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?