the spectrum
Sunday 25 January 2009 | 61 cookies in the jar
I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names. [...] All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private–school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the
Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? ‘This great book,’ ‘this worthless book,’ the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring–rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea–bite in comparison. (Happy birthday, Virginia! from A Room of One’s Own)
Over the summer I was drawn into observing and trying to understand and, to the best of my ability, analyse the current baffling hostilities between U.S. contemporary poetry tribes who like to label their own and each others’ work with strange and often dated terms/slurs such as SoQ/quietist, hybrid, neoformalist, multiformalist, flarf, conceptual, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, postmodern, post-postmodern, avant-garde, post-avant-garde, soi-disant avant-garde, assholes, &c. I’m not going to link you through to all of this, because most of you wisely don’t care [and you may not want to read the whole of this post], and the one or two of you who DO care already know where you can keep up with and/or ignore the literary mud-slinging.
Quite frankly, I’d had no idea there were so many poet-readers who enjoyed pitting, say, John Ashbery and Billy Collins against one another in fantasy wrestling matches, the two locked in an empty imaginary room and left to duke it out mano a mano, not even armed with trademark tropes like rhyming couplets or disjointed imagery. Who knew that populism and rarefaction were so opposed to one another’s existence—that they believed this town was not big enough for the both of them—that they were compelled, like matter and antimatter, to destroy one another and the literary universe along with them, as in that old black-and-white-cookie Star Trek episode starring Frank Gorshin? I’d had no idea. But then who am I to talk, being a resigned omnivore—sexually, spiritually, dietarily, nationally, linguistically, and, it turns out, aesthetically as well. I guess that’s why The Breakfast Club can comfortably coexist with Das Boot or A bout de soufflé on my mental list of buddy movies; or why the Brujo’s musical philosophy of Inside/Out made patent, obvious good sense to me. Bluntly put, snobbery is really interesting until you’re about 25 or 30 and then, if you have all your faculties intact, you eventually start to notice that a) really smart people like all kinds of things, and b) other really smart people dislike things which were liked by the first smart people, so c) who the hell do you think you are, and finally d) what are you missing out on because you’re so busy being a snob? Some of the things I’ve missed out on included people who adored me, Christianity, Mexico, and far too many aesthetic experiences.
In the eighties, one of my first philosophy professors interrupted our ethics seminar’s Socrates-bashing by pointing out, dryly, “Maybe we should begin by assuming that Plato is at least as smart as we are.” So that if there are holes through which you could drive a chariot in Socrates’ arguments, maybe the author was aware of that? Maybe, in fact, the text is deliberately working on more levels than just, which bloody side are you on. Even though most of the dialogues slyly, misleadingly invite you to do exactly that. I’ve used this heuristic of humility in the twenty years since a Thomist ethics professor named Janet (with a moustache and seven kids) gave it to me. I’ve used it gratefully in reading submissions for magazines and I’ve used it in reading angry emails from friends or lovers or students or administrators, and I used it yesterday trying to read Lowell and see what I’m missing, because I’m almost certainly missing quite a bit. Because, per Joe, “Poetry knows more than we do,” and because, per me, frankly? I don’t have the time to be proud.
I’ve probably misunderestimated the argument entirely, and am reducing it to my Easy-Piano version; but this is what I saw and see.
Anyway, after months of close observation, and occasionally venturing timid opinions myself, or more accurately non-opinions, because as the all-American love child of Stein and Frost I don’t really have a dog in this fight, I’ve decided that paying too much, i.e., any, attention to all the class-based arm-wrestling by which (primarily American) sides and schools publicly gauge one another’s merit is, unsurprisingly, ultimately artistically unhelpful.
Like anything interesting, the answer is: It’s a both. Since this is not a poetry blog, I’m free to declare that all these worthy antagonists probably just need a good dose of dialectical behavioral theory to sort ‘em out. A basic acceptance of the nonexclusivity of existence. That there are no sides; that there is no ornamental pot; that Frank Gorshin’s terrifying bipolarity was caused with greasepaint; and that the universe will not explode into teeny tiny pieces if one likes both boys and girls.
Of course, ignoring all this is also presumably very tricky, if one wants readership. For as Woolf says herself, in the same book:
It is all very well for you…to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. [...] I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very, unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Well, but let’s be straight up here—how much readership has my poetry ever had anyway? Or poetry in general for that matter? So, what do I have to lose? Alors, here goes nothing: my one official entry into this argument. Enjoy; or ignore. After all, we’re all all in for oblivion anyway.
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1. It’s time to divulge that I’m a firm believer in spectra.
Spectra as theoretical frameworks allow me to have my cake and eat it too (and besides, once you eat it, don’t you still have it—just invisibly but safely kept in your stomach?). Spectra make it possible for me not merely to tolerate a world which holds both Robert Hass and Ron Silliman, not just to grimly accept a species capable of producing both Wordsworth and Blake, of coming up with both Cecil Taylor and Bill Evans, but to exult in and give ardent thanks for that fact. My unwavering faith in spectra explains why the virulence of the canon wars in the ’80s baffled me even then—because, um, why can’t we just teach Shakespeare and Toni Morrison in our first-year syllabi? (Which is in fact exactly what everyone started to do, once they were finally done hurling textbooks sulkily at one another).
Spectra give permission; they create space for actual conversation, as opposed to the paralyzed stasis of agonistic debate. Spectra are antithetical to stichomythia; though I guess saying that creates a new oppositional structure; and so on, ad Hegelium, ad infinitum. But for its moment the spectrum’s archetypical arcoiris offers an ideal model for, e.g., human sexuality (perhaps why gay activists adopted the rainbow?) and other intuitively defined, non-binary phenomena of actually living (cf. the absurd and irresolvable debate about “when life begins,” as though something as multivalent and polymorphous as life could be treated like a circuit breaker).
Thus I propose a primitive spectrum of contemporary poetics. It is so rudimentary that it already exists, in fact. And this spectrum reflects not only the poem on the page in front of us, but also serves as a typology of the poet herself, whether by nature or training.
In keeping with the class-driven agonisms of our time, let’s put the formalist quietists on the Arizona-red, far-right end of the spectrum; and the avant-garde California-blue folk on the left. Blue for coastal waters, red for burnt-out Midwestern croplands. Lovely.
In this schema, then, infrared represents the most accommodating, audience-friendly work imaginable—art in which the artist does 99% of the work and the audience only has to chip in 1%. And ultraviolet, then, stands for the most audience-unfriendly, oppositional artistic work of which you can conceive, in any genre: the most unwatchable, unlistenable, unreadable. Its aural equivalent might be the sound of bones snapping mixed with nuclear explosions and/or cats making love and/or war. (Try not to think to yourself that this is an exact description of your least favorite popular music, or that it’s just what early critics said of twelve-tone composers, etc.) Unless, of course, you prefer music like that; in which case its aural equivalent for you might be, say, Stan Getz or Wynton Marsalis. While its visual equivalent—? Would be too horrific to describe, no matter where you found yourself personally in the spectrum.
Everyone is born already located somewhere along the spectrum. You’re born into this world as a light turquoise, maybe, instinctively drawn to the sound of rocks falling onto the tin roof of your house. But wait—where were you born? In Bali? Where everyone likes gamelan? So maybe you’re a toasty orange there; but if you’re born in Idaho in 1953, you’re mallard green. What if you’re a painter, and even as an infant you’re instinctively attracted to Egon Schiele and anatomy illustrations, instead of the little fluffy bunnies your mother painted optimistically on the side of your crib? Or, what if you’re raised in concretist Soviet Russia with a hunger for the ornamented decadent furbelows of Italian opera? What if you grow up in East Texas, surrounded by George Jones and Hee Haw, and you privately brood over illustrations of the Kirov and the Bolshoi, their classical coolness?
Man is born free, with wildly non-preferential tastes; and everywhere she is in chains. And I’ve been grappling with this morass ever since I trotted out my little narrative prose poems to my neo-formalist undergrad thesis supervisor, who all but picked them up by the corners, distastefully.
