You Can't Go to Everyone's Wedding

For my last poetics post, I wanted to go back and untuck that last discussion we had in class. I thought it was a pretty good discussion, full of interesting and poignant points about Watten's most interesting idea: the relation of the poetic speaker to the outside world, the "total syntax" of poem to everything around it plus poet to everything around her/him/it.

Why this fear of fractured poetry? Even as our television shows get more and more complicated, our mainstream movies more subtle and our mainstream humor more whittled (watch Major League against The 40 Year Old Virgin if you think Bush is really as bad for comedy as Reagan was). Well, for one thing, poetry is simply the musty old thing. Poetry is the good-for-us oatmeal taught in high school. But it's not really that simple. Poetry is also occasional--not in the sense of infrequent, but geared toward occasion. We're not called upon to write skits for our friends' weddings and birthdays: we're asked to write poems. If asked at all, I mean, we are asked to write "a little something" -- but if you've ever been in that situation you know what that means. People want to commemorate occasions with poems the same way the poem is somehow supposed to commemorate language.

Huh?! What?!

I know. I know. Poetry is for new language!

But for all this talk of poetry reassembling language, love poetry isn't supposed to reassemble love. Consider Mr. Leonard Cohen's popularity and his lines: "Many loved before us / I know we are not new. / In city and in forest / they smiled like me and you." Yep, and many have probably written those very lines before you too, most aware they weren't original. Many want language to communicate, go from self to self, and therefore want poetry to commemorative the universality of ourselves. Not in those words of course. But in the sense of "I don't get it" versus "That's pretty." So of course they don't want fractured, saturated poetry crippled in its awareness of global roles and such. We resent the self getting smaller and smaller and more particularized (pulverized?), losing our ties to the universal.

But wait. Universality? Is that concept--really--universal? Or is that, I don't know, an imperialist gesture designed to bully cultural variety into death by declaring the existence of overarching values? A book review that says "this touches on the universal idea of love" is not that far from the Roman empire declaring a god of love, implicitly declaring anything outside that godly design not love at all but some vague savagery. I remember Nabokov's introduction to Lolita making fun of the then-popular Hemingway-esque minimalism, where he raises his eyebrow at the so-called "realism" of "short, strong sentences" like "He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy."

The idea behind those sentences is "the less explanation the better." But isn't this a ridiculously aggressive gesture? Basically, it says there is one right way to say things, that things can be pared down to that one right way. This one right way is then charged with "universality." Please be aware: such a style is different from just emulating a formally constrained vocabulary, trying to make language talk like people talk or something. No, it's different. A "universal" style is saying: this is how it's done. There is a God and he acts crazy. You know what I mean and if you don't--if you ask what I mean--I won't say anything and you will feel alienated until you finally come around to my universality.

In other words, this style has no sense of humor. Of play. Of "I could be wrong tho."

Looking back over the term, I see this failure peeking up everywhere, this idea of universality via language. It's bleeindg raw in Fenollosa's romance with the Chinese character. It's confronted with humor and ironized into Cheshire cat mode in O'Hara's Personism. It's very male (but maybe just a parody) with the coming and ramping to the end in Bernstein's Semblance. It's everywhere!

That's why I think it was very useful how we left that last discussion. You pick your audience and you write for the audience. Allow universality to fail. People will be interested in the particulars of your audience and what you and your audience are doing, just as we're all interested in our neighbors' recipe for lasagna. On certain scales, we understand perfectly that universality is a weak sham.

So why do we keep hearing wedding poems about how love lights our wings or something? People are trying; they are trying to sound "poetic." And the audience is trying; they are trying to feel the universal stab of the "poetic," like it's a wind that feels the same wherever it goes. But I think the audience knows better. I mean, what lines get the laughs, the smiles? The in-jokes. The lines no one understands except those who understand them. Those are the lines to write. Maybe.

In any event, what a beautiful class! Thank you all for being so wily and inventive and keen.

And special thanks to Sir Kasey Mohammad for being a comet, a carnival, a Charlemagne among poetry teachers. Major major props. Good luck to you all. =)

Hyperlinks and Candy Bars

The "essays" of Coolidge and Stein seem wed in their distinction from the others, but both are distinct in different ways--and really, all the pieces attempt to whip up some sort of distinctive voice. So much for that idea. But Stein's and Coolidge's essays come closest--for me--to the idea of poetics as a distinct genre. Both engage in circumnavigation that implodes their ability to "prove something" but ratchets up their intrigue, their generosity toward tangential interpretations. All caramel, no nougat, etc. Maybe caramel is the wrong word. All hyperlinks, no nougat. A candy bar made of hyperlinks and chocolate.

Stein does this through her peculiarly prescriptive and self-conscious style, her attempts to subvert style and rewire style. I mean, most everybody that writes about her apes or pays homage to that voice of hers. It's a dance. People want to copy it. Most communicated are the gyrations; for all the information she delivers, she most delivers a delivery. I don't mean to say she doesn't throw out seven million brain needles. She says: "When I first began writing, I felt that writing should go on." She talks about question marks and colons. About dogs and paragraphs. Breath, the intensity of complication, and French trains. Her wry skewering of gender-fried writerly roles ("to please a young man"). Stein lacks not for content. But discussion of her ideas in class returned again and again to the blunt charm of reading her writing, the performance of its ongoing self-construction. Or, as she notes: "As I said Henry James in his later writing had had a dim feeling that this was what he knew he should do." This sentence dallies, discovers and spins a pattern--"had had" + "that this" + "was what"--as though language were a body for both gesture and gyration, as if in the middle of moving your hand down a list of budget items in the PowerPoint presentation, you jittered your wrist a little in some robot dance move. But you had planned it all in advance.

