Bad Brains

As with zombies and their recreational pursuits, ideas about our cognitive sufficiency have been occupying my thoughts lately. Someone asked me what I thought about when writing, and I struggled to characterize the extremely dull evidence of generative activity that I display. Occasional rhythmic rocking of some sort. A wide but minute array of fiddling. Scrutinization of the middle distance. A sort of verbal approximation of sign language. Feeling around the shapes of words without actually wanting to touch them, so as to transfer them to the page much the way one handles radioactive material through a wall with big rubber clown gloves. Needless to say, these comparisons didn’t feel particularly striking.

Others, though, have been pursuing plenty of scientifically transgressive thoughts about creativity out there. Mental illness itself is being rehabilitated, having attained, in some circles, Darwinian sanction:


It's now increasingly being argued that there are survival advantages to others forms of illness, too, because of the links between the traits associated with them and creativity. "It can be difficult for people to reconcile mental illness with the idea that traits may not be disabling. While people accept that there are health benefits to anxiety, they are more wary of schizophrenia and manic depression," says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University, who has edited a special edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, looking at the links between mental illness and creativity. "There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness."


In contrast, one researcher is drawing less-than-flattering comparisons between less-than-ideal hemispheric activity and unsuccessful verse:


In a recent study, Albert-Jan. Roskam found that poems of mediocre quality and aphasic transcripts may be indistinguishable, especially for men. His findings raise questions on gender differences in the specialization of the left brain hemisphere in the context of poetry.

To test the hypothesis that poems of mediocre quality and aphasic transcripts cannot be distinguished, Roskam surveyed employees of a Dutch medical center and subscribers of a statistical newsgroup on the internet. Respondents were presented four pairs of poems and aphasic transcripts.

Poems were rated slightly higher than aphasic transcripts. Among men, there were no significant differences between ratings of poems and aphasic speech. Women rated poems slightly but significantly higher than aphasic transcript


I have no idea what the gender differential means. So many variables, so little useful verbiage. Going further afield, other researchers are stripping the already-diminished ego of cognitive credit:


A recent brain scanning experiment by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation - they were playing a specially designed keyboard in a brain scanner - showed dramatically reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. It was only by "deactivating" this brain area that the musicians were able to spontaneously invent new melodies. The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry. But it also resembles the thought process of a young child, albeit one with musical talent. Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."


Kind of makes one want to adopt a Hippocratic oath toward o’erweening ideas about the brain. Speaking of o’erweening, I loved this profile of Frederick Seidel in The New York Times. I’ve struggled for years to explain some of my unease/impatience with the aftertaste of privileged disdain and perverse glee that I’ve felt radiating off his poems, and I think that “Laureate of the Louche” kind of sums it all up:

Meanwhile, from other corners of that world, Seidel has earned different and more complicated epithets: “sinister,” “disturbing,” “savage,” “the most frightening American poet ever” and even “the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry.”

[…]

“When he mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati,” the former poet laureate Billy Collins told me, “it doesn’t even seem like name-dropping. He does what every exciting poet must do: avoid writing what everyone thinks of as ‘poetry.’ ” Collins’s quotation marks around “poetry” are the keys that begin to unlock Seidel’s art. As Lorin Stein, an editor at Seidel’s publishing house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a friend of Seidel’s, explained recently, Seidel’s qualities as a poet are in direct opposition to the poetry of many of his peers. “A lot of ways that people gin themselves up to write poetry nowadays require a setting aside of certain crass realities,” Stein said. “Crass realities of everyday colloquial communication; crass realities of money and power and sex; crass realities of the ‘I’ in its filthier manifestations. A lot of contemporary poetry has manufactured these great machines for avoiding coarseness — the dream of an escape.” That Seidel’s poems embrace the crassness at the heart of modern living makes him sound a good deal more like a novelist in the 19th-century mode — Stendhal and his mirror walking down the street reflecting modern life.


Then again, I’ve never been much for satire, especially satire that carries with it the implicit air that the author is the only one who is qualified (and sophisticated enough) to make the critique. To me, Robert Lowell always seemed to be taking it for granted that the only reason he could criticize the Brahmin was because he was of the Brahmin. I find this strain off-putting in both Lowell and his heirs, with whom I think Seidel belongs, even though he is clearly concerned more with a private good, than a public good.
Finally, in the spirit of psycho- logy/analysis, I’d like to leave you with an excellent little Freud Quiz from The Best American Poetry:


One August day in 1909 Freud fainted in Jung's company because

(1) He was eating lunch with Jung and the schnitzel disagreed with him
(2) He felt a sexual attraction to Jung
(3) Freud had slept with his wife’s younger sister and Jung threatened to blackmail him after hearing him talk about it in his sleep on the trip the two men took to America
(4) They were having an argument about something trivial when Jung revealed himself to be a virulent anti-Semite. “You’re next,” he said with an evil laugh. He kept repeating, Jude Jude Jude.
(5) Freud said the father of monotheism must have hated his own father and Jung gave him a dirty look
(6) Jung said the spring weather made him feel like a young man. From this innocuous remark, Freud knew that Jung was an impostor. “You were never Jung!” Freud cried.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

On the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith confirms what I’ve long suspected. Blogging as a revenue stream is, shall we say, somewhat paltry. Maybe you should go back to shooting those 300 free throws before dawn.

Mark Penn (who was Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist for her presidential campaign) came up with the incredible contention (in the Wall Street Journal, no less) that “more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders,” and that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.”

You could fit what I know about blogging into a matchbox (a full matchbox), but even I know that is an extravagant error. In fact, this bring to mind the overblown claims of “trends” as breathlessly described by Time Magazine--in short, wishful thinking in the form of narrative.

Here are Penn’s claims:

20 million American bloggers
1.7 million bloggers making a profit
452,000 bloggers using bloggers as a primary source of income.

The internet is magical and all that (like King Midas, everything it touches turns to content, which is half-way between data and metaphor, either partaking of the most or least interesting aspects of both), but it’s not that’s magical. Pixel dust will not get you high enough to suspend the economic laws of physics.

Penn claims that it takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Jacquith points out that the average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000, but that this figure is dependent on the top 1% of bloggers, who earn over $200,000. He does some other takedowns of Penn’s, er, methods, the least of which underscore the reality that net journalism needs infrastructure and review just like ground-bound print journalism. Which makes me feel both worried and comforted.

Gift with Purchase

It’s nice to see that April 1st did not go totally unobserved in the poetry world. And the focus of the rites was rather economic in nature. The Kenyon Review took advantage of the serious financial weirdness to acquire Random House, “a division of Bertelsmann AG, an international media corporation with its headquarters in a dormant volcano in Gütersloh, Germany.” And in a move that would give the-collective-rage-formerly-known-as-Foetry an aneurism, Graywolf decided that the Cave Canem Prize should really go to Tao Lin:

“I asked Komunyakka if it had occurred to him that perhaps Lin’s entry was not, in fact, unironic at all. “Yes, that did occur to me,” he said. “Some people on the Graywolf board were especially concerned about this, but I finally just said, ‘Listen, what does it matter? A good book is a good book, and this kid’s stuff actually sells.’ It’s the name of our prize--and your press--that will be on the cover of his book, which we expect he will promote with the same machine-like relentlessness that is his trademark–-which of course is how he ended up entering our contest in the first place. I said to them, ‘you want to see Cold-Pressed Organic Virgin Coconut Oil come out with that little Melville House logo on the spine instead of your wolves, be my guest. But this is the book I’m writing an introduction for.’”

I hope that there were other shenanigans afoot out there. What good is the internet if not for ad-hoc, self-relexiveness? (I mean, besides instantly shrink-wrapping sentiment, merchandise, and data with the same dispassionate even-handedness one would show to a fruit basket.)

Fair Warning

My NaPoWriMo poems shall be written (metaphorically) on legal pads and the first one shall be about blood ponies.

Glut

It is nearly the time of year again for NaPoWriMo (started by the delightful Maureen Thorson), where various unfortunates will write one poem a day for the month of April and post it on their blogs.

I participated in 2006, writing two poems a day, and it nearly did me in. I hadn’t done a marathon like that since my undergrad thesis, when I had to write 32 poems in a month in half (all of which are now extremely defunct) during the fall semester, and then again during the spring semester. The latter-day NaPoWriMo was a lot more exhilarating: 40 minutes for two rough drafts in the morning, 40 minutes to revise them in the afternoon. I’d say that it’s nice to know I can do it if I have to, but I fail to come up with even one hypothetical situation in which it would be necessary. Revision, maybe, but that’s different. Poetry is easily the furthest afield of any of the written disciplines from such pressures, as our product is only minimally economically successful, and the market is blessed with a surfeit of practitioners. (Only the demand for skilled phrenologists is lesser, frankly.)

This year, you can participate in a pledge drive. This makes me feel obscurely disheartened. ("Money and poetry! A combination no one’s ever thought of!") I notice that NaNoWriMo has a Wikipedia entry, but NaPoWriMo has none. Fie. See earlier comment about marketability.

I’ve been trying to think of similar triathlon-style events in literature. I’m sure that somewhere out there are haiku marathons, and some kind of infinitely recursive sestina competition. (This has nothing to do with anything, but a “tanka” always sounds to me like some kind of explosive device.) Like everything else on the web, the mere absence of such things is often enough to serve as the catalyst for them. The internet is nothing if not a physicist’s wet dream of biofeedback.

This paragraph never happened

The recent discussion about the merits of public take-downs of poetry has put me in mind of a friend of mine who does music reviews for an online music company. His method of entertaining himself is to write the reviews of the CDs he doesn’t like in such a way as to subtly alert those who can read between the lines. I have idly read the blurbs on the back of poetry books for years in a like manner, searching for hints at the blurber’s true feelings about obligated blurbage. I think this aspect of poetry merchandizing would be more attractive if blurbs occasionally sunk to (or rose to) such heights:


As I said to my dry-cleaner, I, Correlative is so furiously irrelevant that it makes subatomic particles look torpid.

These poems took me back to my favorite dissociative episode with the surgical theatre soundtrack.

I predict that Metastic Chicken will have a longer shelf life than plutonium-infused jerky.

Postulate Agency formalizes head trauma and the power of its complicated oratory.

Never has the omission of personal pronouns been so electrifying.

The 3 and a half syllable lines of Five Quints have the delicate tint and ineffability of a Faberge egg executed in Silly Putty.

Nodule of Lower Forks gives gender all the subtlety and breadth of a Bazooka Joe comic strip.

The inverted ghazals of Tripoli Communiqué made me forget the sizzling line breaks of TV Guide.

Two Economies... (Wait for it...)

I’m sure that I’ve talked about the poetry world as an economy (who hasn’t? And if so, what constitutes coupons in this world?), but I have to say that in this interview, Gabriel Gudding really brings the earnestness into such a formulation, along with some might fine highfalutin’ argot:


I mean, basically there have been over the past 150 years a limited range of techniques that just keep getting relabeled and rebranded: collage becomes "cut up" becomes "flarf" or "flirph" or whatever it's called now; disjunctive anacoluthon becomes what William James called "automatic writing" and Stein takes that into cubist dada which is then rebranded via a different set of theoretical apparatuses (Frankfurt School) as L=A=N....; a hodgepodge of sleep-based techniques and collaborative aleatoric methods morph (thank goodness) with oppositional leftist politics into surrealism which then meld with the rightist political quietism of late modernism into deep image and...?

This is a market. Markets need a predictive mindset. If "art" and "writing" cannot divest itself of this fascination with symbolic exchange-value in favor of a use-value, it will continue to be just another inverted extension of the economic system.

Too, markets need a projected null point that serves to mask the manufacture of collective misrecognition: the new; imagination; the originary; celebrity and celebration.

Is it possible to write and to think about writing in ways that do not create and maintain hierarchies of artistic domination and power? Is it possible to write without belief in a universe of celebrants and believers? Is it okay to write without thinking oneself a potential object of celebration? And after having written, is it possible not to vie for status as a consecrated writer or as a writer who displays his own performative disinterest in the field of production?


As rhetorical questions go, the last spate is pretty grand. Also, I love “collaborative aleatoric methods morph”. That’s delightful syncopation. I quite agree with his argument, though it seems like such purity is much easier outside the academy. I’ve always thought that the work itself was a much better argument that anything one might be able to deploy, but I have some sympathy with trying to find ways to armor your soft underbelly, even if such performativity is at bottom an extremely subtle form of satire. As Gerald Fitch said, “I only practice philosophy in self-defense.”

And while we’re on the subject of economy, Peter Sagal started a hilarious meme on Twitter: sum up a novel in under 150 characters. Say what you want, this sort of thing is what the internet was made for. (That and finding out about the sex life of hedgehogs).

Here are some of my favorites:


Neuromancer: An AI covertly hires a burnout hacker to free it from its insane rich family creators. Plus: space rastas.

The Fountainhead: As an architect, the last people I should give a crap about are those who pay for or occupy my buildings.

Franny and Zooey: Jesus is a fat lady.

Emma: I'm clever, I'm clever, I'm.. duh

The Silmarillion: What? You find the Lord of the Rings trilogy interesting? We can fix that.

If on a winter's night a traveler: Odd chapters tell you how you read even chapters. All chapters are odd.

The Sun Also Rises: Lost generations seek comfort in booze and bulls. War doesn't mix with genitals.

Gone with the Wind: War sucks. Love sucks. Famine sucks. Families suck. I am fabulous.

Watchmen: Guns don't kill superheroes, other superheroes do.


This is the wisecrack equivalent of flash fiction, which I’m a sucker for. If it’s precipitous, I’m there.

Fusillade

This week, the magic 8-ball stops on Flarf. While I read a number of Flarf-ish blogs regularly (one of the most articulate and entertaining of which I find to be K. Silem Mohammad’s Lime Tree), I haven’t stopped and really surveyed the field.

For a sort of Present-at-the-Creation summary, Flarf could perhaps be encoded in Gary Sullivan’s recounting of a Flarf-ist response to 9-11:

The list had ground to a chittering halt in mid-summer 2001. By September 11, there hadn’t been a new post in more than a month. On other e-mail lists we were getting touchy-feely post-9/11. But not on Flarf. The dead silence continued for two weeks after the attacks, then, Katie Degentesh sent what was possibly the list’s most pivotal post:

“WAX in my STAR-SPANGLED UNDERPANTS!” the subject line read. The post itself consisted of a single word: “uh-huuuuuuuHHHH.”

Elsewhere, this might have been grounds for reprimand—if not expulsion. But on the Flarf list, it was the very breath of life. Soon, we were all posting, but instead of inside-jokes about minor annoyances, the target was The New Era. If irony, sarcasm, and general un-Americanism had tanked when the Towers fell, the Flarf list was too drunk to read the memo. Everyone posted reams of the most offensive rewrites of New York Times “think” pieces, hand-wringing blog-posts, and other well-intentioned public statements this particular reader had ever seen. I was in love. I had found my tribe.

As to what Flarf is specifically, Wikipedia says,

The term flarf seems to have been coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who notes that it variously "has been described as the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing"

Critics of flarf point to its hodge-podge assortment of Google searches and grammatical inaccuracies as evidence of a movement not to be taken seriously. Fans of flarf believe that it is a new, edgy, and clearer representation of our culture by poets and artists. It bears many similarities to the spoetry - also known as 'Spam Poetry' - movement, which appeared at a similar time.

Or, for a less stodgy perspective, Joyelle McSweeney enthuses in the Constant Critic thus:

Jangly, cut-up textures, speediness, and bizarre trajectories … I love a movement that’s willing to describe its texts as ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness.’ This is utterly tonic in a poetry field crowded by would-be sincerists unwilling to own up to their poems’ self-aggrandizing, sentimental, bloviating, or sexist tendencies.

As I said before, I find Mohammad to be a good commentator/participant/combatant, as he seems to have (from my extreme layperson’s point of view) an excellent sense of the aesthetic issues and implications therein (and is even-handed and humorous without being snarky or abstruse--a rare quality in the blogosphere):

JS: Using the links from the piece, I saw lots of hilarious videos from the Flarf Festival 06 (mostly contributed by Jordan), including your own, and you know ... I laughed a lot. Really. They were mostly very, very funny. (But can there be a "bad" Flarf poem?)

KSM: Flarf gets judged good or bad for the same reason other poetry does: because it succeeds or fails at what it sets out to do, whatever that might be. And that, like lots else, is generally a matter of opinion and/or mechanics. It gets interesting (for me) when there's disagreement over what it is that the work's trying to do, and therefore over what the standards of evaluation ought to be. I think most of the past controversy over Flarf--e.g., Mike Magee's "Glittering Asian Guys" poem--stems from disagreements about what the poems' intentions are, or from firm convictions about certain forms of reference always being unacceptable regardless of context, and not really from any coherent theory of aesthetic goodness or badness. An exception would be people who look at the work and just can't get past the surface "badness": readers who say, wow, that's not very good, and who aren't really concerned with the purposive impulse behind that surface affect. And this position is unimpeachable. No one should have to value badness if they don't want to.

[…]

JS: Could Flarf exist in Gaza? Afghanistan? For people who have lost their jobs and homes? Whoops, getting too earnest again, gotta stop.