[Does all this stem from the fact that neo-formalist starts with the same prefix as neo-con, both groups self-identifing during the Reagan/Thatcher era? And as for the word quietist, what's so terrible about a) clearing up pseudo-problems or b) celebrating "absorption of the soul into the Divine," anyway?]
2. It’s time for a grade-school science experiment!
Directions: Place three shallow pans in front of you in a row, and fill them with water. Into the pan on the left, pour hot water. Into the one on the right, ice-cold water. And the one in the center, fill it with tepid, room-temperature water. Goldilocks and the three piepans. You can see where this is going.
Rest your left and right hands in the pans closest to them for as long as you can bear the discomfort. Then, test the temperature of the water in the middle pan. Is it cold? Left hand says, freezing! Or is it hot? Right says, I’m burning alive!
3. In the West, we resolve our agonistic perceptual dilemmas differently from the East (when we bother to resolve them at all); but both world cultures still have them, omnipresent in human endeavor. It must be so, otherwise the symbol of the yin and the yang would be meaningless, and I wouldn’t have been able to teach Matsukaze alongside Antigone with such success (when I taught world drama to Native American art students in 2003). Of course we have enough in common to appreciate each other’s ends of the spectrum. It ought not need saying. Otherwise I wouldn’t be at two thousand words already.
4. Oleoptene sometimes plays the opposites game with her youngest son. The results are completely obvious to him, and delightfully freakish to her, and to me secondhand. I can only recall two right now: “What’s the opposite of ear?” His immediate reply: “The other ear!” And “What’s the opposite of blue?” “Red!” (Cf. Richard Wilbur asking somewhere: “What’s the opposite of succotash?”)
5. I can summarize all I want to say about using the spectrum as a theoretical rulers, as follows: One woman’s Billy Collins is another man’s Ron Silliman.
What’s inscrutable and pointlessly hideous to you is translucent and ravishingly orderly to me.
Your 49 percent (the poet’s not working hard enough, the reader’s having to do all the work) is my 51 percent (that’s all I’m giving; you have more than enough; you’re extremely sophisticated, tender in sentiment and penetrating in wit, which is the only kind of reader I’m inviting over for dinner this decade anyway).
• Your oppositional is my accommodating.
• Your Barry Manilow is my Marquis de Sade.
• Your avant-garde bohemia is my reactionary bourgeoisie.
• My late twentieth century is your late nineteenth century.
• They were infinitely more shocked by Manet than we will ever, ever be by Andreas Serrano.
On another planet in the future, Manilow may well cause rioting in theaters.
6. Further corollaries:
• Questions of audience cannot decide questions of aesthetics.
• For me, anyway.
• As long as I know what I’m giving up.
• Which I do.
• Because I let the terrorists win SO LONG AGO.
Everyone remembers “silence, exile, and cunning” from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But not as often do you hear quoted Stephen’s sentence right below that, indelible for me at twenty: “I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
I’m not afraid of having no readership. I already have no readership. How will it differ when I am sixty from the way it stings now, already a mournful ache as I near forty? But I can only imagine that it will be different, and worse than I currently can imagine; just as twenty years have schooled me in the exact, literal, gross, chthonic details of what Dedalus has to fear.
7. Readership is by nature procrustean. And against what measurement are poems stretched and/or cropped? Well, when I’m the one teaching or reading or just generally obnoxiously holding forth as now, it’s probably some Ur-poem like the ones I memorized and pored over, wide-eyed, in my garage-sale college anthologies as a girl. Maybe Roethke or Yeats, maybe Browning or Frost. Or “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke” by Thomas Wyatt. Sure, there were always a couple of poems toward the end of the thick book, poems by “LeRoi Jones,” poems that scared me, so I politely ignored them. There certainly wasn’t any Ron freakin’ Silliman, or even any Allen Ginsberg. The Dickinson, of course, was safely bowdlerized (so like others I went for decades disliking “her,” because we hadn’t ever met). From among Blake and Christopher Smart and Coleridge, from among our beautiful broken van Gogh crazies, only the more decent and comprehensible had been selected. My favorite of these anthologies (my dad would take me to thrift stores and garage sales on weekends; there wasn’t any other way for me to find or read poetry, in rural East Texas in the seventies; surely there must have been some at the library? but I can’t even remember the poetry section there) was Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine—taking the title of his hoary Procrustean anthology from Pope, of course:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense….
Wild guess: which was more important to Perrine?
He claimed, both. (He was totally lying.)
8. Having said all this, it is also almost certainly the case that children will never eat sugary breakfast cereal while watching David Lynch on Saturday mornings. Nor will small fry memorize John Ashbery for fifth-grade recitals. (Maybe. I memorized “Some Trees” in 1998, in a desperate effort to appreciate Ashbery, and I can still recite the whole thing.)
In other words, there are explicit variables determining where along the aesthetic spectrum we find ourselves, and when.
• Our personal innate predisposition toward stimuli, preferring some instinctively
• Our collective human instinct toward stimuli—our inherited evolutionary preferences
• The culture into which we find ourselves born
• The historical age of that culture (early representational art vs. abstract decadence)
• Our own chronological age as individuals within that culture
• Our societal roles within our culture (gender/class/employment/)
• Our developmental stage as individuals, irrespective of our age
I believe the first and last more significant in determining our aesthetic preferences than any of the others. But then I would think that, being stuck in/defined by late capitalism.
Cf. the détournement whereby the line “their ancient glittering eyes were gay” (from Yeats’ “Lapiz Lazuli,” a poem which honestly comes by its reading as being offensively Orientalist) is refracted into Michael Magee’s flarfist Google-generated poem “Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay.”
9. So where in the heck is all this going, other than to be some kind of manifesto of individuation of the kind which isn’t really developmentally necessary for me anyway?
I recall, to any of you still gamely reading this, the long intense phone conversation I had with the Professoressa during the whole where-to-go-to-grad-school debate (a debate resolved entirely, in the end, by funding, as most of them usually are). She asked me to recount my driving motivation.
“To learn how to write the poem I don’t know how to write. Right now, I don’t even know how to read it, which is probably why I don’t know how to write it.”
“What kind of poem is that?”
“I guess you’d call it…non-narrative.”
“Do you want to write that way?”
“I don’t know, but right now I couldn’t even if I wanted to; and I want the option.”
“That’s pretty smart.” She was silent a moment. “And, poems are for people like me, too. Don’t forget that. Poems aren’t just for other poets.”
[She’s a politics professor, and currently dean of the college. She gave me books by Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver as gifts when I graduated, and the Seamus Heaney excerpt that’s been hanging over my desk for fifteen years now, wherever I’ve lived: "Your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite...."]
Only here’s the thing:
All poems have both narrative elements as well as those which are non-logical, musical, magical, imagistic, stochastic, when “poem” is defined as “an expression of language which contains both of those kinds of elements in some combination.” Which I am. Defining it as that.
10. When you first make a quilt, you make it to be warm, because air comes through the gaps in the rags when you strew them over yourself at night. Hey, you think eventually, I could sew these together!
Then perhaps hundreds of years go by and you begin to make a quilt for reasons of technical prowess: not just a plain nine-patch, but a flawless nine-patch. Not just flying geese, but variations on the friendship star. Not just whole-cloth, but trapunto or matelassé.
Finally, depending on your tradition or cultural matrix or degree of personal obstinacy, you might get bored with perfection and start aiming for nonfunctional effect. Or affect.
You start to repiece and overstitch thinking only of color, shape, line, texture. “Quilt” might lose its meaning as “useful warm nightcovering” and become nothing more nor less than the combination of fabric and batting and thread and air, or none of these, or bottlecaps and tinfoil and plastic wrap or used tires or lumber. Become a canvas made entirely of holes, or a blank page; or a poem entirely about poetry (as all poems are anyway).
11. The Duende said to us in workshop: Language will visit you many times and make you lucky many times. Anyone can write a great poem once—language takes care of us that way. But to do it again, to be able to do it reliably, you need to have a capacity for self-criticism even if you can’t put it into words. You need an architecture to structure your work. Once you’ve done so, though, you will be lonelier. You will have fewer and fewer people to look up to.