And likewise with Coolidge, though in the opposite fashion. Given the lecture format, Coolidge can't sculpt or stylize to Stein's degree. But he too must perform: wire the rigging of his brain to accommodate the audience--sniffling, scraping shoes, yawning--route his points on language through a "hey you" sort of show. Without this format, I doubt we would have ever had such direct and revolutionary statement as "I don't think there is one word." That is not a statement designed for writing; that's a statement designed to make an audience sit up. The proverbial jolt, but also chucking himself into a corner so he can talk his way out of it: "just what the hell does he mean by that?" When he talks about Beckett on Page 158, he first does the boring Beckett quote, but then he digs under the Grey Poupon veneer of that quote to wiggle the audience by the earlashes, recapture them:

"'To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.' The mess. The mess. And we're in a mess now. Look at--we're packed in here, for one thing. I mean, we have fifteen kind of electric toothbrushes."

To me, this speech chunk is very similar to how one might construct a poem. I might be intrigued by an idea, by an abstract, floating, gauzy thing--something like the impersonality of suburban sprawl, California ranch houses (see: Coolidge's new poem "Mr. Hush is Here" in his new [chap]book from Fewer and Further Press: "Counting on Planet Zero"). But I can't just smoke my pipe and pomp up that idea for all to see. First, there is:

The hey. The hey. And we are the hey. Look at us--directly addressing the audience, for to remember where they are. I mean, (then) some crazy laugh line.

To examine that process and recognize how much that resembles how I treat the relationship between a poem and its audience makes me very self-conscious--or even more self-conscious than I already was. At some point, I hope, this will turn inside out and I will never be self-conscious again. Instead, I will treat myself like a strange but jovial outsider, and I will offer myself mocha Mates and oatmeal raisin cookies. We will laugh and clap each others' backs a lot and go "I know! I don't understand that either." Maybe they will commit me to Parkview, like the Porter Wagoner song. And in that famous Nashville mental institution I will develop an utterly singular performative poetics style that will guarantee me a decent VH1 special. My own candy bar?

If I Give You Hejinian, Dickinson, Ouja and Google, and You Manage to Build Anything...

I don't know if Hejinian wants to boss me into freedom. Maybe there is some of that. A "wait, wait, stay awake" insistence that can come across intrusive. But what's more interesting right now is to read "The Rejection of Closure" as an overture to communal poetry. Or poetic community. Or poetry toward communion. We've talked in class about the thesis of multi-source integration as the primary "post-avant" characteristic, but there's something more essential lurking: a poetry incomplete without community. Hmm?

This might be a stretch--everybody wrote letters--but both Modernism and Romanticism (even Beats!) vaulted the idea of Singular Poet Figure: harp wind spewer or mastermind, the 1 to the ideal reader. Jack Spicer (none of the above) said he didn't want more readers; he wanted better readers. But if Hejinian wants texts that reject closure, that invite the ever new take, what else must she have but an inexhaustible supply of new readers? And constructive readers, even--remember "generative rather than directive." This doesn't have to mean "other poets" or "better readers"--those sort of people will generate with any text. So what does it mean? People aware that they are playing a role into the poem, that they are one of many constructing the poem. People who accept an invitation to construct. Which means you need the invitation quality. So we don't just mean "getting poetry out there" or "publishing it," we mean the poem itself doesn't work until it leaves your room and joins the crowd and knows that it's in the crowd. Ergo: poem as communal object.

Like a Ouja board. Like Twister. Have you ever tried to play Twister by yourself? That sort of thing is very disgusting and will get you kicked out of Sunday school. When Hejinian talks about her "patience" pun, she sets up a tidy diametric system: "Patience .. might be a quality of a virtuous character attendant to work / might also be 'solitaire,' a card game played by the unvirtuous character who is avoiding attention to work." Aha! Solitude, loneliness, long the staple of every embattled Poet who hath no friends but Word, who is a Kangaroo amongst the Beauty -- that's unvirtuous! 'Tis far better to "attend" to work, as in "how many were in attendance for the game," like "together in the crowd." Poets hanging out?! If that's not novel then nothing etc. Well done, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, you have subverted your love yet more.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. The wild, starving loner: scary? Jeffery Lewis says we would all be better off if artists would stop privileging their dreams and just do something for other people.

Wait. Are we unconsciously privileging the human role of social contributor? Why are we letting this arbitrary construction of society trick us into helping to sustain it? Should poetry be for parties; shouldn't it really be for those terrifying hours of solitude? Some people, in fact, think that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets aren't really that social. In this essay Leevi Lehto argues that Hejinian-contemporary Charles Berstein's poetry is "militantly anti-communal," always "against various individual poetries," perpetually repelling and repulsing whatever Poetry--and thus other Poets--project. I mean: all this tearing down and muckraking. Isn't it hard to get along with? From here, it's not too much of a leap to say that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry's history of community is really just, I don't know, mutual self-indulgence or something. The people who are mad at everyone hanging out together by default.

Except that's sort of silly. Community rejects closure just as much as poetry. I mean, do we really even need to say this? What will keep you at the party longer: "Good job! Yep. That's. That's good. Yep." OR: "No! Why?! Well--" and so on. If we're being charitable, we can say "Yes and" instead of "No," but the difference between the two is sometimes shaky and a little fake. "Yes and" cuts off just as much as "No," congratulates, yes, but still redirects--it's just a polite "No." Then again we're all fragile people and there's nothing wrong with being polite.

As for whether poetry is pro-party or pro-solitude, I suppose we should get the pro-both argument out of the way. Then say, yeah, either we continue to perfect our solitude, or we integrate the activities of our solitude into our communal relations, to find whatever it is we need in the Other. These are two different things! Very much so. I guess you choose? I mean, you struggle to choose and are never really happy. Wait, that sounds like that one poet--yes, I might talk about her later.

First: if Hejinain is against "Authority as a principle" and "Control as a motive," what guides her Ouja Twister model of poetry? Maybe mutual responsibility as a principle and--sharing? As a motive? To share? What is the difference, really, between: "I've got this thing I would like to give you so as to control you" and "I've got this thing I would like to share with you and see what happens." I'm not sure. Are we, again, just being polite? I think there is a difference. When we share something, we know it's not finished. There is a right way and a wrong way to give a gift. If I give you a bicycle but tell you where to ride it, how fast, how to paint it--well, that's not much of a gift. That's simply introducing a mechanism into your life by which to control you. If I give you a bicycle and just watch what you do with it--that's a little better. If I give you a wheel and a rubber horn, and you build a bicycle--even better! If I give you a candle, a seashell, a rubber horn, a pair of goggles and a panda tail, and you manage to build anything--is that, then, the open text?