KSM: Black humor exists in almost any crisis-ridden social situation you can think of that still somehow retains the vestiges of human consciousness (viz. concentration camp humor, etc.). But of course Flarf is a culturally specific form, like anything else. "Annoying Diabetic Bitch" isn't going to seem very relevant to someone whose children have just been bombed, and that's as true here in the US as in Gaza or wherever. But neither will most other poetry (or art of any sort), beyond a very small subcategory of genres (mourning songs, war chants, etc.), and it's unfair to assume that it should. I don't know why you keep invoking earnestness in the way you do. I don't think any Flarfist ever claimed there was anything wrong with being earnest. I can think of lots of Flarf poems that exhibit varying degrees of earnestness, and lots that don't--again, just like any other kind of poetry.

JS: Actually, even though Sharon's lines were often a scream, the most hilarious line of the review for me was that her flarf "exposes cracks in the culture of banality"--I guess I didn't realize that particular culture needed an exposé.

KSM: Like I said, I didn't write the review. But I can make sense of that statement, I guess: "the culture of banality" is one that doesn't know it's banal, and that tries to present itself as non-banal. The "cracks" occur along those fault lines where the effort to assert non-banality, at its most degradedly heroic, meets the most resistance from the opposing obviousness of banality. I see why you think it's funny, but even though the cracks are already obvious to most intelligent observers, the ways in which the culture tries to cover them up can be insidiously complex, resourceful, and/or pathetic.

Flarf has even splashed over into radio, making an appeareance on Studio 360. How often does that happen for a poetry movement? Luminaries aside, the last thing I remember on NPR was Foetry (which now has a podcast...?) back in 2005.

Anyways, my spelunking in the reference section was spurred on by a recent kerfuffle around these matters, summarized here by David Hadbawnik of Primitive Information.

Apparently, some of Dale Smith’s musings on the subject have been taken as a shot across Flarf’s bow. After much reading, I was still unsure what the smoking gun was, so I hereby include this, because it seems apposite:

Part of what I want to say is that conversations in the blogosphere or elsewhere about the practice of poetry and ethical or social situations that give it definition and shape for others are necessary for the ongoing fluidity and movement of poetry as an art that straddles the practical and theoretical, the experienced and imagined, the felt and the thought. Insofar as we learn to speak with others about what we do—applying pressure when necessary and conceding the value in other practice when it is so recognized—then we are able to expand the capacities of our ability to advance new work into the world. This is not a formal problem—it is essentially an ethical one. The formal surface of a poem can be “inappropriate” (though it better bite), or it can be something else entirely. The thing is that it must open boundaries and not reinforce them; poetry must provide possibility and not foreclose on phronesis with theory; poetry must enhance theory by showing its practical value. We can say that poetry does not do these things—that it is not responsible for anything but itself—and this is absolutely true, too. And yet, as our lives interact within various disciplines, our sense of poetry moves over lines defined from without, and we can’t help responding in various ways to the influences of our working life, or professional life, our domestic life, our political life, and so many other intersecting claims on poetic attention, practice, ethics, and theory.

Mohammad responds hilariously here:

1. Flarf appropriates the discourse of many persons, many of them undoubtedly disempowered, by scavenging the traces of their utterances on the internet for use in the composition of poems. Since no credit is given to these persons, and since some of said discourse is extremely stupid, it is evident that Flarf is mocking the underclasses.

2. Flarf deploys a wide sampling of sometimes tasteless and insensitive language under the guise of social critique, but in ways that make it difficult for some readers (particularly those who are ignorant of the use/mention distinction, or who reject flatly on moral grounds anything that resembles irony) to tell the difference between said critique and the injuries perpetrated by the original subjects who are the source of that language.

3. Flarf sometimes takes advantage of the media attention that is focused upon it (a relatively small amount of attention compared to that enjoyed by more commercially viable art forms such as music, customized T-shirt design, or those plastic testicles some people hang from the tailgates of their pickup trucks, but more than is usually focused upon the work of Dale or his friends, and therefore enough to throw into disequilibrium the fragile economy of all the poetic communities concerned), thus making no attempt to hide its complicity in the Spectacle.

4. Flarf commits the dual error of a) resorting to humor as a means of engaging its readers, in a social climate where humor must be considered a grossly self-indulgent bourgeois barbarism; and b) not always bothering to make sure its jokes are funny.

5. Flarf fails to provide a coherent theoretical apparatus with which to contextualize its disruptions of sense and syntax as acceptable modes of political intervention, and so leaves itself open to the charge of willful obscurantism. This failure is exacerbated by the apparently total lack of interest exhibited by most Flarfists in answering its detractors' demands for such an accounting.

What seems at issue here is, among other things, the fallacy of imitative form (as my fiction professor used to say). Namely, that a poem about boredom must be boring, a poem about tedium should be tedious, etc. Andrew Neuendorf (of Ape and Coffee) encapsulates this particular critique so:

David,

I’d been thinking something similiar lately, regarding one of your above questions, which I will rephrase as, “Are flarfistas (flarfists? Flarfers?) merely imitating the problems of internet speech or are they actually critiquing it and thereby undermining its influence?”

Or maybe this is an unfair position in which to place poetry? Either way, because Flarf poems often use profane and crude language and mimicks the sometimes brash discourse of, say, youtube comments (man, if want to lose IQ points, spend five minute reading those), they take on a bigger burden, because they could merely replicate the damaging, demeaning, deadening nature of such language, thereby lowering the discourse, not, as we seem to expect from poetry, raise it or complicate it.

On the other hand, Flarf is read merely as a reflection of the nihlism of our discourse, the meaningless and utter stupidity of life in America, then merely replicating such langauge is the point, and placing it within the context of poetry is like setting off a bomb in our sacred halls, to, it seems, announce the end.

And when it comes down to it, as with any movement, no two flarfists probably agree on the function of flarf. Looking forward to hearing Kasey weigh in some more. His blog’s snazzy and smart.

For those of you who want to weigh in on the side of “Art shouldn’t be able to do these things, because its speakerhood/position/tools are compromised, and yet it does,” Joe Safdie is for you:

On the other hand, I can't speak for anyone else, but part of my problem with Flarf (and for that matter langpo) was always its uncertain connection with the world, for all that might mean. Someone a few days ago said that there's always a gap between word and world, signifier and signified (thought I'd throw in some semiotics for you Lanny), and if that's true, I'd have to say that the poems that I've always found most important are the ones that have tricked me into not believing that.

For my own part, I’d say that I usually enjoy the formal tension in a piece. Is there a sense of architecture and inevitability about the progression of the piece? Is the voice structured in such a way that there is a pleasing coherence (even in the incoherence)? Are the propositions that the piece sets out fulfilled?

I don’t have any issue per se with poems that do not seem compelled to solve a formal problem (and I’m not talking about meter here), fail to feel any urgency about working through a difficulties associated with a technique, or which derive the majority of their power from the violation of my expectations, rather than any complexity within the piece itself. I don’t think these are questions of “morality” or “immorality.”

[I do have a soft spot in my heart for transgressiveness, but generally when it is a strategy in a piece, and not the strategy.]

However, I usually have limited interest in them, simply because I don’t find their particular ambitions to be very engaging. (Especially when those ambitions have to do with my expectations of a poem. I know what my expectations are, and I don’t derive any particular thrill when they’re tweaked. [Unless you’re really really clever about it.] Literature is an artificial form. You know it. I know it. Any time you sit down to write something new, you are reminded all over again just how artificial your activity is.)

But I like thinkers who make some effort to transcend the artifice through strategy or sheer cleverness, and I tend to prefer elegant architectures or speakerhood that look for new ways to disable or illuminate that artifice. I’d like to have the sense that the writer had at least a complex experience writing the poem as I did reading it, simply because a complex thing tends to bears up under repeated examination better, and pieces that have a number of different concerns and techniques tend to have something to offer you at different points in your intellectual and writing career, as your tastes and most deeply held artistic principles tend to (or should) change over time. Someone said that Bertrand Russell was such an impressive philosopher because he held, at various points, every possible belief, which is not the worst intellectual epitaph in the world (especially since such a career would tend to enrage the critics].

I don’t want to limit anyone’s aesthetic ambitions, nor cobble together some sliding scale of artistic utility. I’m just a restless, finicky, and perverse reader, so poems that rely on instant gratification (though this is a very American device) tend not to hold my attention. (This may seem contradictory but it’s not: I am easily bored, so poems that do a lot of stuff and have a lot of different stuff in them hold my interest better.)

Plus, it’s more useful to talk about writers rather than hordes anyway. C.D. Wright, David Berman, Jeff Clark, Ada Limon, Jennifer Knox, Noelle Kocot, Anne Carson, April Bernard, Dorothea Laskey, Maureen Seaton, Tory Dent, Matthew Zapruder, Thomas Heise, Lyn Hejinian, Lynn Emmanuel, Arielle Greenberg, John Gallaher... these are writers are often claimed by one avant-garde school or another, and it always seems to diminish rather than enhance their work. They’re on my bookshelf, and I come back to them over and over again regardless of how narrative or non-narrative they may be. Raymond Chandler said, “There are no dull subjects. There are only dull minds.” I think this holds equally true when you substitute “styles” for “subjects.”

Though, as Dale says above, discussion is always a good thing, even when it does not make for an especially thermodynamically consistent intellectual universe.

Crank, not Snark

Today, I found myself kicking the can around a bit at Harriet (bonus points if you’re of my generation or older and have any idea what the former metaphor means), and stopped by Don Share’s discussion of Robert Darnton's recent essay, Google & the Future of Books (and some other related discussion, and ancillary tech, both large and small):

In considering the democratization of literary matters, both Darnton and Share jump off at the idea of the Republic of Letters, the consensual hallucination that emanates from the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson:

"The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won."

Of course, theory and praxis diverge:

"Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor's approbation, printed in full in their text.... Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operates, is a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged."

Share goes on to question notions of ownership and access, but what kept me thinking was something, er, less lofty: performativity. Maybe this is only a function of how poetry is mirrored in popular culture, but it seems to me that some eddies of poetic presence in the blogosphere suffer from a kind of mnemonic hang-over, which is bound up in notions of class.

I think there’s often some kind of essential confusion when it comes to poetic identity (as it is commonly bandied about) between privilege and membership. Yes, the "membership" of publication and bookdom is somewhat exclusive, but the distinction between publication in the top tier magazines (however you want to define those) and the vast profusion of other magazines, both print and online, seems to be a distinction that only matters to the practitioners of the subculture. If I tell a non-poetry person that I got published in Grand Street (R.I.P.) as opposed to, I don’t know, McNaughton Mountain Review, they seem equally underwhelmed. Saying that the former can (sigh... could) be found in a Borders produces a slightly slower blink of indifference.

Members of a subculture have endless fine distinctions about the "true" members of a subculture, rather than the "fake" members of a subculture (or, in this case, the "important" as opposed to the "minor" ones), but these distinctions are finer than a gnat’s eyelash to the outsider, especially when poetry is often viewed as a hobby to the rest of the culture at large, and therefore possessing almost no barriers to membership.

Regardless, I am amused at the evocation of the Victorian literary sphere. Reading Montaigne or Barthes or even Michel Houellebecq (I’m thinking of his brilliant Lovecraft book here, not the tenor of his other products, which I remain ignorant of) is to enter psychically into the cognitive atmosphere of the den, the smoking jacket, the brandy snifter, the dark wood paneling and so forth. There’s a sort of inherent feeling of solitude and refinement, a sort of above-it-all-ness, and the faint aftertaste of literary activity being its own reward. Regardless of any actual product, one has these delightful trappings, whether they are tangible or intangible.

The reason for this feeling of enclave is of course because wealth was usually directly tied to the necessary literacy and leisure required to spend all this time, fronting, as the kids say (or used to say). Now, with the internet, the necessary leisure and space required to pontificate or noodle about in an ostensibly literary way is available. In fact, it’s sandwiched in between factoid ranches, stand-up routines and throw-away lines masquerading as ad-hoc journalism, and all manner of fortified compounds where goods and services may be purchased, or talked about in such as away as to resemble an actual lifestyle. That’s it: the internet makes talking into a lifestyle. It used to be that you had to go to some kind of retreat, consciously display some kind of apparel or equipment, or in fact have certain characteristics in order to belong to a lifestyle, as it were ("I am my lifestyle, and my lifestyle is mine!"), but now everything is communal. Your quip, your predilection for Orson Scott Card novels, the holographic detritus of your trip to Niagara Falls (does anyone ever go to Niagara Falls anymore?) is a small cataract of a vast extroversion that pours invisibly into the computer screen and splits prismatically and instantaneously into thousands of virtual spaces, mirrored and Xeroxed and refracted endlessly through search engines, aggregators, blogs, hyperlinks, etc.

And it doesn’t feel to me like poetry is very different in this respect, than, say, knitting. Partly because it is impossible to place a wall around it in the way one did in the old days, when you had Gentlemen’s Clubs, or country estates, or Masonic Lodges. Generally (although this is less and less the case), the only thing sequestered about poets is their words, which exist in a printed space that ranges from obscure to almost totally occluded and invisible to the naked American eye. Perversely, this seems to me to render literary performativity even more of a thing apart from the work itself, though it may be that this is no more true than it was 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. The only difference is now that we have the virtual equivalent of a shopping mall, instead of the frangible Rosetta Stone of a newspaper or lecture hall.

This is not to say that I think the profusion of data and made things on the internet is toxic for society or our own dear little subculture, nor that the staggering array of small and micro-presses that have multiplied are in any way diluting poetry. I think both aspects of how the literary world has enlarged in the past ten years offer powerful opportunities. But they do make some convenient distinctions decidedly past-tense, and make the borders of the subculture more permeable. And while giving rise to sometimes uncomfortable feelings, more consumers of the written word and more, well, written words is always a good thing.

Redacted

The New York Times has an excellent survey of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations. This taxonomy pleases me greatly. Practically anything that is incongruously formal pleases me. (Such as Neil Gaiman’s explication of the theory that musicals can be best understood in terms of hardcore pornography.)

Anyways, I’m a sucker for etymology of questionable taste:


An epithet is a derogation or slur not as “dirty” as a vulgarism or as explosive as an expletive, with which it is often confused. Tagging an intellectual as an “egghead” or labeling a passionate partisan as a “nut case” is using an epithet, or mildly disparaging word. In “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” sometimes used in the locker room, the last “loser” is an epithet.

Imprecation brings us full circle to religion. Based on the Latin precare, “to pray,” the noun imprecation — along with its synonym execration, which shares a root with “sacred” and has nothing to do with excrement — are curses, usually married to the verb “mutter,” calling down punishment from on high. These bookish terms of excessive condemnation are out of critical fashion, merely evoking the exclamation by Snoopy, the cartoon character from Peanuts, “Curse you, Red Baron!”


This got me thinking of other obscenities in popular culture. People admire Battlestar Galactica for making up their own “minced oath” (“frack”), but I’m afraid that Harry Harrison got there first (with “bowb”) in Bill, The Galactic Hero back in 1965.

[Side note: fräck is the Swedish word for audacious, shameless or bold]

Bill, The Galactic Hero, is a hilariously broad space opera satire (a little bit like Robert Heinlein, the way Patrick Swayze is a little bit like Patrick Stewart), and holds a special place in my heart for having a character named Deathwish Drang.

I also thought of Todd Solondz's Storytelling, where a strategically placed red box obscured an interracial sex scene. In the DVD commentary, Solondz somewhat proudly characterized the lurid oblong as a “Stalinist red box.” Maybe he was just proud of the riposte.

Though I myself do not think this justifies censorship in any way, it does sometimes provoke brilliant elliptical bits, such as the immortal exchange between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity:


His eyes fall on the anklet again.

NEFF
I wish you'd tell me what's engraved
on that anklet.

PHYLLIS
Just my name.

NEFF
As for instance?

PHYLLIS
Phyllis.

NEFF
Phyllis. I think I like that.

PHYLLIS
But you're not sure?

NEFF
I'd have to drive it around the block
a couple of times.

PHYLLIS
(Standing up again)
Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by
tomorrow evening about eight-thirty.
He'll be in then.

NEFF
Who?

PHYLLIS
My husband. You were anxious to talk
to him weren't you?

NEFF
Sure, only I'm getting over it a
little. If you know what I mean.

PHYLLIS
There's a speed limit in this state,
Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

NEFF
How fast was I going, officer?

PHYLLIS
I'd say about ninety.

NEFF
Suppose you get down off your
motorcycle and give me a ticket.

PHYLLIS
Suppose I let you off with a warning
this time.

NEFF
Suppose it doesn't take.

PHYLLIS
Suppose I have to whack you over the
knuckles.

NEFF
Suppose I bust out crying and put my
head on your shoulder.

PHYLLIS
Suppose you try putting it on my
husband's shoulder.

NEFF
That tears it.

Neff takes his hat and briefcase.

NEFF
Eight-thirty tomorrow evening then,
Mrs. Dietrichson.

PHYLLIS
That's what I suggested.

They both move toward the archway.

A-27 HALLWAY - PHYLLIS AND NEFF GOING TOWARDS THE ENTRANCE
DOOR

NEFF
Will you be here, too?

PHYLLIS
I guess so. I usually am.

NEFF
Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?

PHYLLIS
(Opening the door)
I wonder if I know what you mean.

NEFF
I wonder if you wonder.


Finally, I’d like to close with something I heard quoted recently that sounds obscene, but which isn’t. Ladies and Gentlemen, a line from the poetry of Leonard Nimoy:

“When you touch me, I am deeply touched.”

