Silliman's Blog

Blogging is both incestuous & serendipitous. Chris Murray commented upon my own remarks concerning genre in response to my forthcoming appearance in Double Room. She also assigned a work from Double Room to what I think must be her advanced exposition class at the University of Texas – Arlington, Anthony Tognazzini’s “I’d Heard She Had a Deconstructive Personality.” Obviously I had to read that – as in fact you should also. Click over there, but come right back.

 

Tognazzini’s work is a lot of fun. Just 25 sentences (or sentence fragments) long, not including that title (which certainly can be read as a first sentence to the piece), it does a deft job of setting up a frame of reference – an unnamed female – then providing a good deal of detail that suggests both the course of a relationship & layers of identity that are only partly peeled away during the course of the text. In general – as Murray’s students saw right away – Tognazzini uses the exceptionally short fragments of the opening line to set up the pacing of the work: rapid, open to radical shifts, yet inherently “coherent” because so many of the cognitive frames appear to identify a female. Thirteen of the sentences, a majority, actually use either she or her – fourteen, if you include the title.

 

When you think about the absolute dominance of those pronouns, it is evident that this is a work predominantly of/about character. The reality, of course, is that it’s at least theoretically conceivable that Tognazzini came upon these exact sentences in some procedural manner, such as taking sentences involving those sentences off the internet and building the piece (& the person) around that, a variant of the flarf device of Google sculpting. If you read Tognazzini’s comments in Double Room, it seems likely that he envisions this as fiction, albeit precisely of that “flash fiction” mode that descends from the soft surrealists of the Sixties (Tate, Knott, Simic, etc.).

 

This reminds me of not one, but two works that I wrote in the early 1970s, roughly as I was getting ready (& starting) to write Ketjak. One, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, was a short (for me) prose poem. It was originally published in chapbook format by Tuumba Press & I was stunned to discover that it had been awarded a Pushcart Prize for (drumroll here) fiction.* Nothing about the piece was in any way fictive. It had neither character, nor plot, nor even verbs. It was, in fact, a long paragraph entirely composed of sentence fragments. But I was now a fiction writer, award winning even, and was hired as such as a visiting lecturer by UCSD in 1982 (I had to insist that I be allowed to teach a poetry course, which the then chairman of literature program thought rather curious).

 

The other was a work that I wrote about one year earlier in which I was trying to construct character from pronouns, specifically the first-person singular. This work, “Berkeley,” first appeared in This 5 and was later reprinted in Michael Lally’s anthology, None of the Above. Here is that work:

 