I am thinking of two kinks. First, how will communal poetry work in an era of enormous, almost incomprehensible community. What shall we do with communal poetry in an age of digital surveillance, of Google mapping down to individual houses? Now when I put a poem in the window and invite its communal construction, I am inviting most anyone anywhere. Very different than Keats on a boat! Or even O'Hara on a telephone conference call with Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest. One reactionary impulse shirks toward scarcity: limit the avenues of poetic distribution, draw the blinds. This seems "nostalgic" or something, so I'm going to ignore it entirely. Another impulse leads toward trying to be incomplete as possible, leave nearly everything to somebody out there, but this seems like a dead end, headed off for a complete incompleteness, just as "insufferable." The boringness of the blank page poem, and so on.

Really, all we're talking about is more of the same world. All the old failures and haunts don't change: they amplify. So, the logic goes, amplify along with them. If, as Hejinian says, "the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and the things in it from each other," we today just have more things and more ideas and more each others. I am open to the idea something more basic is shifting, but the notion makes me a little suspicious.

Just to throw another kink into this and return to your earlier question about that one poet: what would Emily Dickinson say about the internet? About the poem as communal Ouja Twister? Remember, she bristled when the Editors of Journals came to her house demanding her Mind--for submersion/subjugation into zee Hive, of course. She loses her Tutor and for several years her Lexicon is her only companion. But she writes these Master letters to probably an imaginary Master. You can't tell whether she's being sarcastic when she says: "Would you have time to be the 'friend' you should think I need? I have a little shape--" What of the quotes around friend? Is she afraid, wry, skeptical?

The dashes: are they there for the Readers to fill something in, or to string the Reader along? Or to catch her breath? And such breath would further personalize the poem, mark Her as Herself, allowing her to sculpt her personal voice and, basically, perfect her solitude. Does she want for folks or not? Or, more likely and more relativist, is she just not sure?

And, well, isn't language a community, too? A lover, maybe? Lovers are sort of anti-community. Hejinian says: "Language seems to promise ... inherently sacred as well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfying." That sounds almost exactly like the things one might need and look for instead of community. How interminable, eh? Round and round we go: do you love the language or do you share it? To do both--is that even possible? And today, with Google outside mapping your cat--now what?

guest post: Kenneth Patchen

Biography of Southern Rain
--Kenneth Patchen

Rain's all right. The boys who physic
through town on freights won't kick
if it comes; they often laugh then, talking
about the girl who lived down the block,
and how her hair was corn-yellow gold that God
could use for money. But rain,
like memory, can come in filthy clothes too.

The whole upstairs of space caved in that night;
as though a drunken giant had stumbled over the sky -
and all the tears in the world came through.
It was that. Like everyone hurt crying at once.
Trees bent to it, their arms a gallows for all
who had ever died in pain, or were hungry, since
the first thief turned to Christ, cursing.....

Then, out of the rain, a girl's voice - her hand
on my arm. "Buddy, help me get this train."
Her voice was soft.....a cigarette after coffee.
I could hear the clickdamnitclick of the wheels;
saw the headlight writing something on the rain.
Then I saw her face - its bleeding sores - I didn't
ask her if she had ever been in love
or had ever heard of Magdalen and Mary
or why she wanted to leave that town.

Do you see what I mean about the rain?

guest post: Kenneth Fearing

Green Light
    --Kenneth Fearing

    Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
    After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
    Familiar, but not quite recognized.
    Followed and taken home and slept with.
    Traded or sold.  Or lost.

    Bought again at the corner drug store,
    At the green light, at the patient’s demand, at nine o’clock.
    Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
    Found unsuitable.
    Smashed, put together, and pawned.

    Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen
     by the light of day;
    Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek
     Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off
     duty.
    The agent, in broken English, took copious notes.  Which he
     lost.
    Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
    Sad, but true.

    True, or exaggerated, or true;
    As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
    As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
    As it is that the people go;
    As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just
     the same;
    As some one dies and it is serious, and the same;
    As a girl knows and it is small, and true;
    As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and
     pointless;
    As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
    As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people
     change,
    It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

    Bought at the drug store down the street
    Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
     night, or day;
    Bought to use as a last resort,
    Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
    Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock.
    Borrowed or bought.  To look well.  To ennoble.  To prevent
     disease.  To entertain.  To have.
    Broken or sold.  Or given away.  Or used and forgotten.  Or
     lost.

guest post: William Carlos Williams

Tract
--William Carlos Williams

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral--
for you have it over a troop
of artists--
unless one should scour the world--
you have the ground sense necessary.

See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black--
nor white either--and not polished!
Let it be weathered--like a farm wagon--
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Knock the glass out!
My God--glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
how well he is housed or to see
the flowers or the lack of them--
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass--
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom--
my townspeople what are you thinking of?

A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.

                   No wreaths please--
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes--a few books perhaps--
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople--
something will be found--anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.

For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him--
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down--bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all--damn him--
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!

Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind--as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly--
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What--from us? We who have perhaps 
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us--it will be money
in your pockets.

                  Go now
I think you are ready.

D_ Likes the Brandy; S_ Is Pretty Sure You Spiked It

Both Silliman and Davie believe that pure syntax can serve to power poetry, over and above referentiality or traditional verse techniques (what Davie calls "audible rhthyms of versification" and Silliman calls "formal constraints"). But they seem to diverge when it comes to the goals of this power. For Davie, "poetic syntax" delivers "pleasure." Whatever the five syntactical varieties, the goal is this poetic "pleasure." But what is Silliman's goal?