Eventide

Now, as this last miserable year grinds to a close, I thought I’d snatch some last 2008 tidbits out of the ether, before unplanned obsolescence (the lifeblood of the internet in general and blogs in specific) take hold.


Gabriel repurposed the most ineradicable of internet memes--the cat:

how i feel about poetry



sitting on machine i don't understand
cannot make it speak/fly/produce food/pet.me


Nin Andrews managed a bit of brilliant urban camouflage:

I am at the mall, and I have lost all interest or memory of why I am there. (I always do this at malls. It takes twenty minutes, and then I am out of my body. I am floating around, watching the other shoppers shop, the sellers sell, the mothers tug their children and large bags, the fathers wander off aimlessly like fish in the air . . . ) Some man hands me a card and puts out his hand for money. It's one of those cards that reads I am deaf. Give me money. Or something like that. I give the man a dollar.

I am suddenly distracted by a young girl. She's maybe twelve or thirteen, and she is trying on a skimpy skirt (the kind hat my dad would say- shows more than your legs), boots, and a clingy shirt. Her mother is appalled by the outfit. The girl is pouting and twirling around in front of a mirror. Her breasts hang loosely out of the top of the blouse. She is blond and red-lipped and angry.

You look like a slut, the mother says angrily.

I look normal, the girl says. That's the trouble with you. You have no clue what normal is.

The mother looks at me, suddenly, as if I might help her.

Is that normal? she asks me, pointing at her daughter. Tell her THAT is not normal. Tell her.

The girl glares at me.

I can't think of what to say. So I give the mother the man's card. I am deaf...


K. Silem Mohammad attempted... well, I feel I would cheapen it if I slapped a modifier on it:

If a poem about sunlight on a desk is to be relevant, it must have a context for reception among a set of readers who are appreciably qualified to gauge its effectiveness on any number of thematic or structural levels, and to situate that effectiveness in relation to some additional evaluative factor based on the poem's usefulness in sustaining a social aesthetic.


And in response to quibbling, became even more delightful:

From now on I will flag all my satirical intentions as such by writing in this ridiculously inflated 1923 voice. Or maybe I was doing that already. Oh, vexation!


Michael Swanwick gave aid and comfort to the deity-less via a tactical exchange of Godless Atheist Christmas Cards:

Third place went to Friends Who Spent Christmas in Hawaii -- which in and of itself was already one strike against them -- for a card decorated with Adinkra symbols expressing such sentiments as Obik Nka Obie ("bite not one another"), Sankofa ("return and get it") and Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu ("Siamese crocodiles"). A card whose irrelevance extends beyond Christmas to cover Easter, Arbor Day, your cousin's Bat Mitzvah . . . and in fact, any card-worthy event you can think of.

Second place went to multi-year-winners Couple A. Their card arrived the day after Christmas, almost disqualifying them. But its artwork of a faceless soldier holding a machine gun (good artwork, I hasten to stress) was so strong as to demand their inclusion.

But the winners were unquestionably our good friends Anonymous, who sent the above photo with a cheery message of "mathematical modernist winter greetings." It was the, yes, mathematical grid-like machined precision of the chair, coupled with the inherent sadness of a garden in winter that did it. Truly breathtaking.




The horde at Delirious Hem came up with a brilliant advent poetry calendar.


Peter Sagal’s Pinter elegy post provoked a self-fulfilling prophecy:

I love that Pinter-Beckett story. It reminds me of a friend of mine who confessed to Leonard Cohen that he was considering having an affair. “You have to do it,” said Cohen. “You have to risk everything, or you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened.” My friend started to take the advice seriously, but then he stopped short. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re Leonard Cohen. Of COURSE you would say that!”


John Hodgman pimped the daily Moleman:




The death of irony was declared (and argued against):

Not according to the thin black novelist Colson Whitehead, who wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times under the headline, “Finally, a Thin President.”

“Something bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony,” Mr. Whitehead said in an e-mail message on Thursday. “Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring.”


And Neil Gaiman lucidly defended icky speech:

I loved coming to the US in 1992, mostly because I loved the idea that freedom of speech was paramount. I still do. With all its faults, the US has Freedom of Speech. You can't be arrested for saying things the government doesn't like. You can say what you like, write what you like, and know that the remedy to someone saying or writing or showing something that offends you is not to read it, or to speak out against it. I loved that I could read and make my own mind up about something.

(It's worth noting that the UK, for example, has no such law, and that even the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that interference with free speech was "necessary in a democratic society" in order to guarantee the rights of others "to protection from gratuitous insults to their religious feelings.")

[...]

Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

Numerology

VQR has just bestowed on the web at large the most disturbing fact I have heard all year. Perhaps in many years. According to a piece by Ashley Gilbertson in their Fall 2008 issue (audio interview posted here), every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide.

I know that the whole casualty model is flawed to begin with (the vast number of amputees and vets with brain trauma attest to that), but this simple monthly number of 690 makes it obscenely incomplete.

According to my dad, the lesson that the silent, taciturn Texas veterans he grew up with had to offer was this: “The Army may teach you how to kill, but it doesn’t teach you how to live with yourself afterwards.”

Check out the numbers compiled by Michelle Paley in the online article itself:


4,128 number of American soldier combat deaths in Iraq (as of August 2, 2008)

21 number of American soldier suicides in Iraq (as of August 2, 2008)

550 average number of completed suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans not in the care of the VA

140 average number of completed suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans within the care of the VA

1,000 approximate number of attempted suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans in the care of the Department of Veteran Affairs

300,000 approximate number of Iraq veterans who report signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or major depression

3,000 number of mental healthcare professionals specializing in PTSD hired by the VA since 2005

HR 327 bill signed into law by President Bush on November 5, 2007, mandating mental health training for VA staff, mental health screenings for veterans receiving VA care, and suicide counselors for all VA health care facilities

183 average wait, in days, for a disability claim to be processed for Iraq/Afghanistan veterans

1,600 number of calls by veterans to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in one month, three months after the NSPL veteran hotline was created in July 2007

8,500 approximate number of calls by veterans to the NSPL in one month, twelve months after the veteran hotline was introduced

47 percentage of Iraq veterans with PTSD or depression who have not sought treatment

2–3 billions of dollars veteran PTSD and depression cost the US annually

2 years it would take for improved veteran care to pay for itself, based on increased productivity and reduced medical costs


Isn’t it satisfying when our little literary subculture produces something that is not only culturally relevant, but relevant now, in a big bad way?

Appropriate Yourself

Memes. Where would we be without them? Wrangling improper pronouns? Trying to rebrand cosines? The mind boggles.

I know that Olena Kalytiak Davis didn’t mean to start one, but I thought I’d just jack it anyway. Because sometimes you get tired of gossip, and want to get linguistically solipsistic. Frankly, I never met an axiom I didn’t just love, if for nothing but its hinge.

Here is the substrate, followed by my elaborations:

1. what exactly does joel brouwer mean by: "the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage"?

This is somewhat like Douglas Adam’s instruction to learn to fly by trying to hit the ground and miss. Conditionality and intent. In order to take a largely irreversible action, you must be aware of how easily reversible it can be, so that you are cognizant of the commitment and the impressiveness of same. Put more bluntly, you cannot gamble without being an expert on loss.

2. what exactly does seneca mean by: "this is the difference between us and the etruscans ... since they attribute everything to divine agency, they are of the opinion that things do not reveal the future because they have occurred, but that they occur because they are meant to reveal the future"?

I think it means that the present is either proof of the future, or evidence left behind by the future. The former requires the participation of the audience. The latter disdains it.

3.how many poets could you actually sue for the tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress?

To quote Janet Burroway, “Anecdote is anguish recollected in tranquility.” Craft requires deliberate emotional negligence (for all parties: author, character, reader) in order to achieve the proper distance, and catharsis is distress (since dismay is required as a catalyst). Plot is necessarily abusive.

4. giving readings like giving head. right? you can do it even if you haven't written anything new. right?

Giving readings can be promiscuous recollections of being moved. If you’re a pro. Otherwise, they’re just stylized breath with overlong interruptions.

5. why have i not read most of these? i could never leave my house again and actually get an education.

An intellectual career is performativity. In the way an actor imagines the way something would feel, authors often triangulate the way they think ideas in a book will feel. I would be very surprised to meet another writer who had read all the books he or she had a throw-away line about.

6. i should never leave my house again. and get an education.

Calling a writer a shut-in is redundant. Nurturing one’s aesthetic (even a barren, non-productive one) involves a type of cerebral dysfunction that would summon the cognitive equivalent of DSS if bodied forth. I often think the perfect vacation would be a coma.

7. "i i i never told anyone about the time i slept with two guys at once cause...it never happened." i misquote myself, but, low and behold, we actually do mature and evolve. one of them was/is a girl!

Misquoting oneself is pleasurably transgressive. And essential to mass-producing a sense of neural strangers. Without them, we cannot believe in the possibility of a virtuous audience. Like Tiresias, characters become transgendered the instant someone talks for them. As with water, ambiguity finds its own level.

8. does EVERYTHING feel literal to the creator?

The purpose of art is make attitude into nouns, which (if you’re doing it right) hate each other. Once it becomes literal, you become wistfully irrelevant. This is the difference between poetry and rhetoric.

9. jesus! weston cutter's birthday! i was so gonna do an entry in his honor on OCTOBER 31-- day of birth of most emotionally something individuals (keats, too!) (but, shit! was running boxes and african dwarf frogs out of my old house (quick! into the garage) and missing and then catching a plane to meet my lovers). weston! i so need to send you a birthday shirt and some music! (do you have the new dylan bootleg?) mostly, two very corny beautiful songs: the feliz brothers' "radio song" ("don't you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, move me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life") ( yes, i Llove tripetition) and birdmonster's: "my love for you" (my love my love for you will never something it's something than the things i do, my love, my love for you will never stray it's stronger than the things i say")

[Here, the meme breaks down. Tweed clowns are called in. A calla lily is expected to perform. Someone sells jumper cables in the audience, promising large quantities of pneuma to the best student of cellular respiration.]

10. i am in the "surfwise" school of you must change your life rather than the "man on wire" school of you must change your life. (but you gotta love the french. don't you?)

I haven’t seen any either of these. Much in the same way I have not actually read of the Camera Lucida. But I’ll discuss them anyway (see No. 5). C.S. Lewis said (or did he?): “Prayer doesn’t change anything. It changes me.” French intellectuals don’t feel guilty about talking about process. It’s a lifestyle choice. Americans are agonistic or pugnacious about it. New money.

11. speaking of movies: the cool school: that is my dream: a LARGE group of guy painters and sculptors who are as competitive as they are creative. and me.

Writers being competitive is a lot like rats and hamsters trash-talking one another. Same maze, unique cheeses.

10. look! i have built in book shelves!

I once rented a basement room sight unseen for $200 because it had built-in bookshelves. I couldn’t keep the windows open because of the spiders, and the metaphor of the Blair Witch Project hit home the next morning in the stone shower. But it was worth it (as I’m sure your bookshelves are).

Forbidding... lots of stuff

Um, yeah, so everyone has some electoral aftermath, I imagine. Mine consists of 4 hours of sleep. But the fact that my ass is flat doesn’t compare to the numbness of 2000, when I was stranded in a very red state (blue today), watching the gutless campaign that Gore ran bear fruit. Nor the weariness of 2004 (after an equally somnolent effort from Kerry), when I was alone in a hotel room in D.C., and I knew exactly what type of stuff was coming down the pike for the next four years, and it fell to my free copy of good ‘ol banal USA Today to confirm the next morning that it was all going to suck.

But today is not then. No more hunkering down in a cultural bunker with all news forbidden except the New Yorker, Fresh Air, and the local independent weekly, venturing out only for arts podcasts and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. (Sorry, guys. I know that Obama and Biden will be less rich material than McCain and Palin.)

So, as a sort of valedictory gesture, I thought I’d round off your afterglow with a poem from William Carpenter’s Rain (ridiculously out of print, but grand) that handily summarizes the presiding spirit of what we didn’t choose last night:


Military Secrets


This morning we drive over the blueberry barrens,
the downeast landscape cold even in August,
the workers bent over their orange or yellow rakes.
From the high ridge, we can see Cutler Harbor
and the transmitter towers, ranged in a circle
on the shore, like Stonehenge, like something left
here by aliens, so they could control us
from their own planet, making us sing Don Giovanni
or destroy ourselves with little particles,
whatever happens to please them at the time.

Our guide wears the chic uniform of today's Navy.
His speech is relaxed and easy, slightly southern.
The most powerful transmitter in the world, he says.
It can reach submarines at fifty fathoms.
Its waves do not travel through the air, but through
the earth itself. With this we could speak to a man
in the Pacific Ocean. We could tell him now, or not yet,
and he would hear us as if right in his own room.

Dogs go insane from this frequency. Their mouths foam.
They try to climb trees or lamp posts to escape.
Even some people hear these vibrations as sound:
one in a hundred thousand. To them, the air fills
with a hum, or cry, as of a great migration of birds,
and they look up, expecting to see something,
perhaps a brightening of the entire sky, or,
out on the water, a shape, not a Poseidon missile,
but a human hand. To these few people it would
look like that, the way the arm reached up
in Malory's Morte Darthur, and caught the sword,
whirling, out of the air and took it down.

You have chosen... wisely

Over at the tautologically named No One Does That, Blake Butler engages in one of my favorite forms:

Q: What did Anne Frank eat and drink when she was in the cupboard?

A: Anne Frank had large rivets in her skull cut from where while she lay in the womb her mother had smoked 'skonk,' Anne Frank's mother was heavy into the late 1920's Manchester black metal scene and had imprinted a large tattoo of a jackrabbit on her hind ass, as a result Anne Frank was capable of storing vast quantities underneath her hair that in her younger forgetful years she would often forget about until the taffy or goose fur or tea leaves she'd shoved inside herself had begun to rot and grow mold, it was because of the blue mold off a certain early kind of Triscuit that Anne Frank lost most of the vision in her right eye and often would faint without warning when she heard certain tones from birds

(The above: very cool. But I check out later on when Mr. Butler gets a bit Mark Halliday-ish: “I've Gogged the smeepie where I hardly borshbum Gogg I Gogg or Gogg. The neepy-nee-naw will keep on Goggsleereening without me, and Gog can't Gog anything to Gog lissmissum anyGogg. I'll just Gogg matters Gogg their leiffumwitzis and ictrerunnum on Gogg and Gogg Gogg Gogg will Gogg all Gogg in the nordvunt.”)

As a kid, I had a bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure books, where you always died, fell into a pit, got lobotomized, got knocked on the head, or were taken prisoner as an intergalactic sex slave on page 146). Wikipedia formally codifies the types of endings here:


At least one, but often several, endings depicting a highly desired resolution, often involving uncovering a handsome monetary reward.

Endings that result in the death of the protagonist, companions of the main character or both, or other very negative ending (e.g., an arrest), because of a fatal choice of the reader.

Other endings that may be either satisfactory (but not the most desired ending) or unsatisfactory (but not totally bad).

Occasionally a particular set of choices will throw the reader into a loop where they repeatedly reach the same page (often with a reference to the situation being familiar). At this point the reader's only option is to restart the adventure.

One book, Inside UFO 54-40, revolved around the search for a paradise that no one can actively reach; one of the pages in the book describes the player finding the paradise and living happily ever after, although none of the choices in the book led to that page. The ending could only be found by disregarding the rules and going through the book at random. Upon finding the ending, the reader is congratulated for realizing how to find paradise.


Maybe they’re the reason why I really like a fundamental level of uncertainty about a text. Alternate histories have this cool retroactive way about them, where anything could be allusive or invented. One of my favorite adolescent series was the Wild Cards, an alternate history version of America where an alien virus killed, mutated, or gave superpowers to whomever it infected. They were written by a bunch of different authors and went right up from WWII to the present. (Of particular interest to me and my gossipy historical tastes was the book that covered the 1988 Democratic National Convention.) I liked the way the popular culture and the vernacular was refracted through the prism of the virus. Possibly this is why I was born to both write and enjoy snarky poems.

House Style

For your consideration: Issue 1, a 3,785 page issue of just about every poet you can think of, writing a bit like trauma patients trying to explain how a dandelion is sexier than a rhinoceros, if said dandelion had read lots of linguistics textbooks. Here’s the hook. And the... apology?

Say what you want about the poems here (which can be best characterized as being the linguistic equivalent of “easy on the eyes,” but not in the attractive sense), Issue 1 has managed to add something to the literary world: a massive, simultaneous appropriation of poems not written by anyone.

Reactions abound. Many people comment on Harriet, seemingly unaware that the internet depends on people not stopping to think that when you look into the void, the void also looks into you. Then stays up all night composing a suitably arch and becoming phrase to conceal the scathing hyperlink to your comment.

I think my favorite reaction is this:

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED YOU LITTLE SCRABBLE RATS. YOU TURTLENECK FONDLING GOOSE EXCREMENT.

Delightful.

I’m sure that I have spent more time thinking about the nature of Issue 1’s stunt than the creator of said text. Which I generally find to be a bad sign. Hoaxes should be hard work, I feel; otherwise, one might suspect that the nature of your critique is to make someone else come up with a critique for you. Which means you are the intellectual equivalent of Brad Pitt’s character in True Romance, smoking out of a HoneyBee container, and feeling your brain dribble down your spinal column.

