Saturday, March 31, 2007
I was pleased to find The Age of Huts (compleat) at Harvard Books in
Labels: Bookstores
Friday, March 30, 2007
Rachel Blau DuPlessis has a fascinating, even disturbing, critical piece in Jacket 31, which is technically the most recent issue of this by-now-fabled online literary project. Called “Manhood and its Poetic Projects,” the essay close-reads texts by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley & Charles Olson, looking at how their work embodies, indeed creates, a code of masculinity in the 1950s that challenges traditional definitions of what it means to be masculine, but without any ancillary analysis of the role & social position of women. DuPlessis goes so far as to incorporate material concerning Olson’s professional behavior as an academic:
As has been documented, Olson made sexist remarks to women in the classroom (mainly sexual innuendo), and sometimes excluded women from the educational experience. For example, as Michael Davidson has carefully noted, Charles Olson told Nancy Armstrong “that [his] course [at SUNY-Buffalo] was going to be about ‘Men’s Poetry,’ and any women who wanted to attend would have to watch from the hallway” — an incident probably from the first of Olson’s two years at Buffalo, 1963….
DuPlessis goes on to note that Olson was hardly alone in this sort of abject nonsense during that period, nor was it a phenomenon peculiar either to poets or to one kind of poetry.
But I’m not sure that I would have read DuPlessis’ piece when, or how, I did, had it not been for the comments stream that flowed from my note awhile back on the selected poems of Edward Dorn. I may joke from time to time about there being a “Wounded Buffalo”
I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t read Dorn or Tom Clark. In fact, I think quite the opposite, even when I find it troubling or, as I noted re the last 20 years of Dorn’s writing, disappointing. But I do think one has a responsibility to discuss such events & behavior in any piece of writing one does about them. It’s as much of an 800-pound elephant in the room of their poetics as is Pound’s fascism or the anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings. And to say nothing says far more about the critic than it does about the poet in question.
More subtly, tho, DuPlessis’ piece brings up the issue that there are certain poets – Dorn & Olson among them – who are peculiarly men’s poets, by which I mean that not only do they write as men for men but that the vast majority of their readers are guys as well. This is not the same, at least I don’t think so, as seeing the writing, say, of Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich or Susan Griffin as being women’s poetry in a separatist model of feminism (tho the three did not all take the same position with regards to that, nor always express the same sense of that across time either – as Judy Grahn has said, separatism was a tool, not necessarily an end in itself). Or, for that matter, a somewhat parallel male gay liberation aesthetic that once would have included, say, the early poetry of Aaron Shurin.
Part of what makes DuPlessis’ piece worth reading is the inclusion of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as one of the texts she takes on, and the ways in which she demonstrates how the homosocial construct of the New American poetry plays out “the same but different” in the hands of at least one gay man. She notes, of course, that it would have been different had, say, she focused on Jack Spicer rather than Ginsberg, although it might have been interesting to look further and ask how it might have been different in the hands of John Ashbery or Frank O’Hara, or of Robert Duncan. Or, for that matter, Amiri Baraka or Steve Jonas. Or if she had looked at other poetry by Ginsberg that touched on his relationships with women, most notably his mother in “Kaddish” or his Aunt Rose.
One of the dynamics that DuPlessis is most interested in – troubled by – is precisely the double-nature of this male critique of masculinity that could be shared by such poets while at the same time not expanding its reach to incorporate women. She quotes Susan Howe from a conference on Olson to drive home the implication:
After hearing conference papers by two of Olson’s committed commentators, Don Byrd and John Clarke, Howe remarked: “I am a poet. I know that Charles Olson’s writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I
was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice.” Then, playing on her status as a “respondent” to conference papers: “Can daughters ever truly respond to factors that come into play in such a patronymic discourse?” (S. Howe, 166, 168). She follows with a cited catalogue of intensely misogynist passages by Olson and then balances this impression with some other citations. “When he is at his best, frontiers are in constant flux” (S. Howe, 172).
Howe’s point here strikes me as very much on target because it acknowledges the degree to which writers, including the most problematic among us, are not continuous monoliths, but indeed ensembles of complex layerings, some of which can be at complete odds with one another. There is the Gertrude Stein whose writing completely flung open the doors of possibility for women & especially lesbian women in poetics, whose attitude toward other Jews could best be characterized as ambiguous, and whose attitudes on all issues of class & privilege are cringe-worthy. Her presentation of African American female voices in her early prose is generous, but it is also condescending. She is always all of these writers. Leaving one or two of them aside robs you of the whole of Gertrude Stein, even if including all of them might not be as much inspirational or as much fun.
As the absolute number of poetry books expands so dramatically as it has in the U.S. over the past 20 years, it increasingly becomes possible for younger poets & readers to self-select & even balkanize their own reading, to become enmeshed almost exclusively in this particular branch of the post-New American poetries or that particular variant of the School of Quietude. And while it is certainly the case that it is better to be passionate about something than merely a tepid sampler of everything, I do worry about the ease with which these problems can all be avoided through the worst of all solutions, selective ignorance.
There’s no question in my mind that I think every woman writer needs to have both the collected Olson and The Maximus Poems on her bookshelf. Just as every male poet needs to have a comprehensive collection of the work of Judy Grahn on his. Even if her later poetry is, to my reading, as problematic as that of Ed Dorn’s. But it also means dealing with all these issues, whenever & however they arise, with some generosity one hopes (Susan Howe & Rachel Blau DuPlessis are both good examples of this, frankly), but always with eyes wide open.
Labels: DuPlessis, New American Poetry, Theory
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Another
One book that you won’t find listed there is The Flea Market in Kiel, published as a fine art chapbook by The Rest Press, the micropublisher founded by Patrick Masterson & Ryan Murphy. Like a lot of Warsh’s best work, Flea Market is quiet, observant, meditative. In spite of the allusion in the title to the city on the German Baltic that is known to most Americans, if it is known at all, merely as the root to kielbasa, there is nothing exotic in Warsh’ content, much of which could as easily be set in Kiel, Wisconsin:
My dental insurance doesn’t cover my family.
But today I found out I can borrow on my retirement plan.
My heart is still beating, but I don’t know for whom.
For an encore, I’ll sing “Some Enchanted Evening”
or “Up on the Roof.”
It’s remarkable just how much context can be gleaned from these four simple sentences, not the least of which is the tension between the image of family in the first line & the lovelorn tone of the third.
Many of Warsh’s poems apply techniques that may have origins elsewhere, as the one above does the leaps of surrealism. One can imagine poets as diverse as Bill Berkson & Robert Bly using this same four-part exoskeletal structure & coming up with something very different. In the following, I certainly caught the Pound in the first line & heard the irritated tone of Jack Spicer in the last, but it was the ambience of Frank O’Hara, rising up almost as an echo, that lingered the most:
And then Diana Ross & The Supremes were singing “Stop! In the Name of Blub”
But as I was leaving the theater I realized I could no longer understand the words
Because all of the people in the audience who were singing along
Or possibly we can say it was a faulty sound system
Or more to the point maybe all the words began to blur in my head.
The way people look alike when you see them from a distance
So the words & the sounds never convey the same meaning
Or when I thought they meant something it was really the opposite
The glitter in Diana Ross’s hair, for instance, or her dress which consisted
Of thousands of tiny sequins (blinding, really, as she tottered onto the stage)
Each sequin a tiny mirror reflecting the sun, the stars & the planets
That make up a galaxy where existence is a bad dream
From which you wake up in a cold sweat, hair matted to the sides of your face
The indentation of your head on the pillow –
Diana, shut up.
Here Warsh uses the additional spacing between lines to permit him to stretch them out without seeming somehow dense as he builds this satire predicated on two different O’Hara poems, “The Day Lady Died” & “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” His image of Diana Ross as “tottering” turns tragedy into farce – and recalls, as much as the tone of the last line, the way in Spicer characterizes the Beatles as corporatist bubblegum rock in Book of Magazine Verse.
Each section here is built with such care, deliberately aimed at limited effects, but with an overall cumulative impact far more powerful than any of this book’s individual sections. That seems to be a particularly Warshian virtue.
Flea Market is printed in an edition of 350 copies, exquisitely produced by Masterson with great attention to detail & a clean design. Ryan Murphy, who co-founded A Rest Press with Masterson¹, told me that his Ori is the New Apple Press, which does editions of just 75 copies, can only be reliably found at one bookstore – McNally Robinson Booksellers in
.
¹ Making me wonder if the shift from A to The Rest press is an indication that Murphy’s no longer directly involved.
Labels: Lewis Warsh, New American Poetry
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Influencing Paul Muldoon
(tho it still misses
the Jim Morrison allusion
in Horse Latitudes)
§
Borders bails on Britain
(also
When they’re bemoaning
the loss of
Borders,
you know the bookstores
of
are in deep weeds
§
§
Politics & prose
in
§
Divisions in Nigerian literature
§
§
Dream of the Poem:
500 years of
of Hebrew poetry
from
reviewed by Marjorie Perloff
§
The whole of Divagations
reviewed by Wayne Koestenbaum
§
One perspective
from Buffalo
§
§
The other shoe drops
at the
Los Angeles Times
§
§
§
Bright Eyes
has other ideas
§
L.A. as the center
for the visual arts scene
§
Martìn Ramìrez
& self-taught art
Labels: links
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Poets send me work all the time asking me if I will comment on what they’re doing. It’s something to which I can seldom reply, simply because I lack the time. I do, however, often read, or at least read over, whatever they have sent. In the process, I’ve concluded that the surest quick test of whether or not a poet has anything going for them as a writer is specificity. And the quickest test of specificity lies in description. I pick up any new book that’s come in the mail, open it and just let my eyes drift down a page:
Quickening footsteps on wide oak planks, on palatial
slabs of marble.
Check. My eyes drift down further:
Water splashes
and plays at the center of circled
columns, the pale
sunlit dome.
Double check: not only is this language specific, but I immediately realize just how much I like the play of the language, the decisions as when to pause & break the line. So I flip randomly to another page:
A new catalog of roses,
thirty rosebushes in a box
on the front porch
in time for spring,
bare of all but thorns.
Again, specificity. Again, I realize how much I like the sense of line here. This writer’s touch is light & remarkably accurate. By now I realize that I’m going to have to (not really the right word: going to want to, need to) read this book. Which was sent to me not by the poet, but the publisher, tho it is by a poet I’ve been reading now for decades.
Begin At Once admonishes the title, some of the best advice I’ve gotten from a cover of a volume of poetry. The author is Beth Joselow, whom I think of as a “DC poet,” tho she’s been living far enough out on the eastern shore in
Joselow is also a poet whom I think of as something of a DC (
I am always drawn to work by women, and to collections of women's work. At the same time, I am dedicated to the idea of mainstreaming everyone in order to more quickly blur the boundaries between us, if that is possible. I'm not sure that it is possible, but I recall how frustrated I felt when my friends were wearing shirts that said, "It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand." I want to. And I want to keep the dialogue open and lively.
As readers of this blog will realize, blurring the boundaries is not a perspective I’ve shared over the years. I’ve felt – with just cause I must say – that being identified with the language poets has had an enormous, positive impact on my work and on its ability to find a broader audience than I might otherwise have. My own t-shirt would probably read “It’s a language thing. Let me explain….”
One real consequence of her position is that Joselow’s work, like that of Dahlen, is something that should be much more widely known, appreciated & celebrated than has heretofore been the case. Consider this concise piece, which takes its title from the first phrase of the last stanza, that being the one “in prose”:
The elusive optimism
skin of ice on the pond
early morning
all water by
Imagine a different fate
one less repetitive
mild insistence pursuing
the same mistaken path.
When we were violent they were more violent so we became still more violent until all of the rocks and blades were gone over to the other side for further use and so on and so forth and so on.
There are so many things that are terrific here. I love, for example, the uses Joselow makes of grammar throughout, from the deliberate omission of the key verb phrase in the first stanza – highlighted in fact by the presence of the period – through the “perfect” syntax of the second to the trailing, deliberately repetitive & “violently” general use of language in the prose sentence. Equally fascinating is how well she balances the concreteness of the first stanza and the first half of the paragraph with the deliberate abstractness of the second stanza & end of the paragraph. Indeed, this push-pull dynamic between abstract & concrete reminds me more than a little of strategies Rae Armantrout deploys in her poetry, tho the overall feel here is different perhaps because of the framing in the first stanza, which can be read as “rural” or “natural.”
Joselow’s work shows both a remarkable range – from the jazz scat start of “Tantrum,” which begins
Bellyfish lobster-lolly
craydaddy bang
hoopla benny burden
crack crinkle spine
before revealing itself a few stanzas in as a litany of military ordnance-related proper names –
Osprey Atlas
ICBM
Centaur hydrazine
Dragon Javelin
Bushmaster Chain Gun
Walther carbine
Grenade launcher Browning
M16
Kalashnikov Tomahawk
Bradleys Abrams Scout
Peacekeeper Gatling
Sparrow Phoenix Harm
Polaris Poseidon
Nike Stinger SLAM
M4 MP5
Maverick Harpoon
a roster that continues literally for three pages, becoming a hypnotic (if profoundly & deliberately “ugly”) satire a la Ginsberg’s classic¹ “Hum Bom!” – from this all the way over to dour dramatic monolog, such as one hears in the first stanza of “Genes”:
I come from
A family of artists
And bedwetters.