He likes the idea of foregrounding language, of linguistic machines. Maybe it's innovation or the simpering "revolutionary" spirit of mid twentieth century postmodernism. Like when he talks about Jakobson, he explains modern signifier/signified drop off in a pretty fist-raised, power-to-the-people sort of tone: "..the signifier, freed suddenly from its servitude to an integrating hierarchy of syntactic relations, finds itself drained of any signified" (76). And the Frederic Jameson quote that follows is further in line with rah-rah, down with privileged expression etc. Silliman gets even more blatant when he mentions the "tyranny of the signified" on the last page. Yikes. Hold me. I'm scared.

I think this goal idea is important. When Davie goes to describe the five varieties of syntax, he is trying to figure out what delights him about poetry--he wants poetry to delight him. Silliman, ever the engineer, doesn't privilege his needs, seeks instead to analyze them. But I get the feeling that Silliman's is a pleasure soaked in underdog politics. And I don't mean "political" in the casual sense of the "current political scene," but in a broader reference to how ideologies always try to win out and how things assemble into hierarchies. Even--if I'm allowed to be totally lame--New Sentence implies the glee of revolt. Or, you know, indignant protest.

Why is this important? Well, I'm not sure. Let's think about it. Notice that Davie and Silliman both give early examples of how syntactical tweaks, beyond verbal or logical techniques, can direct feeling.

Davie's example:

Socrates is wise
Wisdom belongs to Socrates

Silliman's example:

Someone called Douglas over.
He was killed by someone called Douglas over in Oakland.

What's the difference between these two examples? First, Davie is quoting I.A. Richards, while Silliman just made his up. But that's not really important. I think the choice of example reflects concern. Unconscious concern. What are we concerned with? What is driving us to puzzle through, to figure things out. What is the urgency? Or is it not like urgency; is it delight? When Davie ponders Socrates, tries to figure out how the different sentences ripple differently, it seems to me like an abstract sort of consideration, planted in the realm of "thought game" and outside, say, modern social concerns. But Silliman's Douglas and Oakland story is violent, even up-to-date, if we consider all the connotations arising from the mention of a city like Oakland. Other examples of this latent concern with, I don't know, poking norms: Silliman's urge to remove the family unit from the Watten example, his disapproval of the arrogance behind a narrative "I," his sneer quotes when referring to "some 'higher order' of meaning." You get the idea.

Is the New Sentence an example of syntax like mathematics? You would think so, what with Silliman whipping up a list of eight qualities that are solely compositional (91). But when I read Carla Harryman or Lyn Hejinian, I get a strong whiff of syntax like music, that swimming through a feeling without describing it, pure feeling translation, unconcerned by definition with making sure the audience knows all the subjects involved, where the feeling comes from, all that. Likewise, the New Sentence could rock the objectivity. The Douglas example, maybe: the (somewhat) innocent Douglas interpellation is suddenly surrounded by all this harsh news, the way gangs (or police) surround a beating victim, the way the media (and we) vulture a subject. Yet I don't think the New Sentence could serve subjective syntax or dramatic syntax: too much reference, too much necessary "I," too much privileged feeling.

Hmm, what about feeling? Davie has a lovely quote from Coleridge about feelings and fleeing. I find the first part of Davie's summary sentence pretty eloquent: "This fleeing in a circle, and being overtaken by the feelings from which the poet flees ... " True stuff there, right? Silliman, in the voice of the engineer, analyzes sentence joints, sentence constructions, yet in the New Sentences of Hejinian, oh wow: how beautifully she winds around feelings, roundabouts feelings, carves the circuits to nab the electricity. Harryman too, in the "For She" poem that Silliman quotes and now I'm going to quote:

"In spite of the cars and the smoke and the many languages, the radio and the appliances, the flat broad buzz of the tracks, the anxiety with which the eyes move to meet the phone and all the arbitrary colors. I am just the same. Unplug the glass, face the docks."

Okay, I would have to carefully suspend my heart to think about that solely in terms of construction. But I suppose we do, sometimes. Right? When we are contracted to build effective electric chairs or cribs? O'Hara, again, with the idea that your feelings for the person shouldn't get in the way of your feelings for the poem. And Davie I imagine in isolation, his cap of brandy, mmmm-ing with great pleasure over some obscure Coleridge poem, eyes deliberately confined to the garden (in that dangerous suburban 1950s way). And here is Silliman, full of political zeal, nothing outside of ideology, digging under revolutionary content and looking for a revolutionary structure, a revolutionary skeleton. Yet trying, almost like Davie, to keep his language neutral, scientific. Since feelings have really loud ideological implications, that means ignoring feelings. Davie, moving his feelings to dusty attics, keeps feelings and ignores ideology.

So I don't quite buy Silliman's assertion, made while quoting Stein's point about emotional paragraphs and non-emotional sentences, that emotions exist only in orders "higher" than the sentence. That he's not concerned with such higher orders. Remember the sneer quotes of "higher meaning?" Makes you wonder. My favorite New Sentence stuff does a hybrid sort of thing: intellectually untangles the tyranny of narrative, unpacks the formal feeling with revolutionary zeal, but actually exposes in its feast of sentence forms and sentence joints a feeling goal. Not a delight goal, definitely a political goal. The way a montage frees you from having to care about a story.

Maybe like a potluck where you don't know what anybody else brought. You are still charged with politics: who am I going to offend if I don't like their pickled beets? But you are also liberating yourself from politics, not fleeing them, but feeling a little more free to announce "I hate these pickled beets and I don't care what that means to my complicated relationship with everybody in the world." You get at the single feelings with more clarity, with more bravado even, aware that you are a flawed and subjective and offensive taster and that everything is charged with connotations, but almost able to get at that pure taste again, where you don't have to worry. And why is a pure taste important? Is that a sophistic goal? I don't know. But something's going on there. I don't think New Sentences, or any syntax like music or mathematics, stays on the level of "cool syntax! new syntax! i like your syntax!" We are wanting something. And maybe, hmm, there is a guilt?