Jeffrey Bahr points out that even the sheet number of poem-like-things isn’t even evidence of hard work on the part of the impresario, as a few selective IF/THEN statements can reproduce the effect exactly. (Check out the accompanying manifesto and advice to students.)

Much cleverer, I find, is The Futility Review (where people are deliberately not published). Their submission interview is especially entertaining. It at least assumes an audience. Any audience, rather than a simple assertion that there is none, or that turning one’s back to the audience is the only cue required. I get irked when the more complicated a reaction I’m supposed to have, the simpler the gesture is. (And this holds true for both a lyric and an avant-garde piece).

I must confess that I immediately searched the .pdf file for my name. And this was after I read K. Silem’s Mohammad’s adroit little deconstruction of the value-making of aesthetics and naming. Does this mean I have been co-opted? Maybe. Ridiculously easy to shrug off, if so. Aesthetics involves arbitrary currency. Authorship involves some sort of bad faith contract in order to gain authority. I have an uncle named Stritch. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Everything you know is wrong

Bear in mind that I haven’t fact-checked this yet, but Nin Andrews has a succinct, entertaining little primer on lies:


“Nero didn’t fiddle when Rome burned. (The violin was not invented until the 16th century.) The soil of Carthage was never sewn with salt. Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake. Or brioche, as her enemies said, to inspire hatred of the queen. And Louis XVI did not have a tiny penis. (Quite the opposite. The letters suggest he was too large for the poor Marie.) Catherine the Great did not die when having sex with a horse. Nor did she die on the toilet. Napoleon was neither short nor impotent. Nor was he cured of his impotence by eating green beans. The Virgin Queen might not have been a virgin. And George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth. Roosevelt did not know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Churchill was not an alcoholic, and his father did not have syphilis. Hitler was not an atheist, a social Darwinist, or a follower of Nietzsche. He believed the Bible was the history of man; he professed his beliefs in speeches, and encouraged Nazi soldiers to worship in churches. In short, like most leaders in this country today, he considered himself a good Christian.”


This is why I never worry about running out of stuff to write. The corrections to the general universe alone could occupy me for the rest of my life. It does, however, kind of inspire a millisecond-long wish to go back and be a middle-school Social Studies/History teacher. Then it passes.

The unspoken point is that these things are part of our pop culture heritage (and our intellectual heritage, to a degree), and drastic measures should always be taken. Arthur Miller summed it up thus:

"Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed."

I love the idea of data getting married. (If we carry this metaphor forward, the internet is a brothel for data.) But probably the plague is a better metaphor. As long as it has one host (living or paginated), it’s still alive, if only dormant. [So you should stay away from squirrels.]

In this vein (the non-squirrel one), Philip Levine also has a great poem in What Work Is on the subject of veracity:


Facts


The bus station in Princeton, New Jersey,
has no men’s rooms. I had to use one like mad,
but the guy behind the counter said, “Sorry,
but you know what goes on bus station men’s rooms.”

If you take a ’37 Packard grille and split it down
the center and reduce the angle by 18 degrees and reweld it,
you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce
just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.

I was not born in Cleveland, Ohio. Other people
were, or so I have read, and many have remained,
which strikes me as an exercise in futility
greater even than saving your pennies to buy a Rolls.

F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton. A student
pointed out the windows of the suite he occupied.
We were on our way to the train station to escape
to New York City, and the student may have been lying.

The train is called “The Dinky.” It takes you only
a few miles way to a junction where you can catch
a train to Grand Central Station or—if you’re scared—
to Philadelphia. From either you can reach Cleveland.

My friend Howie wrote me that he was ashamed
to live in a city whose most efficient means of escape
is called “The Dinky.” If he’d invest in a Rolls,
even one with a Packard grill, he’d feel differently.

I don’t blame the student for lying, especially
to a teacher. He may have been ill at ease
in my company, for I am an enormous man given
to long bouts of silence as I brood on facts.

There are two lies in the previous stanza. I’m small,
each year I feel the bulk of me shrinking, becoming
more frail and delicate. I get cold easily as though
I lacked even the solidity to protect my own heart.

The coldest I’ve ever been was in Cleveland, Ohio.
My host and hostess hated and loved each other
by frantic turns. To escape I’d go on long walks
in the yellowing snow as the evening winds raged.

The citizens of Cleveland, Ohio, passed me sullenly,
benighted in their Rolls Royces, each in a halo
of blue light sifting down from the abandoned
filling stations of what once was a community.

I will never return to Cleveland or Princeton, not
even to pay homage to Hart Crane’s lonely tower
or the glory days of John Berryman, whom I loved.
I haven’t the heart for it. Not even in your Rolls.


This is the Levine I like. The acerbic, trickster one. (Not the schmaltz vendor.) The one of M. Degas Teaches Art And Science At Durfee Intermediate School and the immortal essay, “Part of the Problem” (available in The Breadloaf Anthology of Writers on Writing) where he insults just about everyone in a delightful fashion.

(I realize that I have strayed somewhat from the thesis of writers as corrective forces in the universe. Oh well. It felt very natural.)

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Official gibberish is not all that new. Especially if deployed in sustained, strophic fashion (scroll down to the bottom).

Why are the contemporary texts ("Howl" notwithstanding) that so often inspire censorship, so... disappointing? And give rise to ripostes that also lack something. When Virginia Woolf was supporting Radclyffe Hall during the obscenity trial as a result of The Well of Loneliness, she wrote privately, with almost audible sigh, that she didn’t think it was a very good book.

We need some more insult poetry. Truly. There was Catullus. Then a long gap. And... who? No, really. I want to know. In a similar vein, one of the most enjoyable revenge poems I’ve read is “Disjunction” by Kate Daniels (from Four Testimonies), where she describes squirting breast milk into her office trashcan, all over the dean’s “debatable policy on sexual harassment.” Now that’s an objective correlative.

I heard this 10 years ago in undergrad from my German professor, but Kafka is actually very funny. And not so much with the frigid, nebbishy, torment.

So very behind the curve on this (did I mention that I’m not attached to an institution of higher learning?), but I just love the very idea of Seven Types of Ambiguity. It’s like having a limited view of infinity.

Fine Print

I’m sure most people have heard about this publishing nightmare by now. There you are, happily burbling away with your new book contract, and then you get told you can have the full, unedited blurbs on the back cover, or you can have your author photo, but not both. Also, there will be ads for other books from the press on the back. Then you become a "difficult" author, your book contract is "revoked" and your name disappears from the press’s website. Plus, possibly, a gag order. Reb proposes an antidote here, as well as a disclaimer and a hilarious and depressing quiz for those of us who submit to contests. Outrage and sympathy abound elsewhere

Twofer

So Elisa totally got to this first, and how could she not? It’s might fine literary gossip. Everyone loves to see those creative types behaving badly.

[Small interpolation: I had to read an epithalamion by Georges Perec in a wedding recently, and was so fatigued by all the French words that I inadvertently substituted “pointy-headed philosophers” for “pointy-hatted philosophers,” so I guess I’m no better than anyone else in this regard.]

But I’m totally going to hitch my wagon to this gravy train (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor), since I drafted this before Ms. Gabbert’s excellent post. As previously linked by her, on Exoskeleton, Johannes Göransson has posted a debriefing on what he learned at Iowa (via Lime Tree). It’s kind of funny and kind of depressing at the same time:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet"--as I am a... This means that they--like Jorie--used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning--as opposed to Marvin Bell's old-guard poetics of authenticity. [...] I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex; I said "but I like pornos."

[This reminded me of my introduction to grad school. The very first week I was there, I got a writing conference scholarship, which involved a reading. After I gave my reading, one of the third years in my program (whom I had never met before) came up to me and said, “Don’t you think it’s a little weird for you to be writing about a teenage girl?” A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one.]

In my view, Göransson is extraordinarily open and even-handed in his “bullet points.” He names names and isn’t coy at all about the class politics--the least favorite and most uncomfortable subject even for most of the “revolutionaries” among us. But in the end, the conclusion he comes to is that whether or not he respected, liked, or despised his colleagues, people there thought about poetry all the time, and it was clear that they felt it was the most important thing. I would say that my graduate school experience was no less full of camps, palace coups, thefts, intrigues, betrayals, ideological attacks, and absurdities, but that this pervasive “pathological excitement” about verse made it all worth it.

I think writers would be comforted by the thought of a world in which poetry is a matter of dire public concern, and the question of whether or not Milton could have written Shakespeare’s plays is as scandalous as Lindsay Lohan’s choice of companions.
....

And now… because I’m not a total dittohead... some Whitman.

I confess that I’ve always had a hard time with his bellowing to the cheap seats, making sure that everybody knew who he was and that he was everybody. To quote Lynn Emanuel’s “Walt, I Salute You!”:

...inside, like you, I am in my hydroelectric mode.
The infinite and abstract current of my description
launches itself at the weakling grass. Walt, everything I see I am!

...Walt! You have me by the throat!
Everywhere I turn you rise up insurmountable and near.

He generally kind of makes me feel like a sock puppet, with his oratory and his wish to deposit many many podlings inside of us. I don’t think there’s ever been a more presumptuous use of the plural “I” in literature. Sure, his long lines and his train engine stamina for stanzas was and is impressive, and my undergrad poetry professor once spent half an hour demonstrating a brilliant metrical inversion in one of his lines, but I tend to bristle around poets who are anxious about community and solve this by appropriating every sentiment (or scrap of power) in sight.

That being said, I must admit that Richard Tayson’s piece in The Virginia Quarterly Review made me appreciate the kind of, er, speakerhood problems he was facing as a gay poet (NPR podcast here ).

I guess it never occurred to me to think of Whitman’s communal invocation/necromancy as a sort of cousin of camp. Instead of taking gender and distorting it by magnifying its traits, one could argue that Whitman’s mystical megaphone stole public speech in much the same manner. As Tayson points out, he did censor himself by muting less coy references to his love for men, but even the flourishes that remain can be viewed as a clever example of seizing the means of production, as it were, in order to insert one’s own emendations. And you’d have to go all the way in order to provide enough cover for one’s, uh, lyrical proclivities. Even constructing a towering messianic consciousness in verse wasn’t enough to protect him from the criticism, as Tayson points out:

His work was called “a mass of stupid filth” (New York Criterion, November 10, 1855); “indecent” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Atlantic Monthly, September 1890); “uncouth,” “grotesque,” and “reckless” (Charles A. Dana, Tribune 1894); “intolerable” and “disgusting” (critic Charles Eliot Norton, 1913); and “trashy, profane, and obscene” (J. P. Lesley, a geologist who apparently liked poetry). “It’s as if the beasts spoke,” Thoreau famously quipped. Emily Dickinson, also famously, indicated that though she’d never read his book and of course had never met him, she “was told he was disgraceful,” a phrase that would resonate with Willa Cather’s stance that Whitman was a “dirty old man.” Booksellers withdrew Whitman’s vanity-published 1855 Leaves from their stocks, and libraries, most famously Harvard, kept the book under lock and key, even unto Whitman’s death.

It always pleases me to find an extra facet of subversion hidden here and there in poems and writers.

A primer on K

So we have a new overlord. Who is outsider-y. (August Kleinzahler sneering at the New York literary establishment across the river springs to mind.)

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Kay Ryan, who apparently often finds loved ones pinned under cars, and who is so refined, disciplined, and original that she must inevitably be self-taught. (If I listen hard, I can hear thousands of creative writing teachers wincing together, knowing that their job just got a lot harder.)

John Gallaher has a fairly even-handed summary of the argument for and against here. I confess that I thought she was a Victorian writer before today (never having read her and barely having registered the changing of the guard). Clearly, I am less than a reliable source.

How do we feel about accessibility and apparent modesty? As to her feelings about the great textual watering hole of AWP... well, Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.

By the way, I specifically used the overlord metaphor in the first sentence so I could gratuitously throw in a link to the Zombie Threat Level. Just a little lagniappe for ya.

Fie Again

With all of last Thursday’s furor about whether or not “grad student” is a professionally dismissive term, and whether one literary camp gets to beat up the another camp (about which I will only say that taxonomy tends to serve the critic rather than the text under consideration), perhaps it is instructive to think about accountability. Neal Stephenson has a nimble breakdown of same in this Slashdot interview (scroll down to the second question), where he makes a few salient points:

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Later on, he says lots of great stuff, including a comment that Beowulf was “created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn.”

[Side note: Wikipedia says Frisians are among the blondest people in the world. Notable Frisians: Mata Hari, Lenny Dykstra, and Jane Fonda.]

Stephenson also recounts an illustrative little anecdote where he realizes that the reason why someone at a literary festival had not heard of him was because he was famous. (“Famous” is clearly the wrong word to apply to most literary writers. William Gibson’s “magnificently obscure” [originally used to describe a desirous anonymity on the internet] seems more appropriate.) He uses this as a jumping-off point for a split between Dante writers (literary writers attached to institutions) and Beowulf writers (writers who earn a living solely by sales of their books, usually novels), and the critical firewall that has sprung up between them for the reasons described above.

This split was very quickly articulated for me in my very first undergrad lit class, where someone started off the first session by making fun of Frank Herbert’s Dune. To which I say “Fie upon them.” Full stop.

Young Guns

You know how there’s that scene where Flan talks about Matisse and artistic process in Six Degrees of Separation? (Has there ever been a sillier main character name in an ostensibly serious movie? For literature, I think Neal Stephenson has it locked up with Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash, followed by slew of Thomas Pynchon characters). The one where he talks about how kids could be artistic geniuses with paint, as long as someone knew when to take the painting away from them? (Clearly seen by the makers of My Kid could Paint That.) Well, that sprung to mind when I stumbled across John Gallaher’s post of an original poem (with assist) by his first-grade daughter:


        The Snow Falls
        by Natalie Gallaher


         The cars are talking about snow
         in the other room.

         We all come down to this moment
         with snow.

         The snow is talking too.

         I wish for snow
         inside my head.

         The snow looks like shining glazing
         of glass.

         The trees have no leaves
         all afternoon.

         I am cold.

         The winters are wise
         in the future.

I love the first, second, and last stanza especially. Sometimes style isn’t so much content as knowing where to stop. I wonder if this counts as a treatment? Or if the way a child sees the world is a treatment, so to speak, of reality. (Insert interpolation previously discussed here.) Certain things are left out, elided, transposed, or juxtaposed, and therefore stylized enough so as to be unrecognizable. While we’re on the subject, check out Wave Books’s erasures machine. Up with strangely arranged minimalism!

And a one, and a two, and a three...

Charlie Bernstein hath seen the light. Yea, he did look out upon his audience at the Conceptual Poetry conference at the University of Arizona, and he didst speak of quietude. No fancy semantic bludgeoning of linguistic systems, no strange arrangements of punctuation, only the nobility of the poet who stands above it all, “only poets working in solitude and individually.” That alone what can produce “poems of enduring value.”

Right. No cultural ephemera for him. Just stanza after stanza of "a poetry without limits of time or place, a poetry of universal address and true to the timeless human spirit." Doesn’t this sound overly hygienic, like it was written in Star Trek font? But maybe not. After all, I once had a teacher at a poetry conference who advised me (and the rest of the workshop) that Wal-Mart was more relevant than Orpheus, and would thus outlive him. Big Blue is pretty badass.

But that’s all in the past now for Bernstein, as "official verse culture" (previously denigrated by him) represents “the best and the finest, the most profound and significant, the richest and most rewarding, poetry of our nation." (Now you’re thinking, "Hmm.. three double adjectives, and not so much as a blush to tint his superlatives.") Finally, Bernstein asserts (and this may be where he tips his hand) that "clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind."

Whereupon we wake from this dream of cybernetic Emersonian overlords, and realize that this paragraph about paragraphs is, well, see the photo at the upper right.

“You! The one over there with the aesthetic! Yeah, you!”

Flarf has claimed its first (well, the first that I’ve heard of) victim. A Psych Professor at Dickinson was allegedly denied tenure because of his advocacy of Flarf. (The whole tone of the related incident puts me in mind of a few white-knuckled academics clutching shotguns on top of a barrier of Winnebagos while zombies approach, armed with the internet. Soon they too will be corroded by the virus of infinite data, and lurch around inside disassociative but weirdly intimately stanzas.)

But seriously, I’m sure that there’s more to this story, probably on both sides. In my experience, some of the intra- and inter-departmental politics makes the machinations of the Medicis look lazy and haphazard, and even more so when it comes to the Holy Grail of tenure. Said decision being stunningly vulnerable to “subjective” factors.

I know of a science professor who won teaching awards, did fantastic research, and was loved by his students. But he put his first graduate student through the program in two years, rather than hanging onto them with a death grip so as to squeeze all the possible free labor out of them over the course of three or four years. You know, like the department chair did. So no tenure for him.

Of course, that was about labor. This is about (allegedly) what kind of bar code you have on your brain.

Bah

So this is really depressing. Meditate too much on the, uh, surplus of creative writing graduates, and the scene become reminiscent of the proliferation of serfs in Europe before the Black Death. After reading Gessen’s incisive little exegesis, it’s tempting to see money as a sort of chalk outline around one’s writing career.

(For the living circumstances of poets, that is. Fiction writers can get their hands on actual financial remuneration—as opposed to payment “in kind” or other intangible rewards—though as Gessen points out in the article, it doesn’t necessarily make the ledger sheet a whole lot better when applied against writing a novel full-time for a few years.)