I wanted to be
Poor but honest,
But it didn’t work out.
The risk in poetry with this wide a range is that it can feel amorphous, the work of a talented writer without a strong sense of direction. In this regard, Joselow feels much closer to the
But Ashbery isn’t Joselow’s model, and the real key to the organization of Begin at Once is, I think, its three divisions, entitled “One,” “More” & “Time.” The seventeen-page “Self Regard” is the ninth of the 13 poems in “One,” whereas most of what I’ve quoted above thus far comes from “More,” none of whose 17 poems reaches five pages. Two of the six poems in the final sequence, “Jackpot!” and the book’s title piece, are at least that long.
It may seem, given what I’ve quoted here, that I prefer Joselow’s shorter poems. Of the lines cited above, only the very first two passages, which are both from “Self Regard,” come from any of Joselow’s more extended work. The shorter pieces do seem to be the ones best suited for the kinds of treatment I’m giving these lines here. But I actually think that Joselow is at her very best in the longer poems, where tone, image & affect all accumulate over several pages to create a really luminescent meditative space. There is just no way in a form like a brief review, however, to give a sense of what a single one-line stanza, such as
It is my name.
can mean without an enormous amount of context, the sort of thing that never translates well when cast into five or six dense paragraphs of critical prose. So you’re going to have to trust me on this. When freed of the need to have an immediate payoff for this line or that phrase, Joselow soars. Both “Self Regard” and “Begin at Once” make me wonder what she would do over the course of 40 or 100 pages. My gut sense is that it would be awesome. Begin at Once is a terrific collection because Beth Joselow is a writer with a great gift, but it’s also a tease. Because this is a book, all 104 pages of it, that leaves you wanting to read so very much more.
¹ A poem that appears twice in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, albeit in slightly different versions, tho with the same dates.
Labels: Beth Joselow
Monday, March 26, 2007
1961 US Figure Skating Team
boarding flight to
I took just enough time out over the weekend from some projects, ferrying the kids to & from their jobs, fencing & theater, plus attempting to write up some end-notes for The Alphabet to watch the women’s competition of the World Figure Skating Championships, held this year in
Neither would, tho they were about to introduce the years of gloom for figure skating, first with the brouhaha caused by Harding’s husband’s inept attempt to cripple Kerrigan at the 1994 U.S. championships, then a series of international judging scandals that forced the international federations to adopt a far more complex – nearly impenetrable – point system that appears to have taken the favoritism and vote-trading out of the judging process.
The actual inheritor of Yamaguchi’s throne turned out to be another Asian-American, Michelle Kwan, who, between 1994 and 2005, won the U.S. championships nine times, finishing second the three other times, won the World’s five times, finishing second three times, and third once. While Kwan hasn’t skated competitively since withdrawing from the 2006 Olympics, she has not said that she has retired. By the time of the 2010 Olympics, Kwan will be 29, the same age at which Maria Butarskaya won the European championships in 2002. But the real story here is that skating has simply passed Kwan by. She has never won under the new scoring system, which assigns points and difficulty levels for everything, making jumping a far more important part of the sport than the graceful aesthetic spirals that are Kwan’s trademark move.
Kwan, for all of her dominance of the sport, never has won the Olympics, finishing second in 1998, third in 2002. During this same period, no other female skater matched Kwan’s overall dominance, tho Irina Slutskaya of
During these years, the sport as seen far too many one-hit wonders, skaters who won gold at the Olympics or other major events, then quickly turned pro & cashed in on one of the touring ice shows where skaters can make millions without ever having to do a jump more difficult than a double. The last four Olympic champions – Oksana Biaul, Tara Lipinsky, Sarah Hughes & Shizuka Arakawa – are not skating competitively any more. Biaul, whose 1994 Olympic long program is still the single best performance I’ve ever seen, never competed again, unless you count an appearance on Celebrity Poker.
All of this points up the relationship between competitive skating and global capital. Skating is a sport that requires an enormous investment early on, which privileges hegemonic nations. Either the state pays by taking toddlers into national training academies, as I believe may be still done in the People’s Republic of China, or else parents put down 50 grand a year, year after year, often moving from state to state in search of the right coach in the hopes that little Tiffany will grow up to become more than just another ice rat. Not every parent can do that, so it helps to live in a society where enough of them can.
Thus it’s not an accident that seven of the last 14 Olympic champions in women’s skating have been Americans. Americans have won the silver six times during that span, bronze five times. Combined, that’s 43 percent of all possible medals since 1956 in a sport in which several dozen nations compete. But since women’s skating was brought back into Olympic competition in 1920, only two women have won gold more than once, Sonje Henie of
So anyone who chooses to compete on a continuing basis – as did Yamaguchi & Kwan did & as, apparently, reigning U.S. champ Kimmie Meissner is choosing to do – has an enormous long-term value for the sport in this country, even if only in attracting small children & their parents into one of America’s dwindling number of ice rinks to get some exercise.
Because the global geography of women’s skating clearly is changing. Skating commentators for years now have been talking about the “coming wave” of Chinese & Japanese skaters and finally it’s arrived. Chinese skaters in particular have been strong in the pairs competition now for several years, having won 12 medals at the Worlds since 1999, seven by the couple who won this weekend, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo. During that same period,
But it is women’s singles that is the focal point of competitive figure skating and this weekend saw Japanese skaters finish first, second and fifth, with
So the long view of women’s figure skating would see its center moving from the countries where it was long an indigenous local sport, such as Sonje Henie’s Norway, to the nations at the center of the Cold War – The Soviet Union, the U.S. and Germany – and now toward the economic center of the next century, Asia. One wonders if Americans register this indicator of the shift in global relations for what it signals.
Empires are notoriously fragile constructs and there is no question that the
There are a lot of conflicting indices of hegemony in the contemporary world, international sport being pretty close to the bottom when it comes to explanatory importance. But at the same time, it is an index and the message is reasonably clear. “Our” time, if by our we mean the big rubber finger that reads “
Five hundred years from now, it would be very interesting to see at what moment historians would identify the peak of the American empire, the moment beyond which the various roads downhill began to overtake those still on the rise. My guess is that it would be sometime around 1961, when the long post-World War 2 expansion had just a few more years to run, and when John F. Kennedy took over from Eisenhower. The Eisenhower-Kennedy transition represents the moment when the ability of the
Depending on which index you use, the
One could argue, in fact, that our current experiment in government by malevolent incompetence is a serious symptom of what happens to any hegemon as it tends downward. The former Soviet empire ditto. The problem is that countries that are visibly sliding in the wrong direction are often prey to the worst impulses of an increasingly desperate population. It’s not a formula for optimism.
Coincidentally, 1961 was also the only year since the end of the Second World War when there was no world figure skating championship. The competition that year was to have been held in
In 2007, it’s increasingly self-evident that the
Labels: sports
Sunday, March 25, 2007
I’m going to be on the road for the next week. I hope to keep posting, but one never knows. At least the snow has finally melted here in
Labels: Personal
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Happy 50th Birthday
Helvetica!
§
The scourge of Arial
§
The Poetry Foundation
&
Americans for the Arts
find themselves poorer
by $100 million
(not a typo)
§
Terry Eagleton
does
Monty Python,
this time for real
§
The best-selling books of poetry
this past February
from Small Press Distribution
§
§
Origin
is back
§
Dana Gioia,
a Republican,
finds himself facing the Dems
now in congress
§
LibraryThing
you make my heart sing
you make everything
groovy
§
Most of my first drafts are done by pen.
Actually,
unless the paper in the notebook
proves too porous,
it’s been the same pen
for over 25 years,
a Waterman I bought
in the stationery store
that used to be next to Zabar’s
on the
of
§
Merger looming
for Borders &B&N?
§
”gay bookstore”
is on the brink
§
The archive broker
§
Tom Christensen’s
glossary
of publishing terms
§
Through the Russian
looking glass
§
20 percent of American
can’t read
§
Baumol’s cost-disease
and the future of art
§
The “most successful”
living artist
is Damien Hirst
§
§
Steve Reich:
”The orchestra is a museum”
(MP3 files
from the New York Times)
§
Two shows I’d love to see
in San Francisco
§
Saving
the Tugendhat house
maybe
§
Labels: links
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Melanie Almeder, On
Kemeny Babineau, VDB Worldlist, BookThug,
Jonathan Ball, Wolves (lone.ly), BookThug,
Aaron Belz, The Bird Hoverer, BlazeVOX,
Laynie Browne, Daily Sonnets, Counterpath Press,
Chris Cheek, The Church – The School – The Beer, published as Plantarchy 3,
Jack Collom, Two Square Feet of Turf, privately printed,
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden,
Clayton Eshleman, An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire, Black Widow,
Peter Gizzi, The Outernationale, Wesleyan,
Anthony Hawley, Record-breakers, Ori is the New Apple Press,
Barbara Henning, My Autobiography, United Artists,
Brian Henry, The Stripping Point, Counterpath Press,
Hailey Higdon, The Palinode Project: Book One, no publisher listed,
Paul Hoover, Edge and Fold, Apogee Press,
Meghan Jackson, Movement in Jars, Chaudiere Books,
Amy King, I’m the Man Who Loves You, BlazeVOX,
Joanna Klink, Circadian, Penguin Books,
Tom Konyves, OOSOOM: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, BookThug,
Bob Marcacci,
Jeremy McLeod, Search, BookThug,
Jay Millar, Lack Lyrics, BookThug,
Mohammad Ali Niazmand, Change of Atmosphere, Green Zone, no location listed, 2007
Alfred Noyes, Compression Sonnets, BookThug,
Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Green and Gray, UC Press, Berkeley, 2007
Shin Yu Pai, Sightings: Selected Works (2000-2005), 1913 Press,
Ethan Paquin, My Thieves, Salt,
Richard Rathwell, Rules of the River, graphics by Pierre Coupey, DaDaBaBy & Blue Orange Publishing,
Lisa Robertson, The Apothecary, BookThug,
G. P. Skratz, Fun, Philos Press, Lacey, WA, 2006
Rachel M. Simon, Theory of
William Stobb, Nervous Systems, Penguin Books,
Ko Un, Abiding Places:Korea South & North, translated by Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz, Tupelo Press,
Steve Willard, Harm., UC Press, Berkeley, 2007
Anthology
Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets, Chaudiere Books, 2006. Edited by rob mclennan. Includes Stephen Brockwell, Michelle Desbarats, Anita Dolman, Anne Le Dressay, Karen Massey, Una McDonnell, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Monty Reid & Shane Rhodes
Books (Other)
Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Rusty Morrison, Jaime Robles & Susan Dyckman, A Continuing Discussion:Experimental Forms and Accessibility, Woodland Editions, Five Fingers Press, San Leando, CA, 2007
Andrew Joron, The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose, Counterpath Press,
Journals
Court Green 4, Chicago, 2007. Includes Judith Kroll, Maggie Smith, Susie Timmons, Larry Sawyer, Brenda Coultas, Sheila E. Murphy, Elaine Equi, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Joan Larkin. Dossier on political poetry includes Joan Larkin, Susan Tichy, Nin Andrews, Elaine Equi, Aaron Belz, Tom Orange, Jerome Sala, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Gail Mazur, Susie Timmons, David Baratier, Joshua Edwards, Naomi Shihab Nye, D.H. Lawrence, George Kalamaras, Eve Packer, Aaron Smith, Lee Upton, Anthony Robinson, Michael Lally, Terrence Winch, Bernadette Mayer, Muriel Rukeyser, more.
Damn the Cæsars, Vol. II,
Fence, Vol. 9, No. 2,
Matrix, 76,
The Modern Review, Vol. I, No. 4,
The Modern Review, Vol. II, No. 1,
The Modern Review, Vol. II, No. 2,
Open Letter, Thirteenth Series, No. 1,
Primary Writing, 2/07,
Soft Target, 1, 1,
Vanitas, 2,
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Text paintings by Stephen Rodefer
§
Rae Armantrout,
reviewed by Stephen Burt
in the New York Times Book Review,
transcends her
”West Coast cult following”
§
Reading in
Tuesday, March 27
at the Drawing Center
35
John Ashbery & Ron Padgett
reading the work
of Kenneth
Koch
§
Another tribute
to
Niyi Osundare
“I won’t stop talking about
We live in rot.”
§
§
Poetry slam:
Homer vs. Hesiod
§
“100 poets, one room”
(Scotland’s largest poetry gathering)
§
Andrea Brady’s Tracking Wildfire
(all ten sections
complete with source material
& an essay on methodology)
§
Talking
with Lisa Robertson
§
A contrary view
§
BookForum
looks at five “new”
books of poetry
§
Will bookstores change
as much as
libraries?
§
Archive
of the Communist Party USA
goes to NYU
§
§
Check out Mr. Thingamajig
at American Accent
Not to be confused with
American Dialect
§
§
§
§
More nonsense about Shakespeare
What’s wrong with the surge
in the Shakespeare Wars
§
One person who should know
King Lear
§
A new prize
for the
School of Q
§
§
Is Deborah Garrison
Billy Collins in drag?