Don't Keep it Hid

Thanks to high school, I missed the line about coffee-spoons. Did you? At the end of Wednesday's class, we all groaned about our high school poetry explication experiences. For sure: high school skews and skewers poetry. Or, really, poems. After my AP English class mucked with Prufrock, I thought the whole poem was just Eliot's half-ass Horatio monologue. I tuned out. But we never talked about Howl, so that stayed fine. Poetry kept a pulse.

Later, when I actually read Prufrock, I felt the brunt of that killer coffee-spoon line, or other lines like "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." I had (me) let my stance toward a "school lesson" ruin my ability to receive a cool poem. I had used school as an excuse to take my feelers out.

Let's not blame me, though. I cry. Easily and often, like Yellowstone. Let's say this: despite the existence of great educational texts like Koch's Sleeping on a Wing, most 7-12th grade pedagogical philosophies still tell us that we "win" the poem if we find, I don't know, juxtaposition. Or, like, discover that, um, this line uses the imagery of a sailboat to convey the innocence (the while sail?) of, like, life, and the absurdity (the whole, um, ocean thing) of death. Can I go now? It's high school. I have awkward relationships to calcify. I smell like a chimney full of jockstraps. Etc.

Yeah, poem explication sucks. We knew it sucked. Everybody knew it sucked. You still had to do it. Like washing dishes. Whenever you wash dishes, you sing, daydream, yo-yo your brain, distract yo-self. As a kid, I would pretend to be on a gameshow--HOW FAST CAN YOU WASH!--and do the announcer voices in my head while I sped through the pots and pans. I gave myself points for thorough cleanliness and for not--what's that called?--not breaking shit. Since I had to wipe the stove, I threw the sponge across the kitchen to give myself an extra few seconds. Don't worry: I don't understand that part either.

Somewhere along the line, I got this warped notion that poem explication was, like dish washing, a game. You're not really "figuring out" the poem. What you're doing is lugging in a set of goggles and flashy words (juxtaposition! antithesis!) and diving into the au naturale poem, just as we use perfectly nice fields for baseball. This attitude got the essays wrote. I wasn't "solving" or "winning" the poem. Just sprinting through the text in some dazzling or devious fashion, seeing if I could collect the trinkets that fit my suitcase: "oh, this noun is in present tense, that means, um, the fallacy of history!" Sure, essays have to "make sense." A small goal, really. Maybe baseball is a bad analogy. Did anyone ever play that computer game The Incredible Machine? You have this random set of doo-dads, and you try to make your incredibly complicated doo-dads execute a simple task, like light a candle. You use stairs, ramps, bombs, cats, whirligigs, whatever. Meanwhile, the candle itself the ever cool and self-contained and mysterious candle. No harm done.

So too with Zukofsky, Pound, Davie. Sure, these guys are descriptive and prescriptive. They're only trying to explain "good poetry," but once you read "a good poem is full of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia" isn't one reaction to gulp and get to work at self-consciously deploying -poeias? So I try to avoid that feeling. I try to watch it like a game. See what loopy courses get built to light candles. Some of this stuff doesn't even seem to get the candle lit--it just dances around. From Zuk:

"Add--the core that covers the work of poets who see with their ears, hear with their eyes, move with their noses and speak and breathe with their feet. And yet lunatics are sometimes profitably observed: the core that is covered, the valuable skeptic knows, may in itself be the intense vision of a fact."

Honestly. If I read that and go "oh shit, so I'm supposed to breathe with my feet--um, wait--okay, be a lunatic? no--wait, cover my core--what's a core? I have a core? is that like--should I make sure to wear underwear while I'm writing poems? or wait, does it mean I shouldn't write about my 8th grade girlfriend--um, wait, how do I move with my nose? is there a jetpack sort of thing I should have? is there a poet store I missed? should poets sew tissues?" -- then I'm going to be seriously effed. But Zuk is still fun to read. His paragraph above is the very definition of "jazzing around." And I would argue that Davies--with his "Is there not" and "it will be remarked"--jazzes around as well, displaying his skill at the Incredible Poem Chatter Machine to basically just display his skill, though surely his motives involve more, some baffled, brandy-tumbler, tea lawn haze of "chastity" and all that.

Actually, yeah, the game notion is a little simplistic. Most extensive explication, game or not, tends to colonize a poem, and may (more dangerously) ruin it for reading. Snuff the candle! And many people who chatter and explicate think they really are unsheathing the poem's secrets. They think they are figuring out the properties of light, to overextend the candle analogy.

But let's not, to retaliate, chuck all the rhetoric and try to always speak in hardcore truth flame. Or not at all! Isn't that boring? Every now and then, in the right mood, with a caffeine hum and nothing to do, nobody to save from drowning, it is fun to hear somebody gnash about poetics. People say cool things: Zuk's cabinet scheme. Fenollosa's horse. Frank O'Hara's tight pants joke. Or, since I am contractually obligated to quote Mr. Frank Stanford in every poetry discussion: "Poetry will put you out of your misery for no charge, and then will do the undertaking cheap and sometimes it rides up out of nowhere .. and gives you a lap to dream in."

That's poetics. And meaningless, on some level. But is it prescription? I don't really think or feel like it. When I read that I want to write more poems. Not Frank Stanford poems. I'm not a big fan of undertaking or horses. But after reading Stanford's letters, I will look at my poetry and think of more things than before, and I will look at the world and think of more things than before, and I will think how many beautiful and silly ways we have to light candles, and that is, I think, swell.

Standardized Snoopy Poetry

Image: "Our Fortress" by Steve Harrington




For me, Fenollosa's ideas are--to use the most virtuosic term--a bummer. Though Fenollosa promotes English as a capable translator of Chinese, since the two share the genius of strong verb-based constructions, his depictions of Chinese ideographs make me feel like the poetry of English lies pretty lame by comparison. I feel like a kid with a water pistol, staring at the .22s.