I’m not totally convinced that Gessen’s economic destinies (teaching, journalism, or odd jobs) for writers is really as Calvinistic as all that.

Granted, editing and a good deal of arts administration jobs really do fall under the category of subsistence level living, but I think that underestimates the job value of English majors who can handle rhetoric, write a decent memo, communicate with a high degree of verbal facility, handle and organize a heavy paper workload, and stare for long hours without blinking at documents, thanks to reading interminable and thickly forested texts. Corporations (and the Government, I might add, which is already quite gray and only going to get more so in the next 5 years) badly need just such folks. Maybe this is because I’m a poet, with, on the face of it, a time commitment to a finished piece that is less daunting than that of a fiction writer, but I don’t think so. I regularly eat up two hours a day with writing, and would be perfectly happy to eat up at least four more. Though I think Gessen is right in that having a full-time other career prohibits (or severely limits) a lot of the business of writing (i.e. correspondence, interviews, handling readings, applying for grants, sending out manuscripts for publication) and well as the secondary activities (writing reviews, essays, blogging, commenting on other manuscripts, working for literary magazines or sites).

Having another non-writing career requires a sort of continuous hallucination in oneself as a writer. You have to believe that you are in conversation with other writers far removed (or, most often, dead). On good days, you feel subversive. On bad days, irrelevant. (Or perhaps in a form of economic/cognitive drag.) Is this worse than checking your fellow English department committee colleagues to see if they have latched rings, Medici-style, or wondering when the circular firing squad might come to town in the name of doctrinal correctness? I guess it depends on how distanced you feel from the means of production, so to speak. (My biggest fear on leaving the academy was that I would pine for the 15 story library, but then I found a spectacularly good interlibrary loan system in a major metropolitan center, and that really cushioned the blow.) This past weekend, I went to the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and while it was awesome, I’d be lying if I didn’t walk out of there feeling a little despondent.

Blowback

VQR has gotten itself chastised, it seems, by the Net, for being a bit too frank about some visceral reactions to the slush pile. Make one tiny little joke about simians, and you end up having to apologize to... well, all of you.

The offending post has been removed, but you can see snippets of it in the comments here.

I think what we have here is a cultural failure to communicate. There’s the culture of the blog, which—like email—tends to reward immediacy and the cheapest forms of entertainment (i.e. glibness, snarkyness, confessionalism, even trolling). And there’s the culture of the literary magazine, which is more predominantly (and historically) Apollonian, genteel, the organizational equivalent of a tea cozy, where decisions and tastes are mutely orchestrated from behind the scrim of an editorial silence. Readers tend to come to literary magazines deliberately, whereas on the Net, one’s browsing interest (which may or may not touch the actual content of the work consumed) wars with the instant boredom and the latent velocity of any web consumer away from the page/blog/webzine.

VQR’s dispatches from the killing ground of the slush pile are no worse than anything I’ve heard of in editorial rooms, and after reading, I dunno, upwards of 100,000 poems in the service of various lit mags, there are several filters that drop into place over the years in order to make you not totally exhausted and self-loathing.

One of these filters is an instant amnesia that takes effect seconds after you finish a poem from the slush pile. (If indeed it is worthy of slush—good poems snag you, even if you’re in auto-mode, or the rest of the submission is abysmally bad. During my editorial career, I once selected a single poem (and put it first in the next issue) from an otherwise horrendous batch by a poet who seems to have never written anything else even remotely as good—and in fact has written some of the worst lines I’ve ever come across.) This way, you don’t take terrible poems home with you in your head.

Second, there’s... well several methods of emotional release. I have heard of editors reading especially dire poems aloud in a pirate voice (especially badly executed lyrical poems), of a wall of shame of the worst metaphors received, and in one case, the aerodynamic half-life test (meaning, the duration of time between opening a submission and flinging it across the room towards the recycling bin). Is this the apex of professionalism? No. It’s stress relief, and a way of convincing yourself that not all of the careerism, mediocrity, repetition, blandness, and misplaced optimism (and the fear of the aforementioned in one’s own writing) that is a constant note in all areas of the literary life does not, in the end, carry the day. The best editors I’ve known are those who can walk away from a few hours of reading submissions in thwarted hopes of finding something singular, and still be excited about writing themselves, rather than feeling dispirited and queasily afraid that a virulent form of verbal entropy has been gnawing at their brains from the inside.

I’m sure it’s the same in other subcultures, where one constantly questions the worth and relevance (not to mention the meager monetary rewards) of one’s activity, and the recurrent sensation of struggling for a small portion of an already small audience. Combine that with the headiness of the net (say, for instance, with Diagram’s claim of 160,000 monthly hits), and it’s not always pretty. But not out of the ordinary.

There needs to be an anonymous relationship with the submitter, for two reasons. First, because if you don’t have one, you enter into correspondences like this. And clearly someone’s professional, emotional, creative, and possibly sexual needs will not be met. Second, because the reader of literary magazines are going to encounter these poems anonymously, so the best way to model the suitability of the poem for an issue is to respond dispassionately (if not astringently) as an initial acid test. Despite common, underlying assumptions to the contrary, no one is forced to read poetry. Poetry has to make the case for itself, and to total strangers. This is what I try to remember when I sometimes receive puzzling comments on my 350-odd rejections. The editor or reader (who most likely is getting little or no financial recompense) may have just rejected hundreds of poems, and the last horrible one was about Crete, which my poems also references.

Perhaps it wasn’t the most professional thing for VQR to post what should stay secret inter-office cultural communiqués, but then again, how often do you encounter “professional” and “blog” in the same sentence? As a form, it tends to be, well, informal. The only “safe” form of institutional writing is a press release, and you’re not going to get a readership for your blog if all you post is essentially advertising (especially when, with the proliferation of blogs, one’s allergy to official communications and disguised solicitations only grows). In my experience, VQR’s flavor of snark is not a tremendous departure (if at all) from a great deal of editorial culture (and I’m not speaking here for Ploughshares, merely as a private consumer).

Shotgun

Frank Bidart thinks lyric poets (deployers of “verbal filigree”) are drunk.

Walt Whitman was a cult leader, sort of. He kissed Oscar Wilde, but also received lascivious attentions of another kind.

You, yes you, are awash with diatoms.

Why do less and less people give a damn about literature? Maybe because the critics have demanded that any cultural artifact be evaluated politically rather than aesthetically.

Scholarship means never having to admit that an aardvark isn’t a medium-sized inflatable banana.

Sometimes, I write my name on my underpants.

Bees Do It

More stuff on the uh... quantum nature of the written word. (Previously discussed here and here). That grand grey majesty, Wallace Stegner, stands accused of plagiarizing Mary Hallock Foote, an early 20th century a magazine writer and illustrator. Stegner taught her stories while at Stanford and included her in anthologies, before deciding that page-long passages of her unpublished memoir were just too irresistible. So he jacked them for Angle of Repose.

It seems like we’ve reached a critical mass where there should be some micro-department of Plagiarism Studies. And there are noises in that directions, some serious, some less so. I mean, it’s got everything! Music, martial arts, you name it. Helen Keller was terrified of it. That’s why she wrote an autobiography. (Good news for those of us who are content producers, though: the courts have ruled that you cannot plagiarize yourself. Mostly.)

In grad school, I took a great course by Helen Sword on “Hauntology” (an expansive metaphor that encompasses literal haunting within texts, the author haunting linked texts of his/hers, and books haunted by other authors.) Check out her book, Ghostwriting Modernism, here. Of course with all of its ambiguities, plagiarism is a form of haunting (obscured intentions, chronological uncertainty, doubtful presences, etc.)

First word, most expensive word

Missed this the first time around: Ian Daly’s great piece on Aram Saroyan’s deployment of what he termed “The Most Expensive Word in History,” a poem that reads, in its entirety, thus:


                                                  lighght


Saroyan published it in the Chicago Review in 1966 and a year later, George Plimpton put in The American Literary Anthology, which entitled the poem to a $750 check from the NEA. Also outrage from U.S. Representative William Scherle and, as always, the redoubtable Jesse Helms. The NEA (full history here) had to send the deputy chairperson before Congress to explain the poem. I imagine he did a better job than Plimpton, who answered one Congressman by saying, “You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.” I love you, George, but have ya heard of audience there, pal?

[Lighght called to mind Kenneth Patchen’s more elaborate (but not by much) “The Murder Of Two Men By A Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves,” which consists of the word “Wait” randomly repeated 14 times, followed by a “NOW.” There is a sound recording with Patchen backed by the Chamber Jazz Sextet (Patchen also got to read with Mingus and had a play scored by John Cage, that lucky devil).]

All of this makes me very happy. That one word--and not even an obscene one--could make a lot of money and a lot of controversy seems a testament to the fact that poetry (even in miniature amounts) invokes some kind of quantum syntax.

Draw, ya varmint!

I was reading Science and Steepleflower by Forrest Gander yesterday (who, by the way, has a podcast), and was enjoying the extravagance of the diction immensely. In fact, I can’t remember the last book of poetry I’ve read that gave me such pleasure in confoundatory language. This led me to an unprovable thought about the avant-garde: the more specific the language becomes, the more radical the poem becomes. To whit:

agaric
agnostoid
anguilliform
arborescing
aseptic
breccia
canthi
cartouche
cereus
chert
clades
consubstantial
dehiscing
enharmonic
ferruginous
fillip
flexural
galena
glabella
grum
isomorphic
lapilli
lithofacies
lour
matutinal
Merthiolate
Ordovician
orthogonal
penetralia
phreatomagnetic
plagioclase
polyhedrons
pygidium
quintral
raptus
rutilant
scoriaceous
selvage
Silurian
spiracles
spirea
sthenic
stoup
synoptic
tephra
topos
ungulate
volant

I am sure this particular strain of performativity was etched in carbonite in my medulla oblongata when I watched that scene from Say Anything where Lloyd flips through Diane’s dictionary and notices that she had highlighted multiple words on every page), but it actually started much much earlier, when I read a series that gave me these to chew on:

adjure
affrays
ambit
anadem
anele
apothegm
arete
aumbrie
auto-da-fe
badinage
bayamo
bedizened
caducity
chancrous
charlock
chatoyant
chlamys
chrism
clinquant
condign
contumely
coquelicot
corybantic
deflagration
demnify
destrier
desuetude
devoir
donjon
eidolon
epitonic
etiolate
febrifuge
febrile
feoffment
formication
fuligin
fulvous
gelid
hebetude
imbricated
impercipient
inanition
ineleuctable
innominate
irenic
jacinth
jannissary
jerrid
lacustrine
littoral
lorn
macerate
malison
mephitic
oriflamme
orisons
paresis
parethesia
percipience
plinth
propiquinity
quirt
refulgent
relict
roborant
sackbut
sapid
sark
scend
sedulously
sequacious
spandrels
spavined
spilth
steerhorn
stertorius
stillatory
suasion
surquedry
tabidly
tarn
telic
tenebrous
thetic
theurgy
thurible
travertine
treacher
unassoiled
vambrace
virga
viscid
vitiated
vizards
vlei

Crazy, right? I honestly can’t think of another author who has so thoroughly slapped around my sense of linguistic self-possession. It’s an author whom some people think that J.K. Rowling has stolen from, yet also one who views Faulkner, James, and Conrad as major influences (and let me tell you how unlikely I thought those four would ever end up in a sentence together). Why, Stephen R. Donaldson, of course. The author of the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, starring the titular leper anti-hero in a fantastical land. I’ve read other fantasy series, but not one that so systematically assaulted common diction. (Reading the series is arduous for other reasons, mostly because the protagonists suffer so intensely for hundreds of pages at a time with relentlessly insistent descriptions of their anguish. Yet this results in plots that deliver an immense amount of catharsis, which seems to take the reader by surprise somehow.)

I don’t know what this says about genre and literariness exactly, though really it does make me intensely curious as to what his process is--how many of you have actually heard someone say any of the preceding words out loud?--and, to a lesser extent, just what sort of editor they gave him. (My undergrad fiction professor used to say that every word you choose over another loses you a reader, and Donaldson clearly has nerves of steel in that regard.) So I’ve been wondering if there are other authors out there working in the margins or in marginalized genres (in the eyes of the literary world) who seem to have an obscure but unmistakable linguistic agenda.

Titular

Don’t you sometimes wish you could just write titles? Like being one of those people who get to coin color names or company names. Now, in conjunction with the Bulwer-Lytton Award for the worst fiction, we also have The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. Here’s the shortlist:

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
How to Write a How to Write Book
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
Cheese Problems Solved
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

My personal favorite is Cheese Problems Solved. It just suggests an urgency that you normally don’t find around enzymes and whey. Trying to come up with poem titles usually seems like the last thing one does, like assigning names in fiction (for important but frustrating characters previously referred to in muttered undertones as “Sir Badinage,” or “Bastard #5”). You’d think with the potential abundance of... er... virtual rewards of the internet that there would be more fringe-y contests.

“It’s fully operational...”

As long as we’re in lingering in professional dystopia, it seems appropriate to consider once again that yearly pilgrimage to AWP, wherein we shall tender our scrip. When you think about it, the world of poetry could arguably be compared to one big company store. All profit, effort, and professional reciprocity sort of stay within the compound, as it were. It’s a profoundly closed system.

[This might not seem so surprising when viewed in the light of a line from David Bosworth’s “The Cult of the Adolescent”: “Imagine the consequences for a readership bequeathed a generation of authors who believe that ‘language only refers to itself...’”]

Of course, unlike past corporate megaliths, aside from a tiny trickle, our product doesn’t actually flow into the outside world. Oh, and we don’t get machine-gunned in the dead of night. So that’s a plus.

[In case there’s any doubt, this is not meant to be a serious metaphor, as even teaching 5/5 at East Jesus State College--while potentially wildly incompatible with a happy and carefree writing life and the performance of extracurricular higher cognitive functions--is clearly not on par with Third World suffering and Banana Republic atrocities.]

The latest dustup about the legitimacy/relevance/absurdity of AWP makes for amusing reading. Does anyone really believe that the conference is the Death Star of creative writing? Of course, there seems to be (understandably) a lot of bad feeling around it due to recent events. [Upon hearing that the conference was sold out, I entertained myself by trying to follow the metaphor through to the end. It’s not like there are only 5,000 poetry widgets, or widget booths. The notion of an author’s content “running out” is kind of a neat idea.]

I find myself neither a partisan nor an advocate, but as one who goes and finds writers behaving exactly like other conventioneers (though without the red fezzes or tiny cars): getting drunk, hooking up, schmoozing out of habit, reflex, or sheer performativity, but mostly talking shop. Despite the sentiment above, an excuse to talk shop for three solid days without the overt sense of violating social norms of conversation is pretty cool, even if by the end I begin to wish I was an accountant.

[Though the ability of the creative writing subculture to comment on itself is perhaps unsurpassed by other subcultures, unless you make the leap to cults (who tend to somewhat uncritical.) I suppose this is a form of honesty.]

And there’s all sorts of accidental bonuses, such the time I went to see one of my favorite authors on a panel. As another panelist was holding forth, said author slowly lowered her head until she was face down on the table. I couldn’t tell if it was despair, exhaustion, or reverie, but I enjoyed the gesture nonetheless.

Good Gray Prose

Y’ever wake up some days and feel absolutely indicted? Christina Nehring wants you to know that you are what’s wrong with the American essay, specifically the Best American Essay series. You with your venti latte and your second-hand car and your precocious college years. Simply put, the contemporary American essay has made a virtue of being boring. Anecdote recollected under sedation. She makes the case that the cautious, ruminative voice that passes for literary meditation is a sensibility that is all-too safely circumscribed, middle-aged, and middle-class. That is to say, pathologically averse to transgression. (In fairness, I should point out that Nehring also thinks that readers are part of the problem, or represent a problem in themselves, though others disagree.) While there are plenty of essays that are clearly made by and consumed by someone who devoutly wishes to be part of the leisure class (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), there are other pieces out there I could name from Best American Essays which are a little less languid. And while I think we should all dial down the polite recollection in personal essays, saying the American essay is moribund because some of its practitioners skew toward the anesthetized, is like saying Maya Angelou cancels out C.D. Wright.

The Triggering Town

What follows great tragedy? Policy of course. Virginia Tech has comes up with a litmus test for disturbing writing:

Are the characters’ thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening?

Do characters think about or question their violent actions?

If one set of characters demonstrates no self-awareness or moral consciousness, are other characters aware of or disturbed by what has taken place?

In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters’ thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger?

What this really speaks to is point of view: the author’s psychic distance from his or her speaker, and how that distance is betrayed or communicated. Obviously, the negotiation of this contract is much more explicit in fiction than in poetry (if for no other reason than the sheer amplitude of text available--the longer you go on, the more chances you have to reveal authorial attitude toward the weaknesses and biases displayed in the characters). In one sense, you could look on every story as a trial, wherein the characters are cross-examined for their likeability, moral fiber, and entertainment value. (Where’s Kafka when you really need him?) Most modern fiction has to take the moral equivalent of aesthetic stands (as opposed to post-modern fiction, where the reverse occurs). Poetry is dodgier. (In fact, how often does one hear of poetry triggering the same kind of scrutiny and alarm?) Perhaps because it is often much less representational and there is a lack of surprise when it comes to a poetic narrator serving as a stand-in for the author (coupled with a much weaker imperative to conclude whether or not the author is trying to advance a view about or desired outcome in the world). Alternately, there is less expectation in poetry that cathartic expression of transgressive sentiments will lead to transgressive acts (the poem being in itself being commonly thought of as a speaking “act” rather than blueprint to be acted out, which is a fancy way of saying many people think fiction writers make more meticulous and motivated planners than poets). Is there really a divide in poetry and fiction when it comes to these issues, or do such “triggering” texts possess the same inherent quality?