§
Embarrassing Chester County
for 13 straight years
§
Against “creative writing”
§
§
§
Saving Manchu
§
Getting abstract
with Peter Schjeldahl
§
The People’s Republic
gets jiggy
with contemporary
visual art
§
$680,000 fine
for destroying art
§
Art Brut
vs. Crit Brut
§
Should the
bar the Dukes of Hazzard?
§
It’s
the end of the world
as we know it
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
For a reader of my generation, a collection like Way More West: New and Selected Poems by the late Ed Dorn comes as a potentially useful corrective, not the least because it’s instructive to see that the relatively brief excerpt from ‘Slinger comes early, with more than half the book’s weight falling after the completion of this comic epic. Easily the most contentious and controversial of any of the New Americans – Amiri Baraka would be a pretty distant second on that scale – one version of the received wisdom about Dorn was that he was one of those rare individuals blessed with a natural lyric gift – the brilliance of a poem like “Vaquero,” one of Dorn’s earliest, and best known, poems would attest to that – who chafed at the intellectual demands of the projectivist poetics with which he was so closely aligned. In this reading, Dorn wrote What I See in The Maximus Poems as an attempt to come to terms with this challenge, and then produced one, perhaps two great books (depending on the version you heard – The North Atlantic Turbine was always cited, but some folks would argue for Geography as its equal), before flaming out spectacularly by writing Gunslinger, the metaphysical comic western that is, in many ways, a refutation of the projectivist program – a break not unlike the ones that Amiri Baraka & Denise Levertov would make as well. In all three cases, the received wisdom went, none of the apostates was to fulfill their early promise as poets. The villain in Baraka’s case supposedly was Maoism, in Levertov’s a fundamentalist feminism & in Dorn’s cocaine. In this telling, Dorn went off to noodle on some brief poems that basically showed him trying to relearn how to write, producing nothing of consequence unless you consider the bile that spilled forth during the Naropa Poetry Wars where the position of Dorn & Tom Clark opposing the excesses of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which were considerable, was often taken, with evidence in print (and Dorn himself the publisher), to be racist, xenophobic & homophobic. But by then many, perhaps most, of the poets of my generation had long since stopped reading Dorn. Tho he lived the last several decades of his life in
There is no question that Dorn had difficult relations with his peers. When, in 1973 – pre-Naropa but post-‘Slinger – I got him to agree to read with Robert Creeley & Joanne Kyger in a benefit for the prison movement in California, Dorn’s one condition was that he be allowed to go last, so that he could arrive late & not have to speak to either Creeley or Kyger, with whom he was not then talking. It was the only time in my life I ever saw Creeley read first at such an event, but if Dorn took any pleasure in that, I couldn’t tell since Dorn didn’t arrive until right before he was to go on. His reading that night was terrific, that part is unquestionable, the first time I’d ever heard Recollections of Gran Apachería. But his behavior prepared me for all the claims later that he’d become the Mel Gibson of the New American Poetry. His remark years later that he didn’t need to read language poetry because
So it’s fascinating to see that the editor of Dorn’s new selected – it’s not the first & there was even a collected that went through three editions in the 1970s & ‘80s – is Michael Rothenberg, editor of Big Bridge & most recently the editor of Phil Whalen’s selected, also out from Penguin. Think about that. The editor of the poems of the writer most closely associated with Zen Buddhism in
It’s not that Way More West slights the early work – six of the nine sections of North Atlantic Turbine are present, plus more than half of Geography. If I have any qualms about the selection, it’s only the absence of any of the second volume of ‘Slinger, since that was the section in which it became clear that Dorn was not interested in going back to a world in which Charles Olson was the poetry equivalent of god-on-earth & Dorn the favored one among his potential successors. Since Gunslinger continues to be available – tho Duke rather stupidly hasn’t gotten that much of its backlist up on the website – this isn’t a major failing.
The real question is whether this Ed Dorn is as good or significant a poet as the
a bullet
is worth
a thousand bulletins
The first poem (in its entirety) from Abhorrences is a position that captures the Bush foreign policy in
Equating a seven-word poem to the
When Petra Kelly shot herself
I was right beside her in my heart
and my admiration for her steadfastness
was complete and totally unlike
what I feel for the black-boy whips of McDonna
or the earlier pretenders like Jane and Joan
in the brief history of corrective sensibility.
The careful mediation of her
American accent, the pure
german weltwaves in the background.
Certainment, why hang around
for the land to fill up with genetically resentful and
overproduced Southerners just so the pretenders
can get their carpets vacd?
The history of the world has been written
with the disappearing ink of those accounts
and the pilfered wages of their solution –
the sine qua non of population dumping.
¡Salute! and so long
For the price of a single round, you ducked
the destiny you described, and gave the colour to,
and framed – the born prophet
of a finale full of Fall Out, - Bye Bye.
Dorn of course gets it wrong. Petra Kelly didn’t shoot herself – she was shot and killed by her partner & whether it was a murder-suicide or a joint suicide is one of those unknowables of history – tho frankly the idea that it would have been the latter without the presence of any suicide note is extraordinarily improbable given Kelly’s life as a political activist. Misreading a sad act of depression & domestic violence as a political statement is sort of the archetypal stance of Ed Dorn. But what is he actually trying to say? That by dying Kelly is less of a “pretender” than Jane Fonda or Joan Baez? Given their starkly different political trajectories, it’s hard to know what point Dorn is making by conjoining them thus – that anyone who demonstrates is a pretender? Or perhaps just anyone with money, which I take to be the content behind the “
So what we get, finally, is a rather sad case – of all the New Americans, Dorn’s later poems rank up there with Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters as the silliest when it comes to their actual political thinking. And like Pound’s politics, it undercuts the poetry, even more so because Dorn has sacrificed so much of his poetics for this muddle of pissed-off agitprop. Consider Dorn’s poem “about” the case of Ezra Pound, entitled “Dismissal,” part of the last suite of poems, save for the cancer odes of Chemo Sábe, Dorn was to write. Its first stanza notes that Pound “made anti-Semitism a heresy, / although he wasn’t the greatest anti-Semite of his time. / Or even close.” Which is true enough, tho it’s worth noting as Ben Friedlander has, that Pound was considerably more anti-Semitic than, say, Mussolini. What gets me most, tho, is the next stanza:
A Modern gang of cutthroats
in cartoon berets, with sumo champions
like Gertrude Stein –
The giant abbreviator from
who wrote, stuttering
pseudo-wise hymns to war, and
its effects on the adventurous sector
of the lower / upper middle class.
There is an implicit, well not so implicit as cheaply explicit, homophobia in making fun of Gertrude Stein’s weight, but the connection to Hemingway, made with no more than a dash & linebreak & no verb phrase for either side of this equation. What is being said here? Are Stein & Hemingway the anti-Pound gang of cutthroats? Or merely a front for same, these otherwise unnamed figures “in cartoon berets.” Dorn takes up three stanzas & a section title to simply note that there was no trial. “Besides / insanity is the ultimate dismissal!” Then come two further stanzas that carry the implications further:
It was too familiar, a fitting end
to the old, uniformed fascism of the two wars
gliding into the transpace of the new
hierarchical oriental fascism of beehive
conformity, industry devoted only to survival
and ruinous increase. Singularity,
the swamping of the gene swamp.
All of it fondly called
the Modern Movement by those
who fervently hope it is over
and that their banal attempt
to get rid of a whole period
by driving a stake through it
will finally give them an end
to their belaboring the scapegoat.
One might reasonably read this as arguing that state fascism is being replaced by its corporate counterpart, and that modernism is about to be canned by the School of Quietude (parts of which did, in fact, attempt to ban Pound’s works, led by sonneteer & 1934 Pulitzer winner Robert Silliman Hillyer), using Pound to drive “a stake through it.” Why, however, the gratuitous racism of oriental midway through the first stanza above – there’s been no discussion anywhere here of Japanese or Asian capitalism, let alone the outsourcing of manufacturing to
There is more than a little Pound in Dorn. Imagine ‘Slinger as Dorn’s Mauberly, but that the only “Cantos” that follow turn out to be those devoted to Martin Van Buren & that he dies before he can be rehabilitated poetically in Pisa. You would get a selected that feels not so terribly different from Way More West. It’s a career arc that is functionally going over the cliff even with Gran Apachería, and it makes you reread all the earlier work, and especially the ellipses in the earlier work, not as moments of Olsonian leaps, but as real gaps in thinking.
There is a story worth telling – it would make a great doctoral dissertation, frankly – about what happened in the 1960s to the New American poets: who got political, like Ginsberg, Baraka, Levertov & Margaret Randall, who merely played at being political like Diane DiPrima, who incorporated the political into their work (Duncan, Zukofsky, Oppen), who freaked at the idea of poets as political such as Jack Spicer, who stayed silent throughout (Ashbery, for one, but pretty much every NY School poet not named David Shapiro), who actively rooted for the far right (Kerouac), etc. If the aesthetic reign of the New Americans proved short lived (even as their impact continues to resound and expand to this day) a lot of this has to do with their movement being a quintessentially post-World War 2 phenomenon. It was never prepared to survive drugs, the Beatles or
Labels: Ed Dorn, New American Poetry
Monday, March 19, 2007
Nothing is harder or more tricky than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed the poet’s work centering around the poems that confront language most directly – focusing on Words and Pieces more than on the earlier “popular” For Love – not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that Mauberly represents the pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the Quartets. It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John Ashberys we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some poets, including both Auden & Moore, actively revised their own pasts through cautious, if injudicious, editing.
So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro who emerges from New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) captures what is unique about this most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all
A Problem
There are two ways of living on the earth
Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,
Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse
If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.
One arrives in
Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.
One calls up
But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.
Thinking of
delicately engraving nipples
On each of two round skulls
You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions
And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.
Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.
This represents early love, which is now “total space.”
These are the ways of living on the earth,
Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice.
It took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in good part because, while I “got” Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what I’d read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have found myself loving certain lines & images (“the train station is a dirty toad” and that great final sentence, which has both image & tonal echoes of Grenier’s early work – I’m not sure that Shapiro even knew of Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very early 1970s), wishing they hadn’t been “stuck” in the midst everything else. Now, however, I can see all the ways in which “everything else” really is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision is, like when to use punctuation & when not. There’s a whole narrative here just in how periods are used & where: it’s no accident that they turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase, each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences. Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more profoundly different sense of sensuality – and the second makes the final sentence so much more powerful.
The poem is also both sad & serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the
The snow is alive
But my son cries
The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!
But the snow is alive
And the tree is angry
This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from that first line, a part of the title series from After a Lost Original, written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to Ceravolo’s sense of a magical world, but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find this tone, which is both layered & complicated, with more than a little hurt.
If Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it’s not accidental that he’s also the most political – indeed, one might say he’s almost the only political presence, at least for his generation. Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles & after, this isn’t so rare, but before Shapiro – who was very visibly a presence during the
Out of being torn apart
comes art.
Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!
Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)
Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.
Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.
Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”
(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)
And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.
The very flatness of these lines almost echoes Levertov’s most political pieces, even if Shapiro’s source undoubtedly is (again) Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined. But it’s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections – and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line: it is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways is heart-breaking.
When Joe Ceravolo’s selected poems, The Green Lake is Awake, appeared, it had a huge impact on people’s sense of the New York School, gen. 3 and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to the people for whom he was really really important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the Collected Books). Shapiro’s selected won’t have the same impact – tho it should – in part because he’s never truly disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now for more than 40 years, doing important work as an art critic, visibly a presence around New York. Yet I’ve never been certain just how many poets actually know David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young – January was not only a book of poems published Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1965, a time when even Frank O’Hara couldn’t find a real publisher among the trades (Grove Press was a bottom feeder there), but was written for the most part by Shapiro when he was still in high school – it would have been easy (but wrong) to impose on him the narrative of the brilliant savant, and not to recognize the decades of discipline he’s subsequently added to what he brought to the blank page in the 1960s. He’s not Frank Stanford goes to
So this volume is one of the great “must have” books of the year. If you have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems is required reading. It’s also a great, if complicated, joy.
Labels: David Shapiro, New American Poetry
Saturday, March 17, 2007
First Screening:
bp Nichols’
computer poems
from 1984
in numerous formats
including Java
§
A “new” poem by
William Carlos Williams
§
§
Talking with
Clayton Eshleman
§
The future of book reviews
(really, the future of
print book advertising…)
§
Congress
contemplates restoring
federal funding
for the arts
§
For his 200th birthday,
there is a new 39¢
Longfellow stamp
§
The only
Gertrude Stein stamps
that I know of
came from
§
Homophonic
translations of poetry
from the Chinese
§
Gary Sullivan
on
The Grand Piano
§
A Zen poetry festival
in
§
Covering the media’s
coverage
of the death of
Baudrillard
§
International Journal
of Baudrillard Studies
§
Jack Kerouac
would have been 85
last Tuesday
Kerouac festival
this summer
at Naropa
(the website
already has
some great stuff)
The Kerouac Family Association
§
“another paragon
of accessibility”
§
Contemporary poetry
by Korean Women
§
A new profile of
John Ashbery
§
Why
nobody
takes Robert Lowell
seriously any more
§
Jazz, opera
& Robert Pinsky
§
Jazz too
has its
School of Quietude
§
The great ukulele debate &
search for the lost chord
by Glenn Branca, Thomas Pynchon
G.P. Skratz & more
§
South by Southwest
(the great American music
festival)
§
New music economics
§
Economics & the visual arts
Same subject, different story
§
The hidden works
of Clyfford Still
§
§
Steven Criqui
has died
way too soon
§
Contemporary art
and
21st century
Stalinist bureaucrats
§
Why is feminism
”out of fashion”
in the visual arts?