Take the Chinese "I." No matter what I make the "I" do in English, I can't really change the sign, only dress it. We don't get the five I's of Chinese: "spear in the hand," "five and a mouth," "holding off a crowd by speaking," "cocoon," and a "mouth .. who takes pleasure in his own speaking" (375). I mean, we can get it: I can throw out all those examples and you can imagine them by translating the abstract signs and sounds into concepts and brain pictures, but the process is long and shoddy. It's metaphoric, not descriptive. All I can give is a map of coded directions to the thing. My map makes you know what I’m talking about, but only if you think about it, i.e. the truthiness instead of the truth. There is some sense that the feeling is lost along the way, the farther you get from the thing. Fenollosa constantly stresses this. Take "green," the color, which is "only a certain rapidity of vibration" (374), the light moving. Remember, all "things" are only what they "do." So the farther you get away from green, the less you feel that vibration: rock dropped in the lake, ripples slowing outward toward eventual dissipation. With the word green, you have to imagine the rock from the ripple that hits you, a meager and frustrating act of logic. To Fenollosa, of course, a language's logistic processes ruin its poetry.

English is full of processes, steps, coded directions. How do we ever get poetry? Imagism is one thing, but then you're sort of pretending that our verbs are as cool as ideographs. They're not. Even if they're short and punchy, onomatopoeic, whatever. Take the first three lines of Amy Lowell's "The Traveling Bear:"

Grass blades push up between the cobblestones
And catch the sun on their flat sides
Shooting it back,

Okay, so we've got "push" and "catch" and "shooting" (uh oh, there's that nasty implied "is" that Fenny hates so much). All very punchy. Were we to do the work, as we automatically do, we will sort of imagine all that stuff happening and imagine the grass and sun and stones and whatnot. But really. Really, wouldn't it be more tangible, more grass-y and sun-y, if there were three graphical symbols for "Grass catches sun" on the page, maybe with little dashes of cobblestone and squiggles of light? While still representational, wouldn't those symbols get us closer? When Wallace Stevens said (disparaging Imagism) "The problem is ... not all objects are equal," maybe he was thinking of the English word itself as an object, versus the objects our words try to depict. You're not getting "grass" with the word "grass." You're just not.

What's worse: it's not just objects. Remember the different concepts of I? We don't get those either, not without convoluted linguistic maps.

So what do we do? Well. I think (I hope!) we can still do a lot. Nature and its profound delivery of feelings is not the only ideal. Scabby little humans still run around, well, talking, so there's that. There is also the candy of verbal music, of anything that rhymes, even a little: okay potato, maybe she likes sherry. Word-sounds ringing in of and off of each other, which can produce what Fenollosa calls "a delicate and lucid harmony" (387). I wonder what we’re after here, when our brain says "ooo, that sounds nice." Just an indication that we’re still alive, still able to make connections?

Wait. I was reading Baudrillard's America, written in the '80s when Polaroids were really popular. He talks about how the Polaroid, with its instant capture of not Thingness but visual surface, takes us back to old Greek philosophy about a thing's appearance being a sheen dinstinct from its "essence." What Fenollosa might call the "soul’s mask." This is, physics-wise, wrong. But let's think about this. If all natural things are just do-ing stuff, transferring force (leaf vibrates its color, air rises and makes wind and sound of the leaf, etc), then things are already outside our comprehension. We are receiving their action. If all existence is acting, then all Others are audience. Even ideographs don't reproduce the action of the leaf (the action occurs for itself), only what we see of that action. Even visually oriented language that captures things super precisely still only "records." The important thing, maybe, is us, is recording itself.

When you shake a Polaroid, you don't actually make the image come faster, you just mess it up a little, at the bottom (Alex Burford). You get something interesting, something imaginative. When we record the world, no matter how swell our language, we're not going to recreate it exactly--so why not fuss it up a bit, realize that what we're doing is world making, use that imaginative power? Make the grass fondle the sun. Make the grass kneejerk the sun. Make the grass jimmy the sun. Try, sometimes, to make words actors for themselves, just like things in nature act for themselves. Make the linguistic map into a drawing of Snoopy, the way you used to subvert those standardized bubble tests (you little rebel, you). Use language not to see the world and what it does, a task at which it falls pretty short. Try, instead, to convey some of the world and break the rest, to see what’s not there, to dream the world cooler.

i do not have it all figured out. i am guilty too. this is more like "enough already" than "here is a well-researched powerpoint presentation."

Re: the Saul Williams/Oprah thing. This will make more sense if you view/read all of that before you read this.

(And yeah, Bryan, this is recent. I was confused. I thought, for some reason, I had already heard about Saul's letter a while ago, but I was wrong).

This is not so much about current 441 topics, but it is about the strange habits of those who control prevailing language, and the rest of us who indulge in the habits of old languages just because it feels good.

I think this is all very frustrating. This whole thing exposes the notion of "dialogue" as hollow and vague. I agree with both "sides," even though I'm not sure of the argument or where the sides diverge. I don't feel sorry for Russell Simmons or Common or any of the others onstage, or feel that they were unduly sabotaged, because whatever discomfort they might have felt is minuscule compared to the issues at play. I'm tired of the idea that the issue is "pointing fingers" or "saying on three that we acknowledge the problem" or any of that. This is not just for this talkshow, obviously, but for whenever things like this happen.

I'm tired of the idea that Russell Simmons can say he mentors rappers who are misogynistic and materialistic because they grew up in a culture of violence and fear--which is true, which is overwhelmingly true--and yet nothing ever really changes.

I'm not talking about what Saul Williams calls "backpack rap," rap that tries in earnest toward self-consciousness and self-examination.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen with, say, punk rock or country music, and their targeted demographics.

But I mean all these mainstream rap records that continue to come out with unexamined exploitation of the "block," of shock-jock flash and bang, deploying words of weight and sting with blinders on, pretending they are "just words," pretending these videos are just fantasies or whatever, or that the music is "just catchy," or that people don't, in some ways, listen to it because they like rollercoasters, because with every thong and "shit-I-shoot-em-if-i-hate-em" the listener from that environment will recognize how scary such things are in real life, will get a controlled prick that reminds them of the frightening reality. And this prick, this tiny twin reality that won't hurt them like the real reality, makes them feel a little wild and dangerous and out-of-control and paradoxically in control of their reality, but in an utterly inconsequential way.