To me he said: You have something to offer yourself that you aren’t accepting.
12. I came back into the academy assuming that the poem I don’t know how to write is dark blue—that the poem I don’t yet know how to write would be more disconnected from the event, more melopoeic and phanopoeic than logopoeic, the written equivalent of Ornette Coleman or late Coltrane.
But maybe it’s the unloved plain red poem I can’t write, the one that seems dismissable and simple but which is just waiting for you to step back from it so it can kick you in the stomach. Maybe I’ll die being unable to pull off the poems that still make me cry in class though I try to hide it.
13. Anyway, the poem doesn’t care whether I can write her or read her or even think her. She laughs and runs out barefoot to the chicken pen, scattering feed behind her.
14. Please refer to the attached page from the John Thompson Grade III Piano Instruction Book, which I include mostly because it cracks me up every time I read it, especially the last sentence, dripping with an uncomfortable syrupy avuncular unctuousness: “Naturally it is the fervent hope of the author that all students using this book may develop into young artists.” Somehow this recalls veal pens, or pâté de foie gras. And actually it is deeply relevant, to me anyway, in its entirety; but it is not really excerptable (well, or maybe “Style”?).
15. From Anne Carson’s introduction to “Short Talks,” emphasis mine:
Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. One day someone noticed there were stars but no words, why? I’ve asked a lot of people, I think it is a good question. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well, it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called “audacity” that poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
16. From The Triggering Town, by Richard Hugo:
If I say something that helps, good. If what I say is of no help, let it go. Don’t start arguments. They are futile and take away from our purpose. As Yeats noted, your important arguments are with yourself. If you don’t agree with me, don’t listen. Think about something else.
When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult…. If the second attitude is right, then I still have a job. Let’s pretend it is right because I need the money. Besides, if you feel truth must conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean, but love the sounds of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can go on writing—try to stop us.
One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form. [...] Depend on rhythm, tonality, and the music of language to hold things together. It is impossible to write meaningless sentences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout. [I've always wondered if he's thinking of Schubert here—]
Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
When you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.
You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.
17. In the last year of this crazy MFA experiment, it’s seemed at times that I’m energetically rowing toward the open sea of continuing privacy/hermiticism, with one professor (the freewheeling Walt Whitman) waving gaily bye-bye; while the other one (the Duende) stands in thigh-high water and holds firmly onto the boat’s side, hauling me back toward the shore of friendly public readership. So that in effect I get nowhere. Or, I get somewhere that feels like nowhere.
I still don’t like what I’m writing. And I really don’t like what I am not-writing. It gets confusing, because on the one hand I think my readers are telling me to write it; and on the other hand I observe that every time I try, they’re warmly and kindly telling me I should stop.
18. Right, so, hello, the spectrum? What happened to your argument here?
Obviously, I don’t really have one, or not an overt one. Any argument I’m making here is absentmindedly associative rather than linear. Not a spectrum even so much as patchwork. But sometimes it occurs to me that maybe, in a hundred years, if bipeds are around that long, the virulent flame-wars between the quietists and the post-avants will be long forgotten despite the oppositions which now seem so critical and acute. Maybe we’ll all be lumped in together peaceably between covers, simply known as “the Pre-Apocalyptics” or “the Carbon Emissions Age” or “the Late Capitalists” or “the Last Biohumans” or who knows what. We don’t really get to know.
19. Often, see, Zen teachers give their students mutually exclusive instructions. This isn’t so much because they’re fucking with you as it is because they’re completely immersed in the nondual and to them there’s no distinction. Work more!—Don’t work so hard. Try harder!—Stop trying. Be perfect!—Hey, you should make a few mistakes now and then. &c. Eventually you either run screaming out of the monastery or you get it (or both, in my case): Praise and blame are interchangeable and therefore meaningless.
And here I am, back in the university and hither and yon upon the Internet, reaping assorted praise and blame, and still looking for more of one than the other. Being human sure is fun.
It seems distracting maybe that I started talking about teachers, but all teachers are is a kind of reader to whom we typically give a lot of procrustean authority. The Duende said, “Think about what you want, and don’t be closed off by thinking that you have to use the ways you’ve historically used to get there.” Then when I experimentally do exactly this, he seems to wish I had not done so. He attempts to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain, which is one thing I roundly detest about the workshop as a form of readership. But you let yourself in for this treatment every time you load the machine with paper and hit “Print”—or “Publish”—or “Submit.” Think of Nietzsche’s cheering “Pangs of conscience after parties”:
Why do we feel pangs of conscience after ordinary parties? Because we have taken important matters lightly; because we have discussed people with less than complete loyalty, or because we were silent when we should have spoken; because we did not on occasion jump up and run away; in short, because we behaved at the party as if we belonged to it. (Human, All-too-Human, §351)
For parties, it turns out, one may substitute workshops. Or, maybe, poetry blog comment streams. Further self-study errata:
For “taking important matters lightly,” substitute “blundering through debates of crucial aesthetic issues in an (inevitably) cursory manner.” For “discussing people with less than complete loyalty,” insert “mouthing off about noted poets/schools of poetry as if I knew anything at all about them.” For “silent” and “should have spoken,” insert “not silent” and “should not have spoken.” (Because why do I always feel I have to say something? No one’s going to be impressed, especially if I don’t understand the work under discussion in the first place. And maybe nothing needed to be said, or had already been said by someone else; or the poem was actually doing just fine on its own.) And finally, for “behaved…as if [I] belonged to it,” substitute “belonged to it.” (Because au fond, all U.S. poets under forty are now irrefutably children of the workshop.)
Nonetheless, that the Duende or anyone is wiling to read my writing at all is, at least in theory, permission-giving. Which is all any writer needs from her readers and fellow scribblers, dead or living. That they say: YES. That they say it loudly and confidently and often. I think about various teacher-thanking passages from Zen literature, which are interesting when you consider that Zen students are people who get very little sleep and scrub a lot of floors and never say anything for days except for the one word “Hai!” which of course means…yes. Like this one bit from Thomas Cleary’s Timeless Spring:
A teacher is a person who waits for you outside your agenda, outside the script into which you are always trying to write the world. The disciple is a home-leaver, water without a course. But water has the power, which cannot be taken away from it, to find its own course. Each disciple, each committed student of Buddha, is water finding its own course.
In short, you gotta walk this lonesome valley. You gotta walk it by yourself. But that’s okay, because there are 45,000 words in a pencil.
20. Finally. Is this finally? I think it has to be finally, since I haven’t done the reading for the class I’m teaching tomorrow and it’s nearly one p.m. and I’ve been at it since about 9 a.m. and the laundry’s not done and the dishes aren’t done and the lunch-ingredient groceries aren’t bought and I’m still wearing the same sweatpants I donned Thursday night.
Yet I’m relunctant to let go, not sure how much of this hangs together, if in fact any of it does. I guess I’ll take Dick Hugo’s advice and suggest that maybe all this stuff has in common is that it’s flown in and out of my brain during the last few months. There’s another old Zen saying, though I don’t know where I got it: Poetry is the dumb Buddha who doesn’t know the difference between a donkey and a diamond. Sounds about right to me.
I’ve been greatly heartened by the Kenyon Review’s interview with Dana Levin, which crystallizes for me into something satisfyingly distilled and piercing when she quotes Brenda Hillman (“soft avant-garde”) from Loose Sugar:
A power came up; it was in between the voices.
It said you could stop making sense.
Because Jungians, and Zen students, and DBT practitioners, and quilters, and poets? We don’t have to pick sides. Which is why we like doing our practices. I don’t know where this advice might take me if I follow it—letting go of the worry about sounds making sense, about being pretty, about showing off whatever craft I have, about exhibiting artifice, mastery [sic], control. Dana goes on to say, in a passage that makes me nearly swoon, it speaks so aptly:
This comes to mind so often precisely because I am so wedded to sense: not “sense” in terms of a poem being understandable, accessible, plain-spoken, etc., but “sense” in terms of what will serve (the pragmatic approach again). I want, as a reader, to be able to put experimentation to work, to apply it to something other than itself. To make a medicine of it. To understand its necessity to the human condition. And of course, such an impulse is very counter to not making sense. As an experimenting writer (and really, what writer worth his or her salt isn’t experimenting), you have to spend a lot of time feeling around for the edges, the shape, of the new thing you’re discovering: any early attempt to understand and declare its “point” can stunt its growth.