§
Left vs. right:
What’s next?
§
W(h)ither French culture?
Friday, March 16, 2007
The strangest film I’ve seen in some time is an experimental docu-drama from Thailand called Mysterious Object at Noon, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai architect who has an MFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (which, when you think about it, is a great town for an architect to go to in order to study film). It’s not a docu-drama in the American sense of the word, but rather a film that documents a narrative, the tale of a home study teacher and her disabled student. How it does this is what is so unusual. Working for over three years with an all-volunteer cast & crew – which also means an ever-changing cast & crew – Weerasethakul employed the surrealist game of the Exquisite Corpse, which, as described by one web site devoted to this practice,
was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution
Now imagine playing this same game with film, not only with the urban elites of Bangkok, but with villagers in Weerasethakul’s native north who have only limited experience with cinema and no real concept of fiction. The results are both primitive and startling. Filmed in black & white with the cheapest imaginable equipment and film stock, Mysterious Object is something akin to a surrealist version of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera set in the Thailand of the 1990s, which means everything from contemporary skyscrapers and freeway onramps to elephants wandering into the scene as some boys who’ve been playing a version of hacky sack try to improvise what might come next. One group of villagers act out their section, which includes music (some of it involving a mouth organ unlike anything I’ve ever seen before). Another woman, early on, simply tells her own story, which involves being sold by her father in return for bus fare. There is a long truck ride through
This film works for many of the same reasons that any artwork that is actively trying to invent its own genre does – in this sense, Man with a Movie Camera, as well as books as diverse as Tristram Shandy, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Moby Dick, Spring & All and Visions of Cody, are almost parallel projects. Each questions everything and makes no assumptions as to how to proceed. In this context, even a wrong decision (presuming of course we could define such) would be a fresh one. At the same time, Weerasethakul clearly understands this role as historical – there is a scene in which the film-maker and his colleagues are walking along & one comments “We should have had a script.” The film ends when & where it does because that’s where, literally, the film stock Weerasethakul had at his disposal ran out.
If you don’t care for experimental cinema, you can almost be certain that you’re going to hate this film. Even if you love the work of Stan Brakhage, Warren Sonbert & Abigail Child, you may find it hard to imagine that something like this can still be produced in the 21st century. Would it still hold its fascination if the film were in English about
Labels: Film
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Venus, the film for which Peter O’Toole received his most recent Oscar nomination for acting, may be one of the first in a genre that I can safely predict we will be seeing a lot more of in the relatively near future – the senior date flick. It’s not the first – indeed not even the first by director Roger Michell, best known for Notting Hill, who also directed The Mother, a movie one could read as the feminine counterpart to Venus. In that earlier film, Anne Reid beds her daughter’s boyfriend, played by a pre-Bond Daniel Craig looking rather fuzzy in a beard. In Venus, O’Toole plays a randy old thespian who becomes enchanted with his friend’s niece’s daughter, Jessie, portrayed by relative newcomer Jodie Whittaker. The age difference here is not subtle – O’Toole starred in Lawrence of Arabia twenty years before Whittaker was born.
I’ve never been that fond of O’Toole as an actor, but in Venus he is simply brilliant, conveying a difficult combination of lust & fatherly pride often with little more than his eyes or the corners of his mouth. Even as an over-the-top letch – one-part Henry Higgins, one-part Larry Flynt – O’Toole has to be a minimalist in his portrayal for this role to work, since Whittaker’s character is defined by sullen youth & a rural working-class inarticulateness. Once O’Toole’s character – and the audience – figure out why this woman, whom O’Toole insists on calling Venus, was sent away to the city, it becomes apparent that she has no intention ever of returning to the bog from whence she came, but she also has almost no job skills & only a modicum of curiosity. Her basic reaction to most comments on the part of others is to stare back at them wordlessly – a type that cinema has typically relegated to macho actors like Charles Bronson or Robert Mitchum. If a female is given these characteristics, it usually means that she’s a woman of mystery. But if Jessie is a mystery in Venus, it’s primarily to herself. That’s a difficult role to play – Whittaker is superb in it – but an even more difficult role to play off of, and this is where O’Toole’s mastery really takes command. There’s not a scene in this film – tho O’Toole’s appearance at the Oscars suggests that this might not be all acting – in which the actor’s body language doesn’t suggest some level of discomfort.
Michell livens the picture up by giving the audience more than a little of O’Toole’s character engaged with his buddies, portrayed by Leslie Phillips & recent Tony award winner Richard Giffiths, whose scenes are, for the most part, played as pure comedy. Another important story arc involves O’Toole’s character’s ex-wife, portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.
It’s not unusual for Hanif Kureishi scripts – My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Intimacy & The Mother are others – to focus on characters more than plot and Venus is no exception. O’Toole’s Maurice tries hard to live large, but in many respects he’s a shell of the man he once may have been, still working well into his seventies, residing in a small flat behind a café while his ex-, one of several characters he helps out financially in this film, still lives in the big house with all the memorabilia from his glory days. There’s a scene in which Jessie/Venus wants some nice clothes so he takes her to a posh boutique to try on some little black dresses, knowing full well that he lacks the funds to pay for anything. From his perspective, it’s the process that counts, but she’s humiliated & furious.
Whittaker’s character also has to walk a fine line between her disgust at the age of this man who wants to lick her shoulder or put his hands on her bosom – it might become “vomitous” she suggests – while at the same time actually liking him. In general, she does a fine job. This would be an interesting film to see in a triple bill with the likes of Gods and Monsters or Mighty Aphrodite, pictures that portray older men (Ian McKellan & Woody Allen) attracted to young beauties (Brendan Fraser & Mira Sorvino). Venus is the only one of the three to suggest that a young person might be physically repulsed by such advances. Although, and this is where Michell’s subtlety as a director confronts its limit, O’Toole’s Maurice is the only one of the three older men to be wearing a catheter.
Part of what makes this a senior date flick – the average age of the audience at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where I saw it last weekend appeared to be well into the sixties – is that it’s comfortably predictable. If you can’t tell where this film is going, it’s not that they haven’t painted a picture for you. Two of them, in fact, both quite literal. Similarly, an important detail between Maurice and his ex-wife – she describes herself only as his wife in the one scene where that’s a significant fact – is that he abandoned her with three children under the age of six. But there are scenes where the presence of children would seem essential, and these narrative kiddies (all grown up now we presume) are nowhere in sight. The repartee between the three male actors may be comic, but at points it descends into literal slapstick – there is one scene that could have appeared in a Three Stooges vehicle & another, when O’Toole is trying to spy on Jessie modeling for a life drawing class, & finds himself hanging from a door as it swings open & takes out an easel or two, which draws a cheap laugh until you realize just how cheap it was. Maurice also has an illness & you know just which part of the body is most directly affected.
Still, films in which seniors are taken as lead characters are themselves rare enough. Venus is an enjoyable diversion – more if you’re interested in watching how a great actor can carry one scene after another – but hopefully the aging of the film-going populace won’t restrict our choices going forward just to date flicks organized around the fantasies of impotent old men.
Labels: Film
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Talking with Martín Espada
(An MP3 of a reading
at Fox Lane High School)
§
Mary Ann Caws
on translation
§
Albert Mobilio
on interviewing as a process
§
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
versus
Mario Vargas Llosa
§
Jean Baudrillard’s Selected Writings
in PDF format
§
Remembering
a
§
The Supreme Court addresses
”Bong Hits 4 Jesus,”
a major free speech case
§
The Poetry Foundation
strikes back
in the form of
a David Orr
attack on the poetics of
The New Yorker
in the Sunday
New York Times
(Now, about the poetics of
The New York Times…)
§
The Poetry Foundation
also chooses a site
for a permanent home
§
A review of
The Grand Piano,
Part 2
§
Francine Prose
to lead PEN
§
George McWhirter,
poet laureate
§
Society for the History
of Authorship,
Reading & Publishing
is
S.H.A.R.P.
§
A national
Poetry Reading
bee?
§
A summer poetry workshop
in Scotland
that counts
Thomas A. Clark,
Susan Tichy,
&
Ken Cockburn
among the faculty
& includes trips to
Little Sparta
& the studio of
Andy Goldsworthy
§
§
The flurry of
”How to Read” books
get a close reading
§
Kaz Maslanka
explores
torque & Robert Creeley
complete with diagrams
§
Do Republicans write fiction
outside of the White House?
§
Troy Jollimore
is “stunned”
to receive
The National Book Critics Circle
Award
Jollimore,
who teaches philosophy
at Chico State,
may be the first
occasional blogger
to win such an award
His collection of
John Berryman imitations
was originally
selected for publication
by Billy Collins
§
The future of libraries
§
§
Patti Smith
on being inducted
into the Rock ‘n’ Roll
Hall of Fame
§
A poem only
Jack Gilbert
could have written
§
Mark Doty
gone to the dogs
§
§
§
Translating Emily
into other media
§
Scroll down
here
to vote for
The Oddest Book Title of the Year
§
Pretty Lessons in Verse
for Good Children
& the woman
who wrote them
§
Of the
C.K. Stead
§
Talking with Eavan Boland
§
Linda Myers
will retire
as executive director of
The Loft
§
§
The School of Quietude
goes to
the City University of New York
§
Sylvia
down under
§
Talking with
the Poet Laureate
of Connecticut
§
“The avant-garde was always
just the people
with the most energy”
§
Of critics
seeking bribes
§
“the length of time
that an average museum-goer
spends looking at a work of art –
nine seconds”
§
Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings
from the 1960s
§
Bruce Nauman § Saatchi, Stuart § Mark Spoelstra, § Noam Chomsky §
at the
in
& new Chinese artists
the best 12-string guitarist
I ever heard,
has passed on
on Bush & Iran
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
It’s worth noting that the continual appearance of new books of John Ashbery’s short poems has not resulted in the same complaints that “he’s not doing anything new” or “he’s simply repeating past triumphs in comfortable forms” that used to greet the somewhat similar short books published by Robert Creeley toward the end of his life. My counter-argument here has been that it makes no sense to complain that somebody who has changed the world of poetry forever – something I believe both Ashbery & Creeley have done – doesn’t continue to forge such changes ad infinitum. Each wrote the poems he personally needed to have written & when the world of verse shifted to accommodate this new thing, each kept on writing the poems he personally needed.
One reason for the variance between the reception Creeley’s books got and the one that Ashbery is continuing to receive today, however, has little to do with either author directly, but rather is a register of their somewhat different audiences. Although John Ashbery has been a relentlessly innovative author, he has also long been a favorite of Quietist critics (and to some degree of Quietist poets), especially championed by Harold Bloom, the great white whale of the academy. These more conservative readers value Ashbery, but they don’t especially value the new. In this way, they actually avoid the little trap that post-avants sometimes fell into with regards to Creeley, but their own position is as contradictory as any, a problematic that was crowned when Ashbery was given all the Official Verse Culture awards in 1975 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a work that can only be described as a vicious satire of the very people who celebrated it. So the question remains: what is it you value in reading John Ashbery, if in fact you don’t value the new?
That’s a thought that has been haunting my reading of Ashbery’s latest book, the beautiful but slender A Worldly Country, just out from Ecco, reduced these days into being an imprint of HarperCollins. Just 76 pages of poetry with a detail from a Jane Freilicher painting for its cover, A Worldly Country could hardly be more beautiful, nor the poetry it contains more accomplished. John Ashbery may turn 80 this year, but there is no sign that he’s lost any of his inventiveness or wit, or that the ear has gone flat or any of the other possible maladies that can – and too often do – beset older poets.
One possible suggestion towards an answer comes, it would seem, from Ashbery himself, in a poem that occurs late in A Worldly Country, entitled “So Long, Santa”:
You were good to us,
but we’ve got to think these things
out for ourselves, check in with you
later – why did I say that?
Not everything has to be
as big and full as earth.
After he found a million dollars in a slot
the boy persisted, dying without uncovering a lot.
It’s good to be painful
because it will come round again
and we won’t be ready:
Barbara Allen’s cruelty, the night wind
biting at scarves, pedestrians hurrying along.
And if I so longed for you as
to make the original millennial blush go away,
us back to our pets, things we had
to learn at school,
I’d be ashamed of my distance
from you, for being indispensable
at times and cures –
just getting the right thing right, for once.
After finishing everything up
I pay a formal call to the broker.
Sherry is drunk
and it will soon be time to think of the next set of circumstances.