So young white people like us can continue to make shock jokes of these words, these hot potato words, which are catchy because they are "not okay" in a vague and meaningless way (to us), the same way people like to eat things that are on fire.

So people in tenements of town or cities can feel in a logical manner that the whole solution is to be hardcore, that you can solve life by cartwheeling in an armored and aggressive way through all the fear of it, that if you buy a gun you can protect yourself from it, that if you have a yacht you can sail from it, that if you drink enough you can numb out of it, that if Men fuck enough and treat women as sexual doodads they can "Man" their way out of it, that if we all just hunker in and protect ourselves from all of it the all of it won't happen to us, to the me's and me's of us, which is the most important part. Not that the all of it exists and continues to exist—inevitability—to others.

Somebody on one of those blogs, I think, said that "Scott Joplin managed to write songs without talking about bitches and bling," which I think is the wrong idea. This is "avoiding" the issue, or trying to provoke Paradise by depicting Paradise, which doesn't work, which is still compartmentalizing the fear into some sort of abstract philosophy. No matter how much champagne and sex you have, you're still going to die, which is a truism that musn't be viewed in a calm, philosophical manner.

But instead a stern, systematic, loud, moral, pleading way to please stop just telling poor people back in your neighborhood that once you have enough money everything will be happy and hyphy all night long. That with enough money you will have cars that shine and sex without names, which will stimulate the entirety of your chemicals and therefore solve life.

This is untrue.

This is untrue.

If there is a rap artist mentoring session, I don't understand why it isn't just "Stop having goddamn parties in your videos." And then a rapid, stern, systematic explanation of why.

And I'm tired of Oprah looking at her ratings and recognizing in her brain that hundreds of thousands of people watch her show, people not in tenements, people with money set aside to send in envelopes, maybe, given the right whim, people with garages and spare chunks of time in which to do earnest, good things. Because most people, given a choice, are guilty or decent enough that they want to do a few earnest, good things. I'm tired of Oprah looking at those ratings and still holding these meaningless, self-preening, ineffectual summits.

I agree with Saul Williams that men need to outgrow their ideals of jealousy and anger if misogyny is to degrade. Especially those with the education to self-analyze and realize such an ideal exists. I am tired, more or less, of those people using rhetoric and scorn and humor and out-of-context logic to elude such a change, simply because they want to indulge in their habits. To say things like "That commercial wasn't offensive to gay people. Gay people should get a sense of humor. I have a roommate who is gay and he laughed at that commercial. I'm not a bigot: I hate everybody equally (ha ha)." I am tired of men who are smart enough to understand the fossilized biology underlying their abstract notions of manhood--how irrelevant that biology is inside a supermarket, for instance, or anywhere in today's society--and yet insist on "acting like a man" and "not being queer." Blowing up Coke bottles, or lifting weights so they can be a better professional boxer, or writing a book about the "poetry of boxing" if their muscles are small, or taking off their shirt when it's not really that hot outside, or shooting deer for fun, or believing in Fight Club, or acting wounded in a fake and childish manner (but trying to drum up a "mature" and intelligent-sounding rhetoric) when subjected to the truth that they can't handle "powerful women."

These are all okay ways to act if you are thirteen.

Otherwise you're just being an asshole because it's easy and feels good.

I am tired of smart people using their intelligence to justify ignoring things. Or to justify acting like they're thirteen because they like to stimulate the entirety of their chemicals all the time and feel as if they are solving life. I am tired of intelligence and rhetoric and "dialogue" toward justification instead of toward legitimate change.

It is all very frustrating.

self promotion elephant smell

Speaking of Robert Grenier's Sentences, I copied that idea one time and wrote/programmed a poem generator/machine/game/doodad. The lines are more litanous (is that a word? to resemble litany?)--I am mimicking probably Ginsberg via Ashbery's "He" more than Grenier--so the connections are less full of tumbles and interesting electricity, but the way stanzas get assembled can sometimes be rather provocative and cool or something.

BlazeVOX featured it here.

Maybe you will find it fun.

even the wind follows rules

On my other blog, I am trying to do a poem-a-day for NaPoWriMo. Part of my plan is to gather rules or constraints. Without these, a poem-a-day gets pretty tedious and terrifying. Now that I've run out of constraints, actually, the tedium creepeth ever closer. Please help me. Comment me some rules. Thank you.

Handy Syllables

"For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance ..."

While Olson isn't much fun, what with all the SHOUTING, I did dig a little on his devotion to syllabic weight. Syllabic history even. With apologies to Minola Prep, this is a pretty cool concept.

Olson talks about how "is" comes from an Aryan root "to breathe," how "be" comes from a root "to grow." These things suggest that we should respect syllabic connotations, that even the smallest utterance can carry this dense array of ideas. As others have pointed out, Olson isn't a linguistics guru, missing as he does the concept of phonemes. Though one syllable, "be" isn't the simplest construction: it's made of two phonemes. Still. What Olson misses isn't of much concern, since the reader is probably going to miss it all anyway, right? You have to ask: how would the poet's knowledge of syllabic history or reverence of syllables affect a reader who doesn't share that knowledge?

This gets us into the Minola Prep thing. You run, you impress with your display, your instinct. Not your history. But where O'Hara's flippancy is obviously funny--and I want to have a little farm with O'Hara somewhere on a brownstone roof, a roof farm full of quiche and fedoras--I wonder about its validity. Don't you hone instinct through experience? Let's say I understand and respect the smallest contortions of my calves and whatnot, allow that understanding to enhance my running. You can't see my fussing, but you sure as hell feel it when I escape your attempts to rob and bludgeon me.

Please stop trying to rob and bludgeon me. You are bordering on antisocial. You.