But, y’know, I could just be a dense reader, in terms of not getting what the experimental piece in front of me is good for, how it will serve us. And usually it’s helpful for “nonsense” to smack me upside the head, rip the cobwebs out. “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” says Wallace Stevens. It’s the relation part I’m looking for when I read avant work. Stevens also says, “The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully”; the “almost” is the important part of that statement.
21. Part of my own spectrum-position-determining criteria: I have no books published, I’m halfway through my third master’s program and I’m two months away from my fortieth birthday. The Brujo admitted plaintively last night, pulling on his socks before our post-nicotine celebration (involving walking to the Dhaba, eating subzi and deconstructing videos like “Tunak Tunak Tan,” and then returning home and promptly to our clothingless state), “I kinda want to know where we’ll be living next year.” I sighed and agreed, wrestling on my own socks, though thinking in the back of my mind: I just kinda want to know that we’ll be living next year. Either way it plays out, I would be best served by bending my attention to honoring both the cobwebs and their forcible, purposive ripping out. To do this, I’m going determinedly to ignore the donnybrook over at Harriet and elsewhere. I have too much ignorance to make up, and not a lot of time left for playing rhetorical noughts-and-crosses with senior poets who are a lot more educated than I will ever be.
Besides, there’s only really ever one other player in the game:
And yes of course it is a game. But it is a game, like all our human playing, of the utmost seriousness and gravity. And it comes in lots of colors, and I don’t feel like singling out or lionizing any one of them as a favorite. Oddly, it turns out that Daler Mehndi, the jolly guy in the Punjabi video, is singing: “The world is a colorful place / it’s not good nor bad.” Besides, there’s enough stuff in the universe, i.e. everything, already militating against my writing a single word. The last thing I need is to furnish myself with still more narrow parameters.
Here is a poem. Thanks for spending some time with me and with all this.
•
The Moon
—for S.
We all love the finger pointing to the moon:
the university points to literature, which points
to the poem, which points to language, which
points to the angels who, despite all our most
disparaging assessments, still live on the moon.
We all believe that our finger is the best finger,
the right finger, the only finger pointing truly.
We look at our finger, we admire it; we crow,
“The best! Ours is the best! The best is this one!”
But the finger is there to point. It is not the point.
61 cookies in the jar
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wow. I just stopped by by chance (while strolling around the internet)…a giant AMEN to all this sistah!
And an AMEN from you is worth a lot, lady! I’m blushin’ ovah heah.
I apologize for my perpetual obnoxiousness regarding the moon and the innumerable fingers which are not apart from it.
Please post/send syllabus for Hot Babes and the End of the World course. Please.
Also women finally get to study What Women Want. It turns out we’re not so concerned about the gender of those we shag, we like it a bit rough, and perhaps we don’t want to shag quite so often as men. Remember when “science proved” that applying heat to the lower abdomen reduces subjective experience of menstrual pain, and some of us wondered just how much public money was spent on that study?
Actually the article does elicit some interesting questions which I shan’t go into here because I feel like not sitting at my computer any more. Angry menstrual fairies and fog migraine me.
Dude, I have no idea why you’re apologizing for inspiring my poem. Move that finger outta my way!
I see you went right to the part of the post where I talk about me and the Brujo gettin’ nakey. Heh, heh. My one point of contention with the Times article is, excuse me, since when do women not want to shag more than men?! Otherwise, absolutely I’m reminded of my favorite Onion headline: “Study Shows Poor People Are Fucked.” Beautiful obviousness.
Lisa Diamond’s work looks interesting, in re: hasbians.
And then there’s this: “…a German company in the late stages of testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin.” Um, some late-stage advice? DO NOT LET GERMANS NAME DRUGS.
In process of setting up modest, discrete listserv for End of the World course. Still trying to keep public and private lives separate, vainly, in the age of overexposure and Janet Jackson’s left nipple.
FOOTNOTES:
1) I forgot to mention that, for my money (such as it isn’t), the feudin’ between farmer and cowman is obviously inflamed by what Zen people call, tuttingly, “having a mind of poverty”: a sense that resources are scarce. Understandably so—everyone gets Hobbesian when there’s not much cornmeal left, right?
Well, except we don’t; not invariably. Miracle on the Hudson! The B. came home from work and told me about planes landing on ice and people being orderly and prompt and decisive and everyone being saved, and we both stood in the backyard glowing, however momentarily, with admiration for our kind. Amanda Ripley must’ve been pleased too.
[And in fact it turns out she was.]
“OMG, people actually WORK!”
“I know! We’re not totally broken!”
2) Then too there’s the problem of that perceived insecurity—what Steven Pinker would note is the way we chronically misapply small-scale, evolutionarily appropriate metaphors (we’re running out of cornmeal) to large-scale problems (economics, aesthetics). Bandwidth may be finite; but poets have hardly used up any. I would imagine there’s plenty to go around. But forming gangs/territorial behavior—these have been around longer even than Poetry magazine and, however the Brujo mocks me for being reductionist, I think the very strenuousness of the argument shows how closely connected it is to our hardwired taste for tribal politics.
From Charles Bernstein: “There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies; no music to our verse but vastly incompatible musics; no single sentiment but clashes of sentience: the magnificent cacophony of different bodies making different sounds, as different as the hum of Hester Street from the buz of Grand Coulee, the buzz of Central Park on August agertnoons from teh shrieks of oil-coated birds in Prince William Sound.”
It is more than relativism. I may find Ray Armantrout difficult or easy the same way I find Donald Hall difficult or easy. This is fine. But in the story of POETRY, the story that hangs over our heads when we write, the story our 210 students carry with them as they wander into our classes wanting to write this thing they’ve come to know as a POEM–which stories are privileged and which have been excluded?
It’s more than just bragging writes in the canon, because the choices reflect real ideological distinctions, distinctions that are not relative and often disguised in the mask of aesthetics (see Terry Eagleton’s argument about what we come to call Literature for example).
Look at the list of Poet Laureates for the last however many years. Nothing wrong with these poets. But look who isn’t there and that says everything about why the debate about poetic schools matters.
You know — your piepanology experiment pretty much hits the nail on the head with my hypothesis of why conservatives believe the media is liberally biased.
When you believe that right-wing politics is “normal”, then everything that is ANYWHERE left of you will be perceived as “liberal” — even if it was actually more moderate or even conservatively moderate. (i.e. take random person from the street — compare to Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity. ’nuff said)
And yes — that quote from Obama was absolutely glorious. It made me very happy. :)
Ah, driamond, I knew I could count on you!
Have you been following all this, though, across the couple dozen blogs where it’s most virulent? Because the positions are pretty entrenched, which is a sign to me that it’s probably, as the B. and I call the phenomenon, “affect looking for content”; and the rhetoric’s increasingly spittle-flecked and hysterical, adjectives I do not use lightly. Debating historical privilege is one thing, I guess, though it seems like most of that’s been done already and we’ve understood that the establishment is never going to throw open its doors to the cutting edge, cos then it wouldn’t be the establishment any more now would it; but senseless ad hominem carryin’ on is really entirely another.
I might not personally dig, say, Robert Pinsky’s work (and I very much object to its being included in my “postmodern literature” syllabus), but I don’t want to, you know, drag his fans into a field and beat them with shovels. Not yet, anyway.
And I still think your Rae Armantrout might prove to be my Donald Hall.
Wow, there’s a lot here (she says, obviously). I’m working on a post that’s been brewing for a while, and there’s a lot here that resonates with some of the ideas I’ve been knocking around about art (particularly my art, but y’know, that which applies to one completely impractical thing tends to apply to others).
Having been out of the scholarly scene for a few years, I’m bound to ask – what in the name of Jiminy is “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E”?
@aaron le forte: Piepanology! I knew it had a name.
