Silliman's Blog: 2/1/09

Funny no one has mentioned [Larry] Fagin and [Clark] Coolidge's On The Pumice of Morons, their parody of Maya Angelou's 1993 Inaugural Poem for Bill Clinton's first term.

Surely no one has written a worse poem–

"Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need"

Is one of my favorite worst lines. Tee-hee.

Why has no one else "risen" to the occasion to parodize this latest most pedestrian effort by the fake officialdom of literature?

Ignoring for the moment the question of whether parodize is what happens to the verb parody when it goes to France and gets theory, I think the answer to Curtis’ question is two-fold. The first is that people have done just that, albeit my understanding is that they’ve done so mostly by remixing MP3s of Elizabeth Alexander’s tortured reading style. At least I’ve seen references to same, tho I don’t recall linking to any.

But the second (and far more important) is that Alexander’s place in poetry is nowhere remotely akin to that of Maya Angelou, and that Alexander’s poem reflects none of the pomposity that left Angelou open to an attack such as that ventured by Fagin & Coolidge. I’ve heard complaints over the years that On the Pumice of Morons was racist and/or sexist – I don’t think it was the former. Fagin & Coolidge’s real crime lay in making excessive sport of someone who had already made herself ridiculous in public.

Nobody took such liberties with Miller Williams after his inaugural poem for Clinton’s second term:

Of History and Hope

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands – oh, rarely in a row –
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become –
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit – it isn't there yet –
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

I challenge anyone to think of a worse line than The disenfranchised dead want to know.

But Lucinda’s dad has always been someone who took his quietism seriously. A much more diligent formalist than the poem here (And how does our garden grow?) might suggest, Williams has stuck with the same mid-tier college publishers he’s been with his entire career. There were no parodies of this timeless epic perhaps because it took care of the job itself. And there was no real target. By 1993, Angelou had been receiving the usual trade press prize nominations – National Book Award, Pulitzer – for over 20 years. Not so Williams, tho he was at least Angelou’s equivalent in experience. And not so, Alexander.

The other dramatic difference between Angelou in 1993 & Williams four years later & Elizabeth Alexander’s experience this past month has to do with the changes in communication that have taken place since the mid-1990s. Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” predates even the Buffalo Poetics List, the first serious attempt at a listserv for poets just then starting to come online with email, by over ten months. While Tim Berners-Lee had written the code for the first World Wide Web server in 1990, the first true browser, NCSA’s Mosaic, wasn’t released until the middle of 1993.

I don’t think that any of us – not even the worst acolytes of futurephilia – entirely appreciates what happened there. When Angelou read her piece on television in 1993, it accorded her a concentrated boost of media exposure that had been unheard of in American poetry since, at least, Robert Lowell’s face on the cover of Time magazine in 1964. The only way Fagin & Coolidge could respond was via a chapbook, with its belated arrival & dodgy distribution. Against the one-time millions who saw Angelou on television, and the somewhat smaller number who ultimately purchased the Random House edition of On the Pulse of Morning, Fagin & Coolidge had a response that figured at best in the hundreds. As that link to Angelou’s edition notes, there are at least 30 copies of that puppy floating around used book emporia some 16 years later. Abebooks turns up nada, zero, zip for On a Pumice of Morons.

Within five days of the inauguration, I was able to post Elizabeth Alexander’s video from her appearance on the Colbert Report. Where response to Angelou’s poem was constrained by access to existing media – I’m unaware of any “the empress has no clothes” reviews in such midcult venues as the New York Review of Books – which left it to Fagin & Coolidge & copies sold at the counter at such shops as City Lights, Moe’s & Cody’s to note the cloying mawkishness, Alexander’s poem – arguably the best one ever read at an inauguration, regardless of its limitations & her profoundly inauthentic reading style – was critiqued & put down from a wide range of positions almost immediately.

One of the issues confronting all mainstream media in 2009 is precisely an inability to control access to commentary. Just as the rise of cable has gutted broadcast television, the rise of the net is having a direct impact on institutions – trade publishers, bookstores, libraries, newspapers – that have all been complicit with regards to the question of concentration of resources. Do-it-yourself commentary fundamentally changes the equation. While this presents issues for younger poets – how to construct an audience being the obvious one – it also presents profound opportunities.

I noted here the other day that Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker’s Starting Today website, with its 100 poems for the first 100 days of the Obama administration, almost exactly duplicates Stephen Vincent’s parallel project, Omens from the Flight of Birds, for the first 101 days of the Carter regime in 1976. Both projects are, I suspect, fraught with the same difficulties – I dare Cornelius Eady not to cringe at the sight of his own sloppy sentimentality in a quarter century, regardless how praiseworthy the notion – but it makes infinitely more sense, time-wise, distribution-wise, and ultimately project-wise, to do this on the web. That isn’t going to help Eady or Alexander any, but it will change what we do in the long run, and the ways that we do it. Just having access to every inaugural poem since Robert Frost shuffled his around & recited one that Kennedy had requested (and that Frost remembered) rather than the one he’d written ought to give future sacrificial poets pause for thought.