IQ’s Icky Thump

Much like infertility rates and the proliferation of electronic social utilities, IQ seems to be rising every day: 3 points per decade. This only points out that the space of an administered IQ test is just as much a text as any other bound artifact. (For random fun, take the IQ test here for prospective NFL draft picks.) James Flynn, a New Zealand scientist, has painstakingly written up the way IQ tests are yet another brute meme unknowingly snarled in a web of cultural matrices. Or, as he puts it: “If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents.” Yup, I loves me a good concrete referent. Often’s the time, I wished I had one close at hand to while the night hours away.

Malcom Gladwell cites the following as an example of just how fusty old Western cartesianists blunder on in search of the data most pleasing to their ears:

“The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way.”

It strikes me how much a poem is an experiment in taxonomy. The way a poem eats an object, subsuming it into a lyric (or pickling it in irony) seems quite similar to the pairings of the Kpelle. What is wisteria for? Miscarriages. Dusk is for alcohol, and ammonia for fever dreams. The nouns that you bring together in a poem reveal your sense of “rightness,” and how psychic necessity solves the world in a synaptic flash.

Blood in the water

Yes, Mailer is dead. I’d honestly like to know if there’s anyone out there who’s read it all. (I haven’t. I read The Armies of Night, The Executioner’s Song, Cannibals and Christians, and what I could stand of Ancient Evenings.) Frankly, there was a lot of it, and if his oeuvre ever happened to topple over and trap you beneath it, you would be trapped there a long time. My dad once observed that you could tell you were reading a book by someone who had been married six times and was carrying a lot of alimony, because why would you use one sentence when you could use five? (Ancient Evenings was a particular offender in this regard. I appreciate Egyptian symbology as much as the next person, but the man wrote the textual equivalent of more jump cuts than MTV uses. Tom Robbins has a species of the same affliction. Rather than come up with a vivd metaphor and weight its effects, and modulate the intensity of your prose, both Robbins and Mailer will/would bully you with seven metaphors.) Which is not to say that Mailer (or Robbins) is without talent. I still think Armies of Night is a great book, and lord knows Creative Nonfiction would not be the same without his star in the firmament. But the one thing that I took away from the essays in Cannibals and Christians (other than the staggering amount of self-indulgence it takes to interview oneself) is that he was a man who was deeply, profoundly worried about whether or not other writers were better/more famous/got laid more than him. And unlike the rest of us who try to strangle such serpents in their crib, Mailer felt free to slag his contemporaries whenever possible and in whatever venue, on what I must assume is the theory that anyone who read them was someone who wasn’t reading him. I found this zero-sum outlook quite unattractive. I’m sure that it made him legions of enemies, and for someone who made a career out of dismissing the importance of others (like Bukowski, he seemed always ready to point out how difficult it was for him to write and why no one else should attempt it), I can’t say I’m surprised that everyone has their spray-can out, ready to deface the memorial he consciously built for himself. I never read someone else who so casually and transparently tried to hamstring his closest competitors. And, as always, the threat of physical violence (ala William Buckley’s clenched jaw mutterings) was never far away. This is not to say that Mailer deserves venomous eulogies, just that they haven’t materialized out of the blue. My complaint is that the obits that I have read really haven’t talked about him as an innovator of creative non-fiction, but instead focused on his PR machine.

Keep your eye on the red queen...

Literary theory and psychology have a hot new hybrid: Impostor Studies. It seems perfectly natural to me that feelings of academic fraud should be formalized, as a great many of the people I know in academia seem to suffer from it. It’s the mental equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome for the knowledge worker. Or perhaps antibodies against overweening cognitive arrogance, the kind of prompted Larry Summers--when he was merely the chief economist of the World Bank and not the President of Harvard--to say, “I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.” (This was his explanation of why the U.S. should export toxic wastes to Third World countries.) On the other end of the spectrum, you have Buster Keaton flirting with this impulse when he claimed he really didn’t feel qualified to comment on his own work. In one sense, post-modernism is Imposter Theory writ large. If one entertains primal doubts about the legitimacy of one’s own speakerhood, then it is a natural (and arguably ethical act) to export it to all speakers, if for nothing else than to keep everyone honest. Mind you, this might be a fundamentally more compelling argument if power did not accrue to the one performing the destabilizing critique.

Papers, Please

Just finished the title poem from Noelle Kocot’s exhilarating Poem for the End of the Time, which definitely breaks a lot of rules. As exhortation goes, it’s up there. Direct address targets NYC, America, various religious personages, God, etc, and the solid blocks of anaphora can break your kneecaps. Yet excesses aside, it’s great to read something that’s unabashedly transgressive, not titillating and edgy in an oblique, noodly sort of way (both in terms of sly content and form), but straight up. On the minimalist end, it seems like Cavafy with his brazen directness and simplicity is flanked by Alan Dugan’s cranky exhibitionism. On the high end, Anne Carson’s torqued annotations are matched with C.D. Wright’s cascade of particulate nouns. Kocot seems to raise the ceiling a little higher (at least in terms of rule-breaking). I’m aware that one’s awareness of what constitutes transgression against poetic practice is totally conditioned by resentment of one’s own limitations (and habits, which may or may not include the consumption of 5 books of poetry a week and 5 bottles of wine), but it’s great to encounter a poem has an air of the gauntlet. Anyone out there have their favorite scoundrels, verse-wise?

Thinking It Through

Back in grad school, my fabulous instructor’s stipend meant I got to live in a basement room right on the campus for $200.00, utilities included. Of course, I kept the windows closed for two years, due to the fact that sizable wolf spiders would congregate on the inside of the screens if they were open. The shower had rough rock walls and the drain was a hole in the concrete floor. The steps down to my room were very steep (being right underneath another set of stairs), and one day, when it had been raining outside, I leaned back in my customary way as I went down, and my feet went out from underneath me. I remember my head hitting the back of the stairs and I wound up sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, as the cleaning lady stared at me curiously. She asked if I was alright, I said something garbled, and then I apparently passed out, and fell back, hitting my head again on the concrete floor, and had a small seizure. Later there was an ambulance and x-rays and an EEG, and nothing appeared to be amiss, but my physician did pause at one point, and say something sympathetic (but not comforting) about the ramifications of head injuries for “knowledge workers” like ourselves. This I found to be the scariest part of the whole incident, though there appear to have been no after-effects nor any damage. (I couldn’t multiply more than two digit numbers in my head before, and I still can’t.) So heart attacks don’t nearly frighten me as much as strokes and the like.

So I have to say that I wasn’t sure how to react to Diane Ackerman’s introduction to her husband Paul West’s piece about suffering brain damage and the resultant aphasia.

The first section, “Fleet,” has some of the recursive daffiness of poetry (“One way of trying extra hard is to imagine one dimension of the universe coated in either black velvet or a blue that no one has reported outside the province of Baffinland”), and one senses a lot of syntactical navigation through neural back alleys throughout (“It was a matter of looking always on the bright side, until you were looking no longer; in this way, unless you were singularly unfortunate, you always had something to admire.”). Cerebral trauma has been on my mind recently, having just watched Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s, The Lookout, a modest thriller about a brain-damaged ex-hockey star and a bank heist, and I am still haunted by Floyd Skloot’s essay. “Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain” (published in Best American Essays 2000), and its painstaking reproduction of the mental gymnastics involved in just cooking something.

Apparently, there is a Crippled Poetics, as well as debate about whether “autism poetry” is being co-opted by non-autistic poets. Of course, one of the possible side effects of identifying the functionality of the mechanisms of language with poetic/personal identity is the disabling of critique, though in West’s case, any linguistic functionality itself is a vindication of the brain and its plasticity. Yet, as always, when it comes to the page, all bets are off. As a medium, printed matter has its own laws of physics, and while there are wormholes between form and content, signifier and signified, ultimately a text only has recourse to its own First Principles.

Taking it back

I once attended a workshop with the fabulous Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Body Betrayer and The Book of Accident, both of which dominate that particular shelf in my bookcase, where she off-handedly referred to Kenneth Patchen as an archetypal adolescent literary love. Much like Thomas Wolfe, Patchen was another angry young lyricist who had to tell things the way they really were, and risk caricature, bombast, and imagery for its own sake. So at 19, I adored them both, even if Wolfe’s character portraits did tend to acquire the exaggerated demeanor of an Al Hirshfeld sketch, and Patchen’s enraged direct addresses to the reader made me uncomfortable. But they were in a way, a playbill for how a young writer could work on style and imagery and dialogue without selling out, as it were, to The Machine, The Combine, The Authority, or what-have-you, since both of them would rather spit in your eye than admit some philosophical ambiguity or ambivalence in moral literature. They would have hated each immediately, I think. (Wolfe was a Romantic and Patchen was angry but hip. Funnily enough, though, they sometimes fell prey to poor impulse control, textually: Wolfe could shamelessly descend straight into de-facto poetry, as in the pivotal graveyard scene in Look Homeward Angel, much as Patchen does in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.) I suppose we all have our adolescent standard bearers that we avoid revisiting later on in order to protect our experiences of them, and the energy and the authority that they lent to us then, in spite of the flaws that would most likely be quite in evidence now. Still, in order to amuse myself, I often think of the social equivalent of literary steel cage matches (ala Philip Levine’s poem about Hart Crane meeting Lorca). Is this the academic version of celebrity gossip? There are worse vices.

Snip

Another one of the great divides that seems to come between poets and fiction writers is the issue of revision, which sometimes amounts to a dirty secret for poets. As my fiction professor used to say, everything held up Dylan Thomas as the spontaneous child of Pan, out of whom poetry just flowed. Yet when he died, they found over 200 drafts of “Fern Hill.” Still, it's rare to have a poet's editor or literary executor slice a page or a stanza out of an unpublished long poem (of which--let's face it--there must be many) and publishes it as a stand-alone piece, while Ralph Ellison and Ernest Hemingway have suffered the analogous effect. Similarly, no poet generates the same amount of controversy over whether or not their editor was largely responsible for their distinctive style (ala Raymond Carver’s minimalist “dirty realism”, or for the shape--or the manageability generated by 60,000 or 250,000 less words--of their novels (ala Thomas Wolfe). When I was editing Indiana Review, we would once in a great while ask for revisions of submitted poems (if the edits were distinct and severable, such as transposing or cutting stanzas or sentences), but almost never asking for newly generated content to fix old content. Generally, I’m in the habit of revising 50% to 85% of any given poem (aside from abandoned first drafts, of course), though this practice has often been met with bewilderment and astonishment from other poets, as if I had confessed to using a Ouija Board to guide my revisions. I’ve been asked twice for revisions of submitted poems (both times to the greater good of the poem), but I wonder how many poets get asked for revision in general, or if there are any great war stories out there. Anyone have any thoughts?

Unlawful Casual Knowledge

There is no guilt like the professional guilt of the writer who makes an incisive remark on a text that remains unopened by said writer, as Bayard deconstructs. He even has a taxonomy:

“livres inconnus” (books one is unfamiliar with)
“livres parcourus” (books glanced at)
“livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books one has heard discussed)
“les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books one has read but forgotten)

All in all, this covers a huge swath of my cranial space. They’re kind of like evil imaginary friends, the tomes whom you have pretended to have digested. They whisper to you at parties, and track mud all over the floor of your gestalt, saying, “That remark would have been so much funnier if you actually read about the seizure in Chapter 12” and “Of course, I made fun of the motif you said I revered in the epilogue to Crepuscular Tuscany, but you wouldn’t know that, would you?” So what should be as important and primal to a writer as the cave paintings in Lascaux are to an artist end up being mere graffiti: “Call Hester for a brazenly good time.”

Here are my heavies:

Moby Dick
War and Peace
Ulysses
Underworld
The Magic Mountain
Remembrance of Things Past
Gravity’s Rainbow (started 4 times)
Madame Bovary
Brothers Karamazov
Anna Karenina
Native Son
Their Eyes were Watching God
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
As I Lay Dying
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Hopscotch
The Tin Drum
The Sorrows of Youth Werther
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dead Souls
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Brave New World
The Rainbow
The Man in the High Castle
A Farewell to Arms
Tropic of Cancer
Bonfire of the Vanities
Catch 22

And let’s be honest. Wikipedia is not making things any easier. There goes 60% of the conversation of literature majors, whom I notice tend to specialize in off-hand remarks. I suppose that the printing press caused all sorts of resentment also (“I paid an extravagant sum of money for this book and your damned pamphlet cost you a shilling!”). Blogging too, of course. I have this mental image of a publisher’s nightmare, where they look up from compositing type and fearfully ask the blogger lurking in the shadows what his name is. From the darkness comes the sepulchral reply, “OMG! Legion! For we are many.”

Moral Kombat

Keerist. This makes you wonder why anyone ever trusts a damn thing writers say. Poor form to publicly argue with your own work. While being pissed off and dissatisfied with whatever obsession drove you to write something in the past, one tends to look like a idiot if you become wrathful at the mere suggestion that a novel about burning books might be distantly linked to censorship. (Though I suppose arguing with the textual equivalent of your imaginary friend is preferable to actually beating the hell out of your critics... to prove... what, exactly?) Then there are those writers who seem to deliberately piss off the people who venerated them. I suppose that’s one way of solving the problem of the demands of the audience. But don’t all those arguments play much better on the page than in performance art press releases, open letters to your ex-lover’s cat, and David Blaine-style feats of conspicuous but mute suffering, and naked aggression in the guise of philosophy or sociology? Kind of makes me sad to think of all that psychic energy poured fruitlessly out onto the airwaves and newsprint, being sopped up like water splashed onto dry ground. Especially when such interrogations could be generating stuff like Italo Calvino’s ultimate perpetual textual motion machine, If on a winter’s night a traveler (the best example of reader surveillance anywhere), or the cross-referenced lunacy of Milroad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. All I can say is that J.D. Salinger better be making Hunter S. Thompson look like Mother Theresa inside that silent compound.

Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others!

Robert Heinlein would have been 100 years old this year, if he'd had better cryogenic luck. Brian Doherty pens a cogent appreciation of the crusty one himself here. I thought I would celebrate by taking out the audiobook of Have Spacesuit--Will Travel from the library, only to recoil when the voice of youthful americana that they selected for the narrator was totally without pizazz. It was unlike anything I imagined when I read them in the fusty confines of my middle school library. The voice needed to be corn-fed, knowing, wry, charmingly pragmatic, not callow. I won't say that it made me feel patriotic to read him, but certainly he is one of the few writers (Daniel Keys Moran and Stephen Vincent Benet being the other ones who spring immediately to mind) who could convey a beguiling sense of what it means to be American. This impulse was in somewhat short supply for me growing up during the Reagan years. But Heinlein was also attractive because he was cranky, licentious, and (even to an unsophisticated sixth grader) clearly notorious. So my barely pubescent radical socialist self could cozy up to a rabidly anti-commmunist writer who advocated suffrage for veterans only. (When the pneumatically-endowed actors of Starship Troopers waddled onto movie screens, someone gave Heinlein the faintest of faint praises, saying that he was okay, as long as "he could keep the fascism in check." I winced.

But for me, he was part of that personal pantheon of transgressive adolescent literature (such Piers Anthony and Frank Herbert), who could mix pontification and somewhat more openly frank appreciations of adult shenanigans. Sure, Dune had something serious to say about desert religions, tribalism, and messianism (which, y'know, might by slightly apropos in our current situation), but it also had doe-eyed virgins who got off on prophency. (And enough machincations and intrigue to make Danielle Steele blush, which was a bit intoxicating, as my middle school self would have killed to manage even the tiniest iota of intrigue). Similarly, Piers Anthony had some comments on social superstructures and an unblinking assessment of how human needs played out on a macro and micro scale, but... well, there was an entire book whose title was based on the hue of the undergarments of a female character, so it wasn't all keen sociological insight. There was something for Plath's "the peanut-crunching crowd." But there are worse things to be than a provocateur (even if you could be provisionally claimed by the hippies, Barry Goldwater, or the Manson family). Plus, you have to give him credit for getting more outrageous as he got older. I'd say that being a crank isn't such a bad retirement plan.

Dead Souls

Interesting article in The New Yorker on artists who immolate, who take big swaths of their work and put it forever beyond the reach of texts and their scholars. Kafka would have had it so, if he had been obeyed. And doesn’t Emily Dickinson read like someone who always thought it was going to happen that way? In some quasi-Borgesian way, the poems feel like it did happen to them, and we are only reading them through some metaphysical accident. My fiction professor wrote a novel about Hemingway’s lost suitcase full of manuscripts, only to discover that two other novelists had also done so. The trope was kicking about in the ether around that time, apparently. These damaged, endangered, or posthumous texts hold a mystique that can’t ever be fully stomped out. As one of Stoppard’s characters laments in Arcadia, it’s all Cleopatra’s fault:

But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. O, Septimus! – can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – thousands of poems – Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

When I was 18, this was exactly the sort of thing that would have kept me up at night. Like those meticulous listeners of vinyl who somehow still know that the Beatles covered it up that Paul really was dead (which kind of explains Wings, if you think about it), there will always be an audience for aftertaste of these defunct books. Maybe people don’t really feel that way about poetry because poems are themselves rather endangered, tenuous propositions which already seem to argue that they’re not really on the page, but elsewhere, thwarted and receding, undone by other agents and pow’rs.