Oh hell everything is that way,
this way, that way, twisted in the sun
of endurance –
the back way in then,
the assertion of formality without
a celebration next time.
That’s all any of us gets,
why I am happy with you, alone, just us.
Even here, there’s not a lot of form to this “assertion of formality,” the mere echo of a failed rhyme from circumstances to endurance (and before either, distance), the deliberate clumsiness of slot and lot. It’s good to be painful / because it will come around again / and we won’t be ready may be as good a rationale as any for the reiteration at the heart of structure, but it is worth noting what is being characterized here as formal: a call to the broker. The “real” world, it would seem, is just the opposite: everything is that way, / this way, that way, twisted in the sun / of endurance.
Contrast this with the book’s one moment of high form, the title poem literally on page 1:
Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,
the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,
not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,
not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred
in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel
that was OK too. From palace and hovel
the great parade flooded avenue and byway
and turnip fields became just another highway.
Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens
and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.
There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet
or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.
In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.
By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon
hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.
Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!"
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?
One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,
and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.
So often it happens that the time we turn around in
soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.
On the one hand, that of “So Long, Santa,” we see the formalism of the Quiet world proposed as a mode of solace, an ointment against pain. But in the title poem, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird shows up right before a reference to U.S. troops, an almost sadistic view of the human slaughter our president thinks of as “spreading democracy” – the scent of manure indeed!
The cyclical imbalance between the forces posed in the book’s title poem is on target: Ashbery has benefited from keeping readers off balance & on guard in this manner for half a century. It’s the bad cop (here in the form of Tweety Bird) that makes his good cop seem so very sweet, yet without this malevolent twin, it might all be enough to cause some sort of insulin shock, or at least the nausea a child could get from licking all the frosting from a cake. The little parody of the departure scene at the end of “The Game of Chess” in The Waste Land is hardly accidental. And here also we see the cyclical (night, as usual) proposed as a balm to soothe the great ungluing of day.
The final four lines here are worth noting, first for the way the calculatedly bad grammar of the first couplet reinforces just how pathetic our skiff really is. Secondly for the dire pessimism that it all must all end in the shallows.
I’ll leave it to the more clinically minded as to whether or not Ashbery is intentional in his associations of form itself with depression, at least in its reiterative Quietest conception, tho that certainly is one possible reading. My own interest is in how well – and for how many decades now – John Ashbery has been able to manage this balancing act between two universes of readers who come to him with very different interests and needs.
Labels: Ashbery
Monday, March 12, 2007
In 2004, Berkeley-born Ryan Fleck won awards at the Aspen Shortfest, the Boston Independent Film Festival & the Sundance Film Festival for a short film entitled Gowanus,
I sort of avoided this movie when it first came out to rave reviews last year. Being an indie made that easy as us ex-urbanite
So I was surprised to discover that neither of the predictable end results is what happens here, surprised and frankly pleased. In large part, this is because this film intersects with the story already in progress & leaves it well before it reaches either of those logical conclusions. It can do this because it’s not about that story, but rather about the relationship between the two key characters, a charismatic, committed, very likeable history teacher who can’t get away from freebasing crack, and a troubled 13-year-old student who catches him blasted one day in the locker room &, for reasons that have everything to do with her history, decides not to tell anyone.
An awful lot of this film really is about nothing other than the complexity of these two individuals, only tiny portions of which come out in dialog. There are scenes early on, such as when Gosling’s Dan Dunne sees his ex-girlfriend, through rehab & engaged to be married, before she sees him, where the viewer can recognize, just in Gosling’s body language and facial expression, the degree to which the character struggles with his fight-or-flight response. There are several moments when Epps’ Drey glares her way through a scene – Epps is easily the most intense “child actor” I’ve ever seen on screen. She doesn’t need language to articulate the anger she feels at the loss of her brother, who is in prison, or the devastation she senses as a latch-key kid to an emergency medical technician single parent. When the local crack dealer, intelligently played by Anthony Mackie, attempts to recruit her to handle the final exchange of product for cash – she’s the one taking the risk of being busted for dealing – her diffidence & hesitancies as she tests out this path says an enormous amount about her tentative sense of self & self-worth.
Much of this film is about emotional clumsiness. By refusing to adhere to the school’s approved curriculum – he’s showing his students videos of Mario Savio, the Attica massacre, the murder of Harvey Milk, the U.S. role in the coup in Chile, trying to teach dialectics to middle-school kids – the teacher is practically screaming to be fired. Both of the film’s two sex scenes – one of them an attempted rape – are about vulnerability, not eros. When the teacher shows up at school with a stitch on his lip, he covers it with an American flag Band-Aid. A meal at home with his parents is excruciating – the only person he can talk to is his brother’s new girlfriend, whom he’s never met before. When, after the dope dealer has warned Drey to stay clear of the “basehead” teacher, the two older men in her life confront one another, the result is not Fort Apache, Brooklyn, but almost in the manner of two uncles attempting to watch out for the orphan niece. Even the film’s climactic & concluding scenes are all about clumsiness, vulnerability &, at least on one level, acceptance. This film is a choreographer’s dream of emotional missteps, which is what I think Kevin Smith was responding to with his (somewhat overly) generous assessment.
I’ve had the opportunity, if that’s the right word, to see what freebasing can do to a professional, even a single a parent, and I know that the spiral that this teacher is in can – and almost inevitably will – get a whole lot worse, far, far uglier. It would have been easy to have made that movie, it’s one we’ve seen a dozen times, but the result wouldn’t have been one-tenth as solid as Half Nelson.
¹ Gosling was part of the Mickey Mouse Club cast during the fabled 1993-94 period, the end of that show’s third incarnation, that also included Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake. Gosling, a Canadian, lived with Timberlake’s family during filming. While the other three got into bubblegum music, Gosling stuck to acting & subsequently has been in a lot of the dog movies & TV series aimed at teens, such as Young Hercules, but in the process has become a tremendously subtle actor. It’s like watching the next Johnny Depp emerge, tho Gosling lacks Depp’s phenomenally feminine good looks.
Labels: Film
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
What Do Cyborgs Want?
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In this "Xerox degree of culture" that has come to be known, for reasons as paradoxical as they are historical, as post-modernity, what we notice first – because it so loudly and vigorously calls attention to itself, like the stereotypic masochist begging "Beat me, beat me" – is the self-flagellation of theory. We have seen the dispersal of theory, as with the grand diaspora of post-structuralisms, theory posed against theory itself, sometimes for very different reasons, theory sealing itself off and declaring its sole horizon to be a critique of the history of itself, theory that wills itself to become what it once took for its object or Other – this is particularly visible in those sophomoric critical texts that imagine themselves to be art –, and we have even seen theory that is apparently willing to erase its own characteristic feature of the critical gesture, that fundamental distantiation which is the presumption of all analysis, until it slides over from a critique of high culture, so-called, into becoming simply one more wavelength among many in the limitless spectrum of mass culture, a move by which the theoretician is transformed into a kind of celebrity, a talk show host for ideas, perhaps, or a standup comic on the new vaudeville circuit of college conferences, but a person who is most certainly subject to the rules of the game of celebrity far more absolutely than to any for the game of theory. Much of what makes the work of Jean Baudrillard interesting, even fascinating, and which has enabled it to remain resilient over these past three decades, has been a willingness on his part – knowingly and even laughingly, since humor is as much a part of his repertoire as is insight – to occupy so many of these incommensurable positions. Baudrillard is, to follow his own metaphor, the grand drag queen of theory. He gives us theory at its most provocative, at its most pornographic. He is, in some sense, our own Cicciolina, that Italian representative who, it has been alleged, sometimes urinates on the spectators in the front rows of her naked entertainments. What will Baudrillard say next? How can we not hear, whenever he asks that question, "What are we going to do after the orgy?" the real question: what are we going to do after this talk? Baudrillard, at least at one level, is the orgy. Or at least would like to be. No wonder he says that sex is no longer of much interest.
So to be asked to follow Baudrillard, to respond, is a little too obviously a set-up. Here he is discussing, amid much else, the disappearance of art...and I'm a poet. Here he is, the maverick apotheosis of the theoretical, that most critical and academic of discursive formations...I'm still a poet. (Even worse, my terminal degree is from a high school: I'm an unlettered poet.) Here Baudrillard is talking beyond politics, toward what he calls the transpolitical, and I'm a longtime political activist, a veteran, respectively, of the anti-war, prison and tenants' movements, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, part of the collective that publishes Socialist Review and until one month ago the executive editor of that publication. There is even a generational angle here: Baudrillard, after all, is just two years younger than my father. It's all too perfect and Oedipal a match. So if I decline to slay Baudrillard today, in the way that every response to a keynote speech is a form of ritual public disembowelment, Baudrillard posed as the bull and I as the matador, the way I once watched Arthur Kroker slay Fred Jameson in
But it is impossible to approach the horizon of the transpolitical without considering the context within which it first comes into view. It is significant not only that this first sighting should occur within theory, nor even within theory of a certain type, but specifically within theory inscribed under the name Baudrillard. As the translators of Baudrillard's books have learned, whenever they have sought, without success, to locate the precise quotations that ornament and substantiate his arguments, the most distinctive methodological feature of his work – beyond even its reliance on metaphor, that old structuralist gambit, and his weakness (somewhat held in check tonight) for incredible, amazing, unprecedented, unbelievable intensifiers – is a flagrant and unparalleled sloppiness. At least that which appears to be a callous disregard for the documentable and the defensible. There is no graduate student in the
Here, we find its most glaring instance in Baudrillard's conflation of two radically opposed conditions: transvestitism and transexuality. Transvestitism is more or less the practice he describes and what is apparently intended by these terms. In contrast, transexuality need not entail any such liberatory movement on the part of its experiencing subject. Phenomenologically, the transsexual's principle state seems to be a condition of horror, of the self trapped within a body that is explicitly and profoundly Other. The gendering of this experience may very well be a social construct specific to the codes and history of Euroamerican culture. The tragedy of many transsexuals is that this sense of otherness and horror is often not resolved by surgery, and that the suicide rate among post-operative transsexuals is quite high.
Liberation and flight are moves within a game that might be conjoined, as they were for Afro-American slaves moving north along the underground railroad, but they are not identical. The flight of Kampucheans from Pol Pot's killing fields into the inner-city ghettoes and minimum-wage jobs of North America, like that of Palestinians a generation ago from their homeland into the camps of Lebanon, can scarcely be called liberation. Like the parallel concept of speed, that fleeting state which is perhaps best analogized to the phenomenon of acceleration in an already moving vehicle, there can be no representative instance of the pure condition. Purity is a methodological fiction. Like silence, whether in the desert or in an anechoic chamber, it does not exist: the perceiving subject is perpetually stuck with the roar of the blood vessels and the whine of the central nervous system. As recent developments in the theory of superconductivity ironically reveal, even something such as electricity is organized not around the free flow of electrons, but rather as a series of practical responses to the problem of resistance, the impure. At the level of generality that is necessary for Baudrillard to deploy them, categories such as transvestitism never exist. This world is composed only of particulars.
This flagrant disregard for facticity drives Baudrillard's detractors bananas. It counters the fundamental positivism and fetishization of the empirical that lies at the heart of the orthodox academy's concept of professionalism. Thus, in
But it is often more useful to ask ourselves just who is being offended and why. For Baudrillard's cavalier attitude toward his verbal chess games of abstraction, characterized by hyperbole, the broad stroke and the sweeping gesture, is certainly no accident. As computer programmers like to say about peculiarities in software, "that's not a bug, that's a feature." This in fact may be Baudrillard's peculiar genius, and his greatest methodological gift. Here is a strategy for escaping, however imperfectly, the filters and blind spots inherent in those discourses that are constructed upon the disciplinarity that is at the heart of empiricism. Forever held in check by their fear of the impure, which they conceive of as allegiance to the empirical, and even, at its most pathological, to quantification and statistical significance, these discourses can only proceed incrementally, anchored in the framework of previous positions. It's a narrative mode that aspires to hypotaxis – this is why impurity is so threatening – and the teleological function is structurally implicit within it. This is why paradigm shifts are registered as such deep shocks to the system that the vocabulary of revolution is invoked. It is a negative definition of rigor and Baudrillard simply abolishes it.
In fact, even Baudrillard is not yet entirely free of the dubious vestiges of theory's pseudo-scientific rules of discourse, where simplicity and grace are taken for virtues rather than as mediations. Thus, here, we perceive a felt need to carry the prefix trans over several fields of evidence – the transpolitical, the transaesthetic – where it might have been better to have focused the model of transvestism per se upon that distinct sub-category where, typically, males dress as females while consciously foregrounding elements of their masculine gender by retaining beards or wearing lowcut gowns calculated to reveal massive tufts of chest hair. The theoretical term for this is radical cross-dressing, although its practitioners in
The advantage to Baudrillard's method is that it is structural, in the best sense of that term, and proceeds from the broadest and most general features, that domain which is most apt to remain occluded if not outright invisible when approached from any other direction. Baudrillard's term for it is fractal, and his analogy of the hologram cagily presents a perspective that can only operate from above and outside. This perspective is what so often gives Baudrillard's texts their eery air of rightness even when the reader knows full well that massive amounts of evidence, impurities, could be marshalled together to counter this or that assertion. It is this structural view that enables Baudrillard to perceive and identify the transpolitical.