Yes, piepanology is mighty useful for all kinds of applications…the funny thing about it, however, is that one of course runs the constant risk of being accused of being conservative; strange, isn’t it? For an argument that’s actually all about NOT being conservative. But the faux-wide-eyed, hands-spread gesture of an apparent “why can’t we all just get along” sounds a lot to most people like more quietism, just with a different name. I guess it’s an “if you’re not fur us, you’re agin us” kind of thing.
@lisekitten: Oh my, where to start…. Well, here I suppose, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Looking forward to your post, mightily!
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5661
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_poets
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/langpo.html
Well, I’m not sure I see appreciation of diversity as “why can’t we all just get along.”
As someone who continues to promote a space not of hostility, which in Canada seems to be one of the default modes of reviewers alas, this is cast aside as being “un-critical.”
Appreciating difference has nothing to do with a blanket acceptance of work in an uncritical way, it’s approaching all work critically, just not the kind of critical frame that leads to one end, which is a singular view of poetry and poetics is the right one and what doesn’t fit that is wrong no matter where that other view is on a given spread of brilliant to mediocre…
Driamond,
Nice reply. But you say:
Look at the list of Poet Laureates for the last however many years. Nothing wrong with these poets. But look who isn’t there and that says everything about why the debate about poetic schools matters.
Isn’t it perhaps more relevant to discuss the way poetry is discussed rather than further entrench schools?
Oh, to get beyond these smug discussions where the same poets back each other up on the same points…
Ah, Lemon, but of course you didn’t read me as being uncritical…because you are actually reading. A skill which few of us are able to practice. I don’t mean this in that elderly moaning kids-these-days Allan Bloom sort of way (and actually, even Allan BLOOM didn’t mean it that way, though that’s how he was interpreted, which kind of underscores my point, but ANYWAY)—I don’t mean it in, for example, the sense of noting that one of the pillars of our graduate faculty didn’t know who Propertius was. (Which he didn’t.)
But I mean, of course, that there’s more frequently a kind of…wait, what do they call it in AA? “Contempt prior to investigation.” So we humans tend to keep the investigating part pretty short and prefer to leap straight into the evaluation/exegesis. I’ve seen all I need to see, as the casting directors say to the disappointed actors, who didn’t get to finish all of their Hamlet/Ophelia audition piece.
Señor Driamond is dazzlingly widely read, catholic in his tastes, knows exactly who Propertius is, and is pretty much the only person I still trust in workshops to entertain the poem’s logic and agenda before trying to chop it into Procrustean stanzas. I think he’s just cranky because Obama hasn’t appointed him to anything yet.
U.N.: you are an angel of sanity!
Well, hey—I try! ;o) I dig your Millay Project, btw.
My new favorite rhetorical fallacy, just for fun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
Well, I agree that much of this ‘my school of poetry is better than your school of poetry’ is silly and not helpful. But there is something more to it I think, something real that is at stake in these squabbles, or even gained from them.
The problem is really one of perceived ideological neutrality. There is a poetic voice(s) that offers itself as if it is free of the ideological agenda of any poetic school (thus, the insistince on those like Silliman to label it the SOQ, in somewhat hystrical and contradictory ways). It offers itself as just “good poetry,” the kind that gets published in literary journals everywhere, the kind whose practitioners become Laureates and teach at NYU. There is nothing wrong wtih this poetry, but to my mind, the value of the blog-wars is, in part, to make visible that such a poetry, like any poetry, privilges certain values over others. That’s okay as long as we’re all clear about that, that we are aware that there is no value-neutral poetry, no poetry free from the overarching ideology of a certain school/poetic philosophy (whether we can accurately label it or not).
It’s not that my Ann Lauterbach is your Donald Justice…its that these poets, regardless of audience reception, have different objective approaches to what a poem is and can do. And that in the debate/arguments, what is at stake is ensuring that each project for the poem has a place in the discussion. Because there are those that would be happy to blot out certain versions of POEM entirely (rhymes with Zayna Joya).
But yes, I guess I agree, that there are limits to how useful this type of blog-flaming, poetic chest thumping can be.
Poems are born free, and everywhere they are in chains…the funny thing is that each wing of the aesthetic-cum-ideological spectrum claims THEY are the ones being, as Camile Paglia used to say, margarinized. That the OTHER side gets all the poet-in-residence fellowships, etc. Which is kind of odd. Like, you know, Hispanic Republicans; or maybe gays in the military. As in, whoa, wow, I’m sorry—you actually want to be a department chair!
If I ever have a daughter? TOTALLY naming her Zayna Joya.
And PS—of course Zayna/the Duende ain’t the only ones wanting to stamp out certain versions of POEM. You and I just happen to be lucky enough to have the latter twinkling merrily in our little lives! Fa la la la la.
Awwww…now don’t go marrying Zayna to the Duende. I see your point but surely the Duende wouldn’t write something as inane as this. Right? Right???
Weeeelll…no. Because that is indeed jawflappingly silly. He might make some of the same “observations” but he surely wouldn’t begin each paragraph with the rhetorically arresting device: “And my ELEVENTH point is….”
It was admittedly nice, though, to be back in Walt’s classroom last night, even if only to hear him read his most evidently narrative poems. I for one look forward to a semester of not having to make so much goddamned SENSE all the time. Without the whole “Aaaannnnd you lost me!” thing slapping me in the face like a large wet slab of tuna. Though for inexplicable masochistic reasons of my own I did sign up for a practicum with the Duende. NB that most of this post found its way to him in the form of my final paper for his workshop, augmented with a few direct addresses of the “Dude, you have GOT to lay off with the Zayna shtick” variety.
Don’t you think our personal slant on the agon would look mighty different if we were at ANOTHER Arizona State School? Piepanology strikes again! My sense is that if I were down there, I’d be writing sestinas and cursing the aggressive monoculture of Weirdo. Even though in fact the last time I wrote a sestina my age ended in “-teen.”
FINAL PS I swear to God—did you know Elaine Equi’s at NYU now?
I finally got the opportunity to finish this! I wonder if there is further expansion that can happen around the idea of aesthetic spectra: does the backdrop itself move and change? What about the micro-movement, through, say, an anthology or even through Bright Existence (hi, Brenda!) And what about a poet’s own journey through and around the rainbow?
Anyway, I’m just way too little still to have a lot of Opinions (I’m sure that will change) so for now: thank you for article 13.
And for Permission.
I know my comment is late in coming and it isn’t really insightful or pithy, but I just want to say that that applications of #2 as metaphor for some other thing seem limitless, politics, religion, art, really truly limitless and I have been thinking about them everyday since reading it.
@mlle b: Good heavens yes. To the micro-moving-shifting-trembling-ever-mutating rainbow. And our journeys thereunthrough.
@pat: Another convert to the School of Piepanology! Nouahahaha—
I hold back as long as I can on this one, determined to protect myself from the currents and movements and gossippy scenishness that are going to make it impossible for me to read things fairly, unfiltered, with my own take on them, but for this: My own experience of the spectrum is that we like to find things on the spectrum that are, in fact, quite close, and then polarize them. We find friends and partners who are, in the spectrum of personality and interest, all but identical, but once two draw close, there is a dividing of the world among the two. We go along taxonomical trees answering identically and then reach a final branching where we differ and that is the difference that matters. I think there is some churchy joke where doctrinal point after doctrinal point gets ticked off as identical, and then at the last moment there is a difference of which hymnal is used or something and the punchline is something like “You Godless heathen!” We’re much better at contrasting than comparing, we are so in love with our differences.
And you’ve gone and put your little e-finger right on’t, dear, anyway as far as I’m concerned: that an amusing but also deeply telling aspect of this particular agon in contemporary American poetics is that anyone outside the debate is also hopelessly outside being able to understand the hair-splitting. Kind of Tutsi/Hutuish, if you’ll permit that, which you shouldn’t, because I don’t really want to permit it myself. Poets fighting over who gets bigger pieces of the pie? First of all: WHAT FREAKING PIE, and second: Um, you do realize no one can tell you apart but each other, right? And actually one of my biggest obstacles in being a semi-intelligent observer of the whole debate is that I often can’t tell them apart, and thus inadvertently and frequently give offense—I who am supposedly trained in one or the other school (but I switched sides too many times and I don’t remember what I’m supposed to be any more)—I who am a more or less educated reader. If *I* can’t tell ‘em apart, then I say, yea, thou art right; let’s just paint a line down the middle of the church pews and be done with it then!
