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?