                         I thought you might be here

                I was alone and it was almost two

                                 I have enjoyed my lunch

             I knew right away I made a mistake

                   I glanced back once

                            I mean it

                               I thought so

                I had been actually invited

                      I drew my jacket sleeve across my wet mouth

                                   I wasn't even trying

                                      I told him

                  I'll try to let you know

            I watched some piano lessons

               I was a very tough cookie

  I laughed

      I thought I'd tell you

               I haven't hurt him

   I should be too vulgar

         I know where I am

                  I do decline to be left

      I haven't had the time

I'm going to find out about you

               I never thought of that

                     I better have some of that wine

                                  I'm serious

                            I hope so

                               I'm red and brown

                   I would take you to a balcony

                        I swear it

                                 I know who you are

              I knew there was something and opened the window

                I went on up and unlocked the door

          I went out and shut the door

    I put the lamps out and sat by an open window

             I sat down and looked at him

       I sat down and took one of the cigarettes

    I stepped inside the office and picked up the mail

                       I worked there

                    I see

                       I changed my mind

                I just feel that way

                          I want to be sick

             I never said anything

                             I like this rug

                                 I fuck too

                       I am, a stride at a time

                          I came through the museum

                 I was not afraid

                    I could not save her

          I fell asleep on the sand

              I have reasons

               I'm not thinking yet

                    I don't care for the idea

   I shake your hand and even embrace you

      I've been wondering something else

I wish I could have missed this

         I think she needs more time

                  I think we never used the word

                        I do

                           I know

                     I'll meet that

             I knew no one in the place

                  I don't play well

          I'm always willing

                I have to go soon

                      I put out my hand

                               I believe it did

                            I am glad you are at home

        I asked him what might be his immediate purpose

           I'd like to know the reasons

                  I could hear the many voices now

    I'll tell you God's truth

               I don't go at all any more

                         I look behind me

  I care not to perform this part of my task methodically

         I survived myself

                I'll try the bench here

             I don't see how I can help you

     I detest it

        I want to see which side will grow best

  I want to redeem myself

     I can shoot you

  I've no idea really

     I should say it is not a mask

        I must remember another time

              I don't want to know you

           I'm not dressed

  I had to take the risk

     I did look

  I don't care what you make of it

        I am outside in the sun

                    I still had what was mine

              I will stay here and die

           I was reinforced in this opinion

    I flushed it down the toilet

                 I collapsed into my chair

                            I could go home still

                      I forgot the place, sir

         I close my eyes so as not to see those apes

  I said that it was all scattered

     I met him through some friends

             I saw the object itself

                I left them

                       I thought you were different

           I want not to have failed to say it

                       I began to beat the horse

      I will never find happiness

I will not repair the hole in the window

                 I wish you at least a pleasant day

       I don't say that it's me particularly

          I knew now why her face was familiar

               I play a little at it

           I've rung them three times

  I stood on my own two feet

I will see him there

       I begin to recognize where I am

                 I will tell you

     I protest my innocence of these things

           I only heard by accident

      I tell you all women are dead

I could hardly believe my own eyes

                   I could find nothing to say

   I undertook to deliver the letters and the box

            I would do the same

         I'm going back with you

                  I shall keep this spot in sight

            I can only speak for myself

                         I was impatient

               I squeaked for joy

                     I agree with that

                        I close my eyes and think it over

                                       I stick to dealing

                 I've had it a long time without selling it

                              I walked out the back way

                        I don't intend to do anything

          I ain't leaving this machine

             I liked her all right

    I should like him to have a friend

       I'm only speaking the truth

I am going around the corner

               I ask you

        I just don't want to eat, I answer 

  I didn't answer

             I m sorry, he said

     I forgot to notice what brand it was

               I see, the professor said

I tackled him this morning on belief 

   I'm afraid I am

         I came to fetch him from his room in the morning 

              I do not know about others 

     I am shivering

           I open the door

  I wouldn't have wanted to try that myself

        I got up and followed her into the study

I went out, walked a few steps to the front door

      I wonder did he ever put it out of sight

  I laughed but it was not a gay sort of laughter

              I can see the picture

I'm tired and I want to stop this mumbling

                  I won't stand for this

    I'm unpopular everywhere because they expected you

         I was a guide

               I wasn't speaking to you

                     I think you've got enough to do already

 

We didn’t have Google sculpting in my youth, but this piece proceeds by a kind of antecedent, just picking up books that were literally lying around, appropriating “I” statements – there’s Malraux, Mailer, Dickens, Stein & Creeley** tucked in there in various places – yet it seems to me that the work does indeed “construct a voice.” At what level is it (or is it not) mine?

 

Tognazzini’s piece doesn’t succeed for me quite as well as it seems to for Murray & her students. Tognazzini’s ability to articulate two positions within a relationship – more or less “I” & “her” – is well done, but that long sentence beginning “Her fingers hang…” strikes me as just too clunky in a work as short as this one. And, in general, this is a prose ear at work, more comfortable with the prosody of fiction than poetry.

 

But what works best for him are the open-ended, indeterminate elements. “Poppies exploding, smoke.” The risk in such language when attached to a pronoun – “Her head an eraser…Her secret self an igloo” – is that these verbal gestures can telescope down into a psychology of stereotypical tropes. Her head an eraser? Still, I don’t think this is where Tognazzini is going with this. I think it’s only incidentally about a female & much more about the construction of positions & relations. The use of figurative language represents, even if it doesn’t always achieve, an opacity that is not that unlike the opacity of others, even our most intimate others, in real life.

 

 

 

* Bill Henderson removed the label “fiction” from the paperback edition at my request.

 

** It was, in fact, something of Creeley’s – I’m tired and I want to stop this mumbling – spoken in the middle of an interview, that set this piece in motion, even though it’s one of the final lines in the work. I spent much of the writing, as I recall, trying to arrive at a point where I thought it made sense to enter that into the text.

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I want to take a closer look at some of the writing that appears in Another South. I’ve been mulling over Hank Lazer’s definition of kudzu textuality – “rich, generative, polyvocal, over-determined, hybrid” – with his characterization of it a little later as a kind of “hypertextuality.” What I take from this definition are the works in the book that mix media, typefaces, incorporate imagery & the like. In general, the strongest pieces in Another South tend to fall furthest from that sort of thing, including the writing of Lorenzo Thomas, Thomas Meyer & Lazer’s own – probably the most widely known authors here – but also that of Skip Fox, Brett Evans, Joel Dailey, Dana Lisa Lustig, Mark Prejsnar, Kalamu ya Salaam or Jerry McGuire.