Marx certainly understood that the bourgeois state, in particular, was an instrument of capital, and not the other way around, just as he understood also that the state itself was not an absolute, a given of nature, and could at some future point wither away. What Marx seems not to have foreseen, however, is the possibility that, in some utterly critical sense, the state might wither prior to the abolition of capital. At the level of the political, many (if not all) of the effects that we have come to know as postmodernity can be traced to this radical reformulation, this redistribution of power out of (and away from) the body of the state back into a civil society that has itself been technologically internationalized and radically reconfigured.
This is the subtext of a statement such as, speaking of our present world, "it is utopia realized," and this is why Baudrillard can make such a bald and bold assertion, even in the face of famine, wars,
For those of us who have been a part of the traditional left, these events pose an ironic and most unpleasant question: What is socialism? In the
Not one of the notorious shortcomings of capitalism are in any way resolved by this historic shift. If anything, freed of many constraints, these can be anticipated to become even more dire in the future. If American tobacco farmers find a declining market at home for their lethal products, they simply increase their advertising in
The great failing of the left, particularly in
Nations now operate very much the way suburbs once did, as a limit to individual and public will. Much of the original impulse behind these ex-urban hamlets was not in any idealization of the rural, simpler life, but as a mechanism for spatially separating classes, races, and, most especially, tax populations. Particularly when unincorporated, suburbs could not place the same infrastructural demands on their inhabitants that were the acknowledged necessities of the city. Many of the first planned communities of
The totalization of power implicit in nuclear capability is just one of a number of causes that have metamorphosed nations into just such suburbs. Power is elsewhere. The question of dating, of whether this transformation, Baudrillard's "real" orgy, first came forth from its cocoon in August, 1945, in the air over Hiroshima, in Vietnam and Algeria a decade later, or perhaps in the streets of Paris, Prague, Saigon, Mexico City, and Chicago in 1968, is an issue for obsessives. Stalin's worst excesses, after all, can read as attempts to impose from above that which was already no longer strong enough to sustain itself from within. Yet, as we know, this evacuation of power from the state is in no way accompanied by a lessening of the presence or effects of power. If this is what inadvertently generates the confusion we see on the part of those who, like Jameson or the Frankfurt School partisans, cannot truthfully imagine the one without the other, at least not in this configuration, it accounts also for those others who, like Jean-François Lyotard, celebrate the present simply because it is here. The rise of French theory itself may have much to do with the fact that this evacuation may well be more perceptible, more readily felt, from the vantage point of that city Walter Benjamin once called "the capital of the nineteenth century." The history of the present, however, forces us to reconceive this project of theory, even to offer it a new title: "
Long before postmodernity, the
If the problem that faces us today is how to recognize and live with the consequences of this transformation, French theory, precisely because it is so suburban, so conscious of the decline and loss of centers, has presented many valuable hints and suggestions. Baudrillard's advantage over Foucault (the first volume of whose History of Sexuality has been offered to us today not so secretly in the red dress of transvestitism) is that, where Foucault's focus was on the micropolitical, transcribing the concretion and dispersal of authority, Baudrillard's perspective, that of the hologram, has been at the level of the macro. Like Jameson, Baudrillard is – and I will use this term positively one more time – a structuralist. Unlike Jameson, however, Baudrillard is not nostalgic for structure. In this disjunction, Baudrillard replicates, at the level of methodology, what is by now a familiar dispersal of power. Here is the real scandal, the hologram from hell, and it is one from which we can extract clues toward political, cultural and aesthetic practices that extend beyond what Baudrillard himself seems prepared to suggest.
At the level of the individual, the corollary of this evacuation of power from the state, accomplished at least partially by its totalization of lethal force, has been the devolution of the subject from an ego toward an ensemble of destabilized and competing subject positions. Those leftists – still a minority – who are even willing to publicly acknowledge this transformation respond to it by trying to imagine methods for reversing this process. Thus Chantal Mouffe turns to the concept of citizenship without addressing how this might be possible, post-polis, in the epoch of the transpolitical. The dream, which Mouffe shares with such radically different leftists as Stanley Aronowitz and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Michael Harrington and Mike Davis, is to reconstruct this mourned-for coalition, even if it is only a coalition of the self. The slogan of this politics, which might be rephrased as "The Subject United / Shall Never Be Depleted," is notable mostly for the vast quantities of evidence to the contrary it so militantly ignores.
What the emergence of the transpolitical suggests, however, is that the impulse to unite may itself be a significant problem, conditioned as it must be by a principle of organization that can only reproduce a narrative of hypotaxis. All fantasies to the contrary are simply predicated upon a universal citizen whose features are arbitrary (or not so arbitrary) extrapolations of a specific subject, against which everyone else is relativized into a subaltern position. Those political programs, such as syndicalism, that appear to evade this trap through a rejection of the party as their institutional expression merely reinvent it in the guise of their opponent, which is, whether it is called capital or the state, invariably caricatured as a monolith. Yet we know that even the multinational corporation is every bit as unstable as money or as the self. Entire industries are broken apart, reformulated, shipped overseas, brought back, reconstructed, technologically transformed, and dispersed all over again. Inside individual organizations, between the critical tacit knowledge of the shopfloor worker, the turf-jealous sectors of middle management, the often strained relations between CEOs and corporate boards, and the external threats of hostile takeovers, power can never flow freely in any direction. It is always impure, clotted, ambivalent, filled with resistance. Within this reality, we are asking the wrong questions. What we need instead is a practice that reconceptualizes power itself. Our goal and motivation cannot be to "overthrow" it, because we will ultimately never locate the real it to be overthrown.
As Donna Haraway once phrased this issue, we must become cyborgs, not just transvestites. We must move beyond gender-fuck as a strategy, beyond even species-fuck, to power-fuck itself. Our struggle is not for unity, but with unity. The problem we are confronted with is how to neutralize the lethal effects of power without reconstituting it elsewhere. Confusing power with the polis will leave us incapable of even approaching either side of this equation. The very real possibility is that this project is impossible, an oxymoron, for power will not go away. Perhaps what we should be seeking instead is the perpetual destabilization of power, the war of the flea. Politics then would shift away from a teleological practice toward a process of perpetual resistance, one whose integrity is no longer defined by a goal. We need a politics without goals. That is the cyborg lesson of the transpolitical, a politics of perpetual motion, no more stable than mercury on a mirror; in the hypotaxis of this talk, that is the topic sentence.
This does not mean an end to resistance, an end to movements, an end to strategic organizing in coalition form, or even an end to identifying the state as a vital mediating concentration of authority. But it means directing every action, and each movement, not into a master narrative, however noble, but towards anti-narrative itself.
At the level of aesthetics (you knew I would end here – this talk is a narrative, a use of power in the act of perpetual resistance, power aimed against power), the aestheticization of everything via media, advertising and subcultural style destabilizes each artistic practice. This may well be the end of aesthetics as we have known it, but it is certainly not the end of artistic practice, whose political function and potentiality is now open to contestation in ways that are still unfamiliar and may even be wholly new. The question confronting poetry is not what is the best poem, nor even the best poetry, but what are the social roles of the poem and how can these be raised to the level of consciousness so that the power relations upon which poetry itself is constituted become perceptible and vulnerable to challenge. The poem as high art versus low art, the poem as an expression of a Self (that reified subject), the poem – and poet – as the antithesis of theory, the poem as beautiful language, the poem as difficult symbolism, the poem as direct speech, the poet as academic, the poet as drunk, the poet as bohemian, the poet as mystic, the poet as avant-garde, as effete or as macho, the poem as anything other than a research laboratory for verbal effects that can be deployed a generation later in advertising: the social role of each poem is the political content of any such text. And there is no single correct answer, ever.
What is manifestly a disaster in any artistic or cultural practice, for the practitioner as well as for their audience, is a process that seeks stasis. If we say that a certain kind of poetry which attempts merely to preserve the traditional status of the poem is lifeless, or if we make the same allegation about a practice of painting that has become entirely subservient to an economy of galleries, it is because these seek to freeze the relations of power in which they find themselves enveloped. Such work is death through inertia, a culture of agoraphobia. Yet even these, we must remind ourselves, are modes of impurity. How ironic and wonderful: we could not exist without them.
Against the culture of agoraphobia and stasis, however, we must pose a counter-praxis of paralogy, Lyotard's term for the perpetual differentiation of the academy, for the need of each scientific or cultural worker to articulate a position that is defensible precisely because it has not previously been occupied – for each tenure a new idea, a grid of potential information that totalizes and reduces thought to a sequence of moves along an infinite grid. Here, however, we must propose a leap, not in faith but in practice. And Baudrillard's career itself presents us with an excellent model. If we identify freedom in the transpolitical universe as residing primarily, and perhaps entirely, in the interstices between points within a destabilized field of power, perpetual resistance requires us to carry paralogy to a new level. Paralogy's potential lies not in locating new points within the grid of the game, but between games, so as to make gaming itself visible, simply a grid of a different order, with all the same pockets of power and lethal force, to call even this into question. It is in this sense that Baudrillard-the-scholar, like Cicciolina urinating upon her fans, presents us with a model for cyborg politics.
Labels: Baudrillard, Theory
Friday, March 09, 2007
My trip to
I had also just started working – less than four weeks on the job – in the computer industry and had had to negotiate permission to take this week in the Rockies, plus the later time abroad (there were stops along the way in both Finland & Germany), when I first signed my contract with ComputerLand. I had just left my tenure as the executive editor of The Socialist Review (SR) – I remained on the editorial collective for an additional three years – and was making a conscious decision to go into the computer industry, sensing that technology had the potential to change the terms of many social debates of the late ‘80s.
But what makes my trip to
The second was with the painter Mel Laubach, a one-time roommate of mine in
Not only was Mel living in
So I was floored when, as I was walking through the lobby of the Performing Arts Center in Missoula, about to deliver my talk, I ran into Mel again. He had settled in
I spent a good portion of the next day with Mel. Indeed, a screw in the frame of my glasses had fallen out & disappeared the night before as I was addressing the audience of some 600 people & Mel knew which mall had a good optician who quickly repaired them – a good thing as I had a reading that night with jazz musician Eugene Chadbourne, complete with his electric rake.
I lost touch with Mel again after that & it was only a couple of months ago, after I’d googled him, looking to see if there were any jpegs of recent paintings available on the web, that I discovered that he’d been killed in 2004 in an auto accident in Missoula. And it was only after I’d emailed his widow – he’d been single when I’d seen him last – that I discovered that she was the sister of one of my co-workers from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I’d been the director of development for several years before taking over the editorship at Socialist Review. I still have a painting of Mel’s from his Art Institute days just ten feet from where I’m typing right now.
Baudrillard was another matter. I’d read the books, of course, and had originally been interested in him as a provocative protégé of Henri Lefebvre, but had never met the person. In 1989, his star in the world of celebrity academics was at its peak & responding to him on the same stage was, in some fashion, a big deal. For me, it was an opportunity to present in a different context than any I’d had previously, tho my work at SR had put me into some pretty interesting spots, and during that period I was very much involved with working out what I felt were that mostly amnesiac premises of what in those days constituted post-modernism. Amnesiac because nobody, at least other than Jurgen Habermas, was prepared to address the problems of modernity from which the post-modern presumably sprang. Baudrillard presented a terrific opportunity to address this question and the draft of his talk that I’d been given by conference co-chair William Chaloupka – “Transpolitics, Transexuality, Transaesthetics,” maybe 90 percent of the version he eventually published in Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics – made it self-evident that I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity.
Shorter than I’d expected but perfectly affable, Baudrillard had the star routine down solid. He hadn’t flown directly into Missoula, but had landed either in the LA or Las Vegas & rented a car, seeking to drive north through the desert that he loved so much about America – I always thought that he was the one person besides Nabokov who really saw that landscape as sensuous. Unfortunately, the rental car died along the route, perhaps in
I think I surprised him in our session together. If you read his talk – and especially in the back & forth session that followed our presentations – it was clear that he expected me to represent the aesthetic in some relatively pure form, lyric poetry perhaps. But that wasn’t me and certainly what I wasn’t doing. My own piece, when I published it in that same volume¹, was entitled “What Do Cyborgs Want? (Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century),” playing of course off of the title of the famous Donna Haraway essay, “Cyborg Manifesto,” that had first appeared in the pages of SR a couple of years earlier.
Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics has been out of print for some time & a search of the web suggests that there are no used copies to be had at all. I’ll post my piece from the conference tomorrow if all goes well. (See alternate accounts of this conference by Thomas Dumm and Bill Borneman.)
¹ The book's subtitle was a play on my “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” which Chaloupka and his co-editor William Stearns republished in that volume as well.