And now Drian Biamond will impale my head on a stake.
Clearly the poets are just jealous of the schisms that philosophers have dreamt up! I was trying to figure out why this felt so familiar, and realized that part of the reason I felt like such a failure in the philosophy department was that I was always with the reconciling.
•
Rarely appearing editor: Ah, “Mommy is not about the blaming….”
Stupid philosophy department! Don’t know what they lost.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5661
There’s a *new* sentence now?
The old sentence was just so stale and meh and, and, and pre-owned, you know? When with just $100 down and no interest for six months, you can get a brand-new shiny NEW sentence, perfect for all your poetics needs! You don’t even have to move to wartime Paris or buy a standard poodle, either.
which brings us back to Frank Gorshin on Star Trek (an INSPIRED analogy, UN)–
I get so freaked out and fed up and sigh-y about the whole thing (I *am* one of the damned-to-the-SoQ, I think, if we bow to our Great Blog Oz), I end up here:
“I, on the other hand, wish to persist in the state of lively contemplation of nature and of the psychic images…”
C. G. Jung
I can’t tell the difference between Alligators and Crocodiles, but I would hope that zoologists can.
A rose by any other name would not be a rose (Gertrude proved this).
Off with their heads.
If you’re SoQ, Ms. D, then I’m Frank Gorshin!
More to the point, I hope the alligators and crocodiles can tell each other apart, because otherwise we have some problems on our hands.
Right now, considering my own troubled poetics, I can only quote AA Milne:
Speaking of Gertie. Mais ouais, esteemed Driamond—you correctly call my sloppy rhetoric with a strong counterexample. I hope I don’t in any way seem to be advocating deliberate stupidity and/or that kind of historically American anti-intellectual celebration of sludge-like indistinguishability. I will myself prefer the poems of Ms. D to those of Mr. Zoya until my dotage, should I survive the current comment-stream. I judge them (the poems) better; find them arrestingly, productively unexpected and refreshingly unfamiliar, as in, being hit by a truck is refreshingly unfamiliar, yet somehow not incomprehensible, just…novel; and by unfamiliar I also don’t necessarily mean non-narrative, because I don’t really know what non-narrative means anymore—I know what “the kind of narrative the Duende can’t understand” means, and I know what “the kind of narrative that repeatedly does not get me a Stegner or an NEA” means; but I don’t know what it means in any abstract theoretical sense. Which I think I have just amply demonstrated.
Another odd thing about it is how the avantiest plaintiffs, or the plaintiest avanties, seem to be largely straight white tenured guys over fifty.
And we should all go read this right now, because it will make us laugh:
http://donshare.blogspot.com/2009/02/poet-is-museum-of-irrelevance.html
…hey, I finally got round to making that damned post!
It wasn’t that it took me a month to write it, really. It was just that it took me a month to find ONE SINGLE SOLITARY HOUR free in which I could type the thing up.
Whaddyamean, “five weeks isn’t a month”?
And she did and this is it! I think? Is this it, Lise?
http://lisekit.livejournal.com/884719.html
Happy Birthday, Lowe. Since the comments are closed over at Lycanthropia on the post that links to this should-be-well-regarded-and-well-remembered Unreliable post about spectra, I’ll chime in here, VERY late to this party. I need help in areas of aesthetic inclusiveness (as you know, or as you may recall). I don’t agree with everything you say in this post (or in its string of comments), but I do understand there are many things I’m not paying attention to (for reasons stemming from my territorial provincialism)—and that blind spots, while endemic, are not an inalienable right to hold and cherish. Shouldn’t there be spherical spectra (colloquially), or quantum spectra, to help get us past the limitations of line spectra? [a Google image search for a visual aid just proved fruitless]
O well. As you say above: “I would be best served by bending my attention to honoring both the cobwebs and their forcible, purposive ripping out.”
Did I say that? Good heavens, how percipient of me. Still so many cobwebs to be ripped out—
To be honest, I think this all comes across as much more fair-minded than I actually currently feel, with the passage of cruel time. I’m much more in sympathy now (especially after almost two years of having C-e repeatedly rejected) with Drian Briamond (who has also enjoyed swaths of rejection, unfairly, because his ms is freaking amazing IM not so HO, while our colleagues who write poems that are “ABOUT SOMETHING” are getting Stegners and first books and APR spreads and the usual boring rest of it, which such poems always do get, i.e., readership) (except I can’t really claim this because I have colleagues at UH doing really exciting stuff and they too are finding their audiences, in such places as the NYer and the NEA and so forth).
I am only trying to say, but not very well, that I’m enjoying lately being a bit more territorial and provincial than I was previously. And am going to bloody-mindedly go for it. Ripped apart C-e and took out every poem that seemed to me as though it could be accused of being “about something.” I like it much better. We’ll see if editors at places like Slope, Black Lawrence, Diagram, Fence, Saturnalia, Octopus, and Nightboat agree.
If not, one bashes on regardless. Fail better and all that jazz. (As long as it’s, you know, nice NPR-friendly jazz.) I don’t know. I just don’t want to become bitter? But I turned 43 on Friday and I don’t need to tell you how much more tempting bitter becomes with every passing unpublished year. (A very nice friend taking one of the Houses for a wonderful journal somehow doesn’t count? But why don’t I let it? Because it’s OLD and I only want people to love my NEWEST babies.) It gets harder to sort out plain old professional jealousy (very tiresome and persistent mental-formation) with genuine aesthetic “OMG WHY DO THEY WANT TO PUBLISH THAT?!?” horror.
Spherical spectra makes me think of a) Klein bottles and b) soap bubbles. Maybe combined somehow. I’m sure someone at the Institute could visualize this for us.
How are you? Talk to me. The word-world has become a lonely place.
I’ve liked what I’ve found of Mr. D.’s poems online. Can you point me toward what I must not miss of his? Also, of course, to any work of your UH colleagues (or other ASU comrades) that you’ve found engaging.
I’m conversant, unfortunately, with a version of that bitterness. I’ve alienated acquaintances and friends over the past half dozen years with the direction I’ve taken my texts. Even T., my name twin, now Dr. W., says I’ve “abandoned” him, and he won’t read my efforts anymore. I think page thirteen of Karmic will finish everyone off and I can finally sit alone in my weedy yard without fear of visitors (though there is a young poet in Florida—whom I’ve never met—who is unnervingly fond of Karmic and will undoubtedly persist in navigating it with his formidable inclinations—I’m grateful for him).
Congratulations on another bungalow in the block of House being shown to the world. DOE still yields for me and LET. As does C-e and several poems going back to sequin. [Is S.F. now titled C-e and has C-e itself been fragmented?]
I wish I could tar-and-feather every one of those workshop safety-zoners who have tried to corral you.
Have you read any Thomas Bernhard? If not, he’s worth a look (The Loser or Correction are good places to start).
It’s weird, though not totally inappropriate, to be chatting in this out-of-the-way spectrum-corner of the public world. If you want to move to email, we can, but this does allow LET to join us if she wishes.
Thomas Bernhard is on my list, which would now fit comfortably in the hold of the QE2. I am actually, I have to admit, literally still laughing from having just read Meg Wolitzer in the NYT describe the (usually male-authored) long-form novel as “The Big Baggy Book of Me,” albeit laughing guiltily, since I happen to LOVE The Big Baggy Book of Me no matter who writes it. Anyway, the other Brian (fiction writer not poet—but I wouldn’t have made it through ASU without those Brians) has been on me a long time now to get to Bernhard, so.
It is a bit odd, I suppose, to be conversating in the comments thread of a three-years-dead blog; but, we’ve been unconventional/unreadable too long for anyone to care. And as you point out, this way we can have company should anyone choose to chime in, which I hope she/they will.