 

But the two writers who do the most to seal my sense that kudzu textuality is more problematic than not are Bob Grumman & David Thomas Roberts. Each includes some straightforward visual poetry in their contributions. Each also includes straightforward text works. But in both instances, these works are distinct, each “media” or “genre” focused on its own dynamics. Their visual works in particular are some of the strongest pieces of any mode in the anthology.

 

Which makes me realize that the mixed-media poems that Hank is characterizing as kudzu textuality are about something very different. It’s not just that some of these writers use extra-verbal devices, but rather it’s the process of combining media that is both the signature feature of kudzu poetics & its fatal flaw. Whereas all single-media works to one degree or another build around a sense of focus, creating focus, guiding it through the text or image, shaping it almost as if it were a plastic medium like play, kudzu works go in just the opposite direction, as if the work were constantly distracted, shifting gears (or, more accurately, grinding them). My sense in almost all of the truly kudzu pieces here is that they dissipate whatever possible energy their media – especially the writing – might have had.

 

For the second time in one week, this raises for me the specter of Max Jacob. It was Jacob who argued – wrongly I think – that the purpose of art was to distract. I flat out think just the opposite. It’s all about concentration. Maybe this is just a discussion of which pharmaceuticals I tended to favor in the 1960s, but I think not – an art that doesn’t heighten the awareness of the person confronted with it (as reader, viewer, listener, inhabitant, etc., as well as producer) strikes me as completely pointless & less than interesting. An art that disaggregates attention, dispersing it in divergent directions, seems destined for irrelevance. This is not to say that there is only one way for an artist to be effective – I think, for example, one can take the path of Brecht or that of Artaud – but woe unto the artist who cannot make up his/her mind as to which path to take.

 

In this sense, kudzu strikes me as deep weeds indeed. A case in point being Jake Berry’s excerpt from the third volume of his ongoing longpoem Brambu Drezi, the first lines of which read:

 

In the clutch of blind embryo

              madness is a tongue robbing death

             in the matted black hair of darkness –

 

That’s about as dense a cluster of overwriting & cliché as I’ve come across in a long time. I wish that I could report that it was atypical or satiric in its intent*, but if the latter were true, Berry has failed to leave any clues with which to anchor the reading. Rather, this style is just one of several toward which Berry’s writing tends in this long verse gumbo he’s been composing for some years now. Not all of them are this obnoxious or off-putting, but dressing them up with periodic drawings does nothing to enrich the experience. Berry himself describes a writing process that is not unlike Spicerian dictation: “BRAMBU . . . is not projected but merely occurs – I don’t drive it or shape it, I allow it.” If ever there were an argument for driving instruction, this would be it.

 

It’s in this sense that I think that Another South uses that adjective in its subtitle Experimental Writing in the South** way too uncritically. This would seem to be experimental in the sense of an author tooling down the road at 70 MPH with eyes closed & no hands on the steering wheel – it’s sort of ready fodder for the likes of a Joan Houlihan. How contrast this against the likes of a poem like “Flash Point”:

 

This useless clairvoyance

Is embarrassing

What good is it to know

The motives behind manners

 

And worse, the so what stares

Of those upon whom you manage

To inflict this wisdom

 

There is more space

Awaiting exploration

More clouds of gas

That need their picture took

 

Lorenzo Thomas has more going on in eleven lines than Berry does in seven pages. Think for a moment of the frame set up by the terms useless & embarrassing in the first two lines & how each reacts off a term such as clairvoyance. Then think back to madness is a tongue robbing death. The most generous possible reading of that latter line is one-dimensional to the point of being flatline.

 

I have taken to using the phrase post-avant where editor Bill Lavender employs experimental not only because the neo-scientific frame of the latter is at this moment in history comedic at best – think of the late jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie wandering around a stage in his “mad scientist” lab coat – but also because post-avant acknowledges the 200-year-old tradition in which contemporary writing exists while also acknowledging that frames like avant-garde or experimental are not only dated, but misleading. It is in this sense that a deeper limitation to Another South is that generally there is no experimental writing in it, nothing that isn’t in some sense a recombination of trends already going on elsewhere within writing. Some is much better than usual, as in the case of Thomas’ poetry above, and some of it is not. And in this collection at least much of what is not is kudzu.