Labels: Baudrillard, The academy, Theory
Thursday, March 08, 2007
March is Small Press Month
§
According to the Wall Street Journal,
The LA Times Book Review
is about to be toast
with the Washington Post,
SF Chronicle,
Chicago Tribune
&
San Diego Union-Tribune
all considering doing likewise
to their book review sections
§
The new Dark Ages:
15
are set to close
§
A different approach
in
§
The oldest bookstore in
§
The race for a Pulitzer
has begun
§
for Bill Corbett
§
is preparing
for its very first bookfest
§
A profile of
Roger Bonair-Agard
§
Poetry Day
in
§
A reason for publishers
§
Kathryn Starbuck,
the widow of George,
has begun writing poetry
§
§
Granta’s list
of the top new
American writers
under 40
§
"His work was enormously groundbreaking
in terms of typography,
he was using tons of odd punctuation
and strange spacing…"
(Will somebody PUH-LEASE
buy Tree Swenson
a book by e.e. cummings?)
§
“Like Yeats and Lowell before him…”
(you just know
it’s going to be all downhill
from there)
§
“He rebelled quietly…”
(to say the least)
§
“The Perfect Form”
(and other
modes of hyperbole)
§
Mutanabi Street
where booksellers
once thrived
§
The decline & closure
of bookstores
and publishers
is not just
a
§
§
§
Alvin Curran
on
Steve Lacy
§
The trouble with some new Pollocks
§
Hanging
with Brice Marden
§
§
Michael Kimmelman
moves to Europe
§
An appreciation of
John Simon
§
Jazz man or terrorist?
Labels: links
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Never mind the names – any work in the issue you'd consider major?
I nominate Marcella Durand's lyric essay.
It’s a good question. I found myself sympathizing also with the commentators who bemoaned the difficulty of “keeping up” with journals in an era of shit distribution, increasing reliance on web publishing & still way too many print magazines. Even as I get notes every week as to “where should I send my work?” from two or three blog readers here.
I get 20 books in the mail on a slow week these days. Of these, somewhere between seven & ten deserve some serious attention. And I’m lucky if I get to half of those. It would be very easy indeed to become overwhelmed with guilt because I didn’t read your book, or his book, or her book, or that stack over there, three freaking feet tall next to the exploding eight-foot tall bookcase that contains the unread books that fit into the “deserve serious attention” category. And I can understand why friends of mine in the bookstore industry often treat their wares as if it were shit – it’s really a defense against that overwhelming guilt. There’s a tale that
So what does one do?
There are of course many more ways than one to read a text simply front to back the way you were taught in preschool. Just as there different ways to go to a museum or to look at a work of visual art. It’s perfectly reasonable to go to a museum and to sit in front of a single painting or sculpture all day long, just as it is to walk rapidly through gallery after gallery, letting the paintings sweep over you in waves & clusters. That is at least as valid as the zombies you see at these palaces of visual culture with the Official Story literally hanging from their neck & plugged into their ears, wandering from numbered work to numbered work, missing everything else. Or trailing a half-trained docent. Is there anyone who goes to a museum just to look at a single detail – a corner of a Rothko, or the way the registration of paint doesn’t quite fit the lips in one of Warhol’s Marilyn multiples? I don’t see why not. One can learn a lot this way.
There are, looking in Conjunctions’ 25th anniversary number, several poets whom I do tend always to read straight through – Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Forrest Gander, Robert Kelly, C.D. Wright – as well as a number of others whom I tend to read a lot. But even with these poets, it’s not always how I read them when I’m going through a magazine. For example, Peter Gizzi has a longish piece here, five pages, that is quite unlike much of his other poetry, entitled “Vincent, Homesick for the
Is this what you intended, Vincent
that we take our rest at the end of the grove
nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.
– itself contains an interior question, yet neither invokes or otherwise seems to warrant the actual deployment of a question mark. Gizzi wants to put the reader into a particular style of discomfort, which is consistent not only with the next question, but the remainder of the stanza itself:
Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision
the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.
O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
or if you can indeed hear what I might say
heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty
of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.
How is it, in the middle of all this self-consciously stilted language, does a phrase like whoop ass and vision suddenly show up? Otherwise, the stanza reads like a translation, deliberately so. Gizzi’s poetry often pushes & prods the reader, but this one seems instead to want to smother him or her. Gizzi very much to knows what he wants & what he’s doing here, but it’s not a journey I’m personally comfortable taking. I read & think through the first two pages, but don’t complete the piece. But I don’t feel as tho I “haven’t read it,” tho in some sense that’s exactly the case.
Another piece that seems to me no less problematic is “Realm of Ends” by Ann Lauterbach. I like Ann personally a great deal & trust her sense – one shared by several other poets in Conjunctions, including Gander & Wright – that there can be a middle road between the New Americans & the traditionalism of the
Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an
announcement. He says, “Snow in summer” and falls silent.
A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.
It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.
Time passes. The nest is empty.
The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks
to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.
Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.
Thus the bird lands on his head.
Thus there are radiant seconds.
Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.
The streaming elocution is more or less prosaic.
The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.
The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.
Francis is indifferent, but the bird, a cardinal,
shines on the barren branch.
Tit tit tittit tit hovers the weary pragmatist.
It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she
cannot know heartbreak, not
the melodrama of the nest’s margin of error.
Here Lauterbach’s mastery of line and stanza fascinate me & carry me past my initial flinch at the recognition of a narrative so symbolic that I want to cringe at a phrase like “weary pragmatist” characterizing a bird, recognizing the Catholic undertone in the choice of a cardinal, just as, at this moment, I think Lauterbach wants the reader to at least entertain the idea that this may be Francis of Assisi.
The person I immediately think of here, curiously enough, is the late William Bronk, whom I think of as the master of the line that contains within it multiple sentences with their inevitable full stops – it’s the point in Bronk’s work where he gets closest also to the Oppen of Of Being Numerous, the nearest Bronk gets to Objectivism as an overall program.
This puts me into an interesting position – Lauterbach is doing things narratively here I would almost never bother to read – it’s a model of the tale I inherently think of as false because it excludes too much, leaving us only the threads she wants to remain, more suitable to a motion picture (where the camera raises problems of containment poetry never need confront) than to a poem – but Lauterbach is also doing things to line and stanza that completely draw me in. I read the whole poem – the section above is just the first of six – feeling this push-pull dynamic the entire way. At the end I feel that Lauterbach has had her way with me, gotten me to do things I don’t generally like to do, gotten me even to enjoy it. It’s exhausting and brilliant, but it leaves me feeling upset at the same time, not just because of what occurs in the narrative, but because of the narrative itself – this poem would make a great short film, tho perhaps one only Ingmar Bergman could have directed.
So in this manner I proceed through Conjunctions, mostly skipping the fictioneers to whom I may or may not come back later. Are there works here that are major, at least in the way I presume that
Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem
On a funny old island where much has gone wrong
Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love
For coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs
Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed
To protect you, my love, but should I have let it eat
Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?
Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days
I see you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring
I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit
I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am
Your Villain,
Murkly
It is worth noting that everything above is immediately apparent and relevant from the perspective of the story as a whole.
Another work that jumps out at me here is by Marjorie Welish, yet another of the
I.
The following lines were omitted:
Even in
e-signature in whose writings
lie the body
or its facsimile
Et in arcadia, I also,
Saw “
2.
The following lines were omitted:
I, too, have known
Name, signature
Here lie
Ego’s avatars also
I, Jacques Rivière,
The lie:
Fabrication requires a thinker, he said.
Whereas, he went on, attempting to think
Any thought, yet
Attempting to think henceforth
As a text though ex temporare
All were reprinted
With the lyric effect
His and “there is”
By adverting to the effect.
3.
The following lines were omitted, probably deliberately:
I, Marni Nixon, unpaginated
—spacing.
And the corrected typescript
At a table, as a text
Attempting to think henceforth
To think as the corrected typescript would think
through the lyric effect
incited to rhetoric where structure has been.
Followed by an additional line:
I, writing.
“Isle of the Signatories” has one characteristic I associate with all great literature – it makes me madly jealous that I didn’t write it. At what level is this a discussion of death’s immanence in writing? Or of the “ghost” in so much movie music that was Marni Nixon (check out her career). Or the role of the editor in the text, which is how I read Rivière’s presence here? If this poem is characteristic of what Welish is doing these days, she has clearly moved to a new level in her already quite significant career. This is a poem that not only ensures that I will read it completely, but that I will now have to go read & reread her most recent books. As Lethem’s Murkly might put it, something is happening here and there’s only one way to find out.
Labels: Journals
Monday, March 05, 2007
I’ve always found critical writing to be a useful activity. Indeed, when I first began writing relatively theoretical articles, first with “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” – a piece David Highsmith had to talk me into writing for an art journal he was working on – and not all that much later with “The New Sentence,” which began as a talk in Bob Perelman’s series of poets’ talks, I was pulling together lots of inchoate ideas that had been floating around in my thinking with only the loosest connections for some time, but which I had never set down in anything like a systematic manner. So just writing them up was as surprising to me as anything I wrote could have been to any other reader later on. Plus the fact that as you set things down, new pathways begin to suggest themselves, making the actual writing process really a journey of discovery. Which has a lot to do with why it’s so much fun.
The day I finally gave my talk on the new sentence, I was in the kitchen in my top-floor flat on San Jose Avenue in San Francisco typing like a crazed weasel on three pounds of meth until my downstairs neighbor, Alan Bernheimer, knocked on the back door to let me know that “we really really need to go right now if we don’t want the crowd to give up & leave.” It wasn’t the first time he’d come to check on me that afternoon. Once we got to the San Francisco Art Institute, I found myself improvising off a text – it must be in the archives at UC San Diego somewhere – that was more outline than anything else. Later when I typed it up for the anthology Bob did in his journal, Hills, I mostly just put the main points down in the manner of speech. Later, as I was editing the talk into a format for the Roof Press Book, James Sherry and my editor, David Sternbach, forced me to be clear in some thing that had slid along without being questioned. All of which is to say that what you read in the essay by that name really has no more to do with the actual talk I gave (let alone my much more cryptic notes) than the notes of Saussure’s students could be said to really be his thinking about linguistics. It’s in the vicinity, but only an approximation.
It was toward the end of that talk when I was attempting to list the qualities of the new sentence, as such, that I first mentioned torque:
1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;
2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;
3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;
4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy / ambiguity;
5) Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;
6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;
7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;
8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of the paragraph, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.
The number on torque is, in fact, the only one that talks about what occurs within the sentence, as such. Torque, the word, was something I’d never used critically before. Indeed, I’d probably never invoked in my writing at all before that moment. It was a concept I had gotten in, of all places, my ninth or tenth grade electricity shop, a requirement for boys at Albany High, in which we hand-built little motors while attempting to learn the underlying principles of the engine. I understood it – I could have been quite wrong about this – as the force inherent in a twisting motion, and thus specifically as an expression of force. I was, at that moment, thinking specifically of the prose of Peter Seaton, Carla Harryman & Leslie Scalapino, all of whom struck me as masters syntax that started to go in one direction, only to veer off at unpredictable angles, creating as they went something of far greater power than referential or abstract meaning would lead one to suspect. Here are two paragraphs – the first of Seaton’s contribution to In the American Tree – from The Son Master:
The pro stampede which grows out of our associations of the west completely explodes it.
And here it comes again, father stuff and substitution leaving it to read persons and physiological passages for the sake of you under my own roof. I need my burg tomorrow, wishing us onto a field of appreciation like getting happiness from God or Kings or Congress. It’s clear close to the letters leaving everything as a demonstration of alarm, dangers of the test for George for a notion I would like to fix it so. Reading ambition, what the father in English charges streaks as a single line under the thundering thumb.
What is the status of that first sentence? It’s not, strictly speaking, referential, tho a clever reading shouldn’t have that much trouble gleaning meaning from it. But the word choices – the diction of the abbreviated pro or the insertion of the intensifier – seem determined to keep our focus as close to the word or phrase as might be possible. And consistently, throughout these few sentences and elsewhere in Seaton’s work, we come across sentences that can’t possibly be boiled down because at every juncture the actual focus of what is being said can change, not unintelligibly so, but with such localism of attention that the reader is forever refocusing on what “here” means, what “now” is.
This of course is something that occurs in a lot of poetry that is not in prose, particularly since the end of the Second World War and the advent of an interest in Asian literary heritage on the part of many of the New American poets. Phil Whalen seems a very clear instance of this, but so are Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner. What Seaton is showing – not unlike some of what we can learn by close reading Leslie Scalapino – is how this might occur as well in prose. It’s something one finds a great deal of, say, in the early short fiction of Robert Creeley, not to mention Jack Kerouac, in whose works sentences often stretch out so far that keeping it all in mind isn’t even a possibility, so that you are forced to readjust your focus, something that radically reconstitutes what reading means.
The Son Master is prose torqued up high, close to what you will find it at times in the work of Clark Coolidge, neither of whom prove as angular as, say, Scalapino. Whereas the normative view of the sentence is as a “complete thought” – subject (often a noun phrase) + predicate – these are sentences that prove reluctant to conclude, preferring, at moments, to turn & turn & turn again:
A person walking in the freezing countryside in a parka, gloves wool clothes, and no one else being around. Angry voices wrestling in the person as she’s concentrating and walking, beside the road in the snow were the marks of a struggle of a bird picking up an animal. The dark glasses of the person freezing over but the glare from the light snow blinding, feet numbing, having to get back to home – then listening to the radio, people to be in from the freezing, children not to be going out to schools.