And yes, I’m also a member

Social networks just keep on iterating. The hive mind has now contrived to extrovert your reading predilections via Good Reads (which seems to be a clear MySpace-type of knock-off of Library Thing, which one actually has to pay for, unless you have less than 200 books). See what your friends are reading! Engage in a tacit critical arms race! Regress to your crib reading habits! Continue the digital process of systematically eliminating every topic one might conceivably converse pleasurably about with your companions! In the future, only our footnotes will have sex!

Aspic and Antidote

Okay, so it is known in some circles that I am all about the high and the low. Hard to quantify the obscure pleasure that is to be gotten from the fact that on my bookshelf I have Peter S. Beagle’s The Folk of the Air next to William Peter Blatty’s Legion and Borges’s Collected Non-Fictions. As the fabulous Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys, all that stuff--the melodramatic movie scenes and show tunes he makes his students perform in between Aeschylus and Adorno--is an antidote. It’s what prevents intellectuals from wandering into their bellybuttons like Theseus trudging onward as the Minotaur recedes around the next corner of the labyrinth.

As a case in point, I have resisted reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones for three years now. Because it’s literary and sounded dire (in that independent-film-go-on-and-eat-your-turnips-Nikolai sort of way). Frankly, I couldn’t imagine how the author could have pulled off the concept of a murdered girl narrating her family’s lives from heaven. And I disdained what I imagined to be the typical narrative soft-shoe that covers up such a large structural problem (image... image... conjecture... image... bitterly elucidated poignancy... image). I’m halfway through the book, and I freely admit that I was utterly wrong. If she pulls it off, in my opinion, it’ll be one of the cleverest narrative moves since The Virgin Suicides. (And not for nothing, but Marc Cherry, you should cut Sebold a big fat check. Desperate Housewives’s deceased play-by-play announcer reaches for the same sangfroid.)

But as an antidote (now happily unnecessary) to what I had anticipated as a forced march through the textual cranberry bog of literary fiction, I have been reading Brian K. Vaughan’s graphic novel series, Y: The Last Man, which is not unlike what would emerge if you threw Douglas Adams, Ian Fleming, Eve Ensler, and George Orwell into a supercollider. And inverted the plot of Frank Herbert’s The White Plague (where all the woman in the world are killed by a designer disease). And for good measure, I found this, online, not 24 hours after I mentioned that the AP’s it-looks-like-news-but-tastes-like-chicken press release on their pitiful week-long blackout on Paris Hilton hurt my heart. This is what comes of making any edicts about one’s appetites in the world of ideas.

Call Out

Having secretly harbored an adolescent desire to be a 17th century cabinet maker (for, you know, the meditative solitude), I suppose that it’s not tremendously surprising that one of my favorite Jorge Luis Borges stories is The Library of Babel. I liked the idea of pilgrims/adventurers wandering through a vast honeycomb of hexagonal rooms containing books composed of every variation of a set number of characters. I definitely remember thinking that I would have enjoyed math a lot more if it could generate stuff like Borges’s metaphor (borrowed from Blaise Pascal’s model) of the universe as a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Well, the internet giveth and the internet taketh away. In this case, it provides a neat little tidepool analogue of the aforementioned in the Library Thing. Now you can revisit the Dewey Decimal System’s greatest hits by putting your entire library catalogue online. You can wander through other people’s collections and engage in all sorts of cross-pollination (one of the features is The UnSuggester, which humorously tells you which books you won’t like).

Of course, putting an exact number on the amount of books you own (586 in this case) is a little disheartening, but it does make it easier to visualize certain “halls” of books, like Aphasic Crepuscular Poets, Reference Books that Verge on the Threatening, Dyspeptic Agrarians, or Technicians of the Snark. That being said (and allowing for the fact that being a writer and worrying overmuch about privacy is ridiculous in a certain light) there’s something slightly disconcerting about inviting surveillance all the way into your reading habits.

Biographica

For those of you who envision a future (or current) career as provocateur and/or curmudgeon, you might be dismayed to read Elizabeth Tallent’s review of John Worthen’s new D.H. Lawrence biography.

As opposed to G.B. Shaw, who took great pains to make his vitriol clear and easily portable across state lines, Lawrence liked his camouflage: “I hate ‘understanding’ people, and I hate still more to be understood.” Kind of the wrong profession to be in, wouldn’t you say? Working in a mode whose raison d’etre is the transmission of information, much of it psychological?

Tallent makes some good points about the excesses Lawrence grants his characters, noting that while one of his characters in Lady Chatterly’s Lover admits that “When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her,” “nobody has accused Lawrence of wanting to strangle lesbians.” Similarly, Lawrence’s attributed sexism may be complicated or undercut by his “long, sympathetic poem about menopause.”

Lawrence seems rather confident of humanity to accommodate his bile, writing to estranged friend Katherine Mansfield that her very disease (tuberculosis) offended him: “I loathe you, you revolt me stewing in your consumption.” From Tallent’s review, it seems that Worthen had his work cut out for him, as the bio works very hard to make sure Lawrence’s beating of his dog and his assault of his wife Frieda is “contextualized."

I used to devour biographies of writers endlessly: Frank O’Hara, William S. Burroughs, Byron, but it’s fallen off of late, precipitated by a bio of E.E. Cummings, wherein our hero blithely recounts a near-rape of his ex-wife that manages to be both contemptuous (of her body, which seems not to attract him at all) and breathlessly proud in a particularly mindless way of his physical accomplishment in subduing her. At this point, if I ever had a chance at enjoying another of his poems, I had to put down the book. I also recently completed Richard Ellman’s biography of Wilde, which was similarly depressing (the central point of which seemed to be Ellman’s thesis that Wilde suffered from syphilis), and I don’t plan to read the bio of Robinson Jeffers that was next on my list, for fear of discovering that he snuck off into the woods to rip out and consume the hearts of eagles while chanting Pictish.

The web--like so many things--is liminal

One drawback of the information age is the potential for endless post-mortem. Picking up on Laura’s post about the Virginia Tech tragedy, I noticed that Cho Seung-Hui's plays have found their way onto the internet.

I find the fact that the plays have been posted depressing and more than a little creepy, and while I understand why they would be published given the situation, I’m always a little sad when the quasi-confessional veil of the creative writing classroom is torn.

At some point, the data just needs to stop. Mental illness is not a rosetta stone where everything will eventually revealed, and anyone who viewed his flat-affect videos should know that coherence and intelligibility (let alone relevance) are not going to leap off the screen or the page. One can be shocked by the facts, but to return to them obsessively (especially--as is often the case with local and network newscasts--when it’s just raw information and is not shaped or contextualized in any meaningful fashion) begins to say more about the viewer than the subject.

Foucault On, Foucault Off

If there is a big bad theory name out there that causes undergraduates to scurry underneath their desks and recall fondly such thorny questions as whether or not Updike was the apex of American domestic masculinity, it's Foucault. (Honorable mention to Derrida, whose welter of translucent clauses are the grammatical equivalent of being trapped in an aquarium full of grease). Before these two, the most linguistically leaden encounter I had with theoretical language has to go to Herr Kant, whose plodding cascade of cinderblock definitions made me long for intellectual self-defenestration. (I much preferred that waggish Mr. Barthes, whose languorous suppositions made it seem like he would be loads of fun at parties, especially after too much red wine.)

Fortunately, there's cogent snarkiness to be had in Andrew Scull's review of Foucault's History of Madness, wherein Mister Scull highlights some selective scholarship on Foucault's part, inferring that he deliberately chose antique, erroneous, or superseded texts in order to buttress his diagnosis of power, race, politics, power, class, power... did I mention power? For instance, while it makes for good copy (in a kind of "Here there be dragons" sort of way) Scull points out that the 1815–16 House of Commons inquiry into the state of England's madhouses did not reveal "that Bedlam (Bethlem) placed its inmates on public display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year" as Foucault claimed it did. Nor was there actually a "ship of fools" that wandered from port to port with a cargo of the insane. As Mssr. Colbert would say, “Truthiness is all."

Speaking of the Indefensible

Thinking about norms today. Reading Jonathem Lethem’s recent story in The New Yorker, and feeling like fiction is such a better ambassador than poetry, if you take it on a likeability basis. Mainstream fiction in its most diplomatic form--the short story--has a very small space to shake hands with you, pass you a drink, and charmingly sketch a random trauma with a cocktail toothpick, and then slope off to the buffet table, never to be seen again. You have to establish the norms of the character, all the while doing a soft-shoe behind the text to establish your authorial norms (i.e. “I don’t like to eat puppies, am not aroused by the smell of cordite, and do not have 25 cats which I think of as my ‘community’”). Maybe it’s this constant, polite stream of implied social mediation (“Hmm, yes, of course the folk arts of Romania have some relevancy to my life” and “Yoga can be a transformative presence in the lives of electricians”) that makes fiction reading sometimes feel like eating a whole mess of vitamins.

Yet people rarely ever discuss norms in poetry. It’s taken for granted that the author and/or the speaker is unapologetically rapturous, irritable, hermetic, erratic, aphasic, etc. and that’s that. If the poem lingers on a mosaic of chewing gum on the underside of a baby carriage and appears to hold it up as evidence of some obscure consecration, poetry readers seem trained to buy into the system of signs. Not sure if this makes poems compact little logic bombs or just scams hiding behind a long, distinguished history.

No matter which way I fly, I myself...

One of the benefits of living in a society where it is very hard (especially in poetry, where nobody is watching, Amiri Baraka notwithstanding) to write anything resulting in censorship is... well, not being able to write anything worthy of censorship.

So transgression was on my mind this morning, and I don’t seem to be alone. Apparently Satanism is making a comeback inside the ivory tower. For my money, you just can’t have too many stories about fifth century monks trying to avoid a twelve-year lap dance by a succubus. I mean, if you haven’t wandered naked into a hyena’s den, only to be licked clean by them, and then tried to apply a recalcitrant asp to sensitive areas, then you haven’t really lived (or really tried to die, as the case may be). While such exploits seem rather sad, it strikes me that at least they got the glamour of The Adversary, as opposed to Buddhist monks, who, after keeping one hand closed for so many years that their fingernails grew through the back of their hands, could say they did it because... they serenely accepted the emptiness of existence. Doesn’t quite have the same snap, does it?

Yes, we Westerners really know how to repress with verve. Witness the lamentable Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) dreaming up mathematical “pillow puzzlers” to distract himself late at night from impure thoughts. Seems rather tame next to therapy-by-predator, but Victorians had to make do with what they had, I suppose. Any culture that could explain away epic levels of prostitution as an inexplicable epidemic of nymphomania could do serious violence in the world of ideas. Yet, as Victor Sonkin points out in an article about the popularity of Alice in Wonderland in the Soviet Union, Carroll’s fairy tales are unique in one crucial way: "Traditional fairy tales of that era--be they British, German or Russian--were rather fearsome, and the children in them were often afraid. Alice is different; there's no fear in it. I think that's very important."

Yet who could leave out the notorious Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka in his civilian alter-ego)? His personal surgical theatre pretty much puts others repression strategies to shame (and whose drug of choice was nationalism, rather than religion or logic). And I’ve noticed that he tends to cause a singular amount of discomfort among writers and academics. Perhaps because of his John Brown-esque guerrilla take-over of a Japanese military barracks, perhaps because "Patriotism" (his short story about a couple committing ritual suicide) is exquisitely lyrical and flawlessly executed, and as such, thus fairly immune to the usual method of taking down troubling authors (i.e. looking for deficiencies in the text and ascribing them to the psyche of the author). Which is not to say that one has to look very hard beyond his final act for disquieting discoveries. According to quasi-biographer Christopher Ross, the closeted and married Mishima also derived a great deal of enjoyment from rehearsing sepukku, especially in the presence of attentive male witnesses.

It’s odd how quickly the desire comes over the reader to find a better reason for his suicide than Japan’s declining military might. Such motivation seems absurdly abstract (the way moving a sword through your vitals does not seem abstract). Yet scholarship, biography, and writing itself (even at its most transgressive) tends to become a normalizing act, in that it seeks to include the whole universe of concerns around a person or idea. The thought that something could be left out is what really terrifies anyone who tries to make a text or a life complete.

Willful

My high school English professor used to say that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing soap operas. (I’m more of the opinion that it would be Law & Order.) At the very least, he has inspired a fair amount of melodrama, as set forth in Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars. The book serves mainly as a fantastic clearinghouse for just about every petty and fanatical tactic ever deployed for, against, and by the adherents of the Bard.

Make no mistake, Rosenbaum does put pretty much everything in: actors, critics, movies, gossip, journalism, trivia. I was unaware that the antidote to the “dark spell” of Macbeth (and the prohibition against actors naming it) is to instantly recite some verse from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was however, immensely charmed to hear that on the British version of The Weakest Link, a British actor was disqualified because he insisted on answering a question with “the Scottish play” instead of “Macbeth.” Take that, popular culture.

There are far more strange doings in the Elizabethan Land that I was aware of. Hamlet is now (well, always was, sort of) three distinct textual kingdoms: The Bad Quarto, Good Quarto, and Folio. 230 lines in the Quarto are absent from the Folio, and 70 lines in the Folio are absent from the Quarto. In the Folio, Hamlet’s “The rest is silence” is followed by “o,o,o,o”. As Grey’s Anatomy would say, “Seriously? …Seriously?”

Pursuit of the definitive spellings, lines, and so forth has led to some excesses. Charlton Hinman went so far as to invent a sort of special Shakespeare collating machine, a cybernetic contraption with magnifying glasses that has been likened to “riding a stationary bicycle with flashing lights and mirrors.” Perhaps aerobic oxygen deprivation is responsible for such barn-burning analysis as this:

"Hinman himself observed that Compositor E was demonstrably very much more influenced by previously typeset copy than either A or B was… the extent of E’s conservatism can be quickly demonstrated by an analysis of the Folio punctuation of the plays he has known to set from printed copy… The very first page that Compositor E is agreed to have set in the Folio, pp 4 of Titus, he retained Q3 punctuation 77 times and altered only 12 times, on the next page he retained punctuation 126 times and altered it 36 times."

Makes your heart pound, doesn’t it? Stick in an interrobang, and you’d have textual nuclear fission. But this isn’t to say that some Hamlet variance isn’t sexy:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your/our philosophy

You answer with an idle tongue
You answer with a wicked tongue

And would it were not so, you are my mother.
But would you were not so. You are my mother.

O, that this too too sallied/sullied/solid flesh should melt…

I guess it’s not terribly surprising that having texts that change based on the whims of typesetters would produce some… well, rather irregular interpolators. Rosenbaum recounts the peregrinations of a young prodigy named Teena Rochfort-Smith, who was adopted “professionally and romantically in the early 1880’s by F.J. Furnival, an original sponsor of the Oxford English Dictionary, a Victorian Gentlemen who had a penchant for sponsoring ‘young ladies’ rowing clubs’ and becoming involved with the young ladies.” Yes, the Victorians. They did have a way of euphemisms, didn’t they?

The precocious Teena Rochfort-Smith undertook, at the tender age of twenty-one, to issue the four-text Hamlet in parallel columns, the three original Hamlet texts joined by a fourth, conflated one. The text itself must be quite an artifact, with four different colors of ink, three different underlining styles, six different typefaces, and asterisks, daggers, and other innumerable signs and symbols. She met her end when she accidentally set her dress on fire while burning some letters with a candle. Rosenbaum also postulates that John Berryman’s suicide in the 70’s was in part engendered by his continuing failure to complete an edition of King Lear, which he began in the late 1930’s.

Such crankiness… it rings through the ages. Rosenbaum marvels at one Lear scholar who is moved to deploy a classical Greek obscenity (that translates as “goatsucker”) against one of his allies. I think that would liven up some academic panels. But the book is dominated by a takedown of critic Donald Foster, who made his bones by claiming a rather dreary elegy was actually Shakespeare’s. His “proof” was mathematical validation by his super secret SHAXICON, a digitized database of renaissance-era literature. Foster, of course, rode high for a while, happily accepting the mantle of a master of forensic linguistics and the world’s “first literary detective.” His fame was such that he was brought on to decipher the letters from the 2001 anthrax mailings and the ransom note from the Jon-Benet Ramsay case. At one point, Donald Foster cheerily warns Mr. Rosenbaum that “I could destroy you.” He is eventually brought down, and the elegy generally agreed to be the product of John Ford.

Some of the strongest parts of the book are Rosenbaum’s accounting of the various antics of Shakespearean actors, beginning with Will himself, who knew a good racket when he saw it. According to legend, he espied a would-be groupie who was evidently overcome by the force of Richard Burbage’s Richard the III and wanted to express her appreciation intimately. Will got there first, however. Burbage arrived after Shakespeare was already occupied with the groupie, and banged on the door, declaiming, “It is I, Richard the Third.” To which Shakespeare allegedly replied, “William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third.”