 

 

 

 

* The way it would be had, say, a Bruce Andrews or Charles Bernstein penned those very same lines.

 

** The use of the word South twice in the title suggests that the book’s name hasn’t been given very much thought. Similarly, the volume proceeds alphabetically – the default, no-value mode of editing. One possible version would have been to divide the volume into three sections: New Orleans, Atlanta and Other. A fourth section might have been composed of those, like McGuire and Lazer, who teach for a living. Even proceeding by year of birth would have offered more information & shape to a reader.

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I’ve noted before that one of my favorite experiences as a poet was the opportunity to give a reading in the Composers’ Union Hall in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia, with Ivan Zhdanov. Zhdanov, only two years my junior, was born & raised in Siberia, although much of his adult life has been spent in Moscow. We come from radically different social & historical contexts, yet find ourselves not so terribly far apart in how we have chosen to live our lives. Contemplating the parallels (& the divergences) is one of those lovely mind-bending processes with which I’ve been known to wile away an afternoon.

 

To my generation, of course, Siberia is not merely a geographic region in the eastern portion of Russia, but represents much more. Synonymous with Stalin’s gulag, the name connotes a region so distant & forbidding that simply to be sent there proved an irrevocable mode of exile.

 

Yet Russia & the United States are also countries with more than a few similarities. During the Cold War, they were the two so-called Super Powers. Each has a heritage with important roots in European culture &, at the same time, feels a deep ambivalence about that heritage. Each nation is a diverse society, a fact about which each has also expressed more than a few ambivalences. Our “melting pot” mythology may have employed different tropes than their “Socialist Man,” but the deeper reality was that each was intended to construct a post-multicultural world that would pave over what in both instances was often a brutal history of inconsistencies.

 

I’ve been thinking about Zhdanov & Siberia, because on my desk is sitting the anthology Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, edited by Bill Lavender, recently published by the University of Alabama Press. It was John High, poet & one-time editor of Five Fingers Review, who explained to me that it was his own Southern heritage that had first attracted him to Russian writing & translation.* “We both understand failed civilizations,” were John’s more or less exact words, equating the collapse of Czarist Russia – this was before the later collapse of the Soviet one – with the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

 

That’s only one of several frames that one might apply to this collection of 34 post-avant poets. But, as with virtually all of the other potential master narratives, this one is complicated & problematic. A substantial number of these writers – Hank Lazer, Lorenzo Thomas, Mark Prejsnar, Joel Dailey, Thomas Meyer & Dana Lisa Lustig – did not grow up in the South & have no organic sense of having been raised within that framework, or even in its echo, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & ‘60s. Further, over half live in exactly two metropolitan areas – New Orleans & Atlanta – suggesting that the South is just as scene-centric as the rest of the nation. & suggesting that the “agrarian” framework has little to do with what this volume rather unabashedly calls “Experimental” writing.**

 

One of the half-hidden presumptions of any regional anthology, of course, is that, by their remove from “major” literary centers, the poets involved do not receive their fair share of recognition. Yet many of the writers here will be known to readers of this blog – Lazer, Thomas, Lustig, Prejsnar, Meyer, Bob Grumman, Skip Fox, Jim Leftwich, )ohn Lowther, Jake Berry, Randy Prunty & Skip Fox all publish widely. Perhaps it is partly the geography-erasing features of the Internet, but it is also true that the South of today is as urban, metropolitan & connected as any part of the nation – and more so than some. From the perspective of literary access, if no other, would you rather be a poet living in the Dakotas or Atlanta?

 

Is it possible thus to use this book as a means to identify a “regional” style? Hank Lazer makes a case for what he calls kudzu textuality, which he characterizes as a “rich, generative, polyvocal, over-determined, hybrid kind of textuality.” That does seem pretty accurate as a description of about half of the writing in the book, where one finds constructed languages alongside vizpo elements very much in a palimpsest. But that seems to me less a function of new Southern writing than it does of Bill Lavender’s inclinations as an editor. If one adds such poets as Dale Smith, Bobby Byrd, Hoa Nguyen, Jonathan Williams, Mark Scroggins, David McAleavey, or any of the other writers who would qualify with just the slightest aesthetic &/or geographic expansion of the volume’s horizon, you would get a fairly different book. That, too, would be Another South.

 

 

 

* Indeed, the one book of John High’s on my bookshelf is a 1993 volume published in Moscow & translated by the late Nina Iskrenko.

 

** The state with the largest number of rural residents is actually Pennsylvania.

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Tuesday, September 23, 2003