So this is what interests me: the mystical syllable. The syllable that does its work simply through effect. If I say "be," you with the evolution of language intact in your chemicals somehow hear "to grow." Here, I think, I'm getting at Olson's zealous froth, his !!! and devotion to Poetry's supernatural power. As I think Trisha pointed out, far less practical than we should probably be.

But it's still fun to imagine an intricate puzzle of syllables, crafted with a lore-heavy intention but designed to remove any lame-ass resonance of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Sheer effect. Effect due to history.

And then I think of something like a human scenic sublime. Some of my favorite poems are quite sublime, totally mysterious, lacking any "show of power" and still managing to pluck me in the hardest ways. Maybe it's because they're rooted in mythos and language so old that I feel the punch of that lineage? I imagine the poetry of Joseph Ceravolo or Frank Stanford bound up in this sort of thing. Is this obnoxious as that deep image shit?

I don't know. It seems sort of different than the concept of sublime as "never before seen, oh my god, i don't even know what to say, oh my god oh my god." One of my favorite examples of that type is from the movie Gummo, where the kid eats spaghetti in a bathtub. It's beyond beautiful or horrific: it's something I never imagined imagining.

Yet I feel the same thing from this Frank Stanford poem, even though maybe it's because of a rich linguistic (syllabic?) history, all these sounds and words and all their connotations:

Tale
--Frank Stanford

The maid used to pull the drapes
So I could see dust

When it didn't rain
I bought gum and worked in the boat
There was a locked up shack down the road
With a stack of records in the bedroom

We could tell when strangers were around
From what they drank

The girls waited in the orchards
There was no need to lie

***

I don't know. At some point, in poetry, in the best poetry, you hit something, you're unanchored, not unanchored like that boring Billy Collins quote about the cornfield, but you (you) are a little like that scene in the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie, when the girl falls down the hole and gets caught by the helping hands: these waves of disembodied, white-gloved hands, suddenly appearing and stretching out in all directions. All these hands! Where did they come from, who have they touched, which fingers have been burned, palms and knuckles, why are they linked, clasping you maybe, maybe just brushing--and you fall for a few seconds past all these hands. And then you're back again. And not sure what you saw, only that you saw through a field of hands that never seemed to start or end, a sort of temporary forever of hands.

Unify in a Uniform

"The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist."

"Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order ... they are ... the founders of civil society ... "

Out of all the words, all this fuss about prophecy, Shelley goes with legislators. After our discussion about elitism and corn dogs, I started to think about this latent theme in Defence of Poetry, one that tends to make me balk, but one that Shelley presumes underneath everything: poet as social contributor.

In the first page, Shelley talks about how "The savage"—the pre-society individual—"expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects" and "his apprehension of them." By "apprehension," Shelley simply means understanding, but I misread it and applied apprehension's connotations of anxiety and doubt. To me, it seemed corny for Shelley to say that only once we enter society do we lose our fear of objects. Only once we live in harmony do we develop the skill to comprehend objects in harmony. Or something.. Shelley isn't belittling the savage like this, of course. But the whole thing seemed sort of silly, skeptical as I am of "Order" as a universal, snotty as I am to call society's order an abstract human construction.

So then I realized: it's my lack of imagination. I simply can't imagine what Shelley seems to have: utter faith in society as a concept.

He seems to say (or presume we already know) that without society, the poet is nothing. Without fellows with whom to share linguistic prophecy, what good is it? Even further than that, if poets have no society, they don't develop the love of harmony. All this assuming that harmony discovery is really poetry's goal. When Shelley's poets apprehend and perpetuate new apprehensions, they "gather a sort of reduplication from that community." Almost as if such transmissions (poet's mega super gee —> the others) need Society (big sweaty beast) not only as a conveyer belt but also as a generator.

So here's the jump. Is it not too far out to assume that Shelley isn't thinking in elitist terms, but thinking of a well-oiled society where everyone has their particular contribution? The order, the order. I mean, he uses phrases like "legislator," the "delicately organized" poet, and even "the cultivation of poetry," as if poems were plucked and piled into SYSCO trucks. How utterly at odds with the poet as anti-social figure, eh? How not the poem as loudmouthed bobble, shouting about the room full of corn dogs. Let's even say that the shouting were supposed to "save everybody." That scene is still pretty disharmonious. Unless, of course, the shouting engenders a "revolution of opinion" and not just social discord.

Sure Shelley might be stroking with a straight face when he likens poets to priests. Calls them hierophants, maybe even more divine than straight-up priests. But if we jump outside the vertical system we had in mind—charges of "elitism" or elevation, "base" as the actual base—we might figure that priest as another cog in a big, messy plane of social contributors. Poets haul that formatted wind to the ears of their brethren. That's their job. Nothing elite about it. Just fitting. Premium on functionality in this system, so who cares how many Slim Jims or American Idols you scarf while you're formatting the wind? So long as you don't "neglect to observe the circumstances," i.e. neglect your most basic task, your (duh duh DUM!) role.

No doubt: this theory is way more serene than it should be. Capitalism, class-consciousness —sort of sullies it. And Shelley still says thinks like "when the poet becomes a man" as if "he" weren't already. But when he calls "patriotism" an emotion, I realize that I'm way outside my comprehension range. We're post-blahblah fractured selves and all that, so it's hard to imagine how something like poetry could tie into idealistic social goals.

You know that paperwork where you fill in your Occupation? Even if poetry occupies the hell out of us, we joke and slither around actually writing "Poet." We slither around saying it. To be a poet is supposedly impossible, self-indulgent, ridiculous, subversive, etc. But one definition of employment is sort of "how we're folded into things." Shelley definitely wants the fabric of society intact—not doubted or poked at, no more than you would poke any sacred thing. He's writing "Poet" for sure. He's getting a badge.

not my shelley response

base desires

If your base desires include a need for more small press poetry, check out Press Press Press, a new centralized blog shop for small poetry press purchases. Like Wal-Mart but without the bouncing face. Or, you know, the evil.

TULIP

I found my thumbpick in a vase.