A woman reading on the radio, and then in the great heat she and a man bicycling by the corn fields a dark sky that seems to be a tornado near where they’d come from, where they’re living. Bicycling back because of that, sweating in the heat. A dog chasing them up the road. The siren of the tornado warning whined. At night a strand of lightning singes the building, there in bed in the dark. Turn on the radio to hear which has just been blasted back on, after going off.*
There is a footnote attached to that asterisk which reads “See Jerry Ratch, Plein-Air, for fields with crows in them.”
It is not that Scalapino is being obfuscatory or in any way “difficult” in this passage from The Return of Painting, even as her unnamed but gendered characters go from hypothermia to extreme heat within the course of two paragraphs, only one sentence of which follows the normative subject → predicate model: The siren of the tornado warning whined. But normative grammar would suggest that there in bed in the dark refers back either to building or a strand of lightning, and yet no reader I can imagine will be confused by that. Because it’s not about building transparent (or even elegant) grammatical architecture, the transparent prose of a Twain or Bellow, but of representing the shape of time & of experience. Elsewhere, in a piece entitled “’Thinking Serially,’ in For Love, Words and Pieces,” Scalapino writes
Creeley’s use of autobiographical reference, is following the movement of itself in time (watching the mind) – rather than the expression of ‘creation’ of a personality. Its mirroring of its own mind formation and its race to out-run that as ‘serial thinking’ is not static personality creation because it is only that movement.
This internally produced ‘argument’ (the mind watching itself and trying to outrace its own closure, as a ‘particular’ form in this time) rather than being a trap that ultimately enshrines the self, are pieces in the collection of writing which by the very fact of occurring as ‘merely’ components repeating a conflict, as it shows up, without essential change, are not ‘that’ (fixed) psychology.
Nearly 30 years after I pulled together that initial list, there’s nothing particularly new about the new sentence. Like the title of the talk itself, torque is a term that has had something of a career of its own. But given the degree to which I was appropriating a term from a radically different discourse, the idea that it has been in any way useful to anybody subsequently strikes me as fortuitous in the extreme. Mike Hauser’s initial question, which prompted Kasey Mohammad’s response, which in turn provoked this note, isn’t at all off the mark. The suggestiveness of the thing has been far more powerful than the thing itself. And Kasey’s attempt at a definition is about 90 percent on target.
A couple of addenda are worth noting. One is that I never intended to suggest that any particular sentence or piece of writing needed to satisfy all eight points of that list to qualify as a “new sentence,” only that these are some of the features one can anticipate finding there. The excerpt from The Return of Painting demonstrates an instance in which torque pretty much is the only element from that list that’s active there, largely because Leslie is pursuing a different set of interests in that piece. I do know that when I wrote that list, it was very much “top down,” in that the first item – The paragraph organizes the sentences – is by far the most important. So there was (is?) a hierarchy of formal interests I was noticing in the writing being done at that moment in the late 1970s.
A second is that torque, as such, has generally become less important among younger poets. To the great detriment to their poetry. I can’t really think of anybody under the age of, say, 40, whose work is as syntactically marked as distinct as that of Scalapino, Coolidge or Seaton – their writing is unmistakable. In a sense, the disruptiveness that one senses around such work has continued – one sees it in both visual & conceptual poetics. One sees it in flarf, which loves to foreground its seams, or in a work like Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature, just out from Information as Material, a personally annotated & highlighted edition of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in which every word of Blanchot’s master text has been erased. But this is disruption not at the moment of a syntactic turn, but merely at the level of the text as idea. It is not too much to suggest that, in this sense, torque largely has been marginalized. Why, precisely, and what that means are questions we (I) need to be asking now.
Labels: Theory
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Frank Bidart has won
the Bollingen Prize
§
The Brits love lists:
the 100 most loved
books of all time
(4 of the top 5
are by women)
§
“A nation of poets”
(in which
“the crucial event”
turns out to be
Ern Malley!)
§
§
Multicultural poetry
in Kenya
§
Talking with
Niyi Osundare
at 60
§
The trades
get jiggy with
Search
§
§
“The answer to all our problems”
§
More on Frost’s notebooks
§
A
poet
from
§
An Indian view
of the Keatsian trail
§
A view from
of poetry in translation
§
(Another great interview here
revealing the secret connection
between Gosfield &
Asleep at the Wheel)
§
Living without language
by choice
§
A profile of Jennifer Koh
§
§
As in
Podiobooks
§
§
§
Spring
is just
around the corner!
Labels: links
Friday, March 02, 2007
Musidora as Irma Vep, 1915
We were in the mood for a change of pace & so decided to watch Irma Vep, a 1996 French flick by Olivier Assayas starring the unlikely couple of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Maggie Cheung. Afterwards,
Léaud of course started out as the boy actor Francois Truffaut used as a surrogate for himself, starting with 400 Blows. Later Léaud became the protégé of Jean-Luc Godard, starring in such classics as Weekend, Masculine-Feminine, Le Chinoise & Pierrot Le Fou. Although he served for a time as an assistant director for both Truffaut & Godard, Léaud ended up primarily focusing on acting, continuing on in such films as Last Tango in Paris (where he refused to act on the same days of the week as Marlon Brando), 36 Fillette, even an uncredited role in the Cate Blanchett version of Elizabeth. Léaud is noted for his use of improvisation, indeed is often hired for this, and is known for mumbling his way through roles, something he does to good effect here as the director who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And then some.
The Hong Kong-born but British-schooled Maggie Cheung, on the other hand, is a major
This film is a version of what is by now a film type: the parodic insider view of the making of a motion picture. From 8½ to Ed Wood to Tristram Shandy to the documentary Lost in La Mancha, variations on this theme are so familiar that it requires a brilliant variation to make the genre stand up at all. In this regard, Assayas’ version has several things going for it. First, the lead actress plays herself, and seemingly does not speak French, which enables pretty much the rest of the cast to talk about her in her presence without her responding or reacting. Second, the premise is that Léaud’s character, a director in some serious decline, has been hired to remake the French film classic Les Vampires, a silent serial from 1915 starring the actress Musidora. Les Vampires, about a gang of jewel thieves, may be the first action film to star a woman: Irma Vep is literally an anagram of the word vampire. Third, there is a question in the plot of the film as to the level to which Cheung’s preparation of her role goes beyond the usual bounds of method acting. Fourth, when Léaud’s character goes entirely around the bend & has to be replaced, the new director – whose one demand is that they fire the Chinese actress – sees Léaud’s work, edited in progress, only to discover that Léaud has hand altered virtually every frame, giving this remake of the familiar 1915 fare (which we see more than once) a shocking, pseudo-avant garde climax.
Made in a month’s time after Assayas met Cheung at a film festival, Vep is a study in the ways in which film-making’s situation as a collaboration under capital alienates all of its workers. This is worth thinking about given the number of new corporate gurus, starting with In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters, love to use the trope of the film production team as a model for next-generation business: specialists coming together for a set and limited time to create a specific product, then disappearing again into the night (without, dare we say, lasting benefits or any concept of the value of experience manifested through seniority). Just as
This is reinforced in the one interview Cheung gives while on the set, with a French journalist who can’t stop yattering about how bad French films are, made by intellectuals for an elite through government subsidies, so unlike the “great” American “directors,” Schwarzenegger & Van Damme.
When the new director, played by Lou Castel (and given a Spanish name, José Mirano), arrives, his motivation for taking on the project has much to do with the fact that his welfare is running out.
There are other layers worth noting here, including the discussions of costumes and Cheung’s figure, particularly when contrasted with the fuller figure of Musidora in the role in 1915. Assayas has done a remarkably good job of bringing together a lot of interesting, intellectually crunchy ideas, into a film that easily could have collapsed into predictability but instead offers itself instead as the most bittersweet of comedies.
Labels: Film
Thursday, March 01, 2007
It is a sign of a considerable amount of editorial confidence for a literary journal, any literary journal, to start running three poems by John Ashbery on page 319. Conjunctions can do it for its 25th anniversary issue because
(a) it’s an all-star issue, even by the standards of Conjunctions, which has been the best literary review in American now for pretty much all of its 25 years;
(b) the lead-off position is already inhabited by Jonathan Lethem;
(c) 319 is still 97 pages ahead of where John Barth’s latest work turns up.
The table of contents for this issue is simply intimidating. It includes, in the following order: Jonathan Lethem; Ann Lauterbach; Jim Crace; Peter Gizzi; Joanna Scott; Valerie Martin; Robert Antoni; Lydia Davis; Robert Kelly; Howard Norman; Edie Meidav; Clark Coolidge; Marcella Durand; C.D. ; Wright; Christopher Sorrentino; Joyce Carol Oates; Reginald Shepherd; Rosmarie Waldrop; Elizabeth Robinson; Peter Dale Scott; William H. Gass; Micheline Aharonian Marcom; Can Xue; Martine Bellen; Marjorie Welish; Edmund White; Rikki Ducornet; Jonathan Carroll; Peter Straub; John Ashbery; Barbara Guest; Keith Waldrop; Maureen Howard; Lynne Tillman; Rick Moody; Julia Elliott; Rae Armantrout; Lyn Hejinian; Forrest Gander; Jessica Hagedorn; Brenda Coultas; Scott Geiger; Diane Williams; John Barth; and Will Self.
With regards to poetry, that’s an interesting list in & of itself. It includes two masters of the New Americans Poetry (NAP) (Ashbery & Guest), four poets from the generation immediately following the New Americans (Kelly, both Waldrops, Peter Dale Scott), three langpos (Coolidge, Armantrout, Hejinian), several “third way” or elliptical poets (Wright, Lauterbach, Welish, Gander), one identarian (Hagedorn), even one School of Quietude writer (Shepherd), plus several younger poets of the post-langpo variety (Gizzi, Durand, Robinson, Bellen, Coultas). That’s the kind of broad-spectrum inclusion one used to associate with Poetry magazine during the later years of Henry Rago’s tenure there. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that several of these poets also treat Conjunctions much the way writers did Poetry in those years as well, by saving their best, or at least favorite, poems for the journal. It doesn’t matter all that much that Shepherd might not be one of the SoQ poets I would think to pick if I were making an effort to show that tendency off to its best advantage (tho it's not his first appearance in the journal's pages), or that Hagedorn’s contribution is fiction. Rather, Brad Morrow is doing what good editors do best: he is giving us a path through poetry that shows how one might choose to read each of these writers & kinds of writing. The issue as a whole can be read as an argument, or even as a jigsaw puzzle. Morrow is showing us how, for him, these pieces fit together.
He is also offering us a series of values as well. With the exception of Shepherd, really all of the other poets included, even Hagedorn, fall into the broad post-avant tradition. But Morrow is not without his commitments here also. There’s no visual poetry, none of the politically inflected documentation oriented poetics that one saw around a journal like Chain (tho one might make the case that Peter Dale Scott is a direct antecedent to such), nor the pure-play conceptual poetics, say, of a Kenny Goldsmith or Christian Bök. With the exception of the langpos & Peter Dale Scott, the poets are uniformly from the East Coast. The New American are both
I would suspect that one could trace a very similar set of values through the prose work here as well. Gass, White & Barth may be among the most honored fiction writers of the past half century, but they’re all decidedly High Lit & with more than a little of the Pomo about them. Oates is deceiving because she often looks like a conventional writer, but she produces so much work so quickly (a trait she shares with Robert Kelly) & her writing always bristles with ideas & a superb ear (ditto Kelly again, but one might also say much the same about Stephen King, who would be a surprise to find here). Jonathan Lethem is a present-tense fiction superstar, the way Barth was in the 1970s, &, also like Barth, is a writer whose intellectual ambition is almost without bound. Lydia Davis is very possibly the best writer of short fiction since Borges or Kafka. Although she received a MacArthur a couple of years ago, she’s still on my list of most under-celebrated writers of my generation.
I’ve tended – this may be my own bias showing through here – to imagine that Morrow’s editorial vision has always been so strong because he got it not so much in grad school as he did in the book business itself, buying & selling books & archives. How much should one credit Morrow’s co-founder Kenneth Rexroth, whose own allegiances to the New Americans, for example, were not with the New York School (nor, for that matter, with the Projectivists, the other NAP tendency one is apt to find in these pages albeit not so directly in this issue¹, at least not after Creeley ran off with his wife), and who died basically the same year Conjunctions was founded? It’s easy to forget that Morrow was not already a successful novelist when this project began & that the quality of the first handful of issues, before people began to automatically associate Conjunctions with quality, is as much a consequence of his own chutzpah as anything else. Conjunctions is a major magazine, possibly the last print journal deserving that designation in
¹ One might see the Projectivist influence indirectly here through the presence of Kelly, one of the poets most directly influenced by Olsonian poetics and by what I would characterize as “Duncan’s reading of Zukofsky’s ear,” and in the presence of Christopher Sorrentino, son of Gilbert, who has become a significant fiction writer in his own right, though without the same sense of a poet’s prose one saw in his father’s books.
Labels: Journals
