ensure the continued iteration of certain patterns through time. How does one maintain a way of life or a body of knowledge through a universe in a state of eternal flux? This is a question that seems to have interested Confucius, and it's almost certainly a question that interested Pound, whose work can be understood as a kind of digest version of the history of literary knowledge, a kind of seed-book that might preserve information through a civilization's apocalyptic collapse (a collapse that Pound may have seen as imminent).
Pattern is also key to another text in this volume, The Great Learning, which is interested less in replicating patterns through time and more with replicating a specific pattern through scale: from the micro- to the macro-. If a man [sic] can establish self-discipline, or manifest the pattern of "orderliness" within himself, says Confucius, this pattern has the potential to radiate out, remanifesting in larger and larger spheres, all the way up to good (orderly) governance of the State.
"Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet." Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary
Friday, August 27, 2004
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday, May 30 at Myopic Books
The fundamental unit of these poems appears to be the sentence. Ward makes long lovely sentences that adhere to the rules of syntax—although they grow convoluted the different "parts" seem to be in the right "places." The sentences reliably work themselves out, fulfilling the formal demands made by grammatical logic, and in this way they gain closure, but the completed sentences don't produce meaning in any traditional sense; they don't provide the closure of a comprehensible message.
"There's a big residual noon in the alphabet"
"The esophagus works like a phone book interior / it owns the fact that it can't be described"
"The ribcage opened so crystal comes out"
These poems seem to produce a sort of elegant nonsense of the Ashbery variety, although Ward eschews some of Ashbery's other strategies: where Ashbery commonly shuffles rapidly between various discourse modes, Ward's mode remains essentially stable (I'd describe it as gently lyric); where Ashbery's taste in words runs towards the omnivorous, Ward's circle of inclusion is drawn more tightly (he seems to favor words that have generally sensual connotations, or which are associated with traditional poetic thematics such as nature or the body)
"I am lifting my hand that it not become glass"
"Close your eyes, for that's a lovely way to be"
"We grew tinder in yards of warm grasses"
"For now, the most delicate film rides the heat"
Labels: poetry_commentary
Monday, May 31, 2004
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday May 16 at Myopic Books
Hatmaker is working on a series of "crime lyrics": poems which take crimes (and crime writing) as their subject/inspiration
The poems she presents at this reading focus particularly on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in Jan 1947, the case which comes to be known as the Black Dahlia case
In her opening remarks, she outlines the facts and speculation on the case through a discussion of the various texts written about it (Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon II, John Gilmore's Severed, James Ellroy's Black Dahlia, Janice Knowlton's Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, and several others)
"I'm interested in her as a person ... I'm also interested in her as the Black Dahlia, [a figure] who resonates in a lot of psychological ways"
"a kind of similar figure to Williams' Elsie, a pure product of America gone crazy"
The poems themselves seem to use the murder as a springboard for broader meditation. Some (the early ones in particular) retell parts of the narrative in a narrative-lyric style, but then begin to circle outwards from there, meditating on various topics
Some of these meditations sketch out the cultural landscape of 1947—she incorporates reflections on both the recently-ended World War II and 40's-era dental science and funerary techniques
Some segments move into Short's consciousness, although (mostly) remaining at a third-person remove: "when she cooks, she sees the glint of steel before she feels the pain"
Some segments are dialogues
Some are Hatmaker's present-day reflections: one segment riffs on the upcoming film about the Dahlia, to be directed by Brian DePalma (she wonders whether Lynch would not in fact be the more apropos choice)
One poem is in the form of a jukebox track listing, although I'm uncertain as to whether the song titles she lists are actual songs from the era or poetic inventions. In any case, the song titles presented seem to emphasize body parts, presumably female (lips, eyes, etc.) and themes of finality (the end of relationships, and the like). Taken together, they imply a culture obsessed with morbidity and disembodiment
She meditates on how best to tell these stories; who to validate (the cops? the lawyers? the victims?)