Labels: inaugural poetics

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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Anne Blonstein, Correspondence with Nobody, Ellectrique Press, Basel, Switzerland 2008

Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs,, translated by Laura Healy, New Directions, New York 2008

Jules Boykoff, Hegemonic Love Potion, Factory School, Brooklyn 2009

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, Hand Held Editions, New York 2008

Brett Evans, Slosh Models, Factory School, Brooklyn 2009

Thomas Fink, Generic Whistle-Stop, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Brooklyn 2008

Peter Ganick, ambergris, White Sky Books, Puhos, Finland 2008

Peter Ganick, arranger, White Sky Books, Puhos, Finland 2009

Peter Ganick, cake and seve, Arrum Press, Puhos, Finland 2008

Peter Ganick, is v. fact, Arrum Press, Puhos, Finland 2008

Peter Ganick, night lyrics, Blue Lion Books, Puhos, Finland & West Hartford CT 2008

Peter Ganick, soft text, White Sky Books, Puhos, Finland 2008

Peter Ganick, the decimated forest, White Sky Books, Puhos, Finland 2008

Peter Ganick, withness., Blue Lion Books, Puhos, Finland & West Hartford CT 2007

Stefania Heim, Three Poems, Hand Held Editions, New York 2008

Michael Heller, Eschaton, Talisman House, Jersey City 2009

Crag Hill, Dict, Xexoxial Editions, West Lima, WI 2009

Friedrich Hölderlin, Odes and Elegies, translated and edited by Nick Hoff, Wesleyan, Middletown, CT 2008

Lucy Ives, My Thousand Novel, Cosa Nostra Editions, Iowa City, 2009

Erica Kaufman, Censory Impulse, Factory School, Brooklyn 2009

Timothy Liu, Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse, Talisman House, Jersey City 2009

Deborah Meadows, Goodbye Tissues, Shearsman Books, Exeter, UK, 2009

Didi Menendez, For Love of an Armadillo, GOSS 183:: Casa Menendez, Bloomington, IL 2009

Sheila Murphy & mIEKAL aND, How to Spell the Sound of Everything, Xerox Sutra Editions, West Lima, WI 2009

Ethan Paquin, Nineains, Hand Held Editions, New York 2008

Simon Pettet, Hearth, Talisman House, Jersey City 2009

Craig Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory [HACHA], Tinfish, Kāne’ohe, HI 2008.

kathryn l. pringle, Right New Biology, Factory School, Brooklyn 2009

Kit Robinson, The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976 – 2003,, Adventures in Poetry, Princeton 2009

Frank Sherlock, Over Here, Factory School, Brooklyn, 2009

John Unland, The Sea Beneath the House, Pudding House Publications, Columbus, OH 2004

Books (Poetry Anthologies)

mIEKAL aND, Spidertangle Anthology, Xeoxial Editions, West Lima, WI 2009. Includes Brian Zimmer, KS Ernst, Grace Vadja, Derek White, Reed Altemus, PR Primeau, David Chikhladze, Matthew Stolte, John M Bennett, Irving Weiss, Geof Huth, Crag Hill, Carlos Luis, Dan Waber, Nico Vassilakis, Michael Peters, Ric Royer, Bob Grumman, Amira Hanafi, Donna Kuhn, David Baptiste Chirot, Joel Lipman, Lanny Quarles, Kevin Thurston, Ross Priddle, Petra Backonja, Reid Wood & Michelle Greenblatt, Karl Young, Karl Kempton,Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Michael Basinski, Sheila Murphy, William James Austin, Jukka-Pekka Kervenin, Peter Ciccariello, C Mehrl Bennett, Maria Damon, endwar, Martha Deed, Laura Goldstein, Igor Satanovsky & Lenny Drozner, Camille Martin, Márton Koppány, mIEKAL aND, Richard Kostelanetz, Derek Beaulieu, Cecil Touchon, Marco Giovenale, Liaizon Wakest, Jefferson Hansen & CamillE Bacos

Jerome Rothenberg & Jeffrey C. Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, Vol. Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, UC Press, Berkeley, 2009. Includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emanuel Swedenborg, Denis Diderot, Christopher Smart, Erasmus Darwin, Francisco Goya, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Chatteron, Mary Robinson, William Blake, Joseph Joubert, Robert Burns, Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Novalis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Kobayashi Issa, Wu Tsao, Rabindranath Tagore, John Clare, John Keats, Heinrich Heine, Aleksander Pushkin, G.R.S. Mead, Lady Charlotte Guest, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aloysius Bertrand, Gerard de Nerval, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Edward Lear, Mikhail Lermantov, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, The Shakers, August Strinberg, Lafcadio Hearn, Leigh Hunt, Arthur Rimbaud, Mary Shelley, Laurence Sterne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, José Martí, Jules Laforgue, Victor Segalen, Rubén Dario, Alfred Jarry, Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Yosano Akiko, Friedrich von Schlegel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walter Pater, many, many more.