As far as the poet Brian, you’ve probably found these as well as his translations? We are trying to cobble together an Ezra Pound panel for AWP next year, complicated by the fact that we don’t want it to be all white guys over fifty. (I am declining to be on the panel, more interested in what my mom used to call, “let’s you and him fight.”)
As far as S.F. and C-e…yes, S.F. is kind of gone, and C-e is split into 6 segments, with various creepy nonsensical lyrics interpolated. I like it very much, unfriendly as it is. And, I need to write something new. I think it may be about time to tackle Texas/parents/Xianity, as much as I have feared doing it for lo these many years.
Whatcha workin’ on???
Yes, I’d found those particular Diamonds. Good luck with Pound at AWP and keeping white guys over fifty like me from dominating and ruining the panel. Why not one on Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova instead?
Some of my Brown MFA colleagues (Thalia Field, Ben Marcus, Shelley Jackson, Lucy Corin, Lisa Jarnot, et al) have had some “success” finding audiences in the print world. And a couple undergrads at the time who were students in my classes (Sarah Vap and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum). But only Edwidge Dandicat from that whole group (perhaps many of us thought her the most traditional—not that she would feel comfortable with that loaded word) could be called successful in some standard quantifiable way. No matter. I’ve about made my lifetime peace with the Lords of Indifference—I do my work daily and take boyish delusional comfort from anthemic songs like “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George (youtube will oblige).
What am I working on? The before-mentioned Karmic, which is a letter to the Maker Self. I just finished a thing called Settlement, which is a companion text to an occasionally lovely thing called Wilderness. And since we last communicated (lifetimes ago) there are many other texts gone under the bridge (Meld, Surprise, Structure, Fenestral, et al) and many “more obviously failed” efforts gone by the wayside (Stetted, Saint Timothy, American.Quintet, Valence, Strata, Brickwork, etc.—an ugly list). My site is just a pale yellow and gray and greenish Big Baggy Compendium of Me.
I like unfriendly texts. The friendly ones always make me feel like they’re trying to sell me another assembly-line product I don’t need.
Xianity? Replacing Christ with a treasure symbol? Or the marks of illiterates?
God, if ONLY our panel could be dominated and ruined by white guys like YOU. It’s the other kind that bother me.
“Move On” used to be one of my audition songs, back in the silly days of undergrad musical-theatre ambitions. Along with a speech from Rosalind, of course. Utterly predictable. And that song is wholly Bernadette’s anyway.
I’m sorry it’s taken me so bloody unforgivably long to approve your comment and (sort of, halfassedly) respond. Suffice it to say all holy hell has broken loose in my life, from an unexpected quarter and without any precedents, and I don’t know what to do, and I can’t even tell anyone what’s going on yet, and it is all a Big Hilarious Mess. When I eventually ‘fess up, though, I somehow trust you will forgive me for the lapse/s. More shall be revealed.
I have read all of these purported failures (made available) and quite disagree with you as to their appraisal, of course.
You always did like unfriendly things – Sir -
PS and “Xianity” is my deliberate long-chosen gesture toward the fact that, as it’s practiced, the religion has remarkable little to do with poor Mr. Jesus.
We should talk about this Settlement/Wilderness business, this summer.
PPS ah, Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, I like this idea! AWP 2014! My Russian colleague Ms. O. and I have talked about translating the former, but then were distracted by the thought of tackling Brodsky’s younger/midcareer work (pre-Hass/Hecht/Walcott), which is all SO badly translated, and in need of revival/resuscitation…actually none of Brodsky has been translated well. Although of course it is said this is because it is impossible. But if anyone could do it, I feel it’d be me and St. Petersburg-born Ms. O…. On verra.
This isn’t a real post. I’ll send a genuine response later, perhaps even this afternoon, after some dentistry nastiness.
Typos above:
“St. Petersburg-born” – yours
“Tsvetaeva” – mine
“we’ve been unconventional…for anyone to care” – yours
Here’s hoping the BHM is good news, or at least whimsical “ain’t-life-a-kick-in-the-head” news.
Postable response to come…
[No, I won't get in the habit of sending these under-the-radar missives—I'm just embarrassed that I left Marina shy of an "a" and then I saw that I wasn't alone in the leave-out-a-letter or add-a-letter-where-it-doesn't-belong camp]
Gah, typos duly repaired. May the nastiness be mercifully brief and deeply anaesthetized.
Turns out the real dental nastiness will take place on Monday afternoon (just a modest root canal, of the Erie sort, not the Panama or Suez variety). So I get to spend the rest of the week and the upcoming weekend with the current pain. I’ve suffered very little physical pain in my life (as well as a comparatively minimal amount of psychic pain, and yes, I’m lucky and I’m grateful),* so I’m afforded the incredible luxury of still finding pain interesting. The sharpness, when it comes full-bore, has a purifying feel to it for just a moment or two. I’m guessing a violent death must feel somewhat like this—but a thousand times more so—(until it stops feeling like anything at all).
At first I thought “You always did like unfriendly things – Sir -” was a Dickinson paraphrase, but then I realized it’s probably just a quote from Marcie to Peppermint Patty in some unreleased Peanuts strip.
No problems on the delay. It’s almost always been this way for me. I hit the ball over the net and then I have the immense pleasure of watching the whole world on the other side of the court go into astonishing slow-motion while I await a response (illusional, of course, this Zeno-like paradox of motion, since things are undoubtedly a frenetic craziness of limbs akimbo, bloodstream rushing, tendons straining, and mind-racing on that far side). On my side, there’s such beauty in waiting—some of the finest interstitial insights come while one is alone on one’s half of the court, half-crouching, staring into the blur, one’s legs tensed and eager to spring, one holding one’s racket at the ready, for minutes or hours or days or years…
Settlement/Wilderness won’t make much of a business, I’m afraid, no matter what the stock options might present. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I have (to my shame) never found my way (beyond the tourist parking lot and the well-marked trails intended for kids and the mentally indigent) into the Brodsky badlands. I envy you your time spent there.
Here’s hoping Mr. Jesus will be appreciative of your coming to his defense and analyzing the wrongs of his silly fanboys. Seriously, a JSA Lowe tapestry of Texas and The Folks and Unholy Xiandom would be, I’m sure, a welcome treat for me and LET to spend time with together (LET as in graciously ALLOW, not simply as in the tennis term for do-over, or more affectionately LLB, or most appropriately, Lilt, a nickname given to her by Dr. W. in a flash of brilliance).
We also send our best thoughts to you regarding your BHM. And we’ll await future revelations with all fingers crossed for your well-being and your psychological cohesiveness.
* Existential pain, on the other hand, I’m in a complicated relationship with, as you know, but it’s so out of fashion these days that I’m almost ashamed to be seen in its company.
In Dickinson seminar and should not be illicitly typing, but Marcie had this to say (vis-à-vis dentistry? or perhaps having a small audience):
On a Columnar Self –
How ample to rely
In Tumult – or Extremity –
How good the Certainty
That Lever cannot pry –
And Wedge cannot divide
Conviction – That Granitic Base –
Though None be on our Side –
Suffice Us – for a Crowd –
Ourself – and Rectitude –
And that Assembly – not far off
From furthest Spirit – God –
(J789)
PS LILT! Zomg that is PERFECT.
Last week I was asked (casually) to name my top three literary heroes. I answered, without hesitation: Dickinson (compression), Kafka (humor), and Stein (innovation).
I could possibly switch out Kafka with Faulkner, or even Beckett, but Kafka’s comic timing resonates with me more (even in translation—or perhaps made more subtle exactly because of those earlier more demure translations I first grew to love). I can’t think of any writer I could even nominate as being close to Stein when it comes to innovation. Same with Dickinson and compression. The Joyce of Finnegans Wake has his own kind of maniacal compression, of course, but Dickinson’s is so much more syntactically elegant and absolutely untouchably nimble. I make my way through the poem above (not even among her most tightly packed), and whole worlds begin to unfold and open up before me and I want to drop to my knees out of respect and humility. Or, from another angle, Whitman = man (all of us as we are) and Dickinson = son of God (whom we might aspire to be).