One poem applies the logic of dismemberment to the alphabet: "take the t and tear the arms off ... deflate the o"
One poem in Short's voice (first-person this time) has her take on the role of the oppressor: "You'll shout my name—Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!—and you'll masturbate on my command"
"I'll bury the myths of your flesh"
"That's the final logic. That's the new world order"
The contemporary culture of violence seems to operate in the background of many of these poems, implying the figure of G.W. Bush although not invoking him specifically by name
A poem which imagines the Dahlia as a comic-book hero
"she holds the hand of the rapist and the victim as well"
"She knows the world is lonely whether you hold the knife or not"
A poem inspired by Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place," imagining a zone in outer space where the Dahlia can peacably exist
The final poem raises the question of poetic activism: it asks overtly "what can a poem do?" (presumably in the face of a violent world)
This poem instructs directly: "Talk to your children tonight about what it means when you call a woman a cunt or a whore"
It includes the phone numbers of women's health centers and rape crisis centers
"Poetry can be didactic ... Poetry can be about public outcry, same as the next form"
Labels: poetry_commentary
Thursday, May 27, 2004
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday April 25 at Myopic Books
Came in late and so missed any opening remarks.
Bloom's poems sound like syntactical chains strung together into a series. Each "unit" conveys some burst of sense although the "units" don't necessarily follow one another in a traditionally coherent sense.
"another world keeps opening your pillow"
"when love produces complexity, suspense hangs"
"mimosa pot Indian rice grass"
She doesn't pause between poems or preface individual poems with remarks, and since the short syntactical units resemble the short syntactical units commonly used as titles, it becomes difficult to tell whether she is reading a series of short poems or one longer poem, although I believe it was the former.
Despite the formal experimentalism of these poems, they seem to be in dialogue with / in debt to a more traditional poetics: the traditional rhetoric of love poetry can be found here, although heavily disordered / reordered (terms like "heart" crop up surprisingly often)
Some seem to draw from a tradition of landscape poetry, explicitly Southwestern landscape poetry: references to sagebrush and saguaros pass by, as well as Southwestern place names (Pima, Scottsdale)
The sensual (sensuous?) is a theme: one poem (a found poem?) is a recipe for chocolate-dipped strawberries
She references an Elizabeth Bishop quote on the relationship between the conscious mind and a poem, and later reads a Bishop poem ("Varick Street") and a poem dedicated to Bishop
She reads two poems from Jane Hirshfield's Women In Praise of the Sacred anthology, by Lal Ded and Mirabai, respectively: she follows up the Lal Ded poems by reading a response poem
The reading is followed with a lengthy Q&A period, during which she recommends print-on-demand outfit iUniverse (her book Radish is self-published), discusses the personal difficulties that fueled her recently-completed manuscript North, and remarks upon her ambivalent relationship to the culture of poetry blogs (although she stresses that "community is OK—collective is OK," she ultimately warns that "[blogging] takes away from the integrity of the singular voice, and the singular voice is what you're after").
Also in this period she discusses the relationship between dance and poetry (she has been a dancer and choreographer before writing poems): both dance and poetry are "about spirit;" both desire to "transcend" the quotidian. She also remarks that the poems are "choreographed in a way ... there's a lot of kinetic energy in my poems." (She shows a manuscript page here, but even a quick glance at her website will reveal what she means)
At around this point, one group perceives the reading to have basically ended and broken up into post-reading conversation, and accordingly begin having a conversation among themselves. Another group perceives the Q&A session as still being part of the formal reading, and want the other folks to keep quiet. Tension flares momentarily between these two groups, which effectively ends the evening (and on what felt to me like a rather sour note). This makes me realize that a ritualized event (such as a poetry reading) demands a ritualized way to signify its completion, although whether this demand should be obeyed or resisted is anybody's call. Labels: poetry_commentary
Monday, April 26, 2004
One of the readers at tonight's Discrete Series event is Kent Johnson. The e-mail invite gives his bio as follows:
"Kent Johnson has edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English, forthcoming from Combo Books. He has also translated (with Alexandra Papaditsas) The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003) and (with Forrest Gander) Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California UP, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. He was named Faculty Person of the Year for 2003 at Highland Community College, in Freeport, Illinois, where he teaches English Composition and Spanish." What this bio doesn't mention is that Araki Yasusada, apparently, doesn't exist. (Thanks to K. for the tip-off.) Selections from the Yasusada notebooks were published by a handful of journals under the pretense that they were newly discovered work by a Hiroshima survivor who died in 1972, but, as this interesting article by Marjorie Perloff points out, the writings contain inconsistencies, obvious anarchronisms, and things that may or may not be in-jokes; the most likely author is Johnson himself, although Johnson continues to disclaim authorship.