Brenda Shaughnessy & CJ Evans, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Tin House Books, Portland OR & New York, 2008. Includes Agha Shahid Ali, Rae Armantrout, Frank Bidart, Billy Collins, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Mark Doty, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, Seamus Heaney, Jane Hirshfield, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Lucia Perillo, D.A. Powell, Mary Ruefle, Charles Simic, James Tate

Books (Other)

Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn & the Western World, Skanky Possum & Effing Press, Austin, TX 2008

Roberto Bolaño, 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2008

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas, translated by Chris Andrews, New Directions, New York 2008

Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2009

Thomas Devaney, Edgar Allan Poe at 200: The Absolute Literary Case, Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia 2009

Christina Mengert & Joshua Marie Wilkinson, 12 x 12: Conversations in 21^st-Century Poetry and Poetics, University of Iowa, Iowa City 2009. Includes Jennifer K. Dick & Laura Mullen, Jon Woodward & Rae Armantrout, Sabrina Orah Mark & Claudia Rankine, Christian Hawkey & Tomaž Šalamun, Srikanth Reddy & Mark Levine, Karen Volkman & Allen Grossman, Sawako Nakayasu & Carla Harryman, Paul Fattaruso & Dara Wier, Mark Yakich & Mary Leader, Michelle Robinson & Paul Auster, Ben Lerner & Aaron Kunin

Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Penguin, New York & London, 2007

Pam Rosenthal, The Edge of Impropriety, Signet Eclipse, New York 2008

Jerome Rothenberg, Poetics & Polemics: 1980 – 2005, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa 2008

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution, Harper Perennial, New York 2006.

Henry Weinfield, The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2009

Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Knopf, New York 2006

Journals

Bombay Gin, 35:1, 2009, Boulder. Includes Ilya Kaminsky, Rachel Levitsky, Michel Aird, Derek Henderson, Jena Osman, Martha King, Tyrone Williams, Sara Veglahn, Christophe Casamassima, Arthur Nersesian, Martha Cooley, Roberto Harrison, Julie Carr, Michael Knight, Noelle Kocot, Troung Tran, Imraan Coovadia, Shira Dentz, Jared Schickling, Miranda Mellis, Sawako Nakayasu, Raymond Federman, Carrie Etter, Richard Hell, François Luong, Stacy Szymaszek, Peter Gizzi

Chicago Review, 54:3, Winter 2009, Chicago. Stephen Rodefer feature (Keston Sutherland, Fanny Howe, lots of Rodefer, more), Rae Armantrout, Carl Phillips, Ange Mlinko, John Tipton, Johanna Klink, Paul Éluard, Alice Notley, Jim Kruse, Mark Scroggins, Kent Johnson, Andrew Duncan, more.

DW B, nos. 5/6, December 2008, Ghent, Belgium (publishes in Dutch). Includes Peter Volvoet-Hanssen, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Narcisse Tordoir, Max Frisch, Ron Silliman, Kiwao Nomura, more.

The Emohippus Greeting Card, second series, editing uncertain, Eohippus Labs, Los Angeles 2009. Includes Carribean Fragoza, Teresa Carmody, Joseph Mosconi, SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS, Amina Cain.

Gerry Mulligan, number zero, winter 2009, Red Hook, NY. Includes Tom Savage, Ange Mlinko, Marcella Durand, Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan, Lydia Davis, John Wieners, Ted Greenwald, Samuel Greenberg, David Perry, Charles North, Trevor Winkfield, Duncan McNaughton, Kit Robinson, Omar Husain, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, more.

Other Formats (Broadsides, DVDs, CDs, etc.)

Sheila E. Muphy, Upon the Year 2009, self-published, Phoenix 2008. Oversized card.

Eileen Tabios, Novel Chatelaine, A Teeny Tiny Chapbook, no location given (but we’re guessing Edmonds, Washington), 2009. Seven chapter, 8-page novel with great color graphics ingeniously printed on a single piece of 20-lb weight copy paper.

Double Change, France / U.S.A.: A Film Archive of Poetry, 18 films directed by Meryem Delagarde, edited by Abigail Lang & Dominque Pasqualini, Motion Method Memory (Les presses du reel), Dijon, France, 2008. DVD. Includes Tom Raworth, Pierre Alferi, Charles Bernstein, Juliette Valéry, Emmanuel Hocquard, Rosmarie Waldrop, Cole Swensen, Joseph Mouton, Kathleen Fraser, Omar Berrada, Cécile Mainardi, Michelle Noteboom, Norma Cole, Robert Grenier, Bernard Heidsieck, Yves Di Manno, Jerome Rothenberg, Thalia Field, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Kristin Prevallet, Keith Waldrop, Olivier Brossard, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Sarah Riggs, Philippe Beck, Rae Armantrout, Isabelle Garron, Pierre Fourny, Bill Berkson, Tracy Grimmell, Claire Guillot, Joe Ross, Jacques Roubaud, more.