Subsequent actors also had their day, so to speak. The legendary eighteenth-century actor, David Garrick played Hamlet so well in Drury Lane that the critics were actually convinced that he made the temperature of the theatre go down. The same Mr. Garrick relied on some outside help in adding verisimilitude to his performance, engaging a wigmaker who would make his hair stand on end when he saw the ghost.

Modern actors have gone a little more organic in their efforts. Olivier recreated such an authentic ecstatic fit in his Othello that he actually achieved climax on the stage. Our contemporaries have been equally zealous, as in the case of Steven Berkoff, whose Hamlet engaged in a little frottage during his bedroom conformation with Gertrude. While holding her down, he did more than just enunciate as he declaimed “It shall go hard, / but I shall delve one yard below their mines , / and blow them at the moon”. So when he stood up, some, uh, aftereffects flowed down his leg. Which I’m sure the groundlings would have enjoyed.

Don't be macabre

Gore Vidal has finished the memoir he began in Palimpsest. Sort of. It has everything one usually expects from Gore: gossip about movie stars; arch and fastidious political invective from an insider, and, of course, his specialty: the epitaph. (Or at least various versions of antiquity; contemporary ones are frequently compromised, irrelevant, or beneath contempt.) The novel is dead. Theatre is dead. Television is dead. The American Republic is dead.

Reading Gore is like skimming People Magazine in an expensive, highback leather chair. You’re definitely getting away with something. You find out that Fellini was devoted to overdubbing. Paul Newman hurried past woman because he made them faint. Eleanor Roosevelt had an unrequited “Sapphic” passion for Amelia. Gore got Coppola hooked on wine. The right-wing Grace Kelly thought FDR and the New Deal silence her playwright uncle, and got out of movies when her makeup call was moved back earlier to allow them more time to work on her. Tennessee Williams could not write without a character for whom he did not feel sexual desire.

The price for all this dirt is that you have to put up with an occasional snark that implicates your own self, such as when Gore makes fun of someone who doesn’t know what “coeval” means (which, Dear Reader, I did not). So there’s a continual sense that you are reaching above your station. In fact, I can’t think of another contemporary who so adroitly manipulates class anxiety in the reader, though Gore certainly doesn’t claim to be populist or democratic. Like Robert Lowell, one intuits that he feels like he can criticize the monerati because he is of the monerati.

I’ve read criticism of Gore that his memoir neglects his private affairs (read: sex) in favor of pontifications or gently chiding the zeitgeist for getting it wrong on historical events. Maybe. Whether or not it is in good taste to describe liaisons or circumscribe a series of daguerreotypes of one’s personal disappointments, needs, and recriminations decade by decade, Gore certainly does reveal his obsessions, even obliquely. In this book, death sends up its freight of steam on the horizon. There’s a faint aftertaste in his rebuff of Tennessee Williams:

“Once in New York, when Tennessee and I had been prowling together one summer night, without success, he said, ‘Well, I guess that just leaves two of us.’ To which he claims I replied, ‘Don’t be macabre.’”

It hangs over his excavation of suppressed history:

“[Pope Pius XXII] was something of a faddist when it came to medicine. The ultimate fad proved to be his embalmment by what seems to have been an amateur taxidermist. As a result, while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned, according to viewer, ‘emerald green.’ Then, in response to the summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for a long time until someone (a Jesuit)? passed on the information. It is reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during this holy combustion.”

And, it delivers the book’s most pitilessly clinical and certainly costly image (he has to repeatedly invoke both the authority and presence of a ghostly Montaigne to guide him through it) that he chooses to reveal about the death of his partner, Howard Auster:

“During the wait [for the ambulance], I pulled back the sheet for last look at those clear grey eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks.”

Easy to see why he admires Paul Bowles’ own summary of his raison detre: “A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythic personality.” No wonder Gore’s intelligence about 20th Century personages has a clandestine feel.

And now for something completely diffident

So William Logan, whom I have heard described alternately as the most hated man in poetry in America and the most dangerous poetry critic not dead (Gosh, danger! In poetry!) has some thoughts. I was unaware that Hart Crane’s father invented the Lifesaver candy, and that Louise Glück’s father invented the X-Acto knife. It seems that most bloggers are prone to writing that they had bacon and frog’s legs and those miniature Tibetan pears for breakfast. Frank O-Hara also apparently narrowly missed having everything that went into his poems drain into his blog and stay there, like sewage. And be forewarned that Mr. Logan has the capacity to beat your effing brains out if you use certain words around him, so perhaps the steel cage match with Mr. Wright might come about after all. Certain recommendations are advanced (every award should be replaced with a saguaro cactus) and some depressing statistics deployed (you can only find one buyer of a given book of new poetry per 5 football stadiums, and only one person who has actually finished the book for every 40 stadiums). In short, enough maxims, axioms, and trash-talking for everyone. So writing negative reviews is not just its own reward.

I tried to think of some other prominent figure who wrote negative poetry reviews, and came up short. Had quite an extended conversation over the ethics of writing/not writing them, and whether or not it was comparable to writing negative theatre reviews (which are themselves in short supply, I find, at least in Boston). The central argument advanced was that writing harsh theatre criticism endangers theatre itself, given the enormous effort, time, and capital invested in a production, whereas poetry will continue to be produced regardless of, um, an actual audience (as poets themselves sometimes effectively bankroll the production).

Is silence about bad books of poetry enough? I know some poets who engage in the sport of trying to read between the lines of blurbs on the backs of poetry books in order to divine the weaknesses of the book. (A friend of mine who did music reviews in bulk employed a similar strategy when he encoded subtle negative criticism into an ostensibly positive review of a record, so that alert readers would be able to tell if he was truly recommending it or not). One poetry professor I know wrote a negative review, and the poet in question wrote him angry letters and even called him. Then got his friends and colleagues to call/write on his behalf. Eventually, no literary magazine in the state would publish him, which would seem to suggest that perhaps the poetry world is not properly inoculated against such behavior.

Paying It Forward

God, I love writing rules. Weighing them, fetishizing them, breaking them. Matt Cheney contributes a few delightful ones here (via Maud Newton). I can divvy up my writing career by each absolute that was ascendant, though I’ve never had to struggle against the rule about poets being allowed three exclamation points for their entire career. Surely, the illustrious Norman Dubie (who, um, has a MySpace page) has racked up a tremendous deficit here. I remember being told in workshop that gerunds were a cheap way of getting power into a poem, and for months afterward, I was afraid to conjugate for fear or an “ing.” For quite a long time, no verbs of cognition were allowed. The upside of being under the sway of such arbitrariness is dreaming about imposing your own. For instance, if I controlled the universe, I would immediately remove all initial caps at the beginning of a new line (since it always feel to me like shouting with your mouth closed.) Y’know, because that’s all that’s all stands in the way of great poems.

Pixel Elegy

William Styron, alas, is no more, so sayeth The New York Times in a nicely balanced piece. I remember years ago seeing my younger brother reading Darkness Visible, his memoir about depression, and thought, “That sounds like a sci-fi or fantasy novel.”

Then I stumbled across Dead Blue, a documentary about clinical depression, in which Styron is prominently featured (along with Mike Wallace). Styron talks elegantly about how his intellectual, artistic, and emotional sensibilities were deformed by his condition.

One of the strengths of the documentary is how vividly and chillingly it conveys the inexorable chemical degradation of severe clinical depression, giving a savage double meaning to “It’s all in your head.” The title of the film actually refers to the neurological image of a severely depressed brain.

The other strength, of course, is William Styron, who is every bit as satisfying in a capsule portrait of a writer as you would hope. This got me thinking about how few times I have seen writers convincingly portrayed on-screen. Did anyone buy Debra Winger as a poet in Shadowlands? Or Gabriel Byrne as Byron in Gothic? John Heard successfully imitated a poet for about 20 minutes in Mindwalk, and I would have loved to have seen the makers of Field of Dreams try to cast anyone as J.D. Salinger (who the Terrence Mann figure actually was in the book).

That or move to New Hampshire

So Jeannette Winterson has written a Young Adults book. (Generally a phrase I find loathsome, managing to be condescending and oxymoronic at the same time. When I was 11, I didn’t appreciate linguistic charity. I was more like, “Damn it, I just read Lord of the Rings AND Dune, so step off, or I’ll go totally archaic on your ass. Or words to that effect.)

Now a book about quantum mechanics and love and time. Tribal Dickensian subway dwellers. A villain who ran the hospital at Bedlam and his unctuous Uriah Heep sidekick. And a threatening rabbit named Bigamist.

I remember the first time I read Written on the Body, and thought, “So a novelist can be lyric and incantatory and funny? Somebody alert John Updike!” Then Gut Symmetries and Art & Lies and The World & Other Places, and her style got a little... spiky, I guess. Sort of impatient with the reader and less willing to give them anything more the barest narrative and sensual necessity. In grad school, one of my classmates—in the service of an essay about politically committed writing—invoked a quote of hers, “My aim is not to please (the reader).”

Not like she’s the first firebrand writer to radically change genres. Randall Jarrell turned from his delicately lacerating reviews to write The Bat Poet with Maurice Sendak, Theodore Roethke wrote Party at the Zoo, and Lorrie Moore, purveyor of the saddest and sharpest morbid humor around did a Christmas Story.

Given all the anxiety about genre in the academy and avant street cred, it makes me glad to see an established writer be so blithe about it. Or maybe there comes a certain point in a sustained writing career when you just have to be unrecognizable for while in order to hold onto who you are.

The Tao of Publishing

So, the thing about having a strategy that requires ignorance by the intended targets is sort of mutually exclusive with posting said strategy on the internet, which as we all know, allows for the kind of surveillance that would give John Poindexter ecstatic epileptic fits.

Tao Lin’s plan to submit everything to everyone has hit a snag. Or maybe that was the plan all along. Hard to tell. The internet makes deadpan pretty damn elusive. As Oliver North and cohorts would say, it provides plausible deniability. It’s certainly possible for fame in the blogosphere to bring an audience that exceeds print readership, if readership is all one desires.

400 Packets Later

I realized the other day that it has been 11 years since I started submitting to magazines, and things have only gotten slightly less surreal. Though, like a runner’s high, it has never felt as strange as the responses I got from the very first batch of poems.

9 months after I sent to one journal, I received a copy of the next issue in the mail. The artwork consisted of a series of Xeroxed hands. My poem was in the journal, which I found surprising, since as far I knew, it could have been intercepted en route and was currently lining the nest of some auks in Mexico. When I turned to the contributor’s page, I was somewhat startled to find my bio stated that “She is currently a student…” I thought to myself, “I see that we haven’t encountered a lot of Jewish people in our travels, have we?” That was the last time I spoke in the first person in my contributor’s note.

One of my other poems was accepted by a journal, but the acceptance letter was soon followed by another one from the editor, detailing how he had just been fired from his job due to what his boss considered to be explicit content in one of the poems he published in the magazine (which was printed using the facilities of the newspaper where he worked). Accordingly, the magazine was now dead. While it was sort of neat to get a poem placed on the deck chair of the Titanic, it certainly made me feel like I was engaging in a very marginal activity that would cause disquieting silences when disclosed at parties, like a penchant for driving around in those miniature Shriner’s cars, or obsessively curating ferris wheels.

I have the hardbound ennui

While I totally understand the need for anthologies, I find that I have such a hard time reading them anymore (Best American Poetry aside, which is its own animal). It's like watching polar bears at the zoo. You keep thinking, “Aren't they really hot in there? Don't they want to sleep on something other than molded concrete?” Even poems that I really like in their home books seem a little bit like Jehovah's Witnesses once they’re anthologized, knocking at my door in ill-fitting suits, asking for just a moment of my time. (For the record, I haven’t read Legitimate Dangers yet, though I intend to.)

Back when I was starting out, I gobbled up anthologies: The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets , Poulin’s Contemporary American Poetry, and the piece de resistance, Naked Poetry (and its New Naked Poetry edition), a 70’s era anthology of poets writing in “open forms.” Logan, Bly, Patchen, Wright, Koch. All the black and white author photos of them outside in fleeces or in tool sheds. Each entry was followed by a manifesto of sorts, which in many cases were more entertaining and more moving than the poems.

Now I find it even hard to read Collected Poems, as the poems and the moods of each book seem to talk over one another like characters in a Woody Allen movie. I still experience some difficulty when I read Mary Ruefle’s wonderfully delirious Cold Pluto, as the typesetting is so tiny and miserly. Does this make me a bad person?

Callback to Plato

Found this in Tom Stoppard's English version of Das weite Land (Undiscovered Country), by Arthur Schnitzler:

Gustal: Madam, get a divorce. How can anyone marry a poet? They’re a subspecies. It was much better in the olden days, when one kept a poet like a slave or a barber – a tradition, incidentally, which survives in Isfahasn – but to let a poet run round loose is plain silly.

We used to be bad boys, with Dylan Thomas sleeping with students in the bushes and Oscar Wilde flirting with customs agents. Now it's the fiction writers who have the scandals, while poets ask themselves, "If I get tenure and implode, will I make a sound?" Didn't Robert Lowell or Ted Berrigan make Nixon's enemies list? Can you imagine any U.S. poet today making an enemies list?

Don't Look Back

Thinking about persona made me remember the first time I read Norman Mailer. Someone had trumpeted his Armies of Night as one of the most significant memoirs of latter half of the 20th century, so I picked it up. I was impressed by how pitiless the book was toward himself and thought the strange associative reveries were excessively cool, even if speaking about himself in this weird informal way made the tone wobble occasionally. But then again, Nixon spoke about himself in the third person awkwardly too, so maybe the zeitgeist was broadcasting a comeuppance. But it was definitely one those moments (like when I read Girl, Interrupted or The White Album) when you realize that you can get away with anything on the page if you’re clever enough.

Then I randomly picked up his collection of essays, Cannibals and Christians, and the self-interview portion stopped me cold. Definitely felt like a case of trying to make sure he only got forehand serves and not backhand ones (and also some weirdly heightened Freudian inquiries). I had to do a self interview in grad school, and I felt so skeezy doing it, and kept thinking about Donald Hall’s invective against McPoems: verse with jumpcuts designed to flatter the star.

[That started the worm turning. Ancient Evenings finished me off. I don’t think I even made it through a chapter. I have rarely felt so strongly like I was reading a bunch of data slathered into fictional form. The man never had any problems filling up a page, that’s for sure.]

What I found so disappointing in the essays was this constant jockeying to supplant other writers and control how their novels were compared to his. I got a lot of this in Bukowski as well: a constant undercurrent of “This is so hard, so don’t even try it, you young writers.” Kind of sad how much energy writers waste either resisting or giving into anxiety about their contemporaries.

More Literary Outlaws

While we’re in hoax-land, it’s worth mentioning the Sokal Hoax of 1996, where a physics professor submitted a spurious paper entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the humanities journal, Social Text. The paper was “structured around the silliest quotations [Sokal] could find about mathematics and physics.” (Needless to say, Social Text had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review.) On the same day it was published, Sokal published an expose in Lingua Franca, terming the paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense.” His avowed intention was to “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Hilarity ensued. Lingua Franca (which is now sadly defunct, but in its heyday consisted of awesomely readable “literary journalism”) has an essay about it in its tombstone anthology, Quick Studies, which I highly recommend for examples of academic writing that do not have a punitive attitude toward its reader. Click here for another deconstructionist paper hoax, which includes step-by-step instructions on how to deconstruct almost anything. It also includes a homework deconstructionist list, graded by levels of difficulty:

Beginner:

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
this article
James Cameron's The Terminator
issue #1 of Wired
anything by Marx

Intermediate:

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
the Book of Genesis
Francois Truffaut's Day For Night
The United States Constitution
Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock
anything by Foucault

Advanced:

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
the Great Pyramid of Giza
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
the Macintosh user interface
Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco
anything by Derrida

Tour de Force:

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
the San Jose, California telephone directory
IRS Form 1040
the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual
the Mississippi River
anything by Baudrillard

Let's Get Ready to Rumble

I was just wondering this morning if anyone besides me ever thinks about poetry books going head to head (i.e. books that seem overtly oppositional or in response to another book).

Just finished reading Forrest Gander’s Science and Steepleflower, which is my favorite of his (with Deeds of Utmost Kindness and Rush to the Lake following), and admiring his diction (both technical and colloquial). It seems very much a companion to C.D. Wright’s fabulous Translations of the Gospel back into Tongues.

And of course, there’s Jack Gilbert’s Monolithos and Linda Gregg’s Too Bright to See, a pairing which generates the coolest divorce frisson ever.

On a more pugilistic note, I found myself envisioning a steel cage death match between Satan Says (Sharon Olds) and Cemetery Nights (Stephen Dobyns), as it seems like their projects are mildly inimical. Though both invoke the otherwordly, Olds throws down pentagrams as opposed to the monuments in Dobyns, and the speakers in Satan Says seem more like bare-knuckle brawlers. Edge: Olds.

Anybody else out there with books you find have a lot of backchatter?

Amusement and Mild Use

Stumbled across Poem Hunter, which can be good to see a large spectrum of poems from some "classic" poets (kinda makes 'em sound like a Thunderbird, doesn't it?) for use in classroom and such. Of dubious note: the option to "manage" your poems on the site. Number 500 on the "Top 500 Poets List" is katt nasty. Also amusing: the ability to search poems by purple, shopping, chicago, and money.

(via Metafilter)