So the question arises: if Johnson is, in fact, the author, what exactly was he trying to accomplish? Is this the poetry world's equivalent of the notorious Sokal hoax, an ugly attempt to "pull one over" on editors? Or is it something more benign: a heartfelt attempt to imagine the perspective of the "other" through the time-honored tool of the pseudonym?
Of course, as Edward Said famously points out, when imagining the perspective of the Japanese, Westerners are prone to indulge in stereotypes and exotic generalizations: in adopting an air of "Japaneseness," some of the Yasusada work runs the risk of being "Orientalist"—or is it working as a parody of Orientalism? Can a parody of Orientalism itself be guilty of Orientalizing?
Were the Yasusada poems a repugnant, cynical attempt by a (presumably Caucasian) poet to gain attention in a marketplace that feels good about multiculturalism and the poetry of victimized peoples? (In 1999, Charles Bernstein referred to the Yasusada poems as an expression of "white male rage.") Or are they a tour-de-force of postmodern gamesmanship, where this entire set of questions is intended to arise as part of the work, a brilliant conceptual framework "bundled with" a set of striking poems? Can they be both?
Do these questions even matter? Does the identity and "authenticity" of the author matter when trying to assess whether a poem is "good" or not? Does intent?
The later Johnson material only further compounds these questions: after thinking about all this stuff, the title The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek begins to sound distinctly tongue-in-cheek, an impression that is not exactly put to rest by the fact that Johnson claims his co-author to be "Alexandra Papaditsas," a recently deceased Greek poet with a horn growing out of her head. And this forthcoming Language Poets in Leningrad: Post-poems and Elegies, 1998-2003 also seems a bit too likely to be likely.
None of these questions are particularly clarified by this interview with Johnson. But I'll let you know what I think after the reading. (Which reminds me—I enjoy the elliptical way Drew Gardner blogs poetry readings (say here); this may be a model to actively emulate.) Labels: poetry_commentary
Friday, April 09, 2004
The Creeley reading was pretty amazing. He struck me, charmingly, as a person who is utterly bewildered by having produced the work that he's produced: he reiterated several times that he doesn't have a clear sense of what his own poems mean, or even that he himself is genuinely the author of them. He suggested that writing exists outside of one's self, and then comes into the world by being sort of channeled through the artist, who may exert no more intentionality than just sort of stepping aside.
From my notes:
"Writing is as much how do you get to it, how do you find your way to it—once you get to it there's no problem."
"One thinks that because one wrote something that one wrote it—not so simple!" This seems in accord with what Sluk wrote about ideas coming from the unconscious mind—if I train myself, as a writer, to "find" my unconscious / let those unconscious intuitions through (harder than it sounds), then, in a very real way, "I" did not write the poem (if we take "I" to mean the bundled assertions / beliefs / strategies / whatever that constitute my conscious self).
There's another interesting thing that Creeley does that I still can't quite put my finger on: something to do with the way he freeley uses words that other poets might reject as banal or exhausted. There's an argument that I want to make here about individual words as "machines" ("micropoems?") and Creeley poems, aware of words functioning on this level, operate as assemblages of these independent units—but then I wonder if I'm not thinking too hard about it.
I also enjoyed the reading because I knew a lot of the people there... people I know from UIC; people familiar from Discrete Series events; people I met in Arizona during my UIC days who are now in Chicago. Going to an event an recognizing a fair percentage of the crowd always gives me a good feeling, there's something vaguely communal about it. Or maybe it is recognizing my membership in a closed cultural group.
Or is it so closed after all? I've grown really interested, lately, in how the Internet is affecting contemporary poetic culture. The Internet is enabling a national (international probably) discussion among poets on a scale that has not really been seen before—we could say it is intensifying the culture. But we could also say (arguably) that it is opening the culture to outsiders: the Internet is, after all, an open network.
Poetic culture, in the past, could perhaps be described as an invisible college, a "group of peers ... who band around a shared interest" (thanks to Black Belt Jones for my introduction to this concept).