And very soon, in my approaching senility, I’ll conflate Marcie and Emily in my mind.
You nightmare, gasped and jerk up all at once where I bolt too, hand flown to rest on his kidneys. Confused bedclothes, the sulphurous dark. Worse for you, the same war, another battle so undoing that in daylight you won’t admit it, nothing, nothing, avert and work. His purple-circled eyes could have been anywhere. She sets a pan, quietly, of biscuits. Bring me morning’s water bucket, then turn wordless out. Finished enough, now I will out too, Mr. Whitman in scandalous hand with a leaf to hold my place. Rivering. Greening. It all stops, water too silty and feet booted, she crooks in a moss-tree and is lost, forgets even to ask for moccasins. I have wrapped fear into linen and hoped it into lavender, saved for funerary. At noon he looks; returns, admits. Across the tablecloth can ask Where did you come from.
*****************************
Just a reminder from us of what YOU can do.
Italia | Roma. Firenze. Milano. Napoli. Torino. Venezia. Cinque Terre. Summer or longer? Someone with whom to fall in love. Dante to Pavese.
It just occurred to me that Sean Penn—the actor himself, unscripted, and not the character he plays—drops to his knees near the end of The Tree of Life because he has suddenly recalled one of Dickinson’s fourth stanzas.
I want to think that highly of Sean Penn? But am somehow unable to. And I wanted to like that movie a lot more than I did. So much mumbling and whispering, so many adulatory shots of Jessica Chastain’s cheekbones. Which are admirable and all, but. I still prefer other Malick.
You’ve probably heard already about the email I just sent Ms. Lilt. Dickinsonian fourth-stanza love to both of you.
1. Re: Penn. OK. But. Heck. It was the best elucidation I’ve yet fabricated to justify that scene.
2. Re: The Tree of Life & Malick. Concur. Cheekbones + Treebark + Whisperings ≠ Substance. Or: Dinosaur Mercy + Nod to Job + Ginger Levitating in Iridescent Dress ≠ Divine Love (probably)
3. Re: Confidential Revelation to Lilt. A near sleepless night here, despite being thrice removed. Our thoughts, visceral wishes, and virtual spirits are with you. All will be well in the end. If all isn’t well at the moment, it just means this isn’t the end.
Indeed. I tried to comfort myself with a similar sentiment around 3 am:
http://mrsponsorpants.typepad.com/mr_sponsorpants/2012/04/not-to-spoil-it-for-you.html
Wrestling in an ugly, sweaty, grapply, queasy way this morning (and all night) with my friend’s accusation that I am being insufficiently selfless, or am not sufficiently prepared to be selfless for the rest of my life (I’m already bad at this, and am not even committed to it yet!). I can’t argue with any of that, since I am being blindsided at present with what the books euphemistically call Ambivalence, and what I think of privately as a sudden unexpected geyser-like surge of I Don’t Want To. For which I rather feel I should be dragged outside of the village and stoned. There is no clear thinking here, only rafts and clots and surges of shame. And forty papers, and a frayed thread’s-width hope that I might yet be capable of doing what is right for everyone concerned.
PS really not sure why I haven’t already written a poem called “Dinosaur Mercy.” Also, thank you for posting that bit of DOE. I forgot I’d written that. I honestly fear workshop has beaten that kind of writing (e.g., writing I like) out of me, and that I am a worse poet for the last 4 years of this business. The good news is that I am done with workshops here, except the Master Workshop in which one assembles one’s thesis manuscript, and that comes later. So I now have a little rope with which I can &c.
PPS dental nastiness report please?
We had a woman dentist (Dr. McGr*dy) whom we really liked but she left New Mexico with her family about four years ago and none of us had been to a dentist since. We’re not very responsible in that way (no family doctor, either—we usually just go to urgent care centers for antibiotics whenever we think we absolutely have to have them—strep throat, etc).
But a new dentist (Dr. McGillivr*y) was recommended to me by my office mates at the institute when it became clear that the pain wasn’t going to disappear on its own. This root canal was as smooth an experience as I’ve ever had at any dentist. Painless, efficient, and impressive teamwork between dentist and assistant. Perfect, really. And our insurance will cover a good chunk of the ridiculous expense. Great, I thought, I can recommend him to LLB. But now a friend tells me that Dr. McGillivr*y had been in the news last summer because he was sued by a former assistant for “aggressive, cruel and brutal conduct laced with sexual and racist innuendos.” A google search displays some tawdry details. Which reminds of a line in some poem I read somewhere long ago: “Maybe Mengele had gentle hands.”
Well, and all the modernists were anti-semites…what can you do. Just enjoy your low-suffering dentistry and insurance coverage, would be my suggestion. I never have a doctor either. We’re not sufficiently middle-class?
Contemplating cancelling class tomorrow (do my students really want to show up on the last Friday of the semester anyway?) so I can stay home and grade their papers. Also I am sick like the dog of the proverb. This may be partly because I ate too much artichoke dip, though its creamy deliciousness took me happily back to a time of First Fridays and that old brown Pontiac I used to drive. Also remember going to RW’s house in the back of y’all’s Toyota. We were young, and imagined ourselves old. We didn’t drink nearly enough, I think, in retrospect.
Cancel class + Go To Appt. + Grade some papers + Boysenberry Popsicle(s) + Neighborly Backrub = Good Plan
That old Toyota, despite all of our efforts, is not dead yet.
And we’re still youngish in many ways, still imagining ourselves old in unimaginative ways, still incapable of ever drinking enough.
tonight very much a broken, or stripped, right now very of real, of harrow. (because of the great matter.) can i put that here please. walk it into feet, walk into a bare. may 7 is already/10 pm is still/tropic, walk out like into a blanket, soft and hot wet, oak magnolia tree soft branches up there too, gray it is that quiet. mansions and walk on their brick, mossed. the rich live here and gleam. walk into that like into sesshin, the mind on the mind doing plain shame practice, block and block, thank you for that thought, thank you for that thought. walk into that, slow like a walk into body through stomach, cavernous head with magenta or turquoise swirls is how my torso opens between itself, accept an old story, the constant talking of it. corner the brick, a cat, toad. skip insects. that probably there was trauma in an october, that i pretended it wasn’t, that when i met you and lilt that winter at a party with boxed red wine i was two-thirds missing. can i put that here please. that it hurt and he didn’t want it and i couldn’t find it and we couldn’t talk it and you’re not supposed to call it an it and i didn’t know any better which has never been good enough (another story is, he looked at me kindly and said i know you don’t know any better but you have to start now, okay). scraps of story make swirls and my head gets opener. foot the brick, foot it. cramp and drip mean nothing, any fetus is i can feel content and put in tight. not sure why, when i have already been a bad enough one. another cat dim-eyed at the curb crouch. worry on things, gristle gnaw, he said this, she said, they say, they said it, how can i find feet in these swirls wrongs daze, a color, lose it, lost it, where is it. hands and hands. a brain chant. holy, holy mother, holy mother, grant us peace, grant us peace. that cannot be wrong to ask. cannot. dark brick, car. walk it now, walk into that. walk or walk. make mercy when the claw reach to cover your skull. a riverbed stone or mercy.
The harrow and the real are yours, all yours, to keep or discard as you wish—whatever you must with all of your might—as fate will thread into twists of history, private and musty and as soft as those tree branches above you or as warmish and dark as the bricks you toe and bother on lonely walks. We’re thankful for those thoughts, even the nasty wriggly ones, and every story is old, too old to take seriously, and when life is new it might just be language, not sinew and heartbeat. Would you carry a word into light (not the Word into the Light—just some word that came out of the fervor of some letters wanting to join and make a little sense, perhaps the littlest sense)? Even if you don’t, the word will find its way upstream to the source. That’s what living words do, I think, even when they’re not actually alive. They don’t know what they’re talking about—and I never have. I don’t remember any boxed red wine. I remember syntax lust and a smidgen of courage and a peripheral sensation of good enough. Not good enough and plenty good enough. Mercy isn’t smooth—it’s rough like an amplified tongue. Gather your stones. Put them in tight. Colors will come.