The Internet turns invisible colleges into what people are calling "echo chambers": social networks which allow like-minded people to come together to agree (or to argue).
As you might guess from the pejorative name, echo chambers are often critiqued as being insular spaces, feedback systems where all of the participants mutually reinforce one another to the point of myopia. But others point out that since echo chambers operate within an architecture which is accessible and open, other people can look in, comment, and critique, injecting a heterogeneous element that keeps the system evolving...
Tools for thought, anyway. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing
Friday, April 02, 2004
A few days ago, I wrote about how I enjoy reading poetry that, in some way or another, resists the impulse to directly communicate meaning.
Critics of this type of poetry will often be found voicing some variant of the familiar "anybody could do that" complaint. Just throw some random words together, how hard could it be?
Now, poetry of this sort isn't always as "random" or "meaningless" as it might first appear, but I'm going to set that aside for the moment and just point out that trying to create something that doesn't rely on familiar structures or meanings is actually more difficult than it might appear.
Homer: Jazz, pfft. They just make it up as they go along. I could do that: dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee -- Part of why I find poetry very difficult to write is that I'm primarily a narrative writer—that's great for fiction, but I'm not particularly interested in writing narrative poetry—if I want to write narrative, I'm going to write fiction, or maybe a prose poem. When I try to write something more lyrical or something experimental I have enormous difficulty resisting the tide pulling me back towards narrative, towards meaning.
My solution, recently, has been to take a tablet with me to bed, and to write out a quick draft of a poem as soon as I wake up in the morning, or when I wake up in the middle of the night. I've written maybe a dozen of these poems over the last two months, and while I'd stop short of saying that they're great poems, I do find that they show more strange (dreamlike) juxtapositions and unexpected associations than my normal writing, with an internal coherence that's quite loose, a refreshing change from the forwards-moving narrative logic that keeps the fiction integrated.
An interesting experiment, all in all. If I work up the nerve I'll post a few of the better ones here. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing
Friday, March 05, 2004
As I've mentioned here before, I'm teaching an Intro to Lit course this semester. This is the first time I've taught Intro to Lit, and it's been an interesting experience so far. The really interesting thing (for me) has been that this course marks the first time I've attempted to teach poetry. I read a decent amount of poetry, and I have a rudimentary set of thoughts about what makes a poem "good," but I've never before been faced with the need to formalize those opinions into something that can be understood by a room full of teenagers.
As a result, I've spent the new year reading poetry, almost exclusively—when I've been reading prose, it's mainly been prose written by poets. A particularly exhilirating read has been Charles Olson's Collected Prose, especially the volume Human Universe, which is written in a urgent visionary style that recalls some of Philip K. Dick's loopier nonfiction writings—Olson, like Dick, has the ability to compel me into believing (temporarily) that everything in the entire modern world is crucially predicated on some ancient secret that is both utterly esoteric yet somehow in plain sight all the time.
I haven't yet managed to tackle the first volume in the book, a long exegesis of American incantation Moby Dick, but what I've read so far has been a lot of fun.
I want to write something about William Carlos Williams here, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Labels: poetry_commentary
Thursday, February 12, 2004
"In the Icelandic skalds too much clarity is considered a technical fault. The Greeks also required the poet's word to be dark ... Modern schools of lyric ... with their restricted circle of readers ... are a closed cultural group of very ancient descent."
—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens I'm teaching Intro to Lit for the first time this semester, which means that for pretty much the first time ever I'm attempting to teach poetry. It's an interesting experience. It feels a little bit like my job is to induct a few of these students (and it will be a select few) into that closed cultural circle Huizinga is describing...
College profs often say that you should never try to teach the writers you love the most, because invariably (the truism goes) your students will be bored or indifferent to these writers, and your heart will break. I'm starting to realize that as much as I love the John Ashbery poems in the anthology we're using, I cannot teach them: my appreciation for them is so fundamental that I do not know how to explain them adequately to anyone who is not my double.
That said, here's a nice introductory essay, in the form of a review of a John Ashbery audio-book.
Labels: poetry_commentary, teaching
Friday, January 30